by John Klima
Aurelie goes to bed. She stands in front of her closed bedroom door and listens to the voices on the other side of it. She reaches out, unwilling to think about why, and pushes in the flimsy button that locks the handle in place.
#
When Aurelie looks at the dark, she sees a person, a roughly vertical column that swims in and out of certainty a short distance from her bed.
Her heart beats so hard that she can’t breathe.
She gets out of bed. The figure doesn’t move, or disappear. Aurelie walks toward it, and then she stands next to it, and then she sees that it’s Max; but it’s Max in slow motion, Max covered in ash, Max with skin that feels as solid and cool as an unlit candle.
“Aurelie,” he says. “I’m sorry.”
She pulls him into her bed, lifts the covers over his fire-stained clothes, switches on the lamp next to his head. He stares at the ceiling.
Aurelie holds his hand. It doesn’t move from its indentation on the blanket. His fingers feel thick, and she tries several times to fit her own hand around them, but gives up when she finds herself clutching the padded base of a still thumb.
“Max,” she says. “Are you dead?”
“I’m hungry,” he says. “I never ate. I never had the chance. It was a cigarette, of all stupid things—a cigarette!—
like in some cheap soap opera: a man, drunk for no reason except general despair at being alive; sheets on the bed; an expired battery in the smoke detector.”
Max’s hand has achieved a new position. It’s a hardly perceptible change.
“I didn’t think it would be like this.” Max’s face betrays no disappointment, his features are fixed. Aurelie puts her face against his, cheek against cheek, her ear crumpled against the stiff peak of his nose. She detects smugness in his slow face, a relief that surprise would never betray it, not ever again.
“What’s it like?”
“It’s like being sealed up without notice. It’s like being full of want and not knowing what it’s for. It’s like being hungry for your favorite food and not remembering what it is. I need someone else to tell me because I think I forgot.”
Sadness hits Aurelie so hard that she is blind for several seconds. When she can see again, Max’s face looks exactly the same. “I don’t know what your favorite food is,” she says.
“I didn’t know what yours was either.”
When she stands up and leaves the room, the only thing that seems to notice is the mattress, which springs upward to claim the still, slow shape of Max, alone.
Aurelie is surprised to find that the apartment is still full. Imogen and Percy sit at opposite ends of the couch, surrounded by the bodies of strangers who lie still on the floor.
“My husband’s favorite food,” Percy says, “is boiled wheat, sweetened with honey and embittered with ground walnuts. He likes it seeded with sesame and anise. He likes pomegranate seeds mixed in, so many of them that the dish is red and wet.”
Aurelie walks around the edge of the room. She wonders how she overlooked it before. It’s obvious that the strangers are dead. They’re stuck here at an immovable end, with their backs jammed against an ash-dusted wall and no place to go.
Her foot knocks against a ghost’s ankle. She steps on a ghost’s long hair and is surprised that it’s soft and not tangled. She makes it to the kitchen and examines her insides for the swell of fear. She checks herself over as carefully as Imogen might check a pantry, noting the contents of each shelf and cupboard, but there’s nothing there.
Percy’s voice continues. “My husband likes it mounded on a platter and topped with powdered sugar, like snow dusting the top of a grave.”
Imogen says, “My sister’s favorite food is whatever she hasn’t eaten. She’s always been like that, ever since I can remember.”
Aurelie unwraps a candy and drops its square of red cellophane on the floor. She unwraps another and another. She remembers a birthday party, whether it was hers or Imogen’s she can’t decide. There was a cake with ruffles of white frosting and a ring of candles that stood up like the poles on a carousel. Imogen smeared frosting across her face, but Aurelie held her plate in her lap until some grown-up told her that only very strange children didn’t know what to do with a cake when they saw one.
Aurelie crushes the pile of candies on the counter. She puts fistfuls of red into a glass and scuffs through the cellophane that litter the floor. She fills the glass at the sink and drinks down grit, sweetness, and all. Then she pushes through the ghosts, ignoring their complaints that she is getting in the way, letting them surge shut behind her so they can drink up Percy’s voice and Imogen’s, and escapes down the hall.
