The Mutant Plants

“The Mutant Plants” is one of the outstanding stories of the first biannual International Short Story Contest 2018 written by Jorge Gómez Úlehla, El Cole de Los Pekes, Spain.

The Mutant Plants

In 28th century, all the people were wearing a special mask because of the pollution. There were only two big forests of only one square kilometer. There was smuggling of mutant liquid to transform animals like rats or lizards to beasts to fight and win money.

One day the police broke a famous rocket of the smugglers called “Contrabandist” when this rocket was starting to fly near a forest the rocket wasn’t full of it but the liquid reached four plants: The biggest and strongest tree called Frungo, the most intelligent, speediest and little tree called Xd (because he likes very much the jokes), and two mushrooms called Point and Lizzie that have mortal poison.

They decided that they were going to go to the cities to close the factories to reduce the pollution because the plants had to breathe too and there were lots of plants that were dead.

At night they went to the biggest city called Titled Towers to start their plan. They divided and they closed the factories but in Titled Towers there were more than one hundred factories. So they did the same every day for two months.

One day a person called Juan saw the biggest mutant plant Frungo. He only said to all the people that what he saw in the night. So he only talked about Frungo to four people but the next morning all Titled Towers knew that there was a plant closing the factories. The next night Xd saw some army men in a factory and he told all his friends that the plant Frungo entered in the factory and someone shoot him. But he was so strong that it didn´t hurt it. He covered himself with a big box and all the plants started to throw balls that make people sleep. When all the people of the factory were sleeping, the plants started running to the forest where they were safe. Frungo then started thinking when Xd said that they could go to see the government through a smoke grenade so they don´t let the people see inside. They pretended that they couldn´t shoot them and said that they only want peace and reduce the pollution because the plants have to breath like all animals and people.

When Frungo was feeling better they went to the main square where the government of Titled Towers was. They were going to see people and they said that they were ok, they just wanted to reduce the pollution. When they were in front of the government, a big building with a garden of plastic plants, the plants thought that why weren’t them real, but they were through the smoke grenade. Point, Lizzie and Xd entered in the building and all they said in a chorus -We only want peace and reduce the contamination. We plants, mutant or not, have to breathe like all the animals or persons in the world and we and the animals don´t have a mask to have protection from the pollution like you the humans. You only think about yourself – At this moment the president started crying and he ordered to give mask to all the animals and plants of the world, to close half of the factories and to plant more forests.

The mutant plants lived 435 years and in these years they could see that the contamination was being reduced and that the humans built artificial islands with lots of forests and in 45th century there wasn’t any contamination. So after all the smuggling was good!