“He said he didn’t have long to live.” The library was far too silent, as if all discussion paused the moment Aubrey opened her mouth.

“Well duh, if he’s sick enough his brain is shutting off.” No one told Xander to put out his cigarette as he waved it around, stinking up air around the table. The library was too old and decrepit for anyone to check on the smoke detectors anyway, not when it was going to be torn down. He was hidden too, laying behind the table on the floor where the shelves obscured them all from sight. “Why the hell’s he sticking with college anyway? Should have done something interesting with his last year, right?”

The acrid smoke, a familiar scent, burned Reina’s nostrils, and she glanced up to watch it spiral from Xander’s peeling lips.

You’ll end up like him at this rate. Something tight clamped around her throat through the miserable smell. She wet her lips, as if to speak, but she had nothing to say. The black KN95 mask over her face shifted down with the movement, and she scrunched her nose to fix it.

“Can you at least stop smoking around Reina?” Dean appeared once again, smuggled drinks in hand. “She hates that shit.”

Reina smiled half-heartedly at Dean, taking the bottle he offered without opening it, listening to the carbonated choir of hisses. The fruity perfume from everyone else’s open bottle twisted up her sinuses, making clear the fragility of the cover she attempted to provide herself. Xander stared at Dean for a moment, then turned to Reina, whose hand had drifted up to her mask. His eyes narrowed, before he smashed the nub against the plastic carpeting and shrugged.

“Sorry.” His words were tinged with distaste, but his eyes glanced away, unable to meet anyone else’s. Reina watched. His voice wasn’t as deep as her father’s, effeminate and young. The rasp was identical though. She watched his fingers roll over the cold stick, tracking ashes on the filthy floor.

“You know those aren’t good for you anyways,” Dean started, in the elevated tone of voice that meant he wouldn’t stop unless someone interrupted him, “they showed diagrams of a smoker’s lungs to us in class, and it looks like burnt meat. You’re only fucking up your own body like that. Besides, you’ve caught COVID too, who knows what that did to you—” Xander grinned, leaning up and towards Dean, tilting his neck playfully.

“What, scared you’ll catch my smoker’s lungs? Gonna catch my—” Xander lunged upwards, breathing heavily on Dean’s face as he scrambled back with a sharp laugh “—my little smoker’s cooties? Is that it? Wanna suck on my cigarette?”

Aubrey was giggling too now; cheeks pink as she hid her painted-pink lips behind a slender palm as Xander managed to knock Dean out of his chair and the two began to play-wrestle on the ground.

Reina’s eyes drifted from the boys with an unpleasant sense of space around her, as if she’d floated into some separate dimension from them all. Her gaze instead latched onto Aubrey’s hands, the soft olive skin and painted floral nails—natural, not acrylics. Reina bit her lips, watching as they pressed soft crescents into Aubrey’s cheeks. The space between them never felt further.

###

The plants were browning, soft leaves pulled in like aging skin at the edges. Reina traced the hardened tip with a frown.

“I don’t know what I did wrong.”

She tucked her hair behind her ear with a gloved hand, staring down at the tomatoes on her balcony. The narrow concrete ledge, what she’d chosen this apartment for, was littered with withered leaves. Her tools: a small spade, watering can, extra pots, and her dad’s old, full-size shovel she brought along on trips to the campus gardens—they all sat against the black, rusted rails bordering the concrete. The rails rang hollow as the toe of her boot slammed against the metal rods. Her last plants died to some aphids, the others to some fungi. Everything she’d brought home failed, some way or another.

She stared out at the skyline featuring the nearby campus. A smokey haze floated in and across the city from where the plastic plant hid behind the skyscrapers still under construction, coating the sky and falling over the neighborhood below. The sunset was hidden in the grimy heat. Wailing sirens and constant roadwork dug at her ears, and her head ached and spun. She quickly stood up, slamming the door behind her. It jumped out of place, lock still broken.

This place is going to kill me. Not even my plants can stand it.

She stumbled past the unpacked boxes and into her room. None of her roommates were home, all working late, so none of them could hear the slew of curses that left her mouth, as she flung her mask onto her desk, and glared at the mirror. That ugly rash was still flaring up across her nose, only worsened by the mask. Not to mention, she was breaking out. Tiny whiteheads filled with pus, no larger than a needle tip, freckled the part of her face suffocating under that mask all day, the dampness that escaped her lungs too repulsive for her own body. She’d tried her best not to pick at the little pricks, but her face was already discolored from her weak will, purpled spots where her nails pressed a little too deep. She soaked her hands in soap, before dragging her fingertips across the disgusting waste. She imagined a world where she could forgo the mask and return to pretty, smooth skin, the kind of skin Aubrey whined about lacking and praised on all their classmates. For now, the thought of her was enough to keep her fingers at bay.

She snatched a jar of ibuprofen and took one dry. Collapsing on her bed, she felt the stones in her stomach turn to lead. Her lips were parched, but she couldn’t bother to reach for the bottle in her bag. The smoldering sunset from outside lit the ceiling of her Her eyelids began to drift downwards, the noise slowly fading from outside her window.

A blaring ringing sounded at the side of her head, and she jolted up at the sound, chest pounding. She glanced outside. The sunset at the edge of the city and its lurid colors were gone. The room was cold. The ibuprofen had done its job, the sharp pains in her elbows and legs simmering down to a dull ache. She reached for the phone, hand shaking as she glanced at the time. The caller’s name read ‘Mom’.

“Hey sweetie?” Her mother’s voice, static but warm, sparked and sputtered from the speaker. “I know its late, but you didn’t call, and you normally call today. I was a little worried.” Reina blinked, eyes dry despite the time they spent closed. “Today was an exam, right? I hope you studied!”

“I’m fine Mom,” she muttered. “I’ve just been tired lately, sorry.” Moving hurts more than it used to.

“Is it college? Have you been eating well? You know you take after your grandmother; she was always getting sick.” Her mother’s voice was knowing, and Reina’s jaw clenched.

“I’m fine. I’m not sick. I haven’t been sick in months.” She lied a lot to her mom these days.

“Are you sure? I can come visit.” She felt the longing in her mother’s voice. There was no one else at home.

Her eyes burned again, for a different reason. She swallowed hard, clearing her throat.

“Sorry Mom, I’m going out with friends this weekend.” She hadn’t meant to sound so cold. There was a long pause.

“Those friends?” Her mother’s voice was cautious. “From college?”

“Yeah. Them.”

“I see … I know you’re busy, I didn’t want to bother you.” Her mother’s voice echoed out from the phone, and Reina imagined herself next to her. There was a long pause between the two of them.

“You can say what you think, Mom.” Her mother sighed.

