Fruiting Bodies

VINCENT JAMES FIGUEROA YOU CANNOT ROT IN THAT BACKYARD FOREVER. 

You are sprawled on a folding lawn chair. The sky is eyesore blue. You drape an arm over your face. If you can’t see her, she can’t see you. 

—VINCE! The voice comes again, petulant. 

A woman stands on the other side of the gate, her fingers slotted through the chain-link gaps, scuffing the toe of her combat boot into the ground. When she sees you stand up, she bares her teeth in a smile, and her eyes crescent into waxing moons. 

You sigh, and let her in. 

Levy is the biggest, baddest dyke you know, and the minute you saw her smoking a clove cigarette outside the gas station you swore to make her your protector. You who are barely five foot five and tuberculosis-patient thin, you need a protector if you’re going to make it in the big city. People think she’s intimidating, with her military surplus cargo pants and her eyebrow piercing, but you know better. She has a cat named Tolstoy. She used to be a chess prodigy. 

Her car, a slowly deteriorating old Chevy, is parked diagonally across your parents’ driveway. 

—Woah, she says. Did your backyard always look like this? 

Your backyard—what with your parents in Greece, and your father no longer mowing the lawn and trimming the roses every Sunday—has experienced a hostile takeover. The once lush and neatly snipped lawn is now overgrown and shot through with yellow weeds. Lichen climbs up the trunk of a sycamore. Against the neighbor’s fence, cushioned by a crop of clover, three white mushrooms glisten like pearls. Everything is heavy and clinging with dew. It feels like a rainforest has taken root amongst the flat beige suburbs. 

You shrug, and slump back into your chair, which you have been scooting slightly to the left every thirty minutes so it remains in the backyard’s only patch of sun. 

Levy pulls a bag of corn chips from her messenger bag, and tosses it at your chest. 

—You need to eat something, she says. And stop wallowing over Tony. 

You wince, and cover your face like her words burn your skin. 

—Don’t say his name, you whine. She rolls her eyes. 

—Got you this, too, as she smacks a slim glossy magazine down on your knee. It flops open to a photo of an oiled, half-nude man wearing a cowboy hat. 

—Where’d you get this? 

—Stole it from the anarchist bookstore, Levy shrugs. I knew you liked them. 

—Thanks, you say, and squeeze her hand. But, you know, you shouldn’t steal from the anarchists. 

—Eh, she says. I think they’d understand. 

A beat, and a cool breeze wafts in between two boughs of a fig tree, carrying the sticky sweet scent. 

—Anyways, Levy claps you on the shoulder. I’m off. Try to come out sometime. Everyone is starting to think you died. 

You flip the magazine back to the cover. ANGELS splayed in stark white lettering. A lithe, dark-haired man wearing swim trunks that cling to his thighs, reclining on a deck chair against a cyan sky, drops pearling the skin on his chest. You can almost smell it. Chlorine. Sunscreen. Sweat. Summer is here. 

Your favorite part of the magazine is the MAILBOX OF LOST LOVES. A single spread near the back, you flip to it from muscle memory. Other than a Valentine’s Day heart speared by an arrow next to the title, the page is crammed with text, black letters bleeding blue. 

After a brief scan of the page for signs of Tony—inside jokes, secret codes, anything that says HEY I KNOW YOU I MISS YOU I WANT YOU BACK—you go through and read each letter in its entirety. Messages to strangers rendezvoused in alleyways, exes, coworkers or friends of friends who you’re too shy to ask face-to-face, so you send a message in a bottle. Morse code for fairies. Grasping hands reaching out in the dark. It’s nice, you think, to not be the only lonely man in the city. Still, no Tony. 

One says, This city is beautiful, but I’d rent an apartment in hell if it meant I could live with you. Love from San Francisco, J.D. Another, Please forgive me. I told you I don’t handle sickness well. - L 

One letter is longer than the others, more poetry than telegram. Spilling onto a second column, it looks somehow important, like an obituary for a newspaper’s most treasured donor. Squinting to make out the tiny, blotchy ink, you read: 

Dear brown-eyed stranger, 

Do you know what it feels like to be a part of something? Do you yearn, lonely one, to reach out your fingertips in the dark and touch soft skin? To speak and be understood? We’ve been watching you, floating in the sun. Your skin sticky as honeycomb, your hair redwood thick and falling over your drowsy eyes. We think you are beautiful. You would make a lovely host.  