#
Imogen’s room is disconcertingly clean. Everything has been put away, the bed has been made. The only elements that are out of place are the bag, packed, and the two golden coins that lie on top of it. The coins are such small, insignificant objects, but their gravity overwhelms the room. They drag everything in towards them, and Aurelie feels that she is standing beside a gilded, rushing blur.
Dizzy from the sugar, Aurelie thinks. She reaches out and takes the coins, one for each hand.
When she walks out of the room, they already feel like they are stuck to her palms. She has to push through more ghosts to get to the door, and once she opens it, she finds a double row of them lining the hall. They are burnt black and still, but they all make the effort to study her face as she passes. She’s not the one they’re looking for, and every time a face turns away from her, Aurelie tells herself that she doesn’t care. She doesn’t care, she repeats, she doesn’t care. It’s a song that she beats out in her chest and in her head and against the roof of her mouth as she walks down a hall of the dead with sweet pomegranate grit in her teeth and two golden circles safe in her hands.
The ceiling is lost in smoke so thick that it looks like the furry underbelly of a forest at night, or the surface of a river when viewed from below. The ghosts here are a crowd, their burnt limbs unmoving. Aurelie is surprised at how easy it is to pass them, how short a distance it is to the open door.
Just outside, there is a boat. It floats on a current of smoke and the man who stands up in it is dressed in a narrow black suit. All around him, the world is on fire.
“I am looking for my wife,” he says.
#
When Aurelie steps into the boat, it dips beneath her, and there is a moment when she thinks that she will get away with everything. The man in the suit holds her hand, bracing her as she steps out of the door and clambers across his knees. He is unexceptional, but hungry looking, which makes them, Aurelie supposes, two of a kind. She lets him settle her into the boat and, in a motion that feels ridiculous as well as fake, she offers him the coins.
“I can’t feed you,” she says. “My sister is the one who does that.”
“It doesn’t matter.” His voice, Aurelie thinks, is not sad at all. She lets him cradle her shoulders and cup her head and realizes that she is falling backwards of her own accord. When she is lying in the bottom of the boat, he sets the coins on top of her eyes. She can feel them balanced there, the cool flatness of them sitting on the curve of her lids.
“Percy gave those to me,” Imogen says. From her voice, Aurelie knows that she is standing in the doorway. Aurelie sits up. As soon as she moves, the cold weight of the coins slides off her face, and everything is shockingly bright.
“I know.”
“They weren’t for you.”
“I know.”
“But you took them anyway.”
“I did.”
The coins are just gold discs in the sun, ordinary; the taste in Aurelie’s mouth is suddenly bland. Imogen’s mouth goes down at the corners, but Aurelie knows it’s actually a smile that has gotten turned around on its way into the world.
“I’d never have suspected you,” Imogen says. “You aren’t the bravest.”
From any other person, Imogen’s words would be darts piercing the soft parts of Aur
elie, but between the two of them, sisters, they are the sound of a door being opened to a room where they are the only two people in the world.
“I know,” Aurelie says. “But I’m going anyway.”
Imogen doesn’t respond. Aurelie tries to memorize her: the way she fills the door, her hand pinching the frown off her bottom lip. The boat slides away.
“Percy’s gone,” Imogen says. “She asked me to tell you that you should watch what you eat.”
“Thanks,” Aurelie says. She wants to say something else, but as Imogen gets smaller and smaller and the boat leaves her behind, Aurelie still can’t decide what the right words might be.
“Goodbye!” she shouts across the smoke. “Bye!” She thinks she sees the fluttering wave of Imogen’s hand answering her, but even that is lost in the distance, so Aurelie stops looking. She turns her attention to the man across from her, to the dry wooden smell of the boat, and to the smoke that thins as they float through it, reeling into their wake and leaving behind the remains of a fire that flicker, blacken, and die.