“Look darling, you know how I feel about Xander already. And you complain about Dean all the time! Just last summer, you were going on and on about how he always needs to feel right, or how ‘ignorant’ he is. You don’t like those boys.”

“Well—” Reina in fact said all those things many times, and she did have a lot of complicated feelings about Xander. But she didn’t want to not have friends and cut off the only people she liked to hang out with. And sometimes, it felt fun, pretending everything was normal, though she’d never admit it out loud. “—if I don’t keep hanging out with them, I won’t keep boring you with all my complaints. What a boring visit that would be, huh?” Her mother chuckled, and Reina felt a smile melt across her face at the sound. She hesitated, before speaking again.

“I’d like it if you visited next week, Half-truths are no better than lies. Her mom said that once, when Dad started skipping work to go the hospital without telling her. There was a pause, and Reina bit her lip, waiting.

“That sounds lovely sweetie. I know things have been hard, and I know you want to do things on your own, but I’ve missed having you around.”

Reina’s throat tightened, and the patterns on the bed sheets blurred.

Me too.

“I know.” There was another pause. “It’s late. You should be sleeping Mom.” A sigh.

“I know sweetie. Take care of yourself. Good night.”

“Goodnight.” The line went silent. The phone dropped from Reina’s hand, as she fell back on the sheets, her mind fuzzy. She picked up the phone once again, wondering if the call had been a dream like last time. The numbers didn’t lie.

She shut off the phone, caressing the screen with her thumb. It was warm as she placed it on her cheek, pulling the blankets around her tighter as she curled up, holding in what threatened to burst from her shivering chest.

###

“You know, for a plant nerd, you really suck at outdoorsy stuff.”

Reina sighed, crawling up to her sore knees as she wiped the dirt off, as well as a few small leaves pasted onto her jacket. She felt Xander stop to stare down at her as she stood up again.

“I haven’t been hiking in ages. Everyone trips. You trip up the stairs all the time,” Reina said. Xander snorted, hands stuffed into his coat pockets as his eyes narrowed. She could see his fingers fidgeting under the black fleece, rolling nothing between his fingers as he glared up the trail at the other two of their friend group. His cigarettes were left in the car, despite his protestations. While Dean’s complaints were often mild and halfhearted, Aubrey loved to play the angel on his shoulder, enforcing wildfire safety protocol the best she could even in the off-season.

“What are all those stupid identification guides for if you never leave your room?” Xander kicked at a plant with slender leaves and parallel veins arching over a rotted branch. “What’s this one?” Reina glared halfheartedly, but stood, walking past him.

“I like looking at them. And that’s Solomon’s seal, not that you care. You can eat it.” She kept her voice soft, but Xander’s

“See? Why not go out and forage some then? You could just see them outside, it’s not that hard!” There was a sincerity lurking under his acid tone, like a whining child who couldn’t understand why he was being ignored.

Reina exhaled, feeling the condensation inside her mask tickle her upper lip. What was Xander even trying to do now? They’d been friends—well, more like complacent acquaintances—for most of their lives. He knew the reason she’d stopped. Was he really just that insensitive?

“I don’t understand why you care,” Reina sighed, looking back to Xander. “Why can’t you drop this?”

. His eyes, sunken and dark, stared at his feet as he walked, and Reina focused on his chest, which heaved with the effort of the hike. It wasn’t that steep a trail. She tried again.

“Why did you even agree to come?”

Xander kept his uneven gait, shrugging, his words heavy from the exertion. Reina could imagine his breath leaving in a gray, undulating mist, like writhing ashy worms carried by the air.

“I wanted to be with you guys. Why did you?”

Reina didn’t reply, trying to elucidate if he was being honest, despite the lack of oxygen making its way to her brain. Xander was the type of guy to boo whenever sports or the outdoors came up in passing conversation, and he’d never listened to any of Reina’s stories about her and her father’s trips in the Cascades with anything more than mild bemusement. Did he really care about this trip that much?

“We made The flimsy outlines of the two ahead waved back at them from the campsite, bags and tent dropping to the ground from off their backs as they began setting up the tents with a vigor Reina and Xander could never hope to emulate.

Her foot, once again, caught a root snagging the toe of her boots, and she flailed. It didn’t hurt this time, she decided, her knees still throbbing from the last one. Xander stopped again, silently offering his hand. It was rough, ash and blue-green paint staining its creases, yet it shook like a leaf, spindly as one too. Reina took it.

###

“Reina, Xander: I’m glad you came.”

Giggles subsiding, Reina looked up from her hotdog to stare at Aubrey, who’d spoken. The firewood popped and crackled like old joints as the four sat around the fire and the charred sausages that rested on the wooden props they’d thrown together. Aubrey swayed from side to side, knees bumping against Dean’s without a thought.

“Why wouldn’t we have?” Reina asked. Xander didn’t look up as he kept eating, though he furrowed his brows ever so slightly. He was further back from the fire like Reina, sketchbook and pen tucked by his side, perfectly miming nonchalance. Dean shot a worried glance at Aubrey, who stared right at them, faintly smiling.

“Well, Xander didn’t seem excited about the hiking bit, and you aren’t super outdoorsy. I thought you were when we first met and you were reading that nature guide thing, but seeing you go up the trail, it was pretty obvious you weren’t!” Aubrey giggled again, a glob of ketchup painted onto one of her rosy cheeks. Dean opened his mouth to scold her, but Reina ignored him.

“I used to a while ago. With my dad. We’d hike up this mountain sometimes.” She glanced around. Dean and Xander’s eyes were ping-ponging back and forth between her and an oblivious Aubrey.

“Why’d you stop?”

“I stopped when he stopped.” Reina noticed in her periphery how Dean’s jaw clenched tighter, and his leg jittered up and down.

“Why’d he—?”

“I want to sleep,” Xander said. He stood quickly, scooping up his sketchbook as he moved to the tent.

“Wait, what about s’mores—?”

“Aubrey, let him be. I think we’re all a bit tired. S’mores in the morning?” Dean smiled tersely, and Aubrey’s eyes widened in understanding.

“Oh!” She glanced at Reina, apologetic. “I’m sorry.” With herculean strength, Reina met her eyes.

It wasn’t her fault. She’s known us for a month. Still, I wish she’d be quiet sometimes. Reina smothered that thought as best she could, watching Aubrey stare at Xander’s back, biting her lips painted with a dark lip balm. Aubrey was careless, not cruel enough to warrant any animosity.

“I’m tired too. And don’t worry Aubrey, we’ll have smores soon,” Reina said gently.

Aubrey looked back, brows up turned as she pouted at Dean and Reina.