It is warm under the earth, and welcoming. Give us a call. 

—I have brown eyes, you announce to the yard. 

When only the throaty warbling of a robin answers, you look up. Levy is gone. Rust-colored bird watching you from the fence; the overgrown grass rustles like it has a secret. You realize, a slow, sap-heavy dawn, that the writer of the message didn’t leave a number. 

×

The next time Levy comes, you meet her at the gate. 

—Did you bring the new ANGELS? You ask immediately.

—It’s only been like a week! New one’s not even out yet. 

You shake your head, as if to dislodge something. In the backyard, time has stretched out like saltwater taffy. You’ve been watching each individual blade of grass grow, each flower open up its wanting mouth. The fast-forward button has been pressed on some cosmic remote, speeding through the births and deaths of species. 

There is a stack of old ANGELS issues on your deck chair. You periodically search them for messages, codes, from the letter-writer that so captivated you. Nothing yet. 

You hand Levy the magazine, creased open to the MAILBOX OF LOST LOVES. Point to the letter. 

She holds the page far away from her face to read it. She has glasses, but is too vain to wear them. 

—Huh, she says, Weird. Didn’t know ANGELS was letting creepy dungeon sex cults advertise in them now. I always thought they were… (she begins to trail off) pretty… straight-laced. 

The magazine flops over in her hand. She’s looking at something behind you. 

—Your mushrooms are growing. 

—What? 

She repeats herself. You turn. 

Flush against the fence, what once was three diminutive white bulbs has bloomed into a diorama. Some are small, glossy pinpricks, some are so large and bulbous the stalk droops, struggling to keep their heads upright. They look soft, like if you pressed in with the bitten edge of your fingernail, it would draw a crescent of blood. 

—Are they poisonous? Levy asks. 

You don’t register the question, instead moving your lawn chair to a spot with a better view. Levy folds her arms. 

—Uh, listen. You look like… (she realizes she’s still holding the magazine, and lays it gingerly on the chair) You look like you could use some intimacy, how about you come out with me tonight? Me and Hana are going to Pilot’s. 

—I thought you and Hana broke up? 

—Ha, Levy’s cheeks go a shade redder, We’re giving it another try. 

It seems not every relationship is doomed to blow up in a conflagration of azure and cadmium, leaving only a pile of ashes and the lighter he lent you once and never asked for back. Even for Hana, a willowy, six foot tall femme with a smoker’s cough and a tendency to occasionally drop everything and try to run away with her guitar teacher. And Levy, who calls you crying about her twice a month. 

—Uh, sure, you say. I’ll think about it.
You will not go to the bar with Levy and Hana tonight. You know that this bar, like all of the bars that Levy frequents, will have no men in it, nothing to do but stare out at faces livor mortis-ed by magenta light, or into your cocktail where a mint leaf floats like a shard of shrapnel in a milky eye. Instead, as the moon winks out from behind the roof, and pine trees spindle their branches out against the sky, you will kneel in front of the mushrooms. You will bring your face close to them, and breathe in the earthy, alien scent. You will bury your fingers into the soil. Crumbs of earth will lodge themselves under your fingernails, moist dirt will suture your cracked knuckles. Beneath the soil, a latticework of roots and mycelium stretch out, out, out. They pulse, like a throbbing, wounded heart. 

You will ask, your face almost brushing the mushrooms’ pale skin, Is it you? 

×

You wake in a fungal bed. At first, bleary and blurry-eyed, you think you are in the stomach of an impossible creature. The soft ground beneath you is warmed by your weight, and although there is only the sky above you, you have this feeling of being enclosed by something. You raise yourself to a sitting position, your hand sunk into a buoyant patch of sourgrass. 

In the night, the mushrooms have bowed their heads like mourners over your sleeping form. Their stems staccato the fence, bright against the dark mildewed wood. They look like ribs. 

The magazine is beside you; dirt freckles the man on the cover. You flip to the page. Either you are still dreaming, or during your repose the words have shifted into something different.

