The Lonely Planter

In a futuristic world where man has conquered nature's dominion on reproduction, one man steps away from society's margins to seek his truth.

The Twilight Zone redefined storytelling, drawing audiences into the unimaginable. Now, 66 years later, writers, artists, and musicians are stepping into its eerie glow with a fresh twist. Ready to see where they’ll take you?

Liz Zimmers | Edith Bow | Sean Archer | Bryan Pirolli | Andy Futuro | CB Mason | John Ward | NJ | Hanna Delaney | William Pauley III | Jason Thompson | Nolan Green | Shaina Read | J. Curtis | Honeygloom | Stephen Duffy | K.C. Knouse | Michele Bardsley | Bob Graham | Annie Hendrix | Clancy Steadwell | Jon T | Sean Thomas McDonnell | Miguel S. | A.P Murphy | Lisa Kuznak | Bridget Riley | EJ Trask | Shane Bzdok | Adam Rockwell | Will Boucher

Larry Spellington entered the office on the 14th floor and walked toward his glass cubicle. Colleagues were standing in groups, sipping mugs of coffee with the company logo on it, preparing for meetings and work engagements. Eyes lingered on him and then rolled back exasperatedly to each other.

“Hi, Larry,” one of them said reluctantly.

“Hi, Christine,” he replied.

She looked him up and down like a piece of meat. The spoiled kind. Gum rolled around in her mouth. She snapped a bubble at him as he walked to his cubicle.

He clicked on the small lamp and placed his briefcase down on the floor, preparing to engage in his mildly fulfilling job, never asking for more, never giving less. His reflection kept smiling back at him in the tactical glass surrounding him, his slightly crooked smile belying his imperfect nature. A thick curl of black hair fell on his broad forehead, begging for a trim, and he wished he stood just a few inches taller as he slouched into his chair, shoulders rounded over his slim, but perfectly adequate frame. Suddenly he disappeared. Messages and data began to appear on the walls of his cubicle as he scratched out a to-do list on a green Post-it note that matched his eyes curiously. 

With his pressed khakis and starched dress shirt tucked in dutifully, he sat at his desk performing his daily tasks that made him part of the community. Or at least that was how it seemed on the surface.

Two male colleagues, taller than he was, walked by his desk.

“Larry, think you can get that presentation back to us before lunch with the graphics? If it’s not too much,” the one colleague asked. It was more of a command than a request, Larry knew.

“Sure, sure can,” he responded, like a game show host. Chipper. Bright. He aimed to please. No one could get mad at him or not like him if he worked harder and surpassed expectations. Staying happy was key. Or at least seeming happy was.

The second man huffed to himself as they walked away but Larry could still hear them.

“What a planter,” he said.

Larry closed his eyes and exhaled, letting it roll off his back. That word meant nothing, and he knew it, yet it managed to cut him off at his knees and sever his head from his body at the same time. But what could he do?

Witness, if you will, a world so many men have known, where one simple word can define an individual’s entire path in life. Larry’s world was one where the choices were few and the path was straight, where there was never a question about his place in it. For people like Larry Spellington, they knew where they belonged. They knew how the world saw them, because the world was all too ready to make it known. With a look. A gesture. A single word. But Larry Spellington also knew what it was like to be fed up. Larry chose to step outside the boundaries of what was good and acceptable. Follow him now, into the Twilight Zone.

Around noon, Larry left the office for his lunch break, hoping to create some distance from this place that tortured him unrepentantly. Though they said they were jokes, though they said they meant no harm, empty threats and hollow insults accumulated their own mass eventually, and it weighed on his shoulders his whole life, since he realized he was different. It was truly no one’s fault. He knew and accepted that. The New Service, designed to populate the planet after the wars, was simply susceptible to flaws and anomalies. Larry had been one such anomaly for which society made no accommodations.