“I’m sorry …”

Keeping her distance, Reina brushed her hand up the pink fleece of Aubrey’s sleeve, squinting her eyes so that her smile reached past her mask.

The sleeping bag was warmer than expected, so the zipper stayed down. She found herself packed at the end of the tent, staring at the blank orange fabric, steadfast despite the night breeze. Rustles and snores accompanied the warmth of the others sleeping near her. The tent wasn’t quite big enough, but no one seemed to notice her curling away from them. Soft sounds of leaves brushing against each other tickled her ears, and she resisted as her lids lowered, even as memories of plaid shirts and a faint odor of cigarette smoke warmed her chest. She looked behind her, silent as she could. Three bodies, chests rising and falling with gentle breaths under heavy, insulated fabrics. Finally, she gave in to the pull on her lids, letting out a final breath as she fell into a familiar darkness.

###

The leaves squelched under her bare feet, and chills danced across her back. Mist pooled from her breath. She blinked at an earthy darkness. She was not in the tent.

“How …?” She turned, staring where she assumed the tent would be. Waving branches and the faces of bushes coated in solid darkness stared back at her. The wind silently pulled at her hair, and she stumbled into its grasp, forcing her eyes open to stare around her. Was she awake?

“Hello?” Her voice felt muffled, as though drowning in the branches around her and the thick fog pouring from her mouth. “Dean? Aubrey? Xander?” The words were thrown back in her ears, the silence deeper after each scream.

The wind tugged, harder this time, its spindly fingers combing through her hair and pulling at her thin summer PJs. A whisper called to her, a rustle in the woods, in the air.

She swallowed the drying spittle coating her tongue, feet moving, not under her control. The soft ground gave against her toes, warmer than the air. She continued, the turning in her stomach calmed by the harsh, clean scent of pine drifting from the fronds brushing her cheeks as she weaved through their shadowy forms.

How long had it been? The trees didn’t change. There was no path. Her chest rose with quick shivers, and her eyes darted side to side. She spun, and the trees hanging over her spun in time, no sound, nothing, the woods were still, stiller, and she turned once more—

Her bare foot caught a root, and with a silent cry of pain, she collapsed on the muck and dirt. Wincing, her vision turned fuzzy with the pain, and as she blinked the tears away, she came face to face with a white, bulbous form in front of her eyes. A pale stem of some sort rose up above her, up into a ring of ruffles tinged grey. A mushroom. A mushroom the size of her head. She sat up, glancing around her. Mushrooms, or some sort of fungus—similar, but not quite the ones she’d read about in her books—surrounded her in a lumpy ring. Their caps were moon-white and speckled with flecks of red. Her heartbeat quickened, and as she leaned in, the specks of red seemed to run like veins across the caps.

There was something off about the fungi. It was as natural as it could be, she thought after a moment’s hesitation, eyes tracing the outline of the caps down and under to the gills—but it wasn’t normal, was it? They didn’t match any fungi she’d seen in her guides. A variant? Or a sub-species?

Wisps of moonlight suddenly pierced through the branches, ghostly thin, reflecting off the lumpy tops. In the center of the circle, where they burst out in oddly numbered clusters of stalks, an odd shape poked out from the dirt beside them. It was as small as a pebble, stiff, fuzzy, and ruddy brown. She crawled forward. Then, squinting at the fuzzy shape through the faint glimmer of light, Reina began to dig. She felt the dirt packing into her nails, and she wondered why she was gardening without her gloves. The odd, stiff shape, bent and soft under the dirt, seemed to be coated in mycelium, white lines of hyphae crisscrossed over it. Her hands were sore and cold, but the motion was so familiar, she didn’t want to stop. As the realization that the red fuzz was in fact fabric crossed her mind, her middle finger brushed against an object, something the red fabric was caught onto, and she mechanically dug around it.

Pasty white, the stalk of the odd mushroom extended from it. Maybe a type of volva? That didn’t seem quite right. Whole hand latching around the white mass, she found it softer than expected, though hard bits jutted out from its insides. With a gentle tug, she raised it up, dirt crumbling off the mound.

Reina stared for a moment, shivering. Her eyes followed the red fabric, faintly plaid, up a smooth wrist, skin ready to tear from the flesh stretched upon the large, limp hand she held in her own, as if to shake it.

Her limbs were rooted in place. She felt her breath stutter. Slowly, she moved to drop the hand back into the dirt.

The hand grabbed hers in an iron grip. Something under the ground, under the mushrooms shifted, and a tear ran up the paper skin of the hand, skin slipping from it with the strength of the grip. A runny brown substance coated its insides, dripping, riddled with white mycelium veins.

Reina screamed—she thought she did, but she heard nothing from her throat—and yanked her arm back, along with the hand that held itself around hers. The mushrooms rippled, jerked by the sudden movement. A crackling sound, and the air was suddenly full of grey spores. With a gasp, they coated her mouth, throat, lungs, eyes, face, a burning sensation spreading across her body, burrowing into her skin. She pulled harder, harder until the hand tore from the arm it had been attached to, grip still bruising her skin. The smokey spores filled the air. With a futile effort, she held her breath, but they caught everywhere, her hair, her ears, her pores; an itch built in her throat, and she coughed, inhaling more and more with every wheeze from her fluttering lugs. She saw the mycelium spreading across her eyes, the spores latching onto her lungs, and she screamed, silent again, stumbling forward, eyes shut, pushing past the mushrooms in the ring that bordered the body. For a moment, a raspy croak seemed to call to her from the body that lay trapped in the mycelium cage, but she didn’t care, crawling, stumbling, running, sprinting, fast as she could while choking on the air around her, the viscous mix of mist and spores suffocating her, turning her open from the inside out as she gagged and choked, coughing up more and more nothing until her head spun and hit the ground. The ground was warm, she thought, as her vision began to fade, and whispers of agitated voices reached her ears.

###

“—ina! Reina! God damn it, wake up Reina, please!” Whimpers and whispers flitted at the edge of her consciousness. Soft hands tapering into long nails tugged at her shoulders, shaking her.

“How the fuck did she get out here? Was she sleepwalking?” Xander’s voice was high and wheezing, cracking as he coughed.

“No clue. She’s never mentioned somnambulism before.” Dean’s voice was closer, and Reina’s eyes, glued shut, peeled open as she watched the boy press his ear to her chest. She tried to speak, but all she could manage was a croak.

“Reina!” Aubrey wailed, her hand clasped in Reina’s, squeezing hard enough to break bone. Reina moaned, and her stomach cramped as she tried desperately to raise herself, slumping back down with the effort.

“You can move!” Dean exclaimed, but his voice felt faint. “Okay, we need to get you up and go to the hospital.” Reina’s eyes tore open.

