Scene: In the dark of night, a tiny object plummets invisibly to the earth. Glowing with the searing heat of the Earth’s atmosphere, it arrives on the planet as a tiny fireball before slamming into the ground in a suburban backyard. Its flames immediately extinguished by the tiny impact, its arrival goes undetected by the slumbering people in the house. No one sees an amorphous form emerge from the object: an almost-imperceptible, orange, gelatinous blob that oozes its way over to the nearest shrub, attaches to a branch and waits.
“What the heck is this?” I said to my husband the next morning as I took a break from weeding the front garden.
The two of us peered at the small orange blob on the juniper bush. It looked like something the dog would throw up on the rug.
I poked at it and quickly withdrew my finger in revulsion at the feel of the spongy, jelly-like substance.
“It’s probably no big deal,” declared my husband. “Bring it to the garden center and see what they say.”
I went inside to get scissors to cut off the branch and when I got back, I noticed that there were now two blobs.
“I think it’s reproducing,” I said with alarm.
He shrugged with disinterest. I guess orange blobs were not high on his list of priorities.
When I looked back down at the bush, there were three blobs.
“Honey, these blobs are multiplying!” I cried. “I think they’re ALIVE!”
“Maybe they’re alien blobs from outer space,” he joked. He turned to one of the blobs. “E.T., go home.”
“It’s not funny,” I exclaimed. “It will start with this bush, then it will ingest the other bushes, and then the house and us in it!” I had no doubt in my mind that the orange blob was a very, very bad blob. I knew it was like nothing of this Earth and it definitely did not come in peace.
Careful not to touch the blob again lest it ingest my finger, I cut off a branch with a blob attached and threw it in a plastic container. I wasn’t sure whether to bring it to Area 51 or my local garden center. Ultimately, I chose the garden center because it was closer and I had to be at the dentist at 2, assuming the blob hadn’t swallowed my car by then.
Nervously, I carried the container into the garden center and flagged down one of the owners.
“This is classified,” I whispered to him. “You cannot tell anyone what you saw, agreed?”
He rolled his eyes and nodded. Apparently, I was not the first lunatic customer he’d had to deal with.
I peeled back the lid of the container and then jumped back just in case the alien blob tried to ooze out and swallow my arm.
The garden center owner peered into the container.
“That is cedar apple rust,” he said with little fanfare. “It’s a fungus.”
I blinked. “A fungus?”
“Yes.”
“From outer space?” I asked.
“No, from crab apple trees,” he responded.
I blinked again. “It’s not going to swallow my shrubs, eat my house and take over the world?” I wondered.
“Nope.”
I thought for a minute.
“And you’re not afraid of it?”
“No,” he said. “But I am a little afraid of you.”
Tracy Beckerman is the author of the Amazon Bestseller “Barking at the Moon: A Story of Life, Love, and Kibble,” available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble online! You can visit her at www.tracybeckerman.com.
