Compost Home

CONTENT WARNINGS: Slight body horror, implied mental illness, implied parental abuse, implied gender dysphoria, implied toxic codependency.

We hadn’t always been together. That would suggest some form of co-dependency, a symbiotic state in which we couldn’t survive apart. We’d never believed that to be us. You’d described things differently, like we were something of a calibre indescribable by human language and convention. A mycorrhizal network, the type used by fungi to connect themselves to trees, a social lattice from which nutrients and information are shared, but also

 abstained by choice. 

We had a choice, was always your implication, we could step away at any point, cut-off the supply line and still survive. And I had never questioned the authenticity of this. 

Possibly that was part of the problem. 

There have been times when we have slipped from each other’s grasp, either into the hands of another, or into the recesses of our own minds, lost in a darkness from which even our bond could form no reel—further proof that we’d not needed each other, but wanted instead. 

It is one of these times of separation that has me looking for you now, boots caked in riverbed residue, disposition caked in the type of desperation that only surfaces for your benefit. 

I look for you in that hidden place, the one that can’t be found with a cursory glance, the one we only discovered because we were seeking it out, not it specifically, but something like it, a home we could call our own. It hadn’t been a building perse, to call it a building would be an offense to both buildings and architects everywhere, but it had been a stable shell at least, the ghost of a building, the memory. 

We’d been small then, probably too small to be trapsing through the underbrush where venom and the viciousness of nature lie in wait, but you already knew both of these things, and I knew you, my place at your tail having been solidified weeks and months and years before that, on a playground much more tame than the forest we’d been exploring at the time, the forest I walk now, seeking you out in the only place I know to look. 

I almost don’t recognise it at first, if the building from before was a ghost, this is the corpse, risen from the dead. Walls sag like shoulders do, forlorn and heavy with invisible weight. The gutters are gutted, emptied of many seasons of leaves and debris, half dragged to the floor as a result. Structural beams bow in subjugation—whether their master is nature, or something else entirely, it was difficult to know. 

Time has touched it in ways you wouldn’t have thought possible in such a short period. Though you wouldn’t be able to recognise this if you’d never seen this particular building before; one dilapidated home is as good as the next to the unknowing observer. We know the difference however—or at least I do, as the you part of us is still to be found. 

I open the door—what remains of the door, hinges hinging on their last thread of sanity—and the universe within is an alien landscape. Nothing looks the same as it used to, like centuries have passed instead of merely years. Everywhere is green, green, green. The hungry kind of green of forests and deep seas, but never indoors. 

These aren’t the potted-plants of a social-idealists display home, or even an eccentric plant-parent on the brink of rental reprimand, but an indoor landscape of impossibility. The wilderness tamed and neutered, but not quite, because there is nothing tamed about this.

The floors are blanketed in moss and creeping jenny. Tiny flowers peek out from between floorboards, skirting, and other secret places they should otherwise not belong. Each wall is a marvel of varied vines, blooming from cracks and crevices created by weather and time. Furniture have become surfaces for plants to strive, for insects to hide, clicking and singing in time with my steps. 

Wonder, wonder, wonder. 

You’d love it here, and that’s how I know I’m on the right track. You’d always felt more at home amongst plants than people. It’s why we’d come out here so often in the first place, that, and everything else. 

The mushrooms make the greatest impact, mostly because they’re the ones you taught me the most about. You had an affinity for fungi not found in the average nature lover, at least not the ones who didn’t care to delve their appreciation any further past the clearly visible. Eyes easily spy tree lines, hands touch branches, toes graze even the litter upon the floor, but hardly anyone considers what is bellow even that, the subterrain world of you’d made your fixation. 

There are the usual culprits: fantasy red Fly Agaric, flat-headed Honey Mushrooms, the strange but endearing Shaggy Inkcaps. But there are also lesser-seen or little-known varieties: the harmless but horrifying Bleeding Tooth Fungus with its pores of weeping red, the odd, appendage-shaped tea-tree fingers that spout from the floors like hands grasping for the unknown, the rafters illuminated in the pale green light of Ghost Mushrooms. The varieties are outstanding, their shapes and colours otherworldly, dotted through their miniature landscape, interwoven in ways not found in nature. A miracle. 

There’s life here, in this place, a life we built for ourselves, that you continued even in my absence. The rooms breathe, I feel their movement. The foundation warbles and creaks beneath my feet, the walls shudder, remembering what they were. This house is man-made, but these pieces had been a forest once, these beams trees. The proof of it exists in every whirl and contour, in every splinter and knot. Evidence of a life they have since reclaimed. 

The next thing I notice is the heat, stifling in its intensity, each step a freestyle swim, the air thick enough as to almost feel like drowning, the result of striking overhead lighting and moisture, a breeding ground for humidity. 

The lights are a mystery, the water much the same. 

The ceiling is shedding tears for you, that leach into my skin, into the floor beneath my feet, feeding the microbiome that has become this place now unknown to me. They’re the reason for the room’s mugginess, a tropical paradise, a greenhouse, a compost bin. 