“No!” Her tongue felt like sandstone, and a strange worming sensation filled her stomach, but she threw herself up from the ground, slumping over her own legs, panting. “No. I’m fine. I was—I was sleepwalking, that’s all.”

“Are you sure? You can barely breathe!” Aubrey pulled Reina towards her, hands traveling across her face in search of the ailment. Reina flinched, brushing aside her shaking hands and bare fingers that prodded against her pockmarked skin.

“I’m good, just choked, that’s all.” Her tongue was heavy as she forced herself to meet their eyes. “I just want to go back to the tent.” Her face felt cold, lips tingling. Tingling? Reina reached up, tracing her lips, chapped from the night air.

“But,” Aubry leaned closer, eyes wide, “you might have hit your head, you might’ve—”

“Where’s my mask?” Everyone went quiet. Aubrey, Dean, and Xander glanced around, then back at Reina. Their lips were pursed, brows furrowed before raising in realization. “Guys, where is my mask?”

“You didn’t have it when we found you,” Dean said, looking around with uncertainty. But the words were spoken on a frequency inaudible to her. A sharp ringing, harsh feedback echoed in her ears. She’d breathed something in. Something was inside her, now. Where was her mask? Did one of them—?

“Did one of you take it off?” Reina asked, glancing around.

None of the three spoke, looking at her, but she couldn’t read their expressions. Aubrey seemed shocked and offended at the suggestion; Dean looked sheepish or ashamed, but he always seemed that way; and Xander looked bitter and tired as always, still wheezing. She looked past them, over where the tent stood like a swollen blister in the shade, and she stumbled up, pulling her shirt over her mouth, suddenly aware of how mist pooled from everyone’s mouths, and she imagined the cloud of invisible seeds that escaped with the mist, ready to take root in her easy body with its easy blood.

“Woah, Reina, slow down—!” She heard Dean call after her, but she didn’t listen.

Their hands snatched at her to help her stand, but she shrugged them aside, limping to the orange mound. Inside, her mask was by her sleeping bag, sat upright, white underbelly surrendered. She snatched it up. It was probably ruined by now, but there wasn’t anything else but her shirt. As she breathed in with the cold filter rubbing against her skin, she felt a twinge in the back of her nose, where the meat became soft and slick. A painful itch, there for a moment, gone the next. And at that moment, the air inside the tent was ripe with monstrous infections.

I have to get out of here. Now.

Reina stumbled back out, face to face with a wall of three, who stood like sentries awaiting her arrival. No one moved, as if they were all frozen in place. Then Dean stepped forwards, palms out and open as if to mime surrender.

“Reina, I know you’re not feeling well. It would be smart to go to the hospital—”

“I’m not going to the hospital.” She felt gratified by Dean’s flinch.

“Okay, no hospital then. But it’s late, and you need to be careful, what if you collapse again?” He inched closer to her; his bright blue eyes were a beacon of concern, but everything about his height and hands clasping her shoulders made her feel filthier than before. “Now, do you want to put the mask back on and go back to sleep—?” Reina stopped Dean’s words with a glare, shrugging his hands off her.

“I’m going home.”

Xander’s hand grabbed her wrist, tugging her towards him.

“Reina, are you stupid? You’re not hiking down in the dark.”

Reina tore herself from his grasp, snarling at Xander’s steadfast scowl.

“No. I don’t feel …” the words drifted from her tongue and back down her throat. Safe. I don’t feel safe right now. Her eyes turned to Aubrey, who was shivering and confused, as if Reina’s outburst terrified her somehow. “I’m not staying here.”

“Reina, you could get lost or hurt out there—” Dean started again, in that elevated tone of his, but Xander tore through it, his words biting and full of unwarranted heat.

“Yeah, don’t be stupid. You’re gonna get yourself killed. Also—no one took off your fucking mask!”

Reina wanted to tear his voice box from his throat. How dare he, of all people, tell her what could get her killed!

“You think I want to hear you say that, Xander?” She lowered her voice, gritting her teeth as he refused to flinch, his eye twitching harshly. “I bet you did it, asshole. Probably thought it was funny seeing me panic.”

“Why the hell would I find that funny—?”

“Reina, please!” Aubrey tugged Xander’s hand from Reina’s wrist and clasped it with her own, from which Reina slipped hers away quickly.

“I’d rather die than stay in the same tent as any of you right now. One of you—!” The words died in her mouth once she knew what they were, and she knew how they’d sound. How she sounded right now. How they were staring at her like she was some petulant, panicked child who knew nothing. A petulant child who was frightened at the thought of breathing the same air as her friends. They never understood the danger she was in. She was her father’s girl, through and through.

“Reina,” Aubrey was blinking back tears, “you can stay outside, if you want. But it’s way too dangerous to hike back down. I’m sorry about all this, but please. You’ll be in danger.” How easy this danger was for them to understand but not the ones Reina could see. It felt like mites were digging through her skin, and she wanted to tear them out, one by one.

She cares about you. And maybe she’s right. Look at her eyes. Don’t make her cry.

With an exhale that felt like defeat, Reina gave a slow nod. Aubrey stepped forward, arms open in offering for a hug, but Reina stepped back. The hurt masked by an apologetic smile from Aubrey worsened the cold that ate away at her body. Dean looked her way, for once lost for words, before turning back to the tent. Xander just stared with pursed lips. He didn’t leave until she turned to ignore him. And he didn’t leave until she could hear him shiver in the cold.

###

The days after the hike had been gray and overcast. Aubrey had been vibrating the entire hike back down, desperate to reach out to Reina somehow, but Dean had held her back in quiet whispers, telling her “she’s just not well right now”. Xander seemed angrier than ever, glaring out the car window as if every tree flashing by had flipped him off in passing. She’d been dropped off at her apartment in silence and let herself rot on the bed until the next morning, when the hunger twisting her intestines into knots quieted itself, aware nothing could convince her to move from her stinking nest of sheets. Instead of eating, she’d thought. All night she’d thought, trying to make sense of it all. To make sense of what had happened. What had happened? Who’d done it?

Aubrey’s expression … that was genuine, surely. Reina felt inclined to believe her just because she was also a woman, but (she could imagine Dean’s voice reprimanding her in the know-it-all male med-student tone) that was no way to base any judgements on morality. She was also the first girl who was that pretty to actually try and befriend Reina; maybe it had all been some strange ploy? A Mean Girls or Heathers-ian con of some kind?

