by Miriam Boersma

Myceline. I knew I shouldn’t have come here. Stupid, cold, damp cities with nothing to offer but assholes who think they’re saving me. I followed behind Carp and Kiiri, glaring at everyone who dared to look at me. If they’re gonna give me pitying looks like I’m some kind of freak-ass stray dog, I’m gonna be a scary freak-ass stray dog. A really scary dog that growls and barks and bites and makes you run home crying to your mom. The kind of dog they keep saying needs to be put down, but no one ever does it, because no one can get close enough. The kind of dog that’s feared.

We found the place. It wasn’t hard—not many places in Myceline have big-ass “NO HYBRIDS WELCOME” signs in the window. Kiiri would pass for a pure human, but me and Carp would have to stay outside.

“We should just fucking kill them,” I said, again. “It’d be so much easier than this shit.”

“No, Grey,” said Carp. “We need information from them, like I said. I know you’re frustrated, but more violence won’t solve the problem. We don’t want to give them more reasons to hate us.”

“He’s right,” added Kiiri, her eyes still on the sign in the window. “As much as I’d love to see them get karmic justice and all, now is not the time.” She turned her gaze back to me, and where my instincts sought anger in her face, there was just… empathy. It always caught me off guard.

I mumbled a “Sorry…” and looked down, not wanting to face her kindness any longer.

“Don’t apologize. You’re just listening to your instincts,” she said as Carp set a hand reassuringly on my shoulder. “They’ve helped you survive this long. It’s just important to know when they’re needed, and when they’ll do more harm than good.”

I just nodded, kicking at a rock. I missed it completely, causing me to be too focused on controlling my frustration—breathing like Carp taught me to, slow and steady—to pay attention to what Carp and Kiiri were talking about. I still wanted to slaughter every single asshole purist in that fucking bar, but I could control myself. Kiiri had a plan. One that didn’t need me. Yet.

Carp took my hand, bringing me back to reality. “You wanna go for a walk?” he asked, squeezing it lightly. “This might take a while.”

“Sure.” I didn’t, actually, but I was even more opposed to the idea of just standing here with that sign taunting me, daring me to go in, to tear the place to shreds for the way they thought of me. Of us.

Carp led me down the street. He seemed to know where he was going, so I didn’t protest. I didn’t say anything either, just listened to him talk on and on about… whatever. It seemed he’d never run out of things to say. I was glad for that—it meant I didn’t have to think while we walked, I could just… listen.

A few blocks down, he turned into an alley, saying he had something cool he’d seen earlier that he wanted to look into. It turned out to be a small patch of mushrooms that had caught his eye—and as we drew nearer and rounded the corner, it revealed itself to be a quaint little garden with a variety of fungi and plants I had never seen before.

It was a small gap between the buildings, a kind of courtyard with a huge tree in the middle whose branches spiraled around each other like strands of DNA. Colorful ivy crawled up its trunk as well as the white stucco walls of the buildings, red and blue veins coursing up to the canopy. The tree’s yellow leaves dappled the early evening light, already golden from the setting sun and now dripping like honey onto the soft moss below. The multicolored fruiting bodies of mushrooms that I could see gave plenty of space to the round-cut stones that marked a path from the alley to the door on the opposite end, framed by a pair of hanging planters from which ivy stems fell in ringlets.

The presence of mushrooms was not unexpected—there’s a reason this commune is called Myceline—but the sheer quantity of fungi surprised me. I couldn’t identify them, but that was no shock, since I’d be hard-pressed to tell the difference between an oak and a maple if they stood side by side. All I knew is that they were pretty, and I wanted a closer look.

“Careful,” said Carp as I knelt beside a patch I felt particularly drawn to. “You don’t know if they’re poisonous.”

“I’m probably immune,” I responded without looking up, “but I wasn’t planning to eat them anyway.”

“Just making sure.” He shifted behind me. 

My eyes, on the other hand, were glued on one particular mushroom. It was pale green, like the cheap plastic grass you put in spring holiday baskets, and looked something like the radiation warning symbols burned into the back of my eyes: a triangle formed of three wedges, with a circle in the middle. Except this time, it was almost floral, the three lobes something like petals. I couldn’t help but reach out and run my finger over the surface—an act that caused it to release a small puff of spores that seemed to glow slightly in the dim light. I made a small gasp of surprise, inhaling some of the spores, then promptly sneezed and leaned away.

I felt Carp’s hand on my shoulder immediately. “Are you alright?” he asked. “I told you to be careful.”

I almost shrugged him off, but decided I liked the touch. “I’m fine,” I said, “I just sneezed.”

“I saw the spore puff. Did you inhale any?”

“No,” I lied, looking up at him.

“Anyone else would think you were being honest,” said Carp, shaking his head, “but I know you only make eye contact when you’re lying. They’re probably harmless, but with your immune system, we’d better be sure.”

“Whatever.” I stood, steadying myself on him. “I’m fine.”

“Sure you are. Let’s head back, yeah? Kiiri’s probably done by now.”

I followed him back to the purist bar, still listening to him spout off about some random bit of trivia or fun fact he knew—or about his lover, whenever something reminded him of Anuka. When we reached the bar, Kiiri was standing outside, looking confused.