But he couldn’t help that now. Moving forward was easier without looking back. He sat in the little square near the office, under Manhattan’s watchful but oftentimes neglectful eye, and watched the world go by, imagining a different life with a different routine and a different outcome. If only.

But he knew he was just a lowly spectator, watching the theater roll on without him.

And the world’s actors he envied were all too ready to throw tomatoes at him.

A drone  buzzed disharmoniously overhead as it delivered sushi to a couple on a nearby bench. He sighed. Larry longed for his own bench to share with someone.

These thoughts weren’t novel, but he knew he had to bury them, which was terribly inconvenient as a young woman, probably around his age, stunning in his opinion, walked by him. She had a book in one hand, a bouquet of flowers in the other, and briefly, for just the most isolated flap of a hummingbird’s wings, she smiled at him. Larry, in return, managed only to pick up his jaw from the ground as she passed—though in reality, he didn’t move, allowing his eyes to follow her, and nothing more, in case anyone should be surveying his actions. He dared not express too much interest for fear of giving himself away. For fear of drawing the wrong kind of attention.

All afternoon the girl’s creamy face and silhouette never left Larry’s memory, even as the drudgeries of work tried to ward them off.

He attempted half-heartedly to think about other things, but found himself unable to shake her specter. This happened often, but there was something about this particular woman and the way she smiled at him. That all-too-rare smile. She was unlike any of the women in his office, radiating instead something akin to warmth, attraction even, and he wondered what it would be like to trade places with that book and to feel his own hand ensnared by hers. Lord knew he couldn’t talk to anyone about it. He felt his neck prickle with embarrassment as he stuffed the thoughts down inside himself.

“Hey Barry,” an older colleague said, interrupting him from his afternoon reverie in his cubicle. The man massaged his chest, his collarbone exposed, as seemed to be the trend these days.

“It’s Larry,” he responded. He felt the top button of his shirt press against his throat, like some fashion anachronism.

“Whatever. Can you get this report done by tonight? We’re heading out for Gavin’s going away party and we need to get this to HQ in California by 5pm, their time.”

“There’s a party? Gavin was my manager last year. Why didn’t I get invited?” Larry asked.

“It’s not your scene. And frankly, we think it’d be a little weird if you were there,” the colleague said.

“But I—”

“Look, just don’t make a big deal about this. Get this in by seven. Thanks,” the colleague said, shaking his head. He extended his hand to connect to Larry’s wrist device, and with a beep the report appeared on his cubicle walls. The colleague pulled his hand away just as quickly and pulled a bottle from his pocket, leaving the sharp lemony scent of hand sanitizer in his wake.

Larry looked at the other men in the office and, often, perhaps with shame or guilt guiding the way, wished he could be like them. Invited. Accepted. Embraced, even. He needed some coffee to clear his mind and to brace for the long afternoon ahead. He walked to the office kitchen, mindful of each step he took and how someone might interpret his gait. As if he could hide it.

One of his colleagues was studying a catalog by the water cooler, flipping through the pages and gently swiping across various products. An infant’s smiling face changed proportions and colors with each tap on the page. A smaller nose. Lighter hair. Wider eyes. Larry walked slowly and heard snippets of their conversation as he tapped his wrist to the machine and pulled a double shot of espresso with a few soft beeps.

“Colin and I were thinking about getting a blonde baby, but is that trend over?”
“No, no,” the other colleague said. “Blonde is still in. No one’s going for light brown hair this season. Super passé. Wouldn’t be caught dead with one.”

“I keep thinking what it was like doing this the old fashioned way and ending up with one that’s, like, you know, ugly. Like, can you even imagine?” the colleague said, earmarking pages in the catalog.

“Ha, yeah right. I don’t even want to think about it. Ugly or worse, even. No thank you. Long live the New Service.”