Xander … well, Xander was an asshole, sure. After telling him about her lupus, he’d gone out of his way to annoy her by telling people she had a friend called ‘Ana’ hanging around who was all over her. But he’d never given her shit for masking after everyone else stopped. In fact, Dean was the only one who’d even made comments in passing about masking with her around: how it didn’t matter if she kept masking because everyone had gotten vaccinated anyways. He talked all over her, and it had been too much of a bother to explain why certain people got sick more often than others, and that they matter too. She didn’t want to ruin the atmosphere between them anyways. Or maybe she was just a coward.

Her mind had gone on running a thousand scenarios, from dusk to dawn, each of them stranger, weirder, and worse by the minute; when she finally stood to drink, her vision was swallowed by a black spot, rimmed like an eclipse, wavering in front of her until she woke up again, the sun on the other side of the sky outside her apartment’s window. The leaves of the pots sitting in front were all sucked dry.

Breathing was like inhaling sand. Every second, it felt like something was tearing through the raw meat of her nostrils and airways, sharp and prickling. It smelled like the juices that leak from worm boxes, and she swallowed it as it ran down the back of her throat. Her stomach purged itself the moment it was too full, which was always. She’d sneeze into a tissue; her head would spin, and her snot ran brown and thin, splattering over the white sheets with thin clear sheets of dissolving membrane.

Days went by, a slog of strange, lucid dreams in which an hour passed in weeks or the blink of an eye; only when she stared at the time on her phone screen, ignoring the wall of notification, was she reminded of the passing of time and how classes went by, until Reina couldn’t bear to imagine her grades dropping any further. Her phone, which had buzzed incessantly despite her disinterest, was full of names and applications screaming at her for a response. Dean asking where she was, Xander spamming the same five words, and Aubrey asking if she was feeling better. There was only one call she bothered to return.

The phone rang. Reina counted to ten, until her mother picked up the line.

“Hey Mom.”

“Reina, sweetie! I was worried. I missed you last night, I tried to call but you didn’t pick up. Were you busy?”

“Sort of,” Reina replied, “I was sick.”

Her mother clicked her tongue. Reina could imagine the heat of her breath fogging the phone screen.

“Honey, you know what I’ve been telling you. You’ve got to call me, I could have come down and taken care of you!” Her mother’s voice was fried through the phone’s microphone, but it still felt like home. Reina winced, holding back a wet cough as her mother continued. “I could have made you soup, could have helped you clean your room, it’s always a mess—it must have been that thing you did with your friends; you must have been careless.” Bitterness curled in her stomach like an unwelcome sapling in her womb.

“No, it wasn’t serious, Mom. Just a cold.” Reina’s pillow was covered in brown spit and snot. Her mother was never going to get close to any of this if she had any say in it.

“Well, it’s all fine if you’re better now.” Her words were hesitant, as if she could see the way Reina’s face contorted in pain as she spoke.

“Yeah. I’m, like, twenty now, Mom. I know what I’m doing.” Another

“No matter how old you are, you’re still my baby. They had to cut you out of me, y’know?”

“I know Mom, you’ve told me about it a hundred times. It’s gross.”

“No, it’s beautiful. You were just a little shy, always have been.”

Tears cut rivulets down the side of Reina’s cheeks, scalding like acid. They stained the sheets brown when they finally fell.

“Love you, Mom.”

“Love you too, honey.”

Reina paused, forcing the words out of her mouth before she could swallow them whole.

“Are you still coming to visit this week?”

There was a pause, and she heard the sound of shuffling paper and muffled voices through the speaker. Her mother was definitely somewhere at work right now.

“I was trying to call you about that, I don’t think I can make it then anymore, honey. They swamped us, and we’re stuck for a while.”

Reina shuddered, stained sheets clenched in her left fist.

“But you’ll come to see us—see me next break, right? I’ll have some fun stuff planned. Maybe a hike? You don’t go out much these days, I know, but you used to love them. It could be fun!”

“Yeah. Sounds good.” Her chest hurt, like something was wrapping tightly around her and squeezing until those halfhearted words sounded true.

“Yes, and remember to call me again! I miss your voice.”

“Miss you too, Mommy. Bye-bye.”

“Bye-bye, baby.” Her voice disappeared with a beep.

All she could hear, for the first time in weeks, was the sound of her own belabored breathing, in a room where the sun was missing from where it used to shine. She plodded to the closet, pulled out a pair of pilled sweatpants and a black shirt, strapped on a mask, slipped on her bag, and stopped at the mirror, tugging the mask down.

Her eyes were bloodshot, flecked with maroon-brown spots. White flakes fell from sandpaper skin, and her hair was pulled back into a matted mass of dregs at the bottom of a shower, thin and dulled. She brushed her brows into shape with a finger, specks sticking to the tip. Her skin felt hot, feverish. Leaning closer to the mirror, she could see brown gunk pooled at the corners of her eyes, like a little white dog. She was shivering like one too. And from her pores, she watched as a thin trickle of wet brown pus spilled from a burst pin-prick bubble on her skin, dripping down the side of her cheek.

Rubbing it off, she spun towards the door as she tugged on the mask, forcing molecular chemistry and soil lectures into her mind. Any sense of normalcy would be nice, even if she had to double mask herself around everyone else.

###

The cold air was a welcome relief to her burning skin, but the fear of seeing anyone she knew in those days lingered at the back of her skull, a twinging, hair-trigger flinch when someone made for her direction, or a body brushed past her in line at the library. It was impossible to study at that hanging spot of theirs, when the smell of cigarettes made her hackles raise and eyes water; if she let the tears fall, they were mottled with strings of brown mucus. Sometimes, she’d hear their voices in class, like whispering right against her ear drum, rocketing her out of her seat, then back down in shame as the professor’s droning faltered, and hundreds of eyes turned to the sudden sound.

Sharp, burrowing pains electrified the back of her throat when she inhaled too deeply. She coughed wildly in classes, quickly excusing herself to hack her throat hollow in the hallways, the sound echoing for everyone else to hear. Food wouldn’t stay down with the mucus draining down the back of her throat, and she found herself in the restroom on the regular, chunks of carrot and rice coming up a steaming caramel brown, festering like rotten risotto. The burning acid only worsened the cough, and she’d find herself lightheaded, wheezing out nothing but spit and bile. Long sleeves hid the veins of her arms and hands, which had shifted from a bright turquoise into a bruised-purple-gray, fading out her complexion, as if she were turning to stone, and her body ached, muscles burned, a thousand needles buried into her tissue at once. Like something was digging inside her dermis. Brown liquid leaked from stunted pores occasionally as she opened her mouth to speak. She’d taken to carrying extra masks as she roamed, gloves, and Ziploc bags to dispose of them in the bathroom. She wasn’t going to get anyone else sick with these spores.

