Type 1 2C. Rose

Scientists in love. He sends her mutants through the mail--pale red seeds she plants in perfectly straight rows, one each to a test tube. Two weeks later pink flowers fill her office with the smell of bleach and chlorine, little mouths cooing "Rose we love, Rose he love, Rose we love". She strokes their petals to quiet them while clients spill stories of getting caught masturbating by their mothers; how their fathers had a whip for every occasion.

She has to water them once a day, from an old metal pitcher hooked to a base pumping precisely 125 Volts, 25 Hz electricity across its skin for an hour. He sent that in the mail, too. Where does he get this stuff? They hum in perfect fifths as she drips it down their stems. She tasted the water, once. Like stale lightning, like chewing rusted metal.

He has his strange ways of showing affection, sure. Really he's just a little boy in a man's body. One of those brainiacs her mother always told her to avoid. "Just marry a plumber, dear, or an electrician. It will keep your feet on the ground."

But when their eyes met across the conference hall it was electricity, never mind the wattage, voltage, or cliché of it all. Animal attraction. She didn't give a flying fuck when he babbled on about genetic modification through use of alternating sinusoidal wave-current; the inheritance patterns of poppies when you plug their taproots into walls. It was his lips when he said words like " Papaveraceae, Meconiscus ". When she suggested they get a room for the night, he blushed.