Larry felt seen, for the wrong reasons. He had heard about the old fashioned way, but had never experienced it himself. His great grandparents were the last generation to embrace it. It was no secret how his own parents had used the New Service to have him, birthing a dark-haired boy with green eyes, a curious combination that eschewed all trends at the time. The New Service was far from perfect. It wasn’t just like sending a new Apple dog in the mail. It was creating a life, and his life was unexpectedly complicated from birth. But he was more than dark-haired and green-eyed. It was what was on the inside that the New Service tried to control—and which raged wildly inside him. So many natural—or unnatural—urges that even the top geneticists couldn’t systematically weed out of the human genome. 

When they found out about that, well, that was the clincher.

It’s why Larry’s parents didn’t talk to him anymore. 

They wondered why he couldn’t be like everyone else, and why he had asked so often about the old fashioned way of things with too keen an interest.

Larry was powerless against millennia of human evolution.

The espresso steamed in its cup while the machine beeped anxiously.

The colleague with the catalog looked up and saw Larry staring at them.
“Speaking of something worse than ugly,” the one colleague said under his breath.

Nice pleats, Gary,” the other said.

“Oh, it’s, um, it’s Larry.”

“Sure it is.” And the colleagues left, leaving Larry with that ever-present notion of not belonging, of being an outsider, as if he had landed here from Mars only yesterday.

That evening, Larry stayed late while his colleagues went out to a bar to celebrate. But he was indifferent to Gavin’s departure, and instead peeved at the inability to resist doing everyone’s work. Losing this job was not an option and he felt fortunate enough to have it, even if his complaints to HR had gone ignored for months. 

Finally, if not miraculously, he finished the report and sent it to the head office in California. He flipped off his lamp and powered down the touch walls, exhaling slowly as he left the empty office.

The night beckoned and Larry needed a walk through the barren streets of the Financial District as the warmth of summer had yet to leave autumn’s beginning. He strolled near the water, to Battery Park, in sight of the Statue of Liberty off in the harbor. She was alone on an island, and somehow Larry felt her pain, her isolation, but she stood for something. Her isolation stood for freedom. His isolation shackled him to a life unlived. He felt like he’d forever be half of his Aristophanic being, unable to find his missing component dreamt up by the Ancient Greeks.

But maybe that would change.

Maybe there was hope.

These were the lies he fed himself, that nourished his emaciated soul.

It wasn’t by chance that he chose Battery Park. It was well-known, at least in his community, that this stretch of riverfront real estate was a popular place to be seen by very specific people—those of a very specific proclivity.

It also wasn’t a mistake that a very specific purple handkerchief happened to be flailing ever so imperceptibly from his back pocket. It was a piece of fabric that he never let be seen at work, but sometimes, well just sometimes, in the right places, he let it protrude from his pocket. Not all signs are mounted on posts or displayed on screens, after all.

A delivery drone whistled overhead as the glass towers reflected moonlight onto Manhattan’s desolate streets. It was quite nearly romantic. Not long thereafter, a woman walked by, the same creamy-faced goddess he saw earlier in the park. It seemed like chance, a sign from Zeus himself. The purple handkerchief in his coat pocket caught her eye.

“Oh, hello,” he said.

“Hi. Nice handkerchief,” she said.

“Ah, yes, thank you. It’s part and parcel of it all, isn’t it?” he said.

“Of what?” she smiled coyly.

“Right. Care to walk a bit?” He pushed the purple fabric into his pocket and out of sight.

“I saw you in the park today, when I was heading home from the florist. I felt your eyes all over me,” she said.

“I’m, well, I apologize if I—”

“No, it’s quite alright. Men don’t often look at me in that way, so I figured, or hoped, perhaps, that you’d be down by the Battery,” she said. “I pinned a digi-tracer to find you, just in case.” She pointed to her watch and he understood. He felt his own watch vibrate knowingly.

“Well I’m glad you did,” he said, heaping on some of the charm he had seen in the old 2D movies that no one ever watched anymore.

“I don’t do this often,” she said. 

“Me neither,” he said.