The man in the suit smiles. He offers her half a pomegranate and keeps half for himself. They pick out the seeds together and Aurelie is so suddenly, incredibly hungry that she ignores everything except the taste of them bursting on her tongue.
THE END
The Fungi That Talk Softly
by Harry Markov
In the grand conversation of life, fungi are considered rather dull creatures. It’s not hard to imagine why, though. Far removed from the vocal faunas with their incessant self-expression, which quite frankly speaks of poor manners, fungi appear to be mutes when compared to the well-nigh infinite biological diversity.
Roars are too crude, hisses improper, and chirps unfathomable for the well-behaved fungi. It, then, should come to no surprise that fungi don’t click. They don’t find the need to rattle, buzz, or drone. Their bodies are most certainly not resonance chambers.
They are certainly too curvaceous, plump, and proud thereof to consider communication through the winds’ nymphomaniac touches. That is, unlike other floras, whose indecency has been known since Cooksonia first graced the lands.
No, fungi communicate through a language unequalled in the natural and unnatural worlds. The closest analog is the insect kingdom, when insects utilize their hive-mind data transmission system, which fungi have perfected and surpassed. Even humans, evolution’s favored ones, are as of yet inarticulate in their own cognitive process to even consider the possibility of intelligence in the fungi kingdom.
As you might imagine, this pleases the fungi, which feed on all that once lived, and store this knowledge into their collective memory, because fungi are nature’s post-mortem engine. They consummate and calculate algorithms. Find evolutionary trends and alter their hyphae’s basic structure to note down when a species dies. What fungi do not do is recall individuals.
However, there is one human name that every fungus from the domesticated black mold to the tentacled Aseroe rubra knows. That name belongs or rather belonged to Rostislav Kazakchiev, one rather peculiar human with the desire to fathom and translate the fungal language.
The fungi, at the time, did not suspect that the boy—licking mold off the wall in his family’s house in the city of Varna, positioned on the northern coast of Bulgaria—would amount to anything more than a biped with a penchant for reproduction and a questionable taste in nutrition. Not a single ever-observing spore, well hidden in the Kazakchiev’s three-storey house, suspected what revolution awaited within Rostislav’s cellular encryption.
After all, no matter how evolutionarily ahead fungi are, they are not clairvoyant.
Rostislav himself had no reason to suppose how important he would be. By human standards, Rostislav Kazakchiev embodied the concept of a genetic misstep. He had neither the body nor possessed the mind to belong to his kin.
It wasn’t because he had the bones of a small mummified rodent with barely any skin to hide his joints and organs. It certainly had nothing to do with how his neurons bounced off electrical impulses along the paths of his brain, for all the wiring was, in fact, intact.
Upon further inspection and deduction after Rostislav’s assimilation, the Bulgarian clusters of diminutive Psilocybe semilanceata have now confirmed that this otherness manifested in the pauses between the biped’s movements. Then there is how he established eye contact with other members of his species or rather, failed to do so. Not to mention the peculiar notes produced during the utilization of his vocal cords.
For Rostislav, the explanation for this behavior was far shorter and inexplicably more illogical.
In his words, “People halve my lifespan every time I’m forced to look at them.”
Whenever he could, he surrounded himself with walls—and obstructions built of silence, and awkward stares—in order to repel humans. Rather, he turned his attention to growing molds, which he enjoyed as a calming pastime.
As a child Rostislav once soaked a whole loaf of bread in water. He wrapped it in his mum’s plastic folio, carefully stolen from the kitchen cupboard when no one had looked, and then hid under his bed. The young observer ran out of luck and had to abort his experiment a few short days into it, when his father stumbled upon the spongy mess one afternoon. Since then Rostislav performed queer acts, from a human perspective of course.
The fungi, of course, entitle humans to some eccentricities and withhold judgment. The fungi record, they do not critique.
