by John Klima
In that silent protest—where the rain offered loud and incessant dribbles that reminded Rostislav of how his grandmother poured half—molten pig grease into a warm pan—Rostislav kneeled under the weight of the wave of sentience.
As you might assume, this sentience exceeded anything human imagination could fathom, but unlike most humans touched by highly evolved fungi, Rostislav’s cells didn’t give way to nature’s most efficient filing system. On the contrary, he woke a few days after in a musty hospital room. His bed was between two old men, who were on the waiting list to enter the fungi’s catalog of death.
#
Life for one touched by the closest thing humans define as a deity equals nothing known to any rational individual.
No fungi shed a spore in surprise at Rostislav’s denial. He grieved his family’s death, or rather, tried to unsuccessfully. Just as unsuccessfully he tried to ascribe the sickening vision in his dream to the mushroom’s poison. Otherwise, why would he dream his favorite fairy tale from his childhood in such a grotesque rendition. He had nothing against bunnies and wanted to forget the bent—over skeletal figure, which still looked around with bewildered eyes.
What Rostislav could not deny was how fungi reacted to him, or rather how he reacted to them now that he woke from his fever. As the days after his hospitalization passed, he sensed that someone was observing him. A whole hive of eyes, all focused on his body. It was as if every mushroom and mold had acquired a persona and stared at him with an intent he didn’t understand.
Paranoia, Rostislav explained it to himself.
The fungi still remember the aftershocks of curiosity cycling through their cells’ cores, when the human interacted with their psyche.
For a pause in time, which the fungi couldn’t measure because it was so short in their timeless minds, Rostislav opposed the fungi’s inquiring curiosity. He killed any fungus he saw, scrubbed every surface in his bathroom, and dusted the whole house so that not a single spore could land in his home.
Needless to say, spores did land and would have continued to land regardless of his wishes. The spores—although unborn fungi—always maintained a polite composure.
Rostislav’s life path altered significantly when he visited his elderly aunt and she fed him stew. The peculiar thing about the stew, however, was that it had boiled with a few chopped mushrooms. Rostislav hadn’t noticed; and his aunt pretended she hadn’t included the despised ingredient in the first place.
When Rostislav went to bed back in his empty house, a dream formed.
Trampled grass, moss on stones, sagging bark, and the sweet-sour rot thereof rose from his taste buds. In his dream these flavors had slept deep within his tongue and now were awakened. As each taste burst from his ripened taste buds, Rostislav remembered how he grew from the moist cracks in the stones to cover the shadowed surfaces as thick and splendid moss. He remembered the warmth of the ground, and then how he pushed onwards and outwards to greet the sun as grass. And he remembered the wriggles of larvae under his skin which was now bark.
Most of all, he remembered how they all died and the mushrooms came. They ate the dead and nothing went missing. Not a single sensation had been lost. Every sensory memory stuck to their porous flesh and then was transmitted from mushroom to lichen to mold and back. All of this synchronized.
Rostislav experienced the fungi kingdom’s language, a harmonious song of simultaneous transmissions. If every librarian in the world learned to sing every book at the same time, and in tune with every other librarian, the performance would still pale in comparison to the mushrooms.
The fungi grew with swollen caps and wide-spread mycelia—at the human’s endorphin spike—during that first revelation of what fungi have truly accomplished, while the rest of the world’s biodiversity strain to have their voices heard.
After this first dream, Rostislav consumed many other fungi, dreamt many other dreams, and listened to the song, which resonated deeply through his bones and intestines, heavy and pregnant with meaning.
Alas, he understood nothing of it. No matter how far and wide he pushed his dreams, the song remained out of reach. It was uncatchable. It floated like an echo diluted into a cavern sung in a second language he once vaguely knew. The translation never presented itself to him.
When he launched his dream mold experiments, Rostislav had already transformed his small attic into a mushroom cave, which showed streaks of psychedelic hues, whenever light tricked the curtains and landed in the room.