“I don’t know that I believe you,” she smiled again. He melted. Simply melted. He felt the jerking, nearly cataclysmic pull of her very being on his heart, yanking him painfully but mercifully from the inky depths like a sailor aboard a rescue boat. To safety. At last.

They walked side by side north, uptown toward Greenwich Village, toward the bars and restaurants and jazz clubs and other watering holes. They shared a few stolen glances at the other and even fewer words. There was no talk of the New Service, or any of that stuff. It felt natural, if not primal.

He wanted to reach out and touch her hand. To know what that book knew earlier, captured by her grip.

People in the street looked at him curiously. As they approached the busier streets, one older man in thick-rimmed glasses grumbled something nearly inaudible. But, as often was the case, very little was inaudible when the speaker truly wanted a man to hear it. The woman looked at him aghast.

“Did he just call you a planter?” she asked.

“It’s fine. Don’t worry about it.”

“I swear, people these days,” she shook her head.

“I’m used to it,” he said.

“Well I think that’s a shame. A crying shame. But what can you do?”

“My thoughts exactly,” he said, tracing a line from her eyes to her lips, and down her neck, before he caught himself. “My thoughts exactly.”

They walked toward Washington Square Park, where a guitarist was strumming something moody, surrounded by the hoi polloi of New York City. Flashing screens on the arch advertised Maybelline products. To the left, another screen ran news headlines that Larry knew were best to ignore. Instead, he sat on a bench and patted the spot next to him. The woman sat willingly. They stayed anonymous. Her name wasn’t important. He knew they wouldn’t do much more than meet and then disappear into the night. Perhaps, if it happened that she lived alone, he might follow her there, invited of course, to explore the unexplorable. In the privacy of their own homes, there was nothing illegal about it—in most states, at least—but what he wouldn’t give to grab her hands right there in the middle of the park and tell her she was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

Alas, he couldn’t bring her home. Not to the hovel he lived in. His landlady watched hawk-eyed over the building, and if she knew what he was engaging in, she would throw him out, and finding a reasonable rent in the city that would rent to him, a bachelor in pleated khakis, well, forget it. The creamy-faced woman could read the lust in his eyes but made it known that she lived with roommates who wouldn’t look kindly on someone like him in the apartment.

“If they weren’t there, I’d simply love to have you over for tea, but alas,” she said.

The way she said that indicated it wouldn’t be just for tea. His thoughts raced to the old fashioned way of things, wondering what it would be like. Larry had no point of comparison.

They listened to the music as he became drunk on her magnolia perfume. She tapped gently on the wooden bench. He tapped in sync. A code. Their mutual admiration translating itself through the vibrations. That was all they could have and he knew it. 

Two men walked by and one laughed at Larry to his friend, pointing at his pleated khakis. His blood boiled but Larry looked around and knew it was unwise to engage. Groups of men and women all over the park were sharing jokes, smoking cigarettes, dancing in circles. They were all dressed so casually, yet artfully. They were relaxed, but very deliberate in their choices. It was the kind of expressive and public life he’d never know. It wasn’t his world and he’d never be invited in, but needed to paddle through it somehow without a ripple, leaving no wake.

“Do you think, maybe, well, if we walk to the piers, we might…” her eyes were imploring. Almost desirous.

Larry nodded because, well, he knew he had one life that needed to be lived. Transgression be damned. They strolled past the bars, cacophonous with the sounds of laughter and music, the smells of hoppy beer and the ice rattling in cocktail shakers all grew more distant as they arrived at the piers, the dilapidated, forgotten stretch of Manhattan that looked begrudgingly onto New Jersey. Or perhaps New Jersey was the one begrudged. 

They sat on a stack of wooden palettes as the moon danced on the water. Larry looked at her, barely twenty-three years old, he guessed, and he took her face in his hands.

“Now this, I don’t do this very often,” he said.

“Coulda fooled me,” she said.

“Is this OK?” he asked. He caressed her smooth cheeks with his thumbs.