With puberty Rostistlav’s infatuation with fungi lessened in favour of his own body odor, especially after an item of clothing had stayed longer on his skin than socially acceptable. He enjoyed the clammy heaviness of his perspiration. How the smell tickled his nostrils as he pressed the cloth to his nose and the slippery sheen the synthetic materials acquired. These breathing sessions concluded with his mind swimming from the excess of fumes in his lungs and a slippery anticipation acrawl through his windpipe.
As his peers and parents reprimanded his behavior, Rostislav taught himself the subtle art of concealment.
Such is the path of evolution.
He bathed only to fit in. He scrubbed and rubbed the soap between his legs in hopes that it was not too gay, even though no one watched or could surmise what he did, when the shower steam melted his silhouette into nothingness.
What he did, however, was to keep a single pair of white briefs for further olfactory savouring. He had worn those for two weeks straight and kept them well hidden for months. Each night he would sniff, press, and play with the material, noting its fermentation.
By then the briefs’ elastic had capitulated, stretched and abused by his fingers. Now the elastic band looked as if it had hugged the waist of a beggar crone for years on end, before finding itself in a dumpster. The fabric frayed where his nails dug in the sides and looked nothing remotely close to white. Despite the severe wear and tear, Rostislav kept his white briefs folded in a perfect square, placed in the small wooden box his mother gave him to keep his golden cross, and hidden in the rusted springs of his bed.
He sprinkled the briefs with water at the sink and let them sit in the dark box to grow life.
Not one girl mentioned his name without a nervous tic. Beautiful tics of revulsion, whose conviction that no one would ever love or kiss Rostislav. Which infected all those around him, including Rostislav himself.
He knew his loins and his seed would never culminate in a family.
The mold, with its mucous flowers in full bloom, became his child. A child to be ashamed of and hidden, but he was a good father. He fed the mold skin from his scalp, when Rostislav rubbed the briefs over his greasy head. He offered hair follicles, spit, snot, and semen aplenty in the aftermath of his midnight self-satisfaction.
#
The fungi recall the moment Rostislav grew in importance.
The night had been in August, decades before Rostislav’s assimilation. A side dish of well-buttered Russula emetica—the scarlet sickener, or the rabid mushroom as Bul
garians call it—aided the Kazakchiev family to suspend their existence as living matter.
At the same time his parents choked on their last breath, Rostislav dreamt of a forest. He remembered the dream for years.
Much like his parents vomited to death, in his dream the sky vomited rain as thick as blood plasma. Globe-like drops fell down in streaks. The forest became well lubricated, and Rostislav stumbled with each step as the act of standing erect became a bruising experience.
Pine needles perforated his skin.
Raindrops sought to clog his lungs with their salty sweetness, carrying the taste of his fever-sweat that trickled to his lips, until the mushroom greeted him with a swollen bow of its cap, and sheets of bubble-scarred slime where the rain water coalesced at the mushroom’s rim and dripped down.
The mushroom’s body rivaled Varna’s lighthouse in size, but its pigmentation was darker than the night. To Rostislav the mushroom seemed to embody depths that one should behold. Depths with the ability to stare back at him.
As he neared, he saw shapes huddled together. Shapes he recognized from the thin books of tales he used to read. It seemed he could hear the tune for “Good Night Children” swimming in the night, a ghastly succession of strings plucked in a sloppy manner.
Under the mushroom’s cap waited an ant as tall as himself; a butterfly taller than the ant; a mouse in scarlet skirts taller still; a sparrow with coals for eyes hanging from the mushroom’s gills as if it had mistaken itself for a bat; and one rotting rabbit, half-hidden behind the mushroom’s stem.
All signs warned Rostislav that he should run, but the woodland critters cowered before him, even though they were giants compared to their real—life counterparts.
He stepped forward under the mushroom, away from the cold rain, which smelled of carrion. The woodland giants folded back towards the stem and opened their mouths. Jaws dislocated in slickened pops as fungi sprung forth and carpeted the giants’ bodies and the ground around them.