The mushrooms he ate there didn’t poison him. Not because they couldn’t, but because they conducted their own experiments to discover whether Rostislav could progress further than downloading data through the bacteria in his digestive tract.
Rostislav cared for his mushrooms. For his coquettish pink Hygrocybe calyptriformis he brought crushed butterflies and bees. For his Otidea alutacea, the vaginal cluster, only the most phallic animal would do—and therefore she received wild snakes from the beaches’ dunes and shrubbery.
Each night he dreamt of other lives as a fly, a cockroach, a sparrow, and even an old alley cat that used to limp around his city square.
The only fungi group not to assimilate through death proved to be the common black mold, which ate dead cells, secretions from the skin, and even the spray of a cough. This was when he turned his house into a lodging for poor students, who travelled the whole country to attend Varna’s Economic university and found the central location and cheap rent most delectable.
Those Rostislav put to sleep with some morphine and placed their heads on pillow cases coated in mold. He waited in their rooms the whole night and changed the pillow before dawn. Then as the morning news block trampled the silence with its self-important intro tunes, he chewed on thin strips of mold from the sleeper’s facial impression and shivered through the memories of somebody else.
#
Rostislav switched tenants faster than it took for trees to change their leaves, and he didn’t mind as the dreams proved insufficient. It mattered not what the subject was, the dreams did not possess anything that could bring him closer to deciphering the fungal song.
In retrospect, the fungi kingdom agrees and applauds this human’s evolutionary-forward manner of deduction. Diversity matters little, when your biological mechanism is ill-equipped for the necessary analysis.
As if by divine intervention, a specific female tenant rented Rostislav’s house right before he contemplated suicide.
By human standards the tenant, Divna, stopped hearts equally well as a massive cardiac arrest. Rostislav and his little Rosty still had yet to behold such composition of facial features. Her irises demanded attention with the heavenly blue of the Mycena interrupta, while her hair reflected sunlight like the worn brass around his home.
Perhaps it was the desperation with the project, or one final impulse to follow his species’ encoded behavior, but Rostislav altered his known habits. He kept his fungi on a diet through neglect as he greeted the sun with Divna, who by then had survived for a month. What fun they had with her talking about writing, for she was a poet, and him listening.
As their friendship grew stronger, Rostislav wanted to know more about Divna, and her talk about books tired his ears. That is how Rostislav tasted her dreams and saw her. Divna was wild, always caught in a dance under the trees in the mountains of her Stara Planina town. Her feet knew not where the land was. She threw her hair so hard that it soared into the torrents of winds that had the trees shimmy, and made the shadows of their crowns bob on the landscape. The dance knew no end as well. Unlike his other subjects, her dreams multiplied this one image into loops that harbored a sense of timelessness.
Divna appeared to be truly different, so he read about what he saw.
A week into his dream eating, Rostislav recognized what he had housed in his home. His guest had not belonged to the human genus at all, but belonged to an entire different family.
Divna was a samodiva.
But what woul
d make a nymph search outside her forests? The better question being, how did he make her confess her true nature?
Again in retrospect, the fungi criticize in hushed and mannered tones Rostislav’s approach to the subject of supernatural species, for such nonsense does not exist. Nevertheless, dreams never lie. Rostislav’s fault was in his inadequacy as an interpreter.
He read further and discovered that these nymphs fed on poisonous mushrooms, so with a smile on his face he sat Divna at his chipped dinner table and buttered fat pieces of bright red—Amanita muscaria; fly agarics—which he then hid under a blanket of mayonnaise.
Rostislav recovered from his indigestion. Divna did not.
#
Years passed until the government institutions released Rostislav Kazakchiev from the well-nigh endless chain of psych wards he had been committed to. When he returned, Rostislav had entered the autumn of his life. His joints ground together. His cartilage had worn thin from the cold and damp in the run—down white buildings, where screams nested in the spaces between the bricks and made themselves known at all times.
His house, cared for by one of his aunts, welcomed him with cobwebs and dampness, cracks and peeling paint.
