Bubble Blossoms

You’ve always had a knack for adventure. Taking up outdoor activities as a child, the hobby has stuck with you. Now would be the day you take the biggest risk of your leisurely career. You want to check out the uncharted lands outside of your small town’s control.

You’ve been setting up for this event for over a month now. You recently found an app that allows you to find your way back to a recorded spot by grabbing your GPS position every 10 seconds as a way to make a digital breadcrumb trail. The road you’re venturing from has been up to other great opponents, but you chose this one due to being as far out as possible and having the largest area untapped by your town and all neighboring provinces. Early this morning, after an hour-long drive, you find yourself parked off of the road ready to venture into the wilderness.

After a few seconds of activating the breadcrumb app mentioned prior and second-guessing your skills, you hop straight into the adventure. As you walk away from the nearest civilization, you’re surrounded more and more by trees, branches, and bushes. A few cleared trails exist for the first few minutes of venturing out, but they soon quietly disappear, leaving just you and nature around.

Walking around, you pick up a scent of, “Is that soap?” You dwell on this for a second, still smelling the distinct smell of something close to dish cleaner. You decide to try to walk closer, using your nose to guide you. As you get closer and closer, the ground around you start to get whiter and you start to notice an increase in a specific color of a flower.

Eventually, you stumble across a large pool of water. Looking closer, you observe the slight hints of rainbow splattered across the surface, noting that the pond seems to be “infected” with soap. Looking around the trees, you start to see that many of them bear fruit – no, flowers. They seem to be the same color as the previous flowers, bright blue. Those flowers are now much more abundant around this area, seeming to be caused by the pond from earlier.

All at once, the flowers open up and begin sprouting their daily fruits, bubbles. All grew at different speeds and to different sizes, some popping off less than a second after they were formed. These bubbles started to float around in the air, giving the area a calmer vibe. At this moment, you’re glad you took this trip.

A small bubble lands on your left index finger. You look at it for a second before starting to play with it, moving it around your hand. After having your small fill of fun from that bubble, you try to take your finger off. Unfortunately for you, your finger seems to be stuck to the bubble. Pushing and pulling harder, you notice that the bubble can’t seem to get off of your left hand or your right index finger, nor can it be popped.

As you worry in your mind about what will happen, the bubble starts to inflate. It grows quickly, beginning to wrap around your finger and hand. Moving the bubble around and knotting it together, you unintentionally wrap it and your bubbled hand and fingers in a second layer. As it wraps around your left, and eventually right hand, your ten digits, and two palms are made effectively useless. By the one-minute mark, both of your hands are finally trapped together in a solitary double-layered bubble. You try to tug at the bubble from the inside, but it only stretches around your escape attempts.

Moving around in your struggle, you accidentally step on two of the mystical flowers one after the other. As soon as you come into contact with them, they start to grow their blossoming bubbles around your feet. You try to pull your feet off, but it’s too late. Your feet are stuck in place until those bubbles detach from their flowers.

Trying to move off of the flowers caused even more issues for you, as you tripped from the sudden yank from the plants that were not done with you yet. To your dismay, you feel a familiar feeling on your chest.

Your torso accidentally touched yet another flower. Now, stuck on the ground with three flowers tugging at you and no leeway with your hands, you start to feel hopeless. At least the feeling was comforting, their slick membranes maneuvering over your body giving you a massage.

It was at this moment when the bubbles around your feet detach from your flowery captors, fully submerged in bubbles. Your legs straighten out, forcing your feet bubbles to meet up and touch. As they began to cling to each other, the pressure between the two kept growing. This forced your legs to go closer and closer to each other before finally, POP!

Your feet bubbles merged to form another double-layered bubble around your now-touching feet. You try to stretch the bubble around them as you did to your hand bubbles, but the same results appeared. It stretched and stretched without giving way.

Giving your attention to the only bubble left, your torso, you notice that it’s grown much larger, yet still connected to the source flower. You are now laying on a bubbly air mattress, still stuck to its top. It starts to grow around you, rising above your body yet preserving the previous bubbles. Your body begins to sag into the bubble until you finally pass through and land inside.

Your world is tinted with every color of the rainbow, and you deduce that the previous air bed you were on became your new soapy prison. Attempting to move around with your bubbled hands and feet, you find that the friction between the two soapy films is too low to effectively move in your bubble. You come to terms with your ensnarement, and eventually, start to like your unique situation.

Finally, the bubble detaches from the flower, rolling off of it with you spinning with it. You lay on the ground inside your safe bubble until you feel your chest wrapped around again. Looking down, you notice that your bubble leaving the ground for the final time. You stretch your hands down one last time, trying to get any grip on the ground beneath you.

Watching the ground slowly but surely fall away, you think about what you’ll be leaving behind. Your car, social life, and the general color green. Rising higher, you realize that those things no longer matter to you, since all you need now is your bubble to keep you safe. You notice the fact that ever since this whole fiasco, you’ve felt more sated and quenched than you did on the ground, and you realize that this bubble must be protecting you from the world in more ways than just floating away.