Anthurus archeri. The words felt clinical, almost harmless, compared to the thing I’d seen clawing its way out of my flowerbed. “Devil’s fingers” sounded closer to the truth: a blood-red hand, slick and obscene, reaching up from the soil as if something buried had changed its mind. Knowing it was just a fungus didn’t erase the instinctive revulsion; it only gave it a label. A file folder in my mind marked: real, not imagined.
Days later, the image still lingers. I catch myself scanning the yard, waiting for another white “egg” to split and reveal more grasping limbs. The flowers around it look normal, almost too normal, as if they’re politely pretending not to notice. That’s what unsettles me most—that this horror isn’t from some distant jungle or alien world. It’s ordinary, local, permitted. A quiet reminder that nature doesn’t care if what it grows makes us shudder.