After a week of escalating physiological and psychological oddities, Reina found herself sat at her laptop, mind buzzing like the lights in the library as a throbbing ache made the text blur and room sway, until faces with sunken eyes and sallow skin gazed at her sadly from the dark pool below her bed. She looked away from the shadows, the memories pooling behind her, and reread her schedule and the appointment date.

The health center was busy around this time of year with students that hadn’t bothered with flu shots and the COVID cases, which never seemed to let up; she knew that from her friends’ anecdotes. In her mind’s eye, she could see it, her walking around those deceptive white walls with bare faces, their noses stuffed with neon green snot and coughing into the air, like back in the hospital. She could see the smiling nurses, smiling, always smiling as if they knew they were killing him. Teeth out, hair pulled back in a prim brown bun without a mask, because they never seemed to bother with those anymore. Reina found herself turning back to one of those illusory, sallow faces under her bed, who smiled up at her. He was dressed in an ill-fitting baby-blue hospital gown; under the short sleeves, Reina could see the shape of muscle that had been eaten away under duress. Memory had spilled into reality, and she was back where it all started to go wrong. The false paradise she had been promised, and the moment the snake had entered their garden.

“How’s my little Rainshine?” His voice was gravelly, like he’d just woken up from a long rest. Reina stepped forward and over the wires attached to the bed and IV, taking in the room as the nurse walked primly to the corner to mess with some medicine.

“I’m okay. I actually got an A on my Physics test, so great.” It was one of the safe topics, an easy answer that got a quick smile. Always about her, about Mom, about school and her friends. She never talked about the growths inside his lungs and blood, and neither did he. He just didn’t want to scare her, and she knew that now, but still, this time she grabbed his hand and asked anyway.

“Are you feeling better, Dad?” They told me you were going to make it. They told me they could save you. He stared, and then smiled, a real smile that crinkled his crow’s feet despite how his body sank onto the thin mattress and his chest heaved to breathe.

“Yeah. The worms ain’t getting me yet, kiddo. We can take that trip up to Desolation Peak soon, maybe next year during spring break?”

“Gonna keep me waiting, huh?” Reina gave his hand a little squeeze, hard enough to make him laugh and groan. “You said that last year too, you know!” But she was smiling, trying her best to let it show above the mask. A small coughing came from behind the machines, and Reina turned to see the nurse again, wiping a coffee-brown drop from her lips and onto the back of her hand, quickly hidden behind her other palm as she grasped it and smiled at them both.

“I’ll be back in fifteen minutes with Mrs. Aksoy, so take your time.”

Reina nodded and turned back to her dad. But the bed was empty. And she was in her room again. Alone.

###

Nothing was in order, and the harsh light of the sun between the clouds hit the white ridge of the health center’s building, making it glow like ice. It burned her eyes, and she winced, blinking back brown sludge. People walking past her, then suddenly gone, as if glitched out of existence. Her thoughts, jumbled and frayed, could only supply that she’d made it from her apartment here somehow. Perhaps by bus?

Loud gales of wind behind her sent her flinching forward, turning to see bright black and red cars speed off, the stench of gasoline burning her fluttering, quivering lungs. She could taste her breath and the leaking pus under her mask, wet and mossy, and she could envision the black specks that peppered the white filter inside. Spores, escaping her weakened lungs. Each contraction set off a spasm, as the spongey insides, the soft muscle and tissue, pulled at the mycelium strands that had tilled the space inside her lungs to suit its own single-minded aims.

“Look over there, kiddo,” that familiar voice spoke. She turned her head to the left, watching a tawny stag stumble off the sidewalk, antlers shedding foliage onto the road below, crunching it under its clacking hooves. It turned to look at her with empty, inky eyes before it stood on its two hind legs and walked away. A horn blared, and Reina jumped back from the white line on the street, hitting the edge of the pavement with her backend, ears ringing, each echo of the horn turning into a hissing whisper, watching the car swerve to avoid where she’d wandered into the street, before turning left towards the residential streets.

Something wasn’t right. How did she get here? She was here for an appointment, right? Reina tried to think, tried to remember how she’d gotten to the center. But there were ants on the sidewalk, little black specks that trailed from somewhere nearby. Gait stilted, she followed the ants away from the street and up to the doors of the medical center. Her sight swam with fizzy bright colors, bulging and popping, the ringing growing. The glass was right in front of her now: on the door, in chalky white paint, the open hours of the building clearly stated, “Open till we’re not”. Inside, she saw shambling bodies, smashed together in a line of coughing, sneezing, human centipede of sickness, faces leaking, spewing dark fog that was swallowed up by whomever they faced.

Reina remembered her father, whose weakened lungs swallowed, then spewed sickness. The smoke, the breaths of that careless nurse as she stood over him, professing a silent truth the world loved to deny, infecting him until his own body was stolen away from him and Reina and her mother, and his lungs stopped spewing anything at all. It all wasted away.

One step away. Then two. Then Reina was running far away from the center, far away from the sickness, far away from herself until she couldn’t breathe and let her mind go blank again. She couldn’t go inside.

###

She was standing in line at the library to request some book on mycology, when a strange hand grabbed her by the crook of her arm and pulled her away before she could shout.

“Reina, we need to talk. Now. We’ve been trying to contact you all week, where have you been?” It was a familiar, sweet voice, dripping with gentle concern. Skull throbbing, lungs burning, throat thick and sore, like mites were living in the hot flesh turning cold—Reina turned to face Aubrey, whose brows were contorted in her exaggerated fear, lines deepening once she saw the sagging brown bags under Reina’s eyes, darker than her own, and the pallid skin she attempted to amend with splotches of concealer that burned to the touch. “You look awful…” It was her mother, for a moment, whose hand reached out, like the jaws of a shark towards her cheeks. She jumped back as Aubrey’s long nails caught on the patch of exposed cheek between her mask and the shell of her ear. She imagined the revulsion on Aubrey’s face towards the lumpy mass that blossomed under Reina’s mask, and red-hot shame pulled Reina further away from her.

“I’m fine. I have to get to my next lecture, so I can’t talk.”

“No, not happening. C’mon, seriously.” Aubrey tugged Reina out of line and to the field past the library entrance by her forearm, with Reina reluctantly trailing behind her, too exhausted to muster the energy needed to resist or pull away. Her head spun as sunlight swallowed her vision for a moment, only blinking it away seconds later to see Dean and Xander sat on the grass, just as startled to see her as she had been to see Aubrey. They glanced at each other, then back at the two women, Aubrey slowly guiding a shaky Reina to sit.

