Katie Mora

The Mesophile

for Randy 

Most fungi don’t grow when it’s below forty degrees.
I learned this from a book they had in the library,
before the GED study guides and after the family
law compendiums: Fungal Ecology, First Edition.
The thing with the fungus is you can’t see most of it.
It’s a bunch of threads underground, like a spiderweb
or a bed of silk. You could dig it up if you wanted,
stick it under a microscope or squint really hard at it,
and maybe then you’d be able to perceive it, but I
don’t have a microscope and my eyesight’s near gone
and the ground’s near frozen and coated in poison
and besides, I don’t want to dig things up anymore.

In the book there’s a photo of mycelium magnified
900 times. It looks like a tree bearing floating fruit,
the source of the cylindrical berries that drift across
my left eye and dart away when I try to track them
down. I get these fixations sometimes where I notice
one and a pain strikes me in the temple and I think,
it’s the thing in my eye that’s doing this, it’s the thing
in my eye and I’ve got to get it out. I can’t trace it,
of course, it’s too quick and it doesn’t want to be seen,
but I try until I quiver with tension and someone
laughs behind me or calls out my name or number
and I see myself as they do, as power into dust, as
a head in the count, as a guy staring at his own eye.
So I put my elbow on the table like I’m gearing up to
arm wrestle and I hold my hand open like I’m telling
myself to stop and I mash my eye into the meaty part
of my palm, and the berry bursts into a rainbow of
juice and pulp, and the pain falls away with the colors.

There’s another photo next to the first one. It’s the
same mycelium at the same magnification under the
same lens, says the caption, but this time the sample
has been frozen to zero degrees. It’s shriveled up, like
every cell is curling in on itself to keep warm. There’s a
blurriness to the image too, just a little, like the branches
were shivering under the examiner’s breath. The cold
is thirsty, it drains the fungus of its water until no option
but dormancy remains. I can fill in the blanks here,
figure out what happens next: the mycelium sleeps in
its pungent cradle and dreams of all the times it’s done
this before, and when it runs out of those it turns to the
fantastical. It dreams that it can grow upright, form its
own living trellis, absorb the novel molecules from the
air and produce astounding new shapes in unseen hues:
curlicues like pink pigs’ tails, electric blue slivers thin
as dendrites. It dreams of a thousand fruiting bodies it
can slip on and off like finger puppets, of congealing
itself into abdomen and thorax and scuttling away on
extraneous legs. It dreams until it sweats itself awake.

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Katie Mora's work has been published or is forthcoming in Gone Lawn, Progenitor Art and Literary Journal and Fatal Flaw Literary Magazine. She lives in the Capital Region of New York. Her website is http://katiemora.com.