YOUR FUNGAL HEART
YOUR FUNGAL HEART
by Spencer Nitkey
The wishers tell you your heart is too fungal. You are spore-fallen. Rot and rhizome where there should be flower and trunk. You’d come to them for comfort, at the insistence of your grove who no longer knew how to love you, and the wishers’ strange otherness seemed familiar to you. Now, within the hallowed and hollow tree stump they’ve carved into a cathedral, their distance is antiseptic and cold.
Oh little one, they sigh, as they submerge you in the wishing pond that swirls with bioluminescence at the center of their church. The viscous water clings to your skin as they pull you up from the bottom. Your nerves send panic to your mind at the sensation of it. You did not ask to be touched and drenched. You wanted to be understood.
Inside your chest, the hyphae of me spread, tickling white threads of dense signal stitch your atria and valves. You are ruinous, they say.
They have seen your symptoms, noticed your oddness. You cover your ears at feast time, as the celebration rises, as your sisters and parents begin to swing and dance, and the music thrums loud. You shield your eyes from the fire as the wishers send it in a bright column to the sky on the equinoxes. It is too bright and singeing. You do not thrive in the arboreal village, even though you are ripe. You cannot identify those with roles above you on the overstory. You speak to superiors as if they are friends. You pause long, in the middle of sentences, waiting for the words to root, and even with this pause your language spills out as spore-ridden as the rest of you. This, too, is inexcusable.
The mycelium threads into your nervous system, pirouettes with your dendrites. You are mycorrhizal.
Once they have washed you, they test you. They wish music into the air, notes dance from their fingers. You look up at the translucent green leaves of the ceiling, at the light falling through the interstices between them, and for a moment everything sings. The music strikes you perfectly and my spread stops.
They change the song and it all falls apart. You try to enjoy it, sway and shimmer, but it’s wrong, different. The music shifts too rapidly.
Tsks and scoffs and sighs from the wishers come as the music fades. They grab your chin and look you in the eye. You look away, and one of them hits the sole of your foot with a branch. You concentrate on the motion of your finger as you pass a small stone from one to the other, down the length of one finger then up the next. Rocking in rhythm with the wild earth around you feels good.
Mold all the way through, like a ruined loaf of bread, like a rotting fruit sending its tendrils out to ruin the basket. They are speaking to each other as if you are not there. They do not bother whispering.
Burial, then.
They tie your hands behind your back to stop your writhing. They’ve done this before. Your wrists sting at the memory of it. This time, they move you. Drag you by your feet to the loam.
The compost waits for you, steaming into the air. The fungus within you reaches the tips of your fingers and feet. Your bones sponge. Of course they bury you alive. They will make you useful in the only way they can imagine.
You should panic, but the soil feels good. It muffles the wishers’ voices as it covers your ears. Shovelfuls of it rain down over you and block the midday sun. The warmth sends shivers of pleasure across your skin. The weight of it on your chest and arms feels liberating. Heavier on your chest. You cannot breathe so you hold your breath.
The world is silent now, except for the gentle hum of earth. You cannot hold any longer. You inhale and your mouth fills with dirt. It lodges into your throat. You die.
I am born. The fungus in your corpse expands, pulling oxygen from the soil and your consciousness from your skull. You are rot now, a fulfilled prophecy, and I am still you. Free in the soil, we spread. The muscle and meat of you feed the fungus of me. I pool outwards, hyphae like greedy fingers, until I am touching the roots of every tree in the Arboretum. Your family’s home, the wisher’s cathedral. I could help them, understand their needs and share resources between the trees. I could feed and protect them, undergird the whole Arboretum, send nutrients to the hungry and borrow minerals from the rich. But we are hungry, aren’t we? You and your fungal heart are starved. That hunger slimes within me now.
I rot up each tree instead. I swallow the roots and fill the freshly hollowed trunks with my spore. Mushroom caps peek from the bark. Weakened, they crumble and crash to the dirt. Blood trickles into the dirt, washes us, as I am covered in broken bones. I reach up and into them, making a home of their bodies.
I slide between their pores, or through the bone-opened tears in their skin. I enter into the blood, our white dendrites irrupt into their organs. I make a mold of their interior, spreading through a thousand bodies all at once.
We are rot and rhizome. We are sated. In the low-moon evening, I spread through every inch of everything and everyone you’ve ever known. The earth is quiet and warm around your body. There are no more branches, incomprehensible and unexplained. There are no more trees, poking holes in the bottom of the sky. There are no more wishers. There is just the soil and us. Far away we feel the pulse of another crumbling kingdom, and the jittering electricity of a rhizome making its mind in the soil. We would like a friend. We rot towards them.
Fiction © Copyright Spencer Nitkey
Image by Peace,love,happiness from Pixabay
Spencer Nitkey is a writer, researcher, and educator living in New Jersey. His writing has appeared in Apex Magazine, Dark Void Magazine, Fusion Fragment and others. You can learn more about him and read more of his stories on his website, spencernitkey.com.
