CW: kidnapping/abduction, death/dying, and bodily harm.

I have a longstanding fascination with fungi—their interconnectedness, their otherness, their ability to emerge from seemingly nothing. I also have a longstanding fascination with serial killers and the dehumanization they inflict. When I began writing “Primordium” it was only a vignette about mushrooms and their drifting spores, but it grew unexpectedly to incorporate both interests.

— ER

In the night they open, gills delicate as frost, spores like stardust. They feed on the wounds of our heart, our torn mouth, our unlidded eyes. They feed where we are damaged, and they grow.

• • • •

He buried me in the dark, in the fertile ground.

I didn’t know it. I was nothing, then, an empty body. A thing he made, and hid away.

But I did not stay empty. I did not stay alone in a hidden grave.

There were so many others there in the dark, in the fertile ground with me.

• • • •

When the others reached out and entangled me with their delicate threads, I began to become something else. For a long while I was aware but inert, interstitial. I was almost other, almost part of a different whole.

• • • •

He didn’t know I was still there. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t see, not in the dark ground, not with my open eyes filled with dirt. But I knew his movements. I knew how he filled his void. We knew.

• • • •

Time moves differently, here, underground, in the dark. Time is a slow thing, measured by how we spread ourselves through, between, under the broken earth. Time is what we call the progress of our growth, our fruit, our bodies.

• • • •

Hyphae. Mycelium. Rhizomorph. Names for the parts of my new body. Words I’d never known before he took me from one life and thrust me into another.

Memories linger and spread like spores. One of those here had known these new names, names for what we grew to replace our hands, our mouths, our hearts. We have all fed on what we brought into the dark. We share ourselves, here.

Together, we know the shape of the house above us, the color of his eyes, the complexities of how we were seduced into becoming prey. We know.

There is so much, and so little else.

• • • •

I had no way to know I wasn’t alone, at first. I didn’t exist. He’d made sure of that, with his hard fingers and dull knife. He made sure I wished I didn’t exist, before he granted it.

But when he buried me, the others knew.

They reached out, infiltrating, exploring, inhabiting. They found purchase in the empty body. They found nourishment. They gave back an existence, a new awareness, a shared life.

With threads and filaments grown together and intertwining like clasping hands, we held each other in the dark.

There are so many of us, bound body to body, a network made of discarded flesh and what it becomes. It is impossible to separate. He feeds us. He builds us. The pain is always fresh. We absorb it.

I becomes we becomes all.  And we become the same being, beneath the surface.

• • • •

Time after time we break that surface, pushing up from our shallow graves, but we do not stand long enough to release our spores. He has been as violent to us in this form as when we were separate things, and victims. He scrapes our blunt and unripe organs from the earth when he comes to dig new graves, uprooting them, severing them from us. They disturb him, somehow. He mutters to himself as he tears them away from where they sprang. And so they die, isolated, as the bodies they bloomed from have died.

But there will be others, always, pushing gradually up through the soil and into the still, damp air.

We move slowly, here in the dark. But we always move.

• • • •

Hyphae lace together like fingers. We clutch each other, stretching through the earth between us where he cannot see what we have become.

Rhizomorphs like roots holding us here, holding us together. We are becoming far greater than the sum of our parts, every body buried here another sibling in our sanctuary, another limb to reach for and embrace.

If we had names once it doesn’t matter. We are together now, connected, our new life a shared body. A fruitful body. Growing. Full of wonders he could never imagine.

And not as easily taken apart, he will find.

• • • •

We are silent, spilling over the limits of the graves where he hid us, filling the underground spaces with our new flesh. He sees our pale, fruiting bodies where they push up through the soil, but he doesn’t know what he sees.

He only saw the bodies we were. Not what we have become here in the dark. Not the interwoven threads, the warp and woof.

• • • •

We feel him moving about in the house above us, his footfalls vibrating across our network of mycelia. We listen, in our way. We know what he does.

He cannot keep secrets from us. He has been too intimate with us. We share what we remember.

• • • •

He comes down the steps to the cellar, burdened with the deadweight he carries. He grunts as he throws down the soft body and reaches for the shovel. It has been weeks since he has entered this dark space, but he thought of us, about the taste of our skin and the savour of our fear.

He has done this for many years, and he is getting older. The hunting is not as easy as it was. It’s been so long since he brought us a new sibling. Long enough for us to ripen, and wait, full and ready, for him to come.

The shovel blade cuts through us where we cover the ground in a tangle of naked, pale stalks. He swears as our spores explode from our ruptured appendages, dust like stars in the still cellar air. He coughs. He retches. He cannot help but breathe them in.

They will find fertile ground in his lungs. They will seed in him and stretch into hyphae, fill his hollow spaces, and reach out, and reach out, and reach out. We will be there, ready, to weave the new strands into us, to share our memories, to erase him from himself.

Another body for us all.