How Does Your Garden Grow? by TBA

If Diane had one passion in her life, it was her garden. She spent hour after hour tending her precious blossoms. No matter how tough a day she had, she always found peace and serenity among her beautiful flowers. Diane loved her garden more than anything or anyone else.

There was only one thing about her garden that she didn’t like, the bugs. She knew that some bugs were beneficial to her garden’s beauty, but she also knew that some meant to destroy it. Whenever Diane saw a bug in her garden that looked like it was up to no good, she killed it instantly. “Better to kill one good one than to let one bad one take a bite of my babies,” she would often say.

On a sunny afternoon in July while tending her roses, Diane noticed the biggest slug she had ever seen slowly squirming toward her precious plants. The slug was enormous. It had to be at least four inches long. Diane knew that this garden predator was up to no good. Without hesitation, she picked up her hand rake and stabbed the slug repeatedly until it stopped moving. When she was sure the harmful intruder was indeed dead, she carefully buried the slug under the dirt. “At least it’ll do some good now,” she thought.

After a short while, Diane started to feel tired and a little dirty. It felt like her body was coated in filth. Wiping the back of her gloved hand across her brow, she decided to go inside and take a shower. After all, she had been working in her garden for over two hours. No wonder she felt so grimy.

She walked into her bedroom and stripped out of her gardening clothes and looked at herself in the full-length mirror. “That’s odd,” she thought. The dirt seemed to have penetrated her clothes to cover her body. Dismissing the dirt with a shrug she entered her bathroom. “It’s nothing a good hot shower wouldn’t cure.” She turned on the water in the bathtub and stopped. For some strange reason, she didn’t want to get wet. She knew that she wanted to, but something stopped her. It was as if she was afraid of the water. She turned off the water and went back into the bedroom to lie down. She was too tired to care about her sudden phobia.

Diane napped for over two hours. The nap had done the trick. She felt quite refreshed. The only problem was that she was still filthy, but now she was also hungry. Looking out her bedroom window, she saw her garden. It was beautiful. She stared at the flowers and plants for several minutes. She was still hungry, but now she had an uncontrollable urge to go to the garden. Diane contemplated putting her dirty gardening clothes back on, but was repulsed by the idea. She felt great naked. Besides, nobody would see her behind the tall fence in her backyard.

Diane walked slowly into the backyard, checking to make sure that nobody was around. Satisfied that there was nobody watching her, Diane sat down next to a patch of daisies. She never realized how beautiful they were. She started to fidget from side to side, unable to get comfortable. No matter how she turned, it still felt awkward. After several minutes, she decided to lie on her stomach. That felt much better. Lying naked in her garden, Diane felt more content than ever.

She lay there for several minutes. She felt even dirtier than before, but she also felt hungrier. Diane was about the get up when a strange thought crossed her mind. “Why not nibble on a daisy. The look delicious and they can’t hurt you.” The urge to graze on the green leafy stalks soon proved to be too much for Diane. Gingerly, she bent a stalk close to her mouth and took a small bite out of a leaf. She chewed it slowly, discovering that the taste was extraordinary. No wonder bugs liked to eat them, they were delicious.

Absent-mindedly, Diane munched away at the flowers. She felt a strange sensation in her legs, but dismissed it. “It’s probably from lying on my stomach for so long,” she thought, and went back to eating. If she had looked back, Diane would have noticed that her legs were changing. They began to merge together, forming a larger muscular mass that extended from her hips to her toes. Her deep tan darkened to a deep brown with black spots appearing on her back. But Diane was too busy munching on some lilies to notice the change. She did feel slimy, but thought nothing of it to due the fact that she hadn’t had a shower yet. Diane’s body shuddered. Even the thought of water disturbed her.

As she turned toward a patch of violets, she noticed that they seemed bigger somehow. “I guess that new fertilizer really works,” she thought and took a big bite out of the nearest leaf. By now the transformation had reached her torso. Her once slender waist lay bloated and covered in dark spots.

Diane felt a strange aching sensation in her arms. She had been resting on her elbows for quite some time now and decided to rest them at her sides. When her arms touched her sides, Diane felt something slimy. She tried to pull her arms away from her sides, but they wouldn’t move. They were stuck in a slimy mass.

Twisting her body, Diane managed to look behind her and to her horror she couldn’t believe what she saw. She expected to see her long shapely legs and firm round buttocks, but what she saw made her gag. At first she thought she was simply covered in slime. She tried to lift her legs out, but was horrified to see the entire mass rise in the air. Her legs weren’t covered in slime. They were the slime.

Diane tried to thrash around, but it was too late. By now the slime had covered her arms and was working its way toward her neck. She discovered that she was more flexible now and began twisting in every direction to try and free her self, but to no avail. Looking around, she noticed that the flowers looked gigantic. That was when she realized she was shrinking.

She tried to scream, but the noise wouldn’t come. Her mouth felt full of slime. Then the world looked different somehow. Like her eyes were seeing through two different microscopes at the same time. Diane couldn’t focus; it was getting harder to see. To make things easier, she decided to close one eye and look around with the other. That seemed to do the trick. She slowly looked around, the flowers looked even larger, but there was a strange looking brown stalk close by with a round ball on top of it. “What is that?” she wondered. Diane opened her other eye to get a better look at the strange weed, but was horrified to see that the round ball on top of the stalk was her left eye staring at her right eye. Diane tried to scream again, but no sound was to be heard. The only effect was that her lower jaw had stuck to her slimy neck. Risking a look, Diane moved one of her eyes down to look at her jaw. What she saw made her freeze. She no longer had a nose and her mouth was nothing more than a gaping maw oozing slime.

“I’m a slug,” she realized to her horror. “I’m a dirty, disgusting, slimy brown slug. This has to be a dream.” But something deep inside her brain told her that this wasn’t a dream. She could feel the dirt and slime beneath her body, she could feel the warmth of the sun and she could detect the presence of the delicious flowers nearby. She would cry if she could, but slugs don’t have tear ducts.

Lying in the dirt in a pool of her own mucus, Diane couldn’t believe what had happened to her. Then she heard a chirping noise behind her. Swiveling her eyes around, she notice a large robin hopping toward her new body.