She smiled when she saw us. “There you are,” she said. “Where’d you two run off to?”

“Just went for a walk, that’s all,” said Carp as we started back towards our car. “How’d it go in there?”

Kiiri laughed. “I had to pretend to be a purist… that was rough. But I got the info we need. There is definitely foul play going on. Full debrief with Anuka, as usual.”

Carp nodded, and we headed back to base. I went to my room early that night—not to sleep, but to get some of my aggression out. The punching bag I’d hung in the corner had been a good idea. The picture of the most famous Humanist taped to it had been an even better idea.

The next few days were calm; no new work from Anuka, so the three of us mostly did sightseeing. I spent a lot of time wandering off, finding as many little wild nooks like the one with the tree as I could. It was more a personal challenge than an actual aesthetic drive; I wanted to see how much I could slip away from Kiiri and Carp, no more.

It wasn’t until about a week later that I started feeling weird. A dry throat, some minor dizziness, weirdly fungal dreams… I didn’t really think anything of it, though. Decades of radiation poisoning and genetic experimentation do unsurprisingly weird things to your body, so random spells of mystery ailments weren’t unusual.

I’d never heard voices before, though, so when I heard someone call my name while alone in my apartment that we’d turned into a makeshift headquarters, I assumed it was one of my fellow agents. I stumbled to the door, bumping into more things than usual, and fumbled with the door handle.

“It’s the middle of the—” I started to say, but stopped. There was no one there. I blinked, then rubbed my eyes, but no one suddenly appeared.

Then, the voice came again. “You won’t find me out there, Grey. Go back to bed.”

Some small part of me had its hackles raised, but I was tired, and what the hell else was I supposed to do? I wasn’t about to wake Carp or Kiiri up and tell them I’d started hallucinating. I went back to my bed, curling up into a ball under my sheets as usual.

“Everything hurts so much, doesn’t it, Grey?”

My eyes half-opened. I mumbled, “Who are you…” into the air, my curl tightening. Whoever it was, this voice was right.

“A friend. I’m here to help you.”

“I like… friends…”

“I know. You like them because they make you feel safe, right?”

I didn’t like where this was going. Where that was, I wasn’t sure, but I knew I didn’t like it. I didn’t say anything, just squeezed my eyes shut and curled myself tighter.

“I’m on your side, Grey. I’ll make it so no one can ever hurt you again.”

“I just wanna sleep…”

It started to talk; its voice was so calming, so soft, so welcoming. It just kept going, telling me so many sweet things, lulling me into sleep…

I opened my eyes to a wide twilight sky, the night’s first stars above me. I turned my head, taking in my surroundings—some kind of overgrown dump, a pile of trash covered in fungi and mature plants. This place had been here a long time. I was laying on a pad of moss that might once have been a mattress or cushion. Realizing there was a figure next to me, I jumped upright and turned to face it.

Its four-armed body was draped in ruffles, and in place of a head, it had the cap of a mushroom. A familiar mushroom. It was the same one I had inhaled the spores of.

“Y-you…” I whispered, backing away.

“Sorry to startle, you, Grey.”

“You’re the…”

“The mushroom from earlier, yes. Please, don’t hurt yourself trying to get rid of me. It won’t work.”

“Why shouldn’t I just kill myself? Stop you from spreading to others? I won’t let you hurt Carp and Kiiri.”

“Slow down, Grey. I won’t infect anyone you care about. I know how much they mean to you. I just want you to be happy, beloved.”

“B-beloved? What?”

“You are my host. You took in my spores, allowed me to take root. For that, I love you.”

I was silent. Its voice was so nice, so kind and loving… it really meant it. No one ever really meant it. Maybe Kiiri and Carp, sure, but besides them… no one loved me. Not really. I could always tell in the way they said it—it was pity, or duty, not love. But this was different- I felt the words travel through the shiver that ran down my spine.

The figure moved closer, and I flinched, but it just wrapped its arms around me and brought me into a tight embrace. Of course. It would never hurt me. I was safe here, safe and warm and wanted, loved. I didn’t move—I couldn’t, unable to risk losing that wonderful touch that held me like I mattered, like I was worth something.

Tears welled in my eyes, my breath catching in my throat. Slowly, carefully, making sure I didn’t separate from the figure for even a second, I wrapped my arms around it and buried my face in its shoulder. My sobs were muffled by the soft fungal matter, a sweet scent filling the air as my tears ran down its back and dripped off of its ruffles. It began to rub my back as I cried, really cried, harder than I’d ever sobbed before. Decades of struggle, of separation, of loneliness poured out from me in waves until eventually I and the mushroom were laying, wrapped in each other’s arms, nearly buried in the moss as it grew up around us.

It whispered to me again, telling me such amazing things about myself—true things, not the false compliments I was so used to, things I could be proud of, things I could love. “They’re wrong about you,” it said, “every last one of them is wrong. But you don’t have to prove that—no, I know the truth, and I love you, and I will never leave you.”

I felt so wonderful, there in its arms, folding open my mind and splaying my soul for it. I would do anything, anything to serve this beautiful voice. As my dreaming consciousness slipped away and I began to wake, I swore to it that nothing would ever be more important to me. It was my god, and I was its humble devotee.