She smiled and pressed her face into his, tasting the sweet peppermint she had secretly popped into her mouth many blocks back. It was glorious. Larry knew it was wrong, but struggled to understand why, and how, and if, perhaps, somehow, the very notion of this transgression was somehow itself wrong. All those people who said it wasn’t good. It wasn’t normal. It wasn’t right. He feared them no longer. Not here. Not on this riverbank where drones rarely passed, with only the Hudson flowing quietly, keeping their secret.

Their lips released and he looked at her.

“So, OK, wow,” he said.

“I’ll echo that sentiment,” she smiled.

“Listen, I, well, I know this is terribly atypical, but would you want to maybe, see me again?”

She smiled anew and shrugged playfully.

“Is that a yes?” he asked.

She shrugged again, and he anticipated that nauseating despair of rejection from the herd again, but couldn’t be sure.

As if cued by fate, they heard voices as she released his hand.

“Oh dear,” she said, standing up and smoothing out her skirt. “I knew I shouldn’t have done this.”

“What do we have here, boys?” a young man, perhaps twenty-five, said. He was thin and wiry, with large hands. He wore a fitted t-shirt and black slim jeans. The other men behind him existed in variations of this uniform, with different colors. Different hues. One had a gold ring in his ear lobe. The other had a piece of steel in his cartilage.

“Looks like we have a planter accosting this pretty young thing,” a second man said.

“I told you, guys, when I saw them walking here.  I told you they’s was up to no good,” a third man said.

Larry felt the panic of a thousand fire alarms running up his spine. He had heard of people like him facing these situations before, but it always seemed like fiction. Not me, he told himself. And, yet, here he was. The one time he decided to play with fire, and no amount of ointment on earth would soothe the burn headed his way.

“Hey sweetie, you wanna go out with us tonight? We got a great place for dancing,” the first man said. He winked at her.

The woman looked at Larry, and then back at the group of men who smiled sweetly at her.

“Well, I, I, I do love to go dancing, and it has been so long, truly,” she said.
“It’s settled then. But first, we gotta deal with this planter here,” he said.

Larry felt his heart race. He was outnumbered and couldn’t protect himself and this woman, not against these men. 

“Whaddaya mean? I’m not a planter, hey, I, we’re just colleagues and we were—” Larry began to protest.

A fourth and a fifth man appeared from behind, and one of them yanked the purple cloth from his back pocket expertly and handed it to the leader in the slim black jeans. 

“I only know planters who be carrying around purple handkerchiefs in their pockets. Cheap material, too,” he said. “You’re out here makin’ trouble with this nice missus here, eh?”

“No, not me, I—really, I’ll just be on my way now, if it’s all the same to you,” Larry said. He stepped backward and realized he was only a few steps from the river. The men encircled him as his hands shook. They were holding bottles of something, small bags dangled from their hips, and he knew it was time to flee.

“I can’t believe they still make ‘em like this,” one of the men said.

“Bein’ a planter’s a choice, ya know. That’s what my dads always say,” another jeered.

“Nah, guys, it’s just an accident, and we gotta take care of it. Totally useless, I tell ya, but we can put him in his place, can’t we?” the leader said. He looked at the creamy faced woman. “Honey, you really want to pretend like you’re livin’ in the twentieth century again with this one?”

She relaxed a bit and shrugged. Larry felt her acquiescing, turning on him.

“Don’t be too mean to him,” the woman said. She played with her fingernails, suddenly disinterested in him. “He can’t help how he is.”

The men closed in on Larry, who knew the choices. Accept their brutality or disappear under the inky Hudson River and wash ashore, bloated and dead, somewhere in New Jersey. Both options seemed viable but the choice was made for him as two of the men grabbed his arms and Larry, utterly helpless and feeling their strength overtake him, succumbed, hoping it would be quick.

“Let’s beat the hell out of him, boys,” the first man said. The sound of zippers opening seemed deafening as they reached into their bags. They closed in on him and all Larry could do was scream as they did what they did best. 