“Hey… Reina? How’s it—”

Reina shut her eyes, breathing in a shallow breath. She already knew how bad it was. She didn’t need reminders. Xander, to his credit, maintained that twitching scowl, as if the perpetual nicotine stench that he couldn’t stop radiating had finally begun to bother him. His gaze was piercing, ripping through Reina’s addled mind in seconds. Reina turned to Aubrey, who betrayed nothing but concern and nervously torn skin beside her almond nails as her hand tried to pat Reina’s.

“I’m fine.”

“You suck at lying, Reina.” Xander huffed.

His face now swam, a bright-orange pool stained red. Wriggling gray worms spilled from an orifice in the back, squelching like fish in a net. Reina closed her eyes again and steeled her stomach as she felt her body sway.

“What is this, an intervention? I’m not the one who’s all fucked up here.” Her eyes weren’t open to see Xander’s expression, but she hoped it was one of guilt and shame. She hoped it was nothing like her

“Reina, I know this is really frustrating for you. I know something happened that hurt your trust in us, but we need to talk about it. Why have you been avoiding us?”

Reina could hear the tears Aubrey was holding back as her voice shook.

“I was sick.”

“Yeah, fucking clearly. Why didn’t you go to the doctor?”

Reina heard fabric move, and Xander grunt.

“Xander, shut it. With what, Reina? Tell us, so we can help. We can take you to the hospital if you want?” Dean spoke.

None of them would believe me. They took it off.

“You don’t really care about me like that. You’ve all made that clear ever since the pandemic ‘ended’. You know about my issues. Why wouldn’t you protect me too?”

“Reina, that’s not it at all. I brought you here to talk because we care about you!” Aubrey’s voice was shrill.

“Only when I stopped talking to you.”

“Reina, say it clearly. Do you think we’re friends or not?” Xander snapped at her. She could smell the cigarettes on his breath. The inside of her mask turns black in just a few hours. She could imagine, in the swimming red-darkness of her eyelids, the black air that she exhaled, the particles that escaped the mask, that they might inhale.

“I don’t think friends would take my mask off in my sleep, Xander.”

“Are you saying you think it was me?”

You sure seem like the kind of snake who’d find it funny these days.

“She’s not saying that, Xander. Reina, let’s all calm down.”

Dean always knew how to preach down to everyone else.

“Me? I need to calm down?” Thick, stinking spit coated the inside of Reina’s mask as she spoke. “Would you be saying that if I’d woken up to one of you sucking on my tongue? Because that’s what it feels like to me!”

“Reina, I know it’s upsetting.” Dean held his hand out in front of her as if she were some wild animal. “But let’s think logically, what if it just fell off—”

“How can I believe that? They’re custom fitted, I ordered them because I needed them! I couldn’t afford to get sick anymore!”

“Reina, can you look at me?” Aubrey’s panicked voice pulled at some semblance of normalcy and empathy she’d been longing for. Reina’s eyes opened to slits, turning to face Aubrey. She watched as Aubrey’s face swam in a melting, shimmering pink mess. Eyes spilling like spoilt milk down her face, tearful irises breaking apart like a film on top.

We’re fighting right now, but that’s because we all love you.”

“You’ve known me for, like, two months.” The words fell from Reina’s mouth like vomit, and she felt no comfort in the way Aubrey flinched, or how Dean leaned into her, and wrapped his tentacled arms around her melting shoulder, as if she needed some sort of protection from Reina. She hated how it buried into Aubrey’s flesh like some pink worm and claimed it for himself. “And you two don’t get to pretend you care now. None of you do.”

“None of us are perfect—” and Aubrey was talking again, louder this time, “—but I seriously want to fix this. Whatever you’re sick with, it can be fixed! Whatever we did that hurt you, we’ll do better! I’ll wear a mask too, I can get something cute for the both of us, just—” her eyes were gone, pooling on the floor, as some leaky clear sludge, like amniotic fluid, pooled into the mess, and her body shook and shrunk, little hands and claws still clinging onto Reina. “—just give us a chance!”

For a second, Reina could see it, in some floating space far away from her decaying body. A beautiful world, where her friends sat beside her, the bottom of their faces covered, smiling underneath, as she sat in a hospital bed, the room sterile white, honestly clean, and a doctor prescribing her some miracle pellet to kill the monstrosity that had blossomed inside her. But the closer she looked, the more their faces seemed empty, slates she could not fill. They weren’t really smiling, not really. And she couldn’t meet their eyes anymore. The violation had burned too deep, and she wouldn’t wish it on anyone else.

“I’m not going to listen to the fakest-bitch-I-know, the paper-cut-out of a man, and a future-fucking-junkie. Keep your pity to yourself. It’s too little, too late.”

silence all around her, the stilled wind and the distant holler of students letting loose for the weekend game. Reina wondered, for a moment, if she’d been all alone this entire time again, until she let herself open her eyes to her friends’ horrified faces. Aubrey’s streaked with fresh tears that pulled down her sparkling mascara and pink liner, Dean’s pursed lip and furrowed brows, and Xander’s wide eyes and quivering lips. They all sat there, in silence. Reina steeled her face the best she could, hoping nothing about her revealed the way her heart fluttered weakly, clawing with weakened desperation to crawl out and embrace these people, to let herself cry disgusting, fetid tears. But her head was already spinning, her body too deeply gone to appear anything but distant and tired.

“Reina. I say this, as someone who’s loved you for years: you’re a piece of shit. Seriously.” Xander stood, voice shaking. Reina watched in diluted awe as tears slipped past his dark lashes and disappeared in a swipe of his open palm. “Just the worst.”

“I don’t care. Because I’m the only one of us who cares about me and protecting myself and each other, and you still stole that from me.” Reina stood as well, despite a mournful cry from Aubrey. Her voice tasted clogged and dirt-black; it was leaking from her lungs, from her eyes, pores, from her every gesture. The world as she’d always seen it was a mirage, and nothing felt real, or of consequence anymore, not after the conclusions she’d arrived at. She turned from them all, walking towards her apartment, planning the bus route she’d take tomorrow morning. She knew what she had to do. “You’ll live until you die, knowing you were the ones who killed me. You’ll have killed yourself, Xander, with the worms that rotted you inside out. I hope you’re never happy again.” Her body had never felt so cold before.

###

The bus ride with her shovel had only taken her half a mile to the trail, so she walked until she made it to the trailhead, dragging the spade of the shovel through the dirt path following the road, the paper grip she had on the shovel’s shaft often slipping. At the mouth of the monster, she began to climb. The sun was already high in the sky, beginning its hellward descent into the western cedars, whose branches hung like spiders’ legs, twitching in the tepid breeze. She could tell through the shivers and icy surge of sensations that it wasn’t that the air was really warm, but that she was unnaturally cold, as if on a slow path to hibernation. If only that were the case. If only she could wake up after this was all done, like a frog from the mud as winter passed.