The letter now reads: 

We see you trying to resist us. We see you bring your hand close enough to feel our breath, but not close enough to touch. The hairs on your arm drift up and back down like kelp forests bending with the tides. Silhouetted by the sun, you look to us like an angel, or like the carcass of a vermin animal starfished on the black asphalt, four-wheel-drive echo still ghosting your ribcage, which to us is one of the many homes of God. Decomposer is as decomposer does. We long for your body. Please, join us. 

The last vestiges of self-preservation languishing within you, a long dormant claustrophobia, strike together and produce a miniature spark. You scramble up, the taste of earth in your mouth and dirt dusting your palms. 

The gate, never oiled, screams as you wrench it open. The magazine is still tucked under your arm when you dash into the street. The air outside is drier than in the backyard. Hotter. Each pine tree along the street is trimmed to a sharp point, bending faithfully forward to carve lines of shadow into the asphalt. 

You follow the long black road. Your bathrobe, fuzzy and moth-eaten, flaps behind you like some sort of cape. You imagine the neighbors drafting telephone calls to each other: Did you see Suzzana’s wayward son-daughter who dropped out of college and we all thought moved to the city to become a street prophet full-time? Yeah, he’s running around Cedar Street in women’s gym shorts and ragged flip-flops looking like he’s about to keel over from heat exhaustion. 

You gasp, each intake of breath aching like wildfire season in the chaparral. The houses you pass look wrong; so plain and angular against the lush coolness of the backyard still stamped into your eyelids. Hollow and open, they beg to be coated in algae and speckled with barnacles, annexed by ivy grappling-hooked up the beige stucco. Infected with a legion of fungal beauties, fruiting spores into the air-conditioning units. The thought makes you bite your tongue. 

Something tears around the bend. An alien creature, a beast about to crush you in its jaw. Its carapace glints under the sun, shooting shards of white into your vision. Silvery metal, wide and getting wider. It slouches towards you. This might be it.

The SUV swerves, bleach-blonde driver shouting silent profanities at you from behind the wheel. You fall to your knees in the street. 

Gravel flecks your face. You take a deep breath. The magazine is shaking in your hand, its edges blurry. You feel with crystalline clarity the asphalt under your knees and the sun beating down on your back. You know where you must go.

×

We knew you would come back. We knew you were among the faithful, who would kneel before us, open yourself to our flesh. It’s completely natural to get stage fright. But come back quickly to us, and soon we will be conjoined. Like lovers’ symbiosis, the twining together of fingers and mouths. Like the parasite and the eager host. Soon, you will not be able to tell where your body ends and ours begins. Soon, it will not matter. 

Before you, the mushrooms bend and whisper. A bead of dew ruptures and slides down the pearly surface. Drips into the bed of dark soil. You can hear clearly now the clamor, the anticipation, telegrams shuttled through root systems, the messages always crystal clear, never garbled or belated or intercepted by a foreign agent. The speaker and listener are one and the same, their very neurons intertwined. All saying, yes, yes, yes. You will not need ANGELS Magazine anymore.  

Are they poisonous, you remember Levy asking. You don’t care. 

You reach down and seize one by the stem. It is soft, cool, and buckles beneath your fingertips. A tangle of roots comes up with it. Something warm drips from the roots onto your wrist, a thick, rusty substance. You lick it off. It tastes like iron and dirt. You feel your own heartbeat under your tongue. 

The clamor grows louder. Your heart thuds, a basketball repeatedly punted at a brick wall. The bulb glistens under the sun. You sink your teeth into it. Distantly, you hear a screaming, throbbing keen, many-voiced and gaping. The skin buckles under your mouth like an overripe plum. It sounds like an orchestra warming up, at once discordant and apocalyptically unified. The same iron-thick substance bursts from the bitten fruit and laces down your throat. The song mounts, crescendos. The taste reminds you of when Tony would cradle your head in the crook where his neck met his shoulder and ask you to bite down as hard as you could. When he would gasp as your mustelid’s teeth drew scarlet beads of blood, and you would close your eyes against the warm flood on your lips. It reminds you of that, only so, so much better.