The mold inside cared little for him at that time. He had spent years in rooms polished and scrubbed, because he had made the mistake to reveal his passion for all fungi. The nurses had checked over and over again for mushrooms and molds. Rostislav’s old tricks might have fooled his mother, but these nurses, these smart, smart women with wet cow eyes, saw through his nonchalantly fisted hands that hid bread crumbs and lumps of spitted fabric under his pillow.
All this, everyone had repeated, was part of his healing. Every aspect of his project had been denied to him for years and Rostislav had grown so tired from these games that brought only frustration.
Decades had passed and the connection with the fungi had been neglected. Amidst the incessant information upload, download, analysis, and archiving, the fungi had soon shelved his curious peculiarity. Rostislav intended to draw their attention back to him. If he had learned one thing in the years of silence, it was that he had employed the wrong methods.
The choice to consume fungi had seemed so correct, but the years had given him time to think, which is what Rostislav did. As he eyed the walls in his rooms and smiled at doctors who asked him questions, he collected ideas.
He tied them into theories, tested them in his mind, and when they failed, Rostislav scratched them off. This was how he decided not to eat the fungi as his main method. That would be inferior.
No, Rostislav would be the fungi. Only then would he speak their language. But first he had to know them intimately, and what was more intimate than digestion?
His first task, when he returned, was to move to the small attic room and spray the walls with mud water. As the first winter gales threw hail on the attic’s windows, the walls glistened like greasy skin, and musk imbued every surface. Two small heaters growled against the winds outside, lapping Rostislav with their warm breath, as he worked on the first-ever human-to-fungi transformation.
The spray bottle and his pen never left his hands. One to soak his clothes, the other to dot his dreams in notebooks. Rostislav drank spoilt water from plastic bottles, abandoned in his closet for weeks, and ate mushrooms he grew on his carpet.
His dreams fattened, and sat heavily on his mind, and teased his nostrils, and he slept, and he smelled of carrion, and he looked like nothing resembling his species.
His skin itched and sagged under colonies of rashes he knew were fungi. His wrists ached, but he continued to write. What came from under the pen’s tip crawled in the pages. Each letter diluted as if the ink was smoke captured on the paper midflight. By then, Rostislav Kazakchiev neared the fungi song.
The data, the intent, the language that had no words, and the song that had no tune rubbed frequencies with his cells and he responded, although the meaning remained encrypted. Some stray words, as far as a concept of words can be applied to the fungi, would wrap themselves in meaning, and Rostislav would write these down with the swiftness of an entomologist in a chase after an ever elusive specimen.
Such were Rostislav’s winter days.
#
There. He hears it.
The song in its incalculable mass.
Human language really does not possess the capacity to describe it, but he translates. The pen goes on the paper, but he does not see what he writes. He has stayed for so long in the dark, he’s not sure he has any eyes left. At some point he remembers that he hasn’t opened his mouth in what feels like years, though there is no reason to. There is no hunger. Just the song.
He writes. He charts.
His writing is infinite, but the assimilation stops him midway, though he wonders where the middle of eternity is. Now he belongs to the fungi and he understands the song, because he is singing it now, and he knows he would never have gotten it before his assimilation. He never had the chance to understand this as a human.
That is why Rostislav expresses no surprise when the paramedics scream how sick his attic is. Saddened perhaps, but not surprised.
He knows that in the multifariousness of all that lives, cacophony rules—and while mammals roar, insects click, and vegetation rustles, no one hears the fungi that talk softly and divine the world’s genetic path.
The Carnival Was Eaten, All Except the Clown
by Caroline M. Yoachim
The magician’s table was covered by a sheet of plywood, four feet square, completely wrapped in aluminum foil. Sugar magic was messy magic, and the foil made for easier cleanup. Scattered across the aluminum were misshapen chunks of candy, the seeds from which the carnival would grow. And grow it did.