The hike up the trail was long enough that it felt like eternity; the same fronds of sword ferns and Solomon’s seal dragging against the back of her hand, the wood-wet earth, and same snaking roots as before, attached to Douglas firs and vine maples alike; their bare branches and needles caught in her hair, tore it from the roots and from the tangles at the back of her head. It all smelled wet, all woods. For a moment of clarity, recognizing herself halfway up the trail past the trickling creek, she wondered how she’d find the spot where the mushrooms were. But that concern slipped away, washing away with the water until she was in that same trance, that same daze that carried her up the hill without a helping hand.

The camping site was surprisingly bare, and she stopped in the middle of the empty lot, waiting. In the clearing, she could spot the sun sinking past the mountain tops, as the sky turned pink and raw like a rash, purpling into a bruise at the other side. Despite the stiff pines encroaching on the skyline, it was broad and vast enough to set her knees trembling with the weight of her ending in the empty camping ground.

She tore her mask off, tucking away the filthy brown and black stain of mucus she’d leaked and spewed on the way up, and let herself breathe in the air. It was clear, pure. Her breath escaped with wisps of black spores.

Torn from the moment, she caught a scent: a familiar dampness that called her a little to the left, that had her sniffing at the breeze. She walked, slowly on her failing legs, out towards the tree line and into the dark woods. Her sneakers sank into the dirt, the untouched earth that beckoned forwards and away, to nothingness.

Past the maples, the firs and cedars, past the leaves that brushed her skin, filthy or clean, she couldn’t tell. She heard hooves on cement. She heard crows cawing, a sharp alerting cry, and then silence. She smelled that wet, earthy smell, and her mouth, arid, opened to accept the scent like it was water. Then she saw it: the circle. And in it, she saw what she couldn’t see before in the night.

Surrounded by those lumpy mushrooms, as if lured and snared into the ring, dozens of creatures were entombed in lumpy growth. A toad, pockmarked body still rising and falling with an effort of breath, lay there on its back. Mushrooms bulged from its stomach, young and delicate white caps, narrow enough they had only just burst through. Near it lay a deer, rotted to a skeleton, with the mushrooms blooming through its ribcage. A vole, a snake, and an avian skeleton that looked the size of a crow’s: in the dark, or in her strange waking state, she’d never seen these things that remained. In the middle of it all, there were the lumps, the mounds of earth and rotting flesh she had met and touched. She walked slowly up beside them. There wasn’t just one; three or four lumps seemed to protrude from the soil, but there surely weren’t only four graves here. At least, by the end of tonight, there would be five.

Her shovel pierced through the dirt with ease. She watched it slip into the soil in a sedated shock, held it there for a moment, then heaved the shaft down, easing the clump of earth up to be tossed to the side. Stab, toss, stab, toss. The dent became a hole, became a square, became a rectangle, became a grave. Her arms shook with the effort, and her lungs spasmed. She aimed her wet coughs into the grave, hoping to avoid another triggering of the spores in the caps around her with any sudden touch. The brown fluids disappeared into the dirt. Her mind wandered, sound and vision blending, into thoughts discordant and aligned.

Her father had gone this way too. Some sick spores in his already sick body, dying from natural corrosions that could have been, should have been stopped. But those walking fungi, those lecherous, villainous, hard-headed slimes of people sicked their spores, spread their sick all over her father, whose shaky hands, once steady and sure guided hers under fronds of ferns, who smiled when she giggled and shrieked at the yellow dust it left on her fingertips. Not far from the tree, not far at all. That’s what her mother would have said, and her voice whispered in Reina’s ears, soothing her pained thoughts like a salve.

She thought of Xander as blisters on her palm built up then burst on the shovel’s shaft, bleeding a rusty red-brown. She thought of the spores, of the rotten worms that lived in his lungs, that slithered from his mouth. Always invisible to the fools who think themselves invincible. But she could smell it. She thought of Dean and the patients he’d treat and could only muster pity. She thought of Aubrey, the way her eyeliner was always crooked and how the sparkles on her lashes and eye shadow made her seem real in a way the rest of the world wasn’t. She thought of how her hands might feel in hers, what soft skin that warm might feel like. She lost herself in imagining that sensation.

Her body wracked, as if to sob, but all that escaped was a thick, black cough. The numbness in her body, the needling pain that slowly faded into a dull drone, was about to give way, and the hole was deep enough, just enough. Her legs crumpled, sapped of strength, and she fell forward into the shallow grave.

Her body hit the dirt, and her mind was enveloped in its sweet scent. The smell of rain, of rot—a promise of no more pain, no more infection, not when she had no more body of her own. A home, in the mycelium. As if, in this world, there could have been nowhere else.

She turned over, pushing herself up on the palms of her hand. The shovel had fallen by the side of the hole, and she pulled it in with her, to avoid offering an unwelcome invitation. She leaned forward towards the pile of dirt that she’d left by the side of the hole and began pulling it over her cold legs, cold torso, until it felt warm. But it wasn’t happening quick enough. She couldn’t see, not really. It was too dark. Too cold.

In front of her, the sound of familiar footsteps were muffled in the dirt, familiar steady hands that scooped the dirt in alongside her whispering kindly.

“See Rainshine? That little stuff? It spreads on the wind, or catches on fur, takes root.” She could feel his hands pressing the bottom of the fern fronds onto her hands, the pollen catching against her fingerprints. “Don’t worry, it doesn’t hurt to breathe it in. It always turns out fine. It turns out like me, see?”

“Yeah, Daddy,” she whispered, smiling through the stiffening muscles of her upper lip. The dirt was piling up without her now, tucking her into bed, singing her to sleep. She could hear the worms, the pill bugs, the sucking roots, the breathing, swallowing rot. “I see it. I see it too.” And she hoped to God no one else ever would.

Laurent Kate

Biography: Laurent is an artist and writer that enjoys creating soft, murky atmospheres for people to dwell in. They hail from the evergreen forests of Washington and frequent many coffee shops on campus. They love storytelling in all forms and have been on a bit of a horror game streak these last few months. They hope to one day live in a tiny house by the woods.

Artist Statement: This body-horror story is about someone desperately longing for normalcy but being unable to find it in everyday life with people who cannot respect or refuse to acknowledge their medical needs. It was heavily inspired by my own experiences with COVID-19 and medical issues overall, and by my love of fungi and their promise of eternal life through decay. Connecting to the Theme of “Roots”, this story shows the traumas carried through familial ties and the desire for connection: forest roots systems are connected by fungi, after all.