Larry walked home slowly, feeling their hands on him still. He took empty streets so no one would see him, or what they had done to him. On the corner, he stopped at the electronics store that bathed the sidewalk in a peaceful glow as a dozen screens played in the window, all tuned to the local news. He leaned up against the window and the glass felt cool on his forehead. Larry could see the headlines racing past. The captions flicked by and imagined the shortest of delays between the news anchor’s words and the text as he focused on them.

“Lawmakers in City Hall have ousted the secretary of transportation for his views on old fashioned births. The man, an avowed heterosexual, claimed in a public event last week that it was time to return human breeding to its origins.”

Larry had seen that man on television before. He never suspected him of anything so radical.

“In a statement, the mayor commented that the city will continue investments in the New Service, in line with national standards. Recent polling shows that 98% of women across the 53 states are more satisfied with creating a baby without male intervention, spurred on by the out-of-womb technology provided by the New Service that has expanded access to childbirth nationwide.”

The New Service stripped him of purpose. He felt like a life raft in the middle of North New Mexico. Useless.

“And worldwide, catalog data from the New Service show that 99% of women prefer opting for female or non-heterosexual male children over heterosexual male babies. With violence against women at an all-time low, the New Service is hopeful to report even higher profits in the next quarter as these trends continue.”

It was impossible to conceptualize 99% of the world’s mothers opting him out of existence. But he slipped through the imperfections of the New Service and was here to witness what few like him eventually would.

“When reached for comment, Hope for Heterosexuals, a leading advocacy group for men born heterosexual, declined to comment.”

Larry watched the headlines shift to national news, to the president and his husband visiting France for some fancy diplomatic dinner. His blood boiled again, knowing that what he was, and who he was, would never be enough to satisfy this world. Despair rolled in over him like a summer storm off the sea.

Men like him had become obsolete, rarely rising to the ranks of politics, entertainment, or business without having to hide who they were. He knew at least two men at his own company who lived in marriages of convenience with other frightened men. Planters, they called them—a playful insult, they all thought—reduced certain men to their now obsolete ability to plant a seed in a female’s womb. The labs and catalogs furnished by the New Service rendered them redundant. Future mothers didn’t need men. Not for conception. Not for anything, really.

But they still existed, didn’t they?

His interest in the news waned quickly and his thoughts turned to his bed. Upon stepping backward he caught a sudden glimpse of himself in the window of the electronic store. Lit by the street lamps overhead, he could see what those men, those monsters, did to his face. Clear as day. They had beat him, alright. The contours of his jawline were more pronounced with blush, the eyeliner gave his eyes new depth, and he had a supple, smooth quality to his skin that was anything but his natural glow. The beating was epic. It was a guerilla application of makeup that would make even the most over-the-top drag queen whistle in disbelief. They even managed to get mascara on him as he struggled to resist.

He didn’t hate the way he looked, but it just wasn’t him.

But with his face beat or not, he knew he would always be living behind a mask.

Why did it have to be this way? Why did men like Larry have to seek out the company of women in secret when it felt so natural? Just because they weren’t necessary in the act of procreation anymore didn’t mean they were any less valid. He hid in shame, wanting only to scrub his face clean and crawl into his bed, though the stain of the evening’s events would tinge his dreams, or perhaps nightmares, for weeks to come.

As he walked home late that night, past couples of men holding hands and women walking alone with no visible pepper spray or emergency whistles in hand, he hoped, or perhaps only dreamed, that one day he, too, would be not just tolerated, but accepted for who he was, pleated khakis and all.

A man rejected for his nature. His identity. His very state of being. Unable to be who he is, and unable to be who he isn’t, Larry yearned for the one thing anyone has ever wanted in the history of humankind: to be accepted. But society ensures that goal remains out of reach for some, at all times, for no sound, rational reason, and it shall likely forever be so in…the Twilight Zone.