He took a picture of the ship, intending to text Germaine and Charlotte and see if it could possibly be true. But somewhere between tapping the button and moving to get back into bed, sleep took him.

***

Truman groaned as a beam of sunlight stabbed him in the eye.

He was on the floor, in a nest of duvet, pillow, and flannel top sheet that he had no memory of making. His legs were under the bed, and when he opened his eyes, he just had time to see a dust bunny inches from his face before sneezing wildly.

“Oh, Jesus,” he groaned as the sneeze threatened to tear his skull apart.

As if in answer, one of the empty wine bottles, apparently dislodged from its rest by his sneeze, rolled across the floor and clunked into his head.

I’ll just lie here for a while.

***

The next time he awoke, the sun was less stabby and his hip ached. Truman dragged himself up slowly as different parts of his body complained. He crept to the bathroom and stood under the hot water until vomiting didn’t seem imminent.

When he finally opened his eyes, he realized that the bathroom was full of plants. Maybe they were ferns? Two of them hung in front of the small window and another hung on the wall opposite it. There was also something that looked like balls of moss on the windowsill next to a vining plant with beautiful deep purple leaves.

Over coffee, Truman studied the instructions Greta had left and did the morning plant routine of turning on this humidifier and turning off that grow light. One of the humidifiers was for a cluster of carnivorous plants in front of a window in the second bedroom that had been transformed into a kind of greenhouse.

When Truman had heard carnivorous, he’d worried that he would have to mess with live grasshoppers or something. But Greta had written that she’d fed all of them before she left and that he wouldn’t have to worry about feeding them again for two weeks, at which time there were pellets to give them.

So he simply refilled the humidifier and peeked at the odd plants. Several of them looked like the “Feed me, Seymour” plants, though thankfully much smaller. But a number of them were something he’d never seen before: plants with rounded cup-like appendages in streaks of maroon, green, purple, and red.

“What the hell are you?”

They were absurd and almost beautiful. Truman wanted to touch them but wasn’t entirely sure that they couldn’t bite off a finger. So he settled for examining them closely.

And when he looked, he saw that one of the medium-sized plants looked withered and brown.

“Oh god, did I kill something already?”