The Strange Orchid Clung to the Floor

She noticed that the air was very close and loaded with an intense perfume. Then she saw something lying on the bricks between the hot water pipes. For a minute, perhaps, she stood motionless. He was lying face up at the foot of the strange orchid. The tentacle-like aerial rootlets no longer swayed freely in the air. They were crowded together, a tangle of gray robes, and stretched high. She snapped two of these tentacles and their sap dripped red. How they clung to him. She tore at the tough ropes, and he and the white fluorescent swam about her. It still clung with the grimace tenacity to its victim. But