So she's half vegetable, a rutabaga in human form, born from a space spore that descended with its seedling kin on solar winds to invade our world.

Even though she hatched out of a pod and inserted her alien DNA into someone to snatch their body, he still loves her, even though she can't love him back. It isn't like she's completely emotionless and inhuman. She's just emotionally challenged. OK, she is inhuman. But the person she absorbed had been human.

Isn't accepting our partner for who they are and a little understanding what makes a relationship work, anyway?

His occupation, for example, complicates their relationship, as work can often put a strain on a couple. The planetary defense force had rounded her up with some other captured spore people and stuffed them in a huge barn. His job? To spray the barn full of defoliant and kill them all. Naturally, she might find this disconcerting, which would be the appropriate emotional response for a being with a muted emotional life. (She would consider alarm or panic to be reactions indicating a severe mental illness.)

For his part, when he has to spray, he takes care to set her aside without raising suspicion and cover her with a tarp. Some poisoning is unavoidable, but he does his best to protect her. Each time another truckload of Spores gets dumped in the barn, he makes sure that she doesn't get buried underneath.

He does this out of love for her. All of her. Even the pieces of her that have fallen off or rotted away. He loves the kneecap that just fell, in a big clump, off her stumpy left leg, as he embraces her and holds her tightly, but not too tightly, or he'll sever her spinal cord with his loving, manly arms.

Sometimes, when he gazes into her beautiful face--the half that hasn't sloughed off--he thinks he should surrender himself to the spores and join her in their hive mind, but he's not sure he can emotionally handle anything more than a conventional, monogamous relationship with an insidious alien virus from another planet.

But other times, he feels it's inevitable that he will lose himself, get his memories sucked out of him, while he gestates like a caterpillar before he emerges from a pod, looking and behaving pretty much like he did before. A little less joyful, perhaps, but then again, he wouldn’t get nearly as angry as he does when he loses at Scrabble. He'd probably need to find a new job.

And recently he heard that the alien spores have started replacing chimps and bonobos. Next will be the orangutans and gibbons. Before long, they’ll be after the cats and rats that scurry around the town, who would then continue to scurry around much like they always had.

Soon, the world will be completely different, except in all the ways it pretty much is right now. He‘ll feel less passion for his vegetable woman, but on the other hand they won't get on each other’s nerves quite as much.

Like recently she kept suggesting that he take some of the pods and plant them under the beds of my co-workers in our barracks. When he didn’t do it at first, she gave him the silent treatment for weeks. He got so angry. He thought that would be the end of it for them, but then he thought being in a relationship is all about listening to the other person and understanding their needs.

If expanding the hive mind was important to her, shouldn‘t he at least listen and work together to make it a win-win situation for both of them?

So for the sake of the relationship, he did this one little thing that he had some reservations about, but he could compromise on. And to be honest, the tensions and arguments and scuffles at work had been dramatically reduced when all was said and done.

When they’d dumped a new truck full of spores into the barn without asking him, he panicked. Normally, he’d have known ahead of time and would have been able to set his lover in a protected space, where he could find her.

He stepped knee deep into the mounds of spore limbs and torsos—tangled sinewy bodies fused, heads lolling like daffodils. Pushing forward, he put his arms between a pair of adult-sized spores and pushed them apart. They ripped unevenly, exchanging limbs and chunks of rib. One, vaguely female, gazed at him but said nothing about dinner, suicide, depression, violence, retribution, swindles, or whatever had been part of her previous emotion-rich life.

With his hands, he scooped up dirt and debris and tossed it aside until he found her. He got so excited that he hugged her tightly, which severed her spine and left her torso and lower body connected by a thin, twisted spaghetti waist.

She was a bit perturbed by it, but also mildly elated to see him again.

He slid into the muck and nestled between her and a mature spore pod, tough and slick, like a giant spinach leaf. As he slept, little tendrils crept, furtively, from the end of the pod, caressed his arms, legs, his cheek, the back of his neck.