Overnight, as the magician slept, sugar melted into candy sheets that billowed up into brightly colored tents. Caramel stretched itself into tightropes and nets, and green gumdrop bushes popped up to line the paths between the tents.
The carnival glittered with sugar-glass lights. The Ferris wheel was made of chocolate with graham cracker seats and a motor that ran on corn syrup. Out near the edge of the table, a milk chocolate monkey rode bareback on a white chocolate zebra with dark chocolate stripes. The monkey did handstands and backflips while the zebra pranced in a slow circle.
At the center of it all was the clown. She was three inches tall and made entirely of sugar. Her face and hands were coated with white powdered sugar, a sharp contrast to the bright red of her blown-sugar lips and the green and purple of her pulled-sugar dress. She was the seed from which each new carnival was grown, and she was beautiful.
As each of the sugar creations woke, the clown was there to welcome them to the world and tell them of their destiny. “You will be adored by children,” she told the cotton candy sheep, stroking the wisps of their baby blue wool. “You will delight them with your tumbling,” she told the flexible bubblegum acrobats. And, “You will amaze them with your daring stunts,” she told the gingerbread daredevil. She smiled at everyone, but she smiled her prettiest smile for the daredevil, because she was the tiniest bit in love with him.
As she woke the carnival, she told tales of children with bright smiling faces, and always added, “In the end you will be eaten, for that is your destiny.”
When she told them that, her smile sometimes faltered. She had seen a child only once, several cycles ago, the six-year-old niece of the magician who had laughed in delight to see the clown’s dancing routine. That had been a beautiful moment, the defining moment of her existence, the moment that made her the seed. After seeing the joy on the girl’s face, the clown had dissolved blissfully into the warm water in the magician’s cauldron, her sugar becoming the seed crystals from which an entire carnival was grown.
As the seed, she was the only one who woke up knowing the joy of a child’s laughter. The others would have to wait until the magician took them to whatever party was on the schedule. So she told the others what awaited them, how wonderful children are, and what
an honor it was to perform for them. And she told them that they would be eaten, whatever that meant, because when she asked the magician why he grew a new carnival for every party, he told her that the carnival always gets eaten in the end.
She was generally a happy clown, but it made her sad that she couldn’t go to the parties. As the seed, she was always plucked away by the magician and thrown into the cauldron to grow the next carnival.
The clown stood at the edge of the carnival, waiting, and when the magician woke up he came to greet her. She asked, as she often did, if she could go to the party with the others. He replied, as he always did, that she was the seed, and could not be spared.
He picked her up gently and dropped her in his cauldron.
#
Over time, the clown changed. She became a sad clown, with streaks of burnt-black sugar running down her face like smeared mascara. Her once vibrant dress of green and purple was still beautiful, but the colors faded, and her sugar lost its glossy shine.
One morning, the clown peered out from a green-and-yellow candy tent and saw the magician running about frantically, searching for his keys. He looked tired and distracted, and he was late in collecting the carnival. The clown made a decision. Instead of standing at the edge of the carnival, as she usually did, she would hide in the tent and go to the party. She would hear the sound of children’s laughter again, and she would finally be eaten like the others.
She stayed inside the green-and-yellow candy tent as the magician loaded the carnival into his van, and unloaded it at the party. No one noticed she was there, and soon she heard children’s excited voices all around her. She would finally be eaten!
One of the children pulled off the roof of the striped-candy tent and broke it into pieces for her guests. The first performer was the gingerbread daredevil. He jumped twelve sugar cookie cars on a motorcycle with licorice wheels and a candy corn seat. The children clapped politely for his act before they ate him. The birthday girl bit off his head, then ripped his arms off to share with one of her guests. Was that what it meant to be eaten? Her beloved daredevil had met his end bravely, without a trace of fear, but being eaten looked far less pleasant than dissolving in warm water, and—a new thought occurred to her—if she didn’t go into the cauldron, would she continue to exist? The others always came back, each time the carnival grew, but they never remembered what had happened at the last carnival, no matter how she begged them to tell her.