In our youth you’d admired the compost bin at our school. You told me that you’d liked that the rot could be useful, ruin with meaning. I hadn’t taken you too seriously. It’s sounded like bad poetry. The prose of a teen that spewed words for the sake of darkness over depth of meaning. We’d been young and full of angst, though you had more better reasons than many to feel that way. 

I understood now that you’d meant what you’d said, that to you the words were more than words, but some sort of self-defining mantra. You’d been looking for meaning amongst a backdrop of plant matter and decomposition. And looking around now, part of me believes you may have been right.

When I find you it’s at first difficult to tell if it’s you at all. You are not person-shaped, if anything you don’t have a shape, an amorphous entity that’s distinguishability relies solely on my pre-existing knowledge of your general size and structure. 

You’re so innately unhuman looking, like the fallen corpse of an ancient tree, or a tomb reclaimed by nature, like the sort of thing you’d pass on a hike and jokingly comment: “How funny would that be if it was a dead body.” 

I approach you hesitantly with this in mind, a picture show of every horror movie and crime scene photograph I had ever witnessed playing like an intrusive warning to stay back, but I can’t. 

I don’t know how long you’ve been here. Life is strange that way, so is time; sometimes it becomes difficult to define, following no structure one can decern, an abnormality of nature, as you seem to have become. 

You’re more you up close, though only just, peaks of you from beneath of garden of harlequin flora, a textured landscape of mislocated life, a bona fide ecosystem of unfathomable proportions. 

Many entities have made you their home: termites march on tickling toes across the wasteland of your chest, detouring around each mountainous curve at their own discretion. Earthworms dance and descend through the dark crevices between your thighs, your armpits, your toes. Moss has laid itself like carpet across the planes of your abdomen, greens and browns and yellows and the fiercest of auburn. The mushrooms have made their way here as well, forming a forest of many-coloured caps, their shapes as varied here as they are elsewhere in the house. 

Beneath it all, I see you: the contour of a nose, the indentation of a hip. Bones and flesh and untamed hair. What little of your skin I see is febrile, yet concerningly colourless, perspiration like groundwater that seeps from each pore and forms creeks through long-healed wounds that moisten the land and replenish the crops. 

It looks like death, but I know that it’s not, because I can feel the life in you; a throbbing pulse in the air, a kinetic energy like static, caressing my skin. 

“No one understands fungi properly,” you once said, crouched like an infant gargoyle over a crop of Slimy Green Waxcap. You ran the tip of your finger along the edge of their glutenous heads, understandably awed. It was a wonder you’d spotted them in the first place, a minute forest of moss green mushrooms surrounded by moss green moss, most often overlooked by those not looking closely enough. You might have related to them back then I think. Maybe we both did. 

“Most people only think of fungi as their fruiting bodies, the mushrooms you see sprouting in plain view,” you’d dug your fingers within the earth at the base of the Waxcap’s stems, pulling away layers of soil, nails filled with grit, exposing the network of web-like structures beneath, hyphae, you’d called them, the heart of every forest, “But the truth of them exists where most don’t think to look.” 

The wood wide web they called it, the most advanced communication network on Earth, connecting the fungi with the trees, the trees with each other. Hyphae are often the only thing that survives a forest fire, sheltered in their subterrain palace of planetary protection where given time, they can once again build the world from the ground up, an anomaly. 

It’s these downy things that spread from your edges like netting now, rooting you in place, buried beneath your skin, running alongside your veins as just another part of you, a secondary circulatory system of fluffy white mystery. 

We’d come up with names for ourselves in the early days, because yours felt tainted and mine felt wrong. I use this name now to call to you, but you don’t respond, ears lost to the moss and loam; muffled. I try to pry parts of it free in hopes of reaching you, rhizoids coming away with a tear of skin and flesh, exposing bone and cartilage with a single, ghastly pull. My fingers fly away, the piece falling swiftly back into place, the moss visibly making quick work of repairing the carnage my human touch had so easily caused. 

My chest is aflutter, my stomach churning in instinctual disgust. It is not simply the shape of you that is inhuman it seems, but the very structure of you, your personhood put aside, replaced by the bioorganic entity that is the combination of flora and fauna and fungal intervention. 

Part of me wants to be repulsed by it, to feel betrayed by the seemingly unnatural bastardry of what you have become, but a different part of me, the secret part of me that knows you better than I know even myself, believes that maybe this is what you were always meant to become, and I hate it, the loneliness of it. I am confronted by the reality of my own humanity, of how starkly different we are when for so long we had been one in the same, two as one against the world, breathing the same air, taking the same steps, crying the same tears against a backdrop of ancient trees and parental trauma. 

I am that child again, powerless as I watch you break down before me, though now it is in a completely context. 

I remember you the first time it had really clicked how much you’d needed me the way I’d needed you. You’d burst through the door with the force of a storm, trekking dirt and debris from the forest in your wake, staring me down from my place in the driest corner of the room, graphic novel in hand. I watched you back, lost not the in the colours of your eyes, but the colours that surrounded the left one: blacks and blues, edged in red, remnants of your mother’s mercurial moods, