u/Xiphigas

The first time I encountered Death was the night my mother died.

I knew it was night because it was dark, and I knew it was Friday because I was drunk.

Not drunk in the fun way. I was not out, leaning over some sticky bar with someone else’s chapstick sticking my lips together. I was drunk, at home, passed out on my couch in the same clothes I had worn since the day before. Whatever app on my TV that was streaming some show I wasn’t paying attention to was asking if I was still watching. Somewhere in my periphery, my laptop screen was glaring with what felt like hundreds of blue-glowing helpdesk tickets, all marked with the same red “urgent” flag by people who couldn’t tell the difference between a candle and a wildfire.

At first I thought it was quiet, the way it tends to be in the hush before dawn. It took a while for enough of my brain to wake up to register that there was indeed sound, and the sound was sobbing. Small, soft, bitten-off sounds, the kind that make your chest hurt as you try to suppress the noises and the feelings until they build so much pressure they have to go somewhere. Usually out. This is important.

As my brain continued tuning back into reality, the sound was given more detail. It had to be one of my neighbours. A woman, probably. But who?

In a split second, the soft sobs turned into an awful wail, and my brain jerked itself completely awake and forced two realisations through me at once. 

The first was that it was, indeed, not a woman. It was a man.

The second was that it was undeniably me who was wailing, though the sound was not coming from my mouth, but from the hallway outside.

Of course, it was not exactly me. It had the shape of my voice, yet none of the things that made it mine: the vibrations of my skull, the resonance in my chest, the small and well-known distortions of breath and tongue and teeth.

Have you ever heard a recording of yourself? It’s so undeniably you yet unbelievable at the same time. 

The wrongness of it all wasn’t only the pitch or the perceived flatness of the vowels. My voice was making a sound I was very sure I had never made, yet one I clearly recognised: complete and utter grief, so deep and dark and breaking that it had nowhere to go but out.

I sat up so fast my head spun and with enough force that my phone, which I had probably dropped on my face at some point as I was falling asleep, slid off me and fell to the floor with a thick thud. My mouth was tacky with an aftertaste of cheap whiskey and cigarettes. I tried to rehydrate the corners of my mouth with my tongue. It did not help.

The wailing rose and fell as if whoever was making the sound was pacing down the hallway. When it began to recede, my phone also decided to let out a scream of unwelcome noise that blurred my vision.

It scared me more than the crying. The crying was impossible, and the soft stupidity of being drunk lets you reject impossible things. That warmth does not extend its welcome to a phone call at 3:13 in the morning.

I watched the phone dance in a small circle on the floor, screen-down, as I considered just not answering. After all, I knew what it was about.

That sounds dramatic. It wasn’t.

If you try to love someone like my mother, you spend years waiting for them to die in a way that somehow still feels premature and unfair, even if it isn’t.

Every unknown number is a hospital.

Every missed call or late knock at the door is the police.

Any distance between the sentences we spoke to one another was tension until it eventually became peace. Rinse and repeat.

We had just recently closed that distance again. Let’s try again, she had said. She always called it that, trying. As if our entire relationship was a knot that you could loosen with enough patience, and not twenty-nine years of us both pulling as hard as we could between the pauses in opposite directions. 

She had sounded better the last time we spoke, and I had believed hard enough in the nuance of her words that I felt mostly anger. So far as my mother was concerned, that was the usual end to whatever hopeful cycle we had begun anew: a sliver of light dressed in irritation, already halfway out the door.

When the nurse asked if I was her son, the only surprise I felt was at the fact that she had, at some point, thought about me long enough to put me down as her emergency contact.

I felt sad, but maybe not in the way that people would think. I would rather call it disappointed in a way that was unavoidable and expected, but never wanted.

I picked up the box three days later. It was small and not very heavy. Also not a surprise. The more useless an object was, the better its chances of sticking around until its last threads frayed in the stale, shut-in air of my mother’s home… wherever that happened to be at the time.

The contents of the box had been chaotically thrown in there by whichever landlord she had annoyed last, namely some grumpy old man with a prickly, unkempt beard and cold eyes. I just opened the lid and gave a little shrug as a weak attempt to communicate something like, yup, that’s it, I guess. The landlord, who had done nothing but grunt the entire time, averted his eyes and squared his shoulders. He did manage to squeeze out a few perfunctory condolences before he gave a final grunt accompanied by a nod and walked away. His hard gaze had given away that he had already formed his opinion of me before we met, and that I was too much like my mother to deserve anything else. 

Asshole. 

Anyway. I left the box on my kitchen table and didn’t bother to look at or open it until its presence felt like it was burning a hole in my neck. Inside were the few remnants of my mother’s life that had survived the storms. 

Below assorted (and expired) bus cards, broken charger cables, and folded receipts from corner shops was a small package. It was wrapped in what I assumed was a reused paper bag, held closed with yellowed nylon string. An envelope had been wedged below it, my name written in one corner in pink highlighter, barely legible.

It was not sealed, and this annoyed me enough that I had to take a break before continuing. I don’t know why. Maybe because even in the case of her death, I was an afterthought.

Inside was a single sheet of printer paper folded unevenly twice. 

I’m sorry.

I snorted loudly. Yeah, sure you are. We both are. We both always were.

The words were written slowly and carefully with some kind of fine-liner, in what I could only imagine was an attempt to look sober. Not sure why that would matter to her.

Right as I was about to crumple the paper, I noticed there was more writing at the bottom of the paper in highlighter, yellow this time. The space between the initial line and the last three was large enough that the soft shadows almost made the text disappear completely.

I squinted my eyes.

I know you hate me.

I don’t blame you.

Read it anyway. It’s important.

I was frozen for a moment as every emotion it was possible to feel tried to wrap its tentacles around my heart. 

I know you hate me.

I never hated her. I didn’t particularly like her, but it was never hate.

Hate would have required more heat than I had left for her. What remained was mostly exhaustion. Resentment, when energy allowed. The occasional stupid, embarrassing tenderness that hit me when she sounded sober enough to maybe be a mom. 

Hate or not, something uncomfortably warm flashed by under my skin and collected itself like a clump in my belly. I couldn’t quite articulate what it was, but I knew where it came from. Even in death she tried to steer my emotions toward her interpretations of the world and our relationship. Even in death she made it about herself.

I know none of this excuses what I did after receiving the box, which has led to my predicament. But hopefully it helps shed some light on my mental state at the time anyway. Maybe that’s important. You would know better than me, I hope.

I left the package unopened the same way I had left the box. I don’t know for how long, only that I was four shots deep by the time I had finished reasoning with myself about whether the heartache and potential intellectual damage was worth it.

I tried. I really tried to give her some benefit of the doubt. 

There had been enough therapy-ish between her first week-long disappearance and her latest apology that I had grown to know quite a bit about the behaviors of addicts. You have worth, and it’s up to you, but they can be more than the worst thing they did to you. There is good as well as bad because the world is not, and never has been, black and white, and there is some self-growth in realizing that all the colors of the world can exist side by side. All of it is true and lived, and neither diminishes the other. 

I opened the package. Of course I did. I said therapy-ish.

What was inside was… nothing like the outside. If the outside looked like a neat package, the inside resembled what I imagined compressed trash blocks looked like.

Notes, photographs and assorted papers were layered and pressed around a well-thumbed notebook bound in brown leather, its surface worn into a completely smooth and shiny patina except for where it had cracked shallowly. The only reason I noticed the notebook was because, as soon as I peeled the paper, the trash block pretty much exploded and scattered its contents everywhere. 

Some papers were old and yellowed, some were laminated, some were white printer paper. They depicted maps, documents, lists, photographs, letters — I could go on.

I remember seeing a few handwritten notes on some of them. Black ink, probably fine-liner. At some point, the word CURSE appeared for the first time, surrounded by random exclamation marks and arrows. Once I found the first remnant of a red string under a piece of tape, I stopped looking at them at all. 

Instead, I gathered them all up.

I got myself a trash bag.

I crumpled and forced all of the loose papers inside.

Every. Single. One.

The warmth in my gut had transformed from someone else’s shower setting to fresh out-of-the-oven lasagna, so I broke my records for both how quickly I reached the garbage chute and how much force I used as I shoved the bag inside.

I heard it hit against the walls on its way down before landing with a soft whump. 

My gut did not get any lighter.

The journal was on the table staring at me when I got back inside, and this time anger flashed by. I don’t know why.

I threw it back into the box. Then, I threw the box into my closet, closed the door harder than I needed to, and went to bed.

You’d think that was the end of it, but the morning after was when the feeling appeared.

I wouldn’t describe it as terror, at least not yet. At that point it was barely even fear; fear has some object, fear has to point at something.

My mouth tasted like I had spent the night chewing coins, and as I stood up, my heart gave one very hard and off-beat thud against my ribs that made me shudder, before going back to pretending everything was normal. That’s why I noticed it wasn’t. 

It felt heavy and made it hard to breathe and think through the fog. As if whatever shroud covered the world had become hostile overnight, spitting out invisible and intangible spikes underneath the fabric of reality that were pointing directly at me. 

I blamed the drinking, obviously. My hands felt unsteady as I reached for the glass of water on my bedside table, and someone was knocking down walls inside my skull. 

So, hungover. Grieving. Slept badly. Too much whiskey and too little water. 

I made coffee strong enough to qualify as a checkmark on some mental health self-evaluation checklist somewhere, and got ready for work.

Then I just did normal stuff. My work includes a lot of forgotten passwords and a surprisingly creative mix of “yes I *** turned it on and off you absolute dumb— oh” variants, so I’ll spare you the details.

Coincidentally, some lady in accounting had forgotten her password for the fourth time in a month. I was halfway through trying to compose a polite email when something tapped against the window.

I looked to the side.

There was a crow standing absolutely still on the outside sill. Its claws were folded neatly around the metal edge, and its glossy black eyes seemed fixated on me through the glass. 

I live on the fourth floor. Birds land on windowsills all the time, and crows themselves are not unusual. I probably looked at it for a while, thought that it was neat, and tried to move on with my day.

The crow tapped again. The distinction here is important: it did not peck, it tapped. It wanted me to notice it. I knew this at the time, too, which made the hairs on my arms stand on end. A small shiver ran along my spine as I looked back to the bird, but this time it was different. It had not moved an inch. It was just… staring at me. Its gaze felt impossibly black and dark and dense, as if it was a black hole I could fall through and would fall through if I looked away.

We stared at each other for what felt like forever, or at least long enough for the staring contest to feel so normal that I jumped when the loud ping of a new “urgent” ticket brought me back to the room I was in and out of the impossible dark I had been falling into.

The crow turned its head, lining one of its eyes up with mine, and tapped the glass a third time.

This time, the sound was as impossible as the dark. 

It was not small.

It went through the windowpane, through the desk, through my teeth. My coffee shivered in its mug.

I looked down at it because I had to look at something else. Because if I kept staring at the crow, I had the sudden and absolute certainty that I would stand up, open the window, and put my hand outside. The thought was so clear it felt less like a thought and more like an instruction.

Open the window.

Put your hand outside.

Let it take.

I pushed my chair back so hard it snagged on the floor and gave a terrible wobble. The crow did not move. It watched me stand, watched me back away from the desk, watched me create more distance between us.

It tapped one final time.

This time, it felt impossibly slow. Deliberate.

A small motion of its head, then the sound came from behind me before the beak touched the window.  

I turned so quickly I lost my footing as my sock slipped, and for one horrific second I was completely sure that this was where I would die. There in my kitchen, cracking my skull open on unwashed laminate the color of washed-out vomit.

There was nothing behind me. Of course there wasn’t.

When I looked back, the sill was empty. 

There was a small mark on the spot that the crow had tapped, the only thing that marked that any of it had just happened. Just a small hairline crack with the tiniest chip of the glass missing.

My eyes trailed downward to the floor, where the missing piece was resting. It was vaguely shaped almost like an arrow with its tip pointing straight between my feet.

The rational part of my brain was desperately grasping at straws while sounding every possible alarm and sending out emergency flares in all directions, which made my ears buzz dully. 

Birds fuck with windows all the time. Glass usually breaks in sharp pieces that make strange shapes if you look at them hard enough. Humans are natural pattern-seekers. I was hungover, grieving, sleep deprived, and apparently one spooky bird away from being sent to the nuthouse.

Fine.

Great.

Perfect.

Good to know.

I bent down and picked up the piece of glass between two fingers, the point of the arrow pointing upward as to not cut myself. It felt cold. Pretty normal as far as glass goes, it’s one of its main characteristics. 

I looked at it intently. Just a piece of glass.

Wasn’t it?

The piece felt colder, and colder, until it got so sharply cold it burned my skin. I dropped it before I had the chance to decide whether the sensation was real or not.

It landed in almost the exact same place, tip pointing between my feet.

My laptop pinged again and this time I flinched so hard I almost stepped on the shard of glass. For a moment, I hated that woman in accounting intensely. Instead of dissipating, the hatred mirrored the shard and turned itself inward, until its sharp edge cut deep in my heart and turned to a sense of loss.

I don’t remember what the email said. I just remember I wrote something awfully normal, which was the opposite to anything I was and had been feeling for a long time, and hit send. I do remember it felt satisfying, that something was behaving predictably. At the time, I so badly needed there to be one sliver of reality that still seemed fair. Maybe, if things just kept going the mundane would outpower the weird and potentially embarrass the world around me enough to shift everything back to the way it should be.

It didn’t, but you know that. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here. 

The feeling stayed in the odd space between my ribs and the air around me, an intense pressure that shifted and moved and increased until it became nigh unbearable. Like the piece of glass, everything seemed to suddenly mean something. I didn’t know what something was, but I knew it wasn’t good.

I couldn’t in good conscience leave the shard where it was, so naturally I squeezed it tight between a folded paper towel. 

It didn’t burn through the paper. It did not try to escape, or whisper things in my ear, or any of the things that a decidedly cursed object would do if you were about to un-curse yourself by simply throwing it in the trash.

It just sat there, a cold arrowhead in a twist of recycled white paper. 

I threw it in the bin under the sink. Then, I stood still for an embarrassing amount of time and waited for it to… do something.

It didn’t.

It remained silent, just the low groaning of my fridge and the creaky footsteps of someone above. Normal noises in the silence.

It wasn’t funny, but I had to stifle a laugh anyway. The relief hit me too suddenly and too hard, and the only response I could physically muster was a giggle. At myself, at my mother, at the world.

By lunchtime, both the hangover and the worry had eased enough that I had managed to convince myself it had been some kind of episode. I liked that. Episode. Clean, medical, perfectly vague. A nifty little box to hold anything between low blood sugar and sleep deprivation and intoxication without needing to think too hard about the details.

I made more coffee, I answered more tickets. I explained with a great amount of patience that no, deleting the shortcut to the payroll app would not delete the app itself.

That’s the worst part, I think. That the world continued around the feeling of wrong. Forgotten passwords, microwaved fish, crying and laughing and drinking and eating under a sun that continued to rise and set. Its light had just finished moving across the floor as a blurry rectangle and now begun to shrink while hovering over the fridge.

All the while, the feeling remained and kept spinning itself into something larger.

At some point, I got up to pee only to find myself in front of the closet instead. I don’t remember walking there.

Don’t get me wrong. I remember pushing my chair back. I remember my eyes still feeling achy. I remember thinking that if I didn’t get up, I’d probably get a kidney infection and die and that would not be a great way to go.

Then there I was, in the hallway, facing the closet, with my hand on the handle. 

I let go of it so quickly my knuckle hit the wall.

The pain helped somewhat. It was small and immediate and entirely explainable, which felt holy enough to cast a shade over that other feeling for a short amount of time.

I stepped back and looked at the door. It was just that: a door. It looked the same as always, cheap and badly painted with the same gray scuff mark near its bottom from when I had accidentally bashed it with my vacuum cleaner and then promptly decided, like with most things in my life, that fixing it sounded exhausting.

I kept standing there until my bladder reminded me with burning urgency that I had, in fact, originally not set out to stare at a door, but for a completely different purpose.

I waddled to the bathroom, and it went exactly as expected, thank you very much.

The rest of the day didn’t have any answers or revelations, but it was filled with small and maybe stupid acts of resistance. Sipping coffee instead of opening the closet. Making toast instead of checking the bin. Finishing more tickets rather than looking at the window. Pretending, for the last times, that if I just chose the normal thing again and again and again everything would move on.

By evening, there were seven crows perched near the window: four on the roof of the opposite building, and three on the light post closest to my window. 

When I noticed them, I went up to close the blinds. Pretending normal had almost worked.

Below, and beyond, were more. Many more. I do not know how many.

They sat in neat rows along the gutters, and they were all facing my building. I told myself it didn’t matter that it felt as if they were facing me specifically. Hard to tell which exact direction some nearby black fuzzballs are looking after all, and either way that would be absolutely insane. I was not special. My block was not special. There were probably thousands of them, and they just happened to be hanging here for some reason or another, exactly like the odd one that tapped my window.

Then, the middle bird on the light post turned its head, just ever so slightly. Every bird in my periphery followed suit.

I closed the blinds.

At some point, I must have fallen asleep on the couch. A hangover and… whatever else was going on does that to a man.

I woke with a stiff neck. My phone showed 03:13, because of course it did.

The apartment was dark except for my laptop screen, still open on the desk. For a second I figured a notification had woken me, and got annoyed at whichever asshole would be working at this hour in the morning.

Then I heard it again.

The crying.

It wasn’t pacing this time, but right outside my door. 

It was soft at first, and stayed that way while I tried to make sense of it. Small, broken sounds passed through the thin wood of the door and seeped between the cracks.

I did not move because, again, I knew who it was, and that was impossible.

The person that was crying was, without a doubt, my mother.

I knew it with that same awful certainty I had known my own voice only days earlier, but did not have the comfort of drink to suppress the impossible.

And it was impossible, because my mother was dead and either way, it wasn’t… completely correct.

The crying carried the same frailty as my mother’s did, that same sense of small and apologetic. The little break of breath that only appeared when she was sad, or drunk, or usually both. It was the undertone of grief that was wrong, yet again.

My mother had been sad ,often and loudly, but it had never carried that specific emotion. She had never been able to send that sadness elsewhere because it had always been too occupied with whatever turmoil was spinning around inside her head and her heart.

Whatever was outside my door did not have that problem.

I wish I could tell you I did something smart, or useful. I didn’t. 

I stayed put on the couch, very still and afraid to breathe.

Sometimes the crying would soften long enough for me to think it had stopped. Then it would hitch, or catch, or break into something so recognisable and instinctive that my body reacted before I had the chance to reason with myself. My throat would tighten, my eyes would burn. Then it would break into a horrific shriek that made me curl into a ball and shut my eyes tight, hands clasped over my ears.

It continued for over an hour.

I did not bravely resist some urge to open the door, because there was none.

I did not arm myself.

I did not call the police, or a priest, or a therapist, or anyone else whose job description might include standing between me and whatever was using my dead mother’s voice. I did consider calling for an ambulance for myself, but the terror kept me glued to that couch until it went quiet.

The crying didn’t fade gradually, and there was no final sob or soft retreat of footsteps down the corridor. No door opening. At some point it simply cut off. 

I didn’t trust the silence, and stayed put until the sun began to light the corners of my blinds. It took four neighbours to leave for work, audibly, before I had gathered enough courage to go near my door.

On the floor were three black feathers, carefully pushed underneath the door and neatly lined up on the floorboards. 

I did not touch them.

I know how this all sounds, by the way. I don’t think I am dumb or insane. I know what type of person would write this.

What do I want? I don’t know that either. This has all become very complicated and big, and I figured this is as good a place as any to post it. Maybe I need someone to believe me, because I do not think anyone will. Maybe I just need someone to read my story so that I am not so fully alone.

It just keeps getting worse. I don’t know what to do, and when I finally opened the journal it was an unhelpful mess. The only thing I know is that my family seemed to have been cursed with Death, and I think I may have thrown away the instructions on how to break it.

She’ll be back any minute. I have to go.

The first time I encountered Death was the night my mother died.

I knew it was night because it was dark, and I knew it was Friday because I was drunk.

Not drunk in the fun way. I was not out, leaning over some sticky bar with someone else’s chapstick sticking my lips together. I was drunk, at home, passed out on my couch in the same clothes I had worn since the day before. Whatever app on my TV that was streaming some show I wasn’t paying attention to was asking if I was still watching. Somewhere in my periphery, my laptop screen was glaring with what felt like hundreds of blue-glowing helpdesk tickets, all marked with the same red “urgent” flag by people who couldn’t tell the difference between a candle and a wildfire.

At first I thought it was quiet, the way it tends to be in the hush before dawn. It took a while for enough of my brain to wake up to register that there was indeed sound, and the sound was sobbing. Small, soft, bitten-off sounds, the kind that make your chest hurt as you try to suppress the noises and the feelings until they build so much pressure they have to go somewhere. Usually out. This is important.

As my brain continued tuning back into reality, the sound was given more detail. It had to be one of my neighbours. A woman, probably. But who?

In a split second, the soft sobs turned into an awful wail, and my brain jerked itself completely awake and forced two realisations through me at once. 

The first was that it was, indeed, not a woman. It was a man.

The second was that it was undeniably me who was wailing, though the sound was not coming from my mouth, but from the hallway outside.

Of course, it was not exactly me. It had the shape of my voice, yet none of the things that made it mine: the vibrations of my skull, the resonance in my chest, the small and well-known distortions of breath and tongue and teeth.

Have you ever heard a recording of yourself? It’s so undeniably you yet unbelievable at the same time. 

The wrongness of it all wasn’t only the pitch or the perceived flatness of the vowels. My voice was making a sound I was very sure I had never made, yet one I clearly recognised: complete and utter grief, so deep and dark and breaking that it had nowhere to go but out.

I sat up so fast my head spun and with enough force that my phone, which I had probably dropped on my face at some point as I was falling asleep, slid off me and fell to the floor with a thick thud. My mouth was tacky with an aftertaste of cheap whiskey and cigarettes. I tried to rehydrate the corners of my mouth with my tongue. It did not help.

The wailing rose and fell as if whoever was making the sound was pacing down the hallway. When it began to recede, my phone also decided to let out a scream of unwelcome noise that blurred my vision.

It scared me more than the crying. The crying was impossible, and the soft stupidity of being drunk lets you reject impossible things. That warmth does not extend its welcome to a phone call at 3:13 in the morning.

I watched the phone dance in a small circle on the floor, screen-down, as I considered just not answering. After all, I knew what it was about.

That sounds dramatic. It wasn’t.

If you try to love someone like my mother, you spend years waiting for them to die in a way that somehow still feels premature and unfair, even if it isn’t.

Every unknown number is a hospital.

Every missed call or late knock at the door is the police.

Any distance between the sentences we spoke to one another was tension until it eventually became peace. Rinse and repeat.

We had just recently closed that distance again. Let’s try again, she had said. She always called it that, trying. As if our entire relationship was a knot that you could loosen with enough patience, and not twenty-nine years of us both pulling as hard as we could between the pauses in opposite directions. 

She had sounded better the last time we spoke, and I had believed hard enough in the nuance of her words that I felt mostly anger. So far as my mother was concerned, that was the usual end to whatever hopeful cycle we had begun anew: a sliver of light dressed in irritation, already halfway out the door.

When the nurse asked if I was her son, the only surprise I felt was at the fact that she had, at some point, thought about me long enough to put me down as her emergency contact.

I felt sad, but maybe not in the way that people would think. I would rather call it disappointed in a way that was unavoidable and expected, but never wanted.

I picked up the box three days later. It was small and not very heavy. Also not a surprise. The more useless an object was, the better its chances of sticking around until its last threads frayed in the stale, shut-in air of my mother’s home… wherever that happened to be at the time.

The contents of the box had been chaotically thrown in there by whichever landlord she had annoyed last, namely some grumpy old man with a prickly, unkempt beard and cold eyes. I just opened the lid and gave a little shrug as a weak attempt to communicate something like, yup, that’s it, I guess. The landlord, who had done nothing but grunt the entire time, averted his eyes and squared his shoulders. He did manage to squeeze out a few perfunctory condolences before he gave a final grunt accompanied by a nod and walked away. His hard gaze had given away that he had already formed his opinion of me before we met, and that I was too much like my mother to deserve anything else. 

Asshole. 

Anyway. I left the box on my kitchen table and didn’t bother to look at or open it until its presence felt like it was burning a hole in my neck. Inside were the few remnants of my mother’s life that had survived the storms. 

Below assorted (and expired) bus cards, broken charger cables, and folded receipts from corner shops was a small package. It was wrapped in what I assumed was a reused paper bag, held closed with yellowed nylon string. An envelope had been wedged below it, my name written in one corner in pink highlighter, barely legible.

It was not sealed, and this annoyed me enough that I had to take a break before continuing. I don’t know why. Maybe because even in the case of her death, I was an afterthought.

Inside was a single sheet of printer paper folded unevenly twice. 

I’m sorry.

I snorted loudly. Yeah, sure you are. We both are. We both always were.

The words were written slowly and carefully with some kind of fine-liner, in what I could only imagine was an attempt to look sober. Not sure why that would matter to her.

Right as I was about to crumple the paper, I noticed there was more writing at the bottom of the paper in highlighter, yellow this time. The space between the initial line and the last three was large enough that the soft shadows almost made the text disappear completely.

I squinted my eyes.

I know you hate me.

I don’t blame you.

Read it anyway. It’s important.

I was frozen for a moment as every emotion it was possible to feel tried to wrap its tentacles around my heart. 

I know you hate me.

I never hated her. I didn’t particularly like her, but it was never hate.

Hate would have required more heat than I had left for her. What remained was mostly exhaustion. Resentment, when energy allowed. The occasional stupid, embarrassing tenderness that hit me when she sounded sober enough to maybe be a mom. 

Hate or not, something uncomfortably warm flashed by under my skin and collected itself like a clump in my belly. I couldn’t quite articulate what it was, but I knew where it came from. Even in death she tried to steer my emotions toward her interpretations of the world and our relationship. Even in death she made it about herself.

I know none of this excuses what I did after receiving the box, which has led to my predicament. But hopefully it helps shed some light on my mental state at the time anyway. Maybe that’s important. You would know better than me, I hope.

I left the package unopened the same way I had left the box. I don’t know for how long, only that I was four shots deep by the time I had finished reasoning with myself about whether the heartache and potential intellectual damage was worth it.

I tried. I really tried to give her some benefit of the doubt. 

There had been enough therapy-ish between her first week-long disappearance and her latest apology that I had grown to know quite a bit about the behaviors of addicts. You have worth, and it’s up to you, but they can be more than the worst thing they did to you. There is good as well as bad because the world is not, and never has been, black and white, and there is some self-growth in realizing that all the colors of the world can exist side by side. All of it is true and lived, and neither diminishes the other. 

I opened the package. Of course I did. I said therapy-ish.

What was inside was… nothing like the outside. If the outside looked like a neat package, the inside resembled what I imagined compressed trash blocks looked like.

Notes, photographs and assorted papers were layered and pressed around a well-thumbed notebook bound in brown leather, its surface worn into a completely smooth and shiny patina except for where it had cracked shallowly. The only reason I noticed the notebook was because, as soon as I peeled the paper, the trash block pretty much exploded and scattered its contents everywhere. 

Some papers were old and yellowed, some were laminated, some were white printer paper. They depicted maps, documents, lists, photographs, letters — I could go on.

I remember seeing a few handwritten notes on some of them. Black ink, probably fine-liner. At some point, the word CURSE appeared for the first time, surrounded by random exclamation marks and arrows. Once I found the first remnant of a red string under a piece of tape, I stopped looking at them at all. 

Instead, I gathered them all up.

I got myself a trash bag.

I crumpled and forced all of the loose papers inside.

Every. Single. One.

The warmth in my gut had transformed from someone else’s shower setting to fresh out-of-the-oven lasagna, so I broke my records for both how quickly I reached the garbage chute and how much force I used as I shoved the bag inside.

I heard it hit against the walls on its way down before landing with a soft whump. 

My gut did not get any lighter.

The journal was on the table staring at me when I got back inside, and this time anger flashed by. I don’t know why.

I threw it back into the box. Then, I threw the box into my closet, closed the door harder than I needed to, and went to bed.

You’d think that was the end of it, but the morning after was when the feeling appeared.

I wouldn’t describe it as terror, at least not yet. At that point it was barely even fear; fear has some object, fear has to point at something.

My mouth tasted like I had spent the night chewing coins, and as I stood up, my heart gave one very hard and off-beat thud against my ribs that made me shudder, before going back to pretending everything was normal. That’s why I noticed it wasn’t. 

It felt heavy and made it hard to breathe and think through the fog. As if whatever shroud covered the world had become hostile overnight, spitting out invisible and intangible spikes underneath the fabric of reality that were pointing directly at me. 

I blamed the drinking, obviously. My hands felt unsteady as I reached for the glass of water on my bedside table, and someone was knocking down walls inside my skull. 

So, hungover. Grieving. Slept badly. Too much whiskey and too little water. 

I made coffee strong enough to qualify as a checkmark on some mental health self-evaluation checklist somewhere, and got ready for work.

Then I just did normal stuff. My work includes a lot of forgotten passwords and a surprisingly creative mix of “yes I *** turned it on and off you absolute dumb— oh” variants, so I’ll spare you the details.

Coincidentally, some lady in accounting had forgotten her password for the fourth time in a month. I was halfway through trying to compose a polite email when something tapped against the window.

I looked to the side.

There was a crow standing absolutely still on the outside sill. Its claws were folded neatly around the metal edge, and its glossy black eyes seemed fixated on me through the glass. 

I live on the fourth floor. Birds land on windowsills all the time, and crows themselves are not unusual. I probably looked at it for a while, thought that it was neat, and tried to move on with my day.

The crow tapped again. The distinction here is important: it did not peck, it tapped. It wanted me to notice it. I knew this at the time, too, which made the hairs on my arms stand on end. A small shiver ran along my spine as I looked back to the bird, but this time it was different. It had not moved an inch. It was just… staring at me. Its gaze felt impossibly black and dark and dense, as if it was a black hole I could fall through and would fall through if I looked away.

We stared at each other for what felt like forever, or at least long enough for the staring contest to feel so normal that I jumped when the loud ping of a new “urgent” ticket brought me back to the room I was in and out of the impossible dark I had been falling into.

The crow turned its head, lining one of its eyes up with mine, and tapped the glass a third time.

This time, the sound was as impossible as the dark. 

It was not small.

It went through the windowpane, through the desk, through my teeth. My coffee shivered in its mug.

I looked down at it because I had to look at something else. Because if I kept staring at the crow, I had the sudden and absolute certainty that I would stand up, open the window, and put my hand outside. The thought was so clear it felt less like a thought and more like an instruction.

Open the window.

Put your hand outside.

Let it take.

I pushed my chair back so hard it snagged on the floor and gave a terrible wobble. The crow did not move. It watched me stand, watched me back away from the desk, watched me create more distance between us.

It tapped one final time.

This time, it felt impossibly slow. Deliberate.

A small motion of its head, then the sound came from behind me before the beak touched the window.  

I turned so quickly I lost my footing as my sock slipped, and for one horrific second I was completely sure that this was where I would die. There in my kitchen, cracking my skull open on unwashed laminate the color of washed-out vomit.

There was nothing behind me. Of course there wasn’t.

When I looked back, the sill was empty. 

There was a small mark on the spot that the crow had tapped, the only thing that marked that any of it had just happened. Just a small hairline crack with the tiniest chip of the glass missing.

My eyes trailed downward to the floor, where the missing piece was resting. It was vaguely shaped almost like an arrow with its tip pointing straight between my feet.

The rational part of my brain was desperately grasping at straws while sounding every possible alarm and sending out emergency flares in all directions, which made my ears buzz dully. 

Birds fuck with windows all the time. Glass usually breaks in sharp pieces that make strange shapes if you look at them hard enough. Humans are natural pattern-seekers. I was hungover, grieving, sleep deprived, and apparently one spooky bird away from being sent to the nuthouse.

Fine.

Great.

Perfect.

Good to know.

I bent down and picked up the piece of glass between two fingers, the point of the arrow pointing upward as to not cut myself. It felt cold. Pretty normal as far as glass goes, it’s one of its main characteristics. 

I looked at it intently. Just a piece of glass.

Wasn’t it?

The piece felt colder, and colder, until it got so sharply cold it burned my skin. I dropped it before I had the chance to decide whether the sensation was real or not.

It landed in almost the exact same place, tip pointing between my feet.

My laptop pinged again and this time I flinched so hard I almost stepped on the shard of glass. For a moment, I hated that woman in accounting intensely. Instead of dissipating, the hatred mirrored the shard and turned itself inward, until its sharp edge cut deep in my heart and turned to a sense of loss.

I don’t remember what the email said. I just remember I wrote something awfully normal, which was the opposite to anything I was and had been feeling for a long time, and hit send. I do remember it felt satisfying, that something was behaving predictably. At the time, I so badly needed there to be one sliver of reality that still seemed fair. Maybe, if things just kept going the mundane would outpower the weird and potentially embarrass the world around me enough to shift everything back to the way it should be.

It didn’t, but you know that. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here. 

The feeling stayed in the odd space between my ribs and the air around me, an intense pressure that shifted and moved and increased until it became nigh unbearable. Like the piece of glass, everything seemed to suddenly mean something. I didn’t know what something was, but I knew it wasn’t good.

I couldn’t in good conscience leave the shard where it was, so naturally I squeezed it tight between a folded paper towel. 

It didn’t burn through the paper. It did not try to escape, or whisper things in my ear, or any of the things that a decidedly cursed object would do if you were about to un-curse yourself by simply throwing it in the trash.

It just sat there, a cold arrowhead in a twist of recycled white paper. 

I threw it in the bin under the sink. Then, I stood still for an embarrassing amount of time and waited for it to… do something.

It didn’t.

It remained silent, just the low groaning of my fridge and the creaky footsteps of someone above. Normal noises in the silence.

It wasn’t funny, but I had to stifle a laugh anyway. The relief hit me too suddenly and too hard, and the only response I could physically muster was a giggle. At myself, at my mother, at the world.

By lunchtime, both the hangover and the worry had eased enough that I had managed to convince myself it had been some kind of episode. I liked that. Episode. Clean, medical, perfectly vague. A nifty little box to hold anything between low blood sugar and sleep deprivation and intoxication without needing to think too hard about the details.

I made more coffee, I answered more tickets. I explained with a great amount of patience that no, deleting the shortcut to the payroll app would not delete the app itself.

That’s the worst part, I think. That the world continued around the feeling of wrong. Forgotten passwords, microwaved fish, crying and laughing and drinking and eating under a sun that continued to rise and set. Its light had just finished moving across the floor as a blurry rectangle and now begun to shrink while hovering over the fridge.

All the while, the feeling remained and kept spinning itself into something larger.

At some point, I got up to pee only to find myself in front of the closet instead. I don’t remember walking there.

Don’t get me wrong. I remember pushing my chair back. I remember my eyes still feeling achy. I remember thinking that if I didn’t get up, I’d probably get a kidney infection and die and that would not be a great way to go.

Then there I was, in the hallway, facing the closet, with my hand on the handle. 

I let go of it so quickly my knuckle hit the wall.

The pain helped somewhat. It was small and immediate and entirely explainable, which felt holy enough to cast a shade over that other feeling for a short amount of time.

I stepped back and looked at the door. It was just that: a door. It looked the same as always, cheap and badly painted with the same gray scuff mark near its bottom from when I had accidentally bashed it with my vacuum cleaner and then promptly decided, like with most things in my life, that fixing it sounded exhausting.

I kept standing there until my bladder reminded me with burning urgency that I had, in fact, originally not set out to stare at a door, but for a completely different purpose.

I waddled to the bathroom, and it went exactly as expected, thank you very much.

The rest of the day didn’t have any answers or revelations, but it was filled with small and maybe stupid acts of resistance. Sipping coffee instead of opening the closet. Making toast instead of checking the bin. Finishing more tickets rather than looking at the window. Pretending, for the last times, that if I just chose the normal thing again and again and again everything would move on.

By evening, there were seven crows perched near the window: four on the roof of the opposite building, and three on the light post closest to my window. 

When I noticed them, I went up to close the blinds. Pretending normal had almost worked.

Below, and beyond, were more. Many more. I do not know how many.

They sat in neat rows along the gutters, and they were all facing my building. I told myself it didn’t matter that it felt as if they were facing me specifically. Hard to tell which exact direction some nearby black fuzzballs are looking after all, and either way that would be absolutely insane. I was not special. My block was not special. There were probably thousands of them, and they just happened to be hanging here for some reason or another, exactly like the odd one that tapped my window.

Then, the middle bird on the light post turned its head, just ever so slightly. Every bird in my periphery followed suit.

I closed the blinds.

At some point, I must have fallen asleep on the couch. A hangover and… whatever else was going on does that to a man.

I woke with a stiff neck. My phone showed 03:13, because of course it did.

The apartment was dark except for my laptop screen, still open on the desk. For a second I figured a notification had woken me, and got annoyed at whichever asshole would be working at this hour in the morning.

Then I heard it again.

The crying.

It wasn’t pacing this time, but right outside my door. 

It was soft at first, and stayed that way while I tried to make sense of it. Small, broken sounds passed through the thin wood of the door and seeped between the cracks.

I did not move because, again, I knew who it was, and that was impossible.

The person that was crying was, without a doubt, my mother.

I knew it with that same awful certainty I had known my own voice only days earlier, but did not have the comfort of drink to suppress the impossible.

And it was impossible, because my mother was dead and either way, it wasn’t… completely correct.

The crying carried the same frailty as my mother’s did, that same sense of small and apologetic. The little break of breath that only appeared when she was sad, or drunk, or usually both. It was the undertone of grief that was wrong, yet again.

My mother had been sad ,often and loudly, but it had never carried that specific emotion. She had never been able to send that sadness elsewhere because it had always been too occupied with whatever turmoil was spinning around inside her head and her heart.

Whatever was outside my door did not have that problem.

I wish I could tell you I did something smart, or useful. I didn’t. 

I stayed put on the couch, very still and afraid to breathe.

Sometimes the crying would soften long enough for me to think it had stopped. Then it would hitch, or catch, or break into something so recognisable and instinctive that my body reacted before I had the chance to reason with myself. My throat would tighten, my eyes would burn. Then it would break into a horrific shriek that made me curl into a ball and shut my eyes tight, hands clasped over my ears.

It continued for over an hour.

I did not bravely resist some urge to open the door, because there was none.

I did not arm myself.

I did not call the police, or a priest, or a therapist, or anyone else whose job description might include standing between me and whatever was using my dead mother’s voice. I did consider calling for an ambulance for myself, but the terror kept me glued to that couch until it went quiet.

The crying didn’t fade gradually, and there was no final sob or soft retreat of footsteps down the corridor. No door opening. At some point it simply cut off. 

I didn’t trust the silence, and stayed put until the sun began to light the corners of my blinds. It took four neighbours to leave for work, audibly, before I had gathered enough courage to go near my door.

On the floor were three black feathers, carefully pushed underneath the door and neatly lined up on the floorboards. 

I did not touch them.

I know how this all sounds, by the way. I don’t think I am dumb or insane. I know what type of person would write this.

What do I want? I don’t know that either. This has all become very complicated and big, and I figured this is as good a place as any to post it. Maybe I need someone to believe me, because I do not think anyone will. Maybe I just need someone to read my story so that I am not so fully alone.

It just keeps getting worse. I don’t know what to do, and when I finally opened the journal it was an unhelpful mess. The only thing I know is that my family seemed to have been cursed with Death, and I think I may have thrown away the instructions on how to break it.

She’ll be back any minute. I have to go.

Fungi are weird.

They’re neither plants nor animals, but their own thing. Alive in their own way. Plants sprout up, reaching for the light. Animals eat the plants. We eat the animals. 

Fungi, though, wait until the rest of the food chain is done fighting over who is actually on top, and then they lick the plate clean.

You can fry up a chanterelle or button mushroom with butter and onions, sure, but you’re not the winner of the exchange. The mushroom is so much more than that which reaches above ground. Every forest, every field, every inch of soil is their stomach, and we are but temporary guests on their domain.

People don’t like thinking about that. That they’re everywhere. Makes most of us uncomfortable.

I think we want to believe that there is something noble and unique about our way of being alive, a purpose to all the chewing and swallowing and shitting. 

There isn’t.

In the end, I think there’s just the stuff that feeds, or gets fed on.

That’s why I started growing them. 

It started as a hobby; a completely normal one, if there is such a thing.

People grow herbs on their windowsills, tomatoes in buckets, feed sourdough contained in jars. Wanting to be in control is part of our nature. 

So, why not take control of the thing that is actually at the top of the food chain? Something that doesn’t need sunlight or praise and can be done quietly, in the moist and the dark. Like having my very own dungeon, where I am the God and the king and the owner.

I ordered my first kit from Amazon after a really shitty date. Came in a cardboard box with colourful prints on its side, the inner plastic bag filled with inoculated grain I just had to mist twice a day. Simple enough. 

They grew fine, of course. Took a few weeks before the beautiful fruiting bodies of the oysters peeked through that which lived in the substrate, white and plump.

I’ve been lonely ever since I moved away from my parents. I’ve done everything you’re supposed to do: got a degree, got a job, tried the gym thing, tried being “interesting”. None of it sticked. 

My best friend said I just have to “put myself out there”, but I’ve figured it’s just code for begging, which I shall not do. They don’t want you to be real, they just want you to be useful and pay for their meal and then go back to being invisible, until they want you to serve again. I think I gave up after the hundredth date or so. The world is just so unfair.

It’s all so predictable. Smiles, scripts, excuses. You buy them a drink, or two, or three, they laugh at the right time then check their phones. Again and again. Turn polite. That’s when you finally know it’s over, and that the rest of the evening will be a waste of time. No point in buying another drink or snack if I get nothing back for it.

Mushrooms are nothing like that. They don’t lie or perform or think they’re better than you. You give them that which they need, and you always get something back. That’s a fair exchange.

I think people could learn a lot of things if they just considered mushrooms.

About patience, about gratitude. About knowing their place in the order of things.

I am getting ahead of myself.

My friend said I was getting too attached to my hobby, but honestly I just think that’s what people with company say to those without. They cannot possibly understand what it’s like to be alone and left out.

I watched the plastic on some nights, took in all the detail I could. The condensation on its surface and the table it stood on, the smell of the earth turning sweet, the way the creeping mycelium looked like frost on a window as it outgrew its container.

I liked how it felt so different from me and the breaths I took, yet so distinctly alive. Yes. Something that doesn’t need to be entertained or impressed, and that responds to me and my needs completely, incapable of the selfishness that otherwise encompasses humans.

The kits felt lazy, after a while. I could do better, take better care of them. Work for the intimacy.

I mixed my own substrate, instead. Coffee grounds, shredded cardboard or moist sawdust, flour, calcium powder. Any mix of those things. 

I experimented and logged. Size, time to fruit, flavour. With each iteration, they grew faster: stronger. Smelt less like wet dirt and more like skin. Warmer, and fuller.

People at work started complaining that I smelled of mould and damp. I didn’t argue, just said I’d look into it. Moisture problem, I said, apologetically. In reality I didn’t care, of course. Not like they’d bother to talk to me otherwise, fucking twats.

I don’t think they’d even notice if I didn’t show up. I could rot in that office chair, and the only thing they’d care about is who’d get my parking spot.

And anyway, I liked the smell of home. It was getting richer. If I shut the windows, it would envelop me as soon as I came home. Thick and sweet. 

I liked it. I really did. It smelled like hard work done right, proof that something depended on me. Obediently waiting for me to feed, to water, to care. My very own livestock.

I used different trays, bigger jars. The more surface, the better the yield. The air in my apartment was alive with spores. I could see them dancing in the light, mingling with the dust. Every time I breathed in, I could imagine lining my lungs, growing little forests within. A small ecosystem, just for me.

The fruiting bodies were beautiful, too. Dense, white and layered: ‘d bush my fingers along their gills to feel the cool and damp, the texture of that which I had raised with my love.

People online said not to touch them too much. Contamination, fingerprints, bacteria. Mine didn’t mind, though. Rather, they seemed to like the touch, new clusters spouting where my hands had been the night before. Finally, something that gave back what I put in.

The thing with cultivation, though, is that once you get that rush of the improved yield it’s hard to not continue. Coffee grounds and cardboard can only do so much, and you have to start asking what else they’d like.

Supplements, of course. Soy hulls, bran, a little protein.

All living things need protein.

I began adding what I had: scraps from my plate, grease from the pan, nail clippings and hair from the drain. Waste, really, but waste is still food. It’s the thing that remains, once everything else is gone.

The smell reached upstairs, of course, the more they grew. The woman in 1B kept complaining.

She knocked on the door one night, eager to tell me to fix it. Stood in the opening with her arms crossed and her eyebrow raised, a hint of annoyance on her face. 

I explained to her, of course. About the mushrooms. What they need to thrive. That, if you live in an apartment complex with other people you need to be empathetic.

She called it gross, then. That didn’t leave my mind. Gross. I was at the top of the food chain, was I not? I was God. 

It hit me that she might turn and complain to the landlord, so of course I ensured she couldn’t.

The mushrooms went wild, after that. Twice the yield, that caps yellowing at the edges. Thick, pale fold curled up from the trays like splayed lungs, taking their first breath of air. 

I didn’t change much else about the process, not yet. 

I had to rake, of course. Create lines where I could gently push the mycelium, let them fester and find root. Moisture solved itself, mostly. I didn’t care as much for the new substrate smell, or the noises, but it was a fair price to pay for the expansion.

I ran my hand along her swollen belly, every so often. It had a moist kind of give to it. I knew that just beneath the surface, the mycelium is working its way up and out, digesting and creating and expanding. 

The mushrooms have softened her both literally and figuratively. She looks more peaceful than I remember her ever being, and boy was that lady a sourpuss. The pinched skin around her mouth is gone, the eyebrows relaxed. 

It had taken me nearly an entire night to get her positioned in the larger of my two growth tents. She was heavier than I had expected, and to some degree I could appreciate that. Being more than what you look like. Sound familiar?

I had already cleared the shelving to make place for a new batch, so it was almost as if I had prepared for this the entire time. 

Not deliberately, of course. I am a king, not a monster.

The first cuts were difficult. The knife had caught on something beneath the skin and made a sound and feeling against the bone that I didn’t like, so I had stopped. And anyway, there was no reason to make a mess of her. Not completely. The mushrooms knew what to do either how, better than I did.

I opted for packing her with substrate instead, extras. Making the entry easier. Under her arms, between her legs, along her neck and mouth; I filled every hollow I could find, then covered her in a thick layer of colonised grain.

I left her face uncovered, mostly because I felt a little… well, not guilty. I don’t have a word for it. I wanted her to see what she’d become, what I had become. I know she can’t, but it felt important at the time.

For two days, nothing changed except the smell. I worried I had made a mistake, or that she had contaminated the culture somehow. People are filled with all kinds of unnatural shit, chemicals and plastics and toxins. Medication and preservatives and alcohol and humanity. Maybe she was inhospitable.

I misted her every few hours, checked the stats. Humidity, heat. Whispered encouragement, just in case.

I don’t know if it was the misting or the temperature or the whispered words of encouragement that did it, but when I saw the white fuzz began to spread in her corners by the third day that this would be something glorious.

By evening, it had reached her face and covered her gums and teeth. I laughed when I saw it.

She had called them gross, and here she was adorned in their lipstick and foundation.

Then, the change was rapid: The mycelium webbed itself across her skin, stitched the pieces of her body that had sunk into themselves back together. Her flesh darkened and rotted—no, not rotted, became—beneath, and the white made it pure.

By the tenth day, tiny pins had pushed through the soft skin of her abdomen. They clustered around her navel, and more appeared beneath her jaw, along the inside of her thighs. 

This cultivar grew faster than any I had succeeded with before, and I was so happy. I logged it all: the exact temperatures, the humidity, time to fruit. A note that it seemed to especially like the fatty tissue of her hips and breast and thighs.

At some point, I thought I heard noises coming from the tent. An unfamiliar splat of something wet and heavy hitting the plastic off the floor. I opened the flap, but she was still the same. Unmoveable, beautiful, but stagnant.

I slept next to the tent after that. Not because I was frightened, but because this was my ascension. I couldn’t miss a thing.

My manager asked me whether everything was alright at home, and it was the first personal question he had asked me in three years. I told him the truth, that things were better than ever. That it was up up up and would continue up.

 Piece of shit. Like everyone else, he didn’t give a shit until he could smell it on me. The success. The win. The fact that I had domesticated the smartest predator on earth.

More people showed concerned, but I just smiled and shook it off. Like any animal, they were just noticing that something new had entered their territory.

I stopped going to work sometime after that. Not officially, there was no letter of resignation. I just didn’t go. There was no point.

So much for their concern! They sent a few emails, even fewer texts. My managed called once, and then never again. Assholes.

By the end of the fourteenth day, she was almost entirely covered. The mushrooms rose from her in thick shelves, white-edged and pink-centred. The fruiting bodies lacked the symmetry of my previous batches, instead growing in distinct pairs of two. Swollen and round, fleshy and soft. 

Perfect.

I called them human oysters in my notes. Creative? Not very. Scientific? Not at all. But what good would a scientific or creative name be when the entire point was to remove myself from that which traps us all?

Naming a thing is part of owning it, though, so just the act of trying was important. Nothing like the human oysters had ever grown before, I don’t even think anybody had thought to try. Not like this, not like me.

I selected the largest fruit from somewhere below her ribs. Usually, oysters are quite easy to pick: a gentle twist will do, followed by the smallest little pop. This one resisted, though. The root was somewhere deep inside her, possibly even growing straight through to the centre of the earth. I had to brace with one hand against her decaying side, gently positioned between the fruiting bodies of course, and pull quite hard with my other. The flesh followed the pull for several centimetres before it finally released with a wet squelch.

The fruit felt like a kitten in my hand: soft and warm and breathing. Warmer than expected, considering the temperature. 

I weighed it, photographed it, and then cut it lengthwise. I had to see.

Its interior was dense and white, threaded with fine red veins. 

At its centre was a small but dense obstruction that caught the blade.

At first, I assumed it must be bone. It made the same sound as when I had first opened her.

When the knife refused to cut through, I carefully dug around it. Peeled back the flesh in layers before the object finally dropped with a soft clunk onto the cutting board beneath.

It was… round. White, but in the way that healthy teeth are white: with a soft tinge of yellow. The light reflecting off of it showcased its gritty surface, but just barely. From a distance, the small biological imperfections would have been invisible. 

A pearl.

I found this extremely satisfying. An oyster producing a pearl. But of course. What was this if not the ultimate proof that I was on the right path? That something so valuable would end up here, in my tent, growing inside my domesticated creation. 

Real pearls form around irritants. Grains of sand or parasites, anything unwanted that slips inside and cannot be easily expelled. I wondered what had bothered her so.

There were plenty of possibilities, of course. Maybe it had been too light, or too dark. Maybe too cold, maybe too noisy. I don’t think I will ever know.

I washed the pearl beneath the tap. The water that flowed down onto it entered the drain cloudy and muggy.

It didn’t smell like the rest of it. It smelled of… nothing.

I wrote everything down to the last detail, and took another photograph to add to my logbook. It weighed a whopping 212 grams. Can you imagine?

The next mushroom I tried cutting up contained another, at 187 grams.

The next 253.

Every single mature cluster had grown around one of them. 

By the time I had arranged all my findings on my table, there were twenty three of them. All weighed between 150 and 300 grams, yet varied greatly in size. Some were the size of flower seeds, and others could fill my palm. They shared the hardness, softness, and warmth.

The smell when I fried the first fruit was extraordinary. Below the notes of browned butter and onions was something richer than meat, sweeter than any mushroom I had ever grown. It was so overpowering I could no longer smell the murky smell of the apartment.

The texture was firm, yet seemed to melt inside my mouth as it made contact with my tongue. 

The flavour gave way for something different.

The smell of perfume?

Of her perfume.

Not of essential oils suspended in alcohol, but unmistakably hers.

Laundry detergent, the lilacs on her balcony. The sourness of cigarettes barely covered by a trace of menthol.

Then, I was a child. Two people screamed above me, loudly. I was underneath the kitchen table, and urine had ran down one of my legs and soured my dress. It was my nicest one, too. My hands were over my ears but the shouting made its way inside my skull, anyway.

I was alone in a hospital room. I felt defeatedness, anger, loneliness. My mouth tasted dry and everything could be fixed if I just took one drag off a—

I hated everyone. Everyone. This was at least familiar. Useless men, never doing the right thing, what ever should I do with—

He’s beautiful. He’s kind, compassionate, understanding. He repaired the parts of me that I didn’t even know were broken, and new life had been breathed—

I’m stood in the hallway with my arms crossed. My brows were furrowed, but not in anger. I felt nervous. Worried. It took twenty minutes before I decided to finally knock. I recognised the smell of despair, of moist. Maybe there had been an outbreak. I knew what the effects could be, so of course I had to check in on—

Me. 

I vomited into the sink. I did not finish my plate.

For three days, the pearls remained on the table.

At night, there would be a faint clicking from there, as if the pearls were gently bumping into each other from an unknown force.

The mushrooms began to collapse.

Not really like rot, just… collapse. The caps folded inwards, shrinking away from the air outside, and there she was.

Whole.

Well, not whole. Her skin had darkened and there were still traces of where the openings I had created had widened from the fruiting bodies. It had not consumed her, though. They had grown through where I had introduced them, then around, and then withdrawn.

I was furious, at first. Then I got curious.

They had rejected her. Why?

The pearls. 

They had not been created by the mushrooms, of course not. They were the indigestable. The irritant. The—

Soul. It sounds childish, sure. But that’s what it is. The soul. Something hard and definite at the centre, something the body grows around. The thing that remains, when the rest is to be stripped away.

Twenty three pieces of her, all so useless.

I knew I had to fix it. This was the flaw, the main challenge, the final step before my ascension could be complete.

I had to find mine. I wondered what it would contain, and rejoiced at the idea of how light I would be without it.

I waited for the mushrooms to find it. I shoved my face inside the grain, rubbed it onto the patches where my skin had cracked.  I ate it, I breathed it.

And… nothing happened.

Perhaps my flesh was too thick.

Perhaps my soul is too large, my conscious too heavy.

I can feel it beneath my breastbone, I think. 

It’s small, and hard, and shifts whenever I breathe. It makes me cough.

So, I have sterilised the knife. Won’t be much of a god if I am dead, I guess.

I have managed three incisions so far, but it’s getting harder.

I am a little bit scared, I think.

—

“And, yeah, that’s where it, uh. Ends.”

“That’s all?”

“Uh. Yeah, that’s all. Jesus, what more did you want? This is serving us the entire case on a silver platter.”

“Well, we don’t know if it’s—if it was him.”

“…Mhm.”

“And the neighbour? Ms Gregory?”

“Indeed in the, eh, tent. Quite intact.”

“And him?”

“… to be honest you should—you should probably see for yourself.”

“Of course. Later. I don’t get why it’s always you and me that has to… What’s that? In the bag?”

“That? A pearl. Probably just— I don’t know. This entire thing is so psychotic, dude. It was just, like, in his—his mouth. It’s been classified already. 4 grams, almost pure luck we found it at all.”

“Huh. Disgusting.”

“Yeah. Absolutely—absolutely vile.”

I really wish I had seen this subreddit before I bought my V15.

TLDR; Customer service is a joke, and the vacuum is right now laying in a Miele box, ready to be shipped back.

We have two batteries, and overnight the charger seems to have broken (or the device itself since it won’t show the low battery indicator…).

Contacted support through whatsapp, because ”oh nifty!”

Dear reader, I regret to inform you it was indeed not nifty at all.

We wrote a lengthy opener detailing the issue and what we had tried.
We immediately got bounced to a bot that asked for a bunch of information one message at a time. Cool.
We get connected to an ”expert” (shoutout to Dhruv!), who have us repeat all the information he just got… one message at a time.
He asks for proof of purchase, we send him the order confirmation

Now, in my country they are not obliged to send a receipt for online purchases so, we didnt have one. Because they didnt send one.

Dhruv kept insisting that he needed the receipt to continue and I was just like ?????

He then had me send a photo of the serial number. Cool, I can do that.

He asks me to go through the same steps as the troubleshooting online did, super tedious. I explained several times we did do it and that the fact two batteries seemed to have died at the same time into account.

Nope. You need a new battery.
I repeat that I dont think its the battery a few times, and all of a sudden the man agrees.
Within half a second he says he will order one, but its out of stock. We have a year left on warranty.

I am sweating. I have small children and pets and I swear the layer of now-invisible-to-me crumbs and hairs are laughing at me. I ask how long.

The man can NOT respond to this question and gets stuck in a loop like a broken bot. ”I am sorry for any inconvenience. I promise a new charger will resolve this issue swiftly. It will be sent as soon as possible. Is there anything else I can help you with?” X100

I explain that this is my main vacuum, I use it several times daily. Its been four hours Dhruv! THE DUST IS ACCUMULATING.

I also explain in-depth the consumer laws for my country since the guy has absolutely no idea. He cannot send me to someone who does, either.

Legally, a vacuum cleaner is considered an essential and a company needs to do their best to replace and fix any issue without inconveniencing the consumer. Precedent says two to three weeks is reasonable for an out of stock item like a charger, since the vacuum is completely useless without it.

I call a customer service rep from my country instead, and they have me show the SAME TROUBLESHOOTING STEPS on a video call. Very awkward, by the way. I had to pause so she could take screenshots. Not sure what torture device Dyson has on these workers because it feels like youre talking to a hostage.

Anyway! The charger is still out of stock, so they want to send a replacement machine. A full-ass new vacuum. Im like ??? But its a goddamn CHARGER? But fine I can hear my toddler running around in her boots indoors so, whatever. I just need this solved!

Oh. The v15 is also out of stock so take a v16. At this point Im like lol no thanks.

Most likely they will have to refund the entire purchase, my country’s laws are nice that way, but if youre not from a country that cares about the consumer Dyson is a joke. I never had (much) issue with the machine itself but for this hecking price it should be possible to get my hands on a damn charger without risking burning my house down.

There had been no word for death, for there had been no idea of self.

No thoughts could be sealed, but there were ways to narrow oneself. To fold the attention inwards, reduce the interference so that only the closest patterns noticed the pressure of one’s thoughts. Courtesy called for it, and precision required it. Civilisation itself depended on the discipline of not being everywhere all at once.

No thought could be sealed, though, and the scientist’s fascination had been leaking for quite a while. Just a mild brightening of the Field, a tonal shift along the energy currents filled with the harmless pleasure of a mind arranging difficult things. 

Young patterns that drifted by would pause in the current, turning toward the input briefly, maybe curiously, before returning to their own exercise. The elders barely even observed. There was no danger in delight.

In the basin, the cold matter waited. Water gathered and moved, minerals changed and settled. The scientist found carbon the most interesting, with its folding and failing chains of ordered chaos. Heat moved through the system in pulses, crude and slow; nothing like the clean exchanges of the greater Field and its medium. 

There was a stubbornness to matter that invoked a feeling of love within the scientist. 

That love, too, leaked. 

A neighbouring pattern vibrated with gentle amusement. Still with the cold?

The scientist sent a widening as reply. Yes, still. Look, how badly it wants to become!

The neighbour shimmered, but did not look. Not closely. Cold matter bored most minds. It did not answer when addressed, fell apart unless held together. Lacked the grace to stay continuous, understandable, and opted instead to create boundaries. Odd things.

The scientist found the boundaries most interesting, and each time this thought crossed the Field a shiver passed through it. A small disturbance that invoked a feeling of wrongness that no pattern could bother to place before it was gone again. Not important enough to propagate, not at the time.

The scientist reduced the thermal interval by a fraction, and the suspension changed. A chain curved around itself, opened again. There was something beautiful about recreating the openness of the Field within the cold basin, and the scientist chimed with delight.

A failed configuration.

Another.

Another.

The scientist recorded each one with great difficulty, as the instruments thought of them as just noise.

Failure. Nothing. Just the edges of possibility. Of boundary. Of… alone.

Across the Field, several minds paused at once. The wave moved a bit further than intended, and more were listening.

Edges? Alone?

The scientist dimmed in apology, but also in question. It did not know what this meant, but it too felt it: the wrongness.

But the word had already spread, a new shape in the Field. Of something becoming less coherent, less whole. A few young patterns tasted the new concept, and created waves of bright unease. The elders remained still.

In the basin a droplet formed, and the scientist leaned in closer.

Not closer, as such. Not physically. There was no closer or further away in that sense. Attention has mass, though, and there was a lot of it pointed at the cold matter.

The droplet didn’t collapse.

A skin of lipid chains had enclosed a pocket of water and mineral ions. Three strands had assembled within the boundary. One clung to the inner surface of the membrane, another had folded near the droplet’s centre. The third had begun to draw loose components into a pattern roughly similar to itself.

Roughly.

The scientist brightened. It was involuntary this time, but the entire chamber caught it. A sudden increase in wonder that reverberated across the chamber, loud and proud and careless of custom.

Around the basin, other minds slowed. A question harmonised from several directions:

What is it?

The scientist let the nearby minds feel its hesitation, let the words hang in the air before answering.

It’s… a local structure. Something temporary, but catalytic.

There was a sudden sharpness as the elders sent the wave. It wasn’t a question, this time.

Show us.

There was no self, so the scientist did what it was told. It opened the instruments, and sent the translated image. A droplet with thick skin, and the slow theft of molecules from the water by the strands. 

The responses varied. Curiosity, surprise, aesthetic pleasure.

Then, the strand finished its copy. It was shorter, bent differently. The minds concentrated their peripheries in anticipation of the moment of dissipation, affected by the delight of the scientist.

The droplet did not collapse. It did not dissolve. The altered fold caught an ion in a way the first had not.

The scientist’s joy became too large to contain.

It learns.

There was only pressure in response.

Not learns. Adapts. Persists.

The correction was worse, and the pressure increased. The scientist huddled down, dimmed.

The droplet narrowed at its middle, changed tension. The internal strands pulled apart, and it divided.

For one interval, the Field brightened again. This was new.

The next, one droplet opened. Its skin broke, and the folded strand inside loosened, became ordinary matter again.

The other droplet drifted through the remains, took them in. Still held together.

The brightness dimmed, and silence again followed.

No mind present could misunderstand that which had happened in the basin, though none yet possessed the ideas to explain it. 

The elders resonated, and the scientist tried to shape an answer before the accusations could form.

It lacks intention.

Silence.

It cannot choose.

Silence.

It is only chemistry.

The Field tightened around that word. Only. 

In the basin, the surviving droplet thickened again. A new fold appeared inside it.

The nearest elder sent a command.

End it.

The scientist shimmered with hope.

End the interval?

Instantaneous.

End the basin.

The command gathered weight as it moved through the Field, quiet but absolute. A collective recoil to this pattern, this shape, that the civilisation had no place for.

The scientist turned its attention back to the droplet, paused. It was already beginning to divide again.

There was beauty in it, still.

No, it sent.

The word did not travel far; it bounced back instinctively, flattened by the shock.

No?

It is new, the scientist sent.

Yet, it is closed.

It is not aware!

Yet it continues.

It has done nothing wrong!

Yet it may.

The final answer did not come from the closest elder. It emerged from the Field itself, from every mind that had watched the intact droplet feed on the failed one. 

The judgement and its command arrived before they needed to be spoken again. Edge. Alone. Persist. Eat.

The basin could not remain.

The instruments were withdrawn first, then the attention from the Field. The chamber was cut off from the wider currents, and curious young patterns were pushed away from the exchange with a force that would have been unthinkable moments before.

The basin began to warm. The droplet seemed to tremble.

Please, the scientist sent. It is my error. Let me carry it. 

It pressed itself against the narrowing chamber, spilling everything it had not meant to feel. Wonder, shame, tenderness, terror.

There was no answer.

Then let me end with it.

The request passed through the Field, returned expanded with horror.

A mistake was not a crime. There was no such punishment, no such mercy. A mind could not be made less because it had loved wrongly.

Below them, the droplet divided.

Both halves held, and the elders trembled.

The basin was sealed, abandoned. The remaining cold matter was gathered into a single dark bead, glassed in mineral. 

The scientist followed it as far as it could reach. 

Where? 

Far, the Field answered.

There was a long and empty pause.

Somewhere cold. Colder. Colder. Where it cannot wake.

And so it was removed, the catalytic thing with boundaries. With self, with death. 

—

Now, on the world where the basin’s remnants had woken, another scientist sits before another container. This one is not made of water, but rather of dreams, debt, and ambition.

He does not think of himself as wicked. No one does in the beginning. 

The scientist looks once at the camera, wipes his forehead with the back of his hand. Behind the lens, other minds watch with the same bright, harmless delight.

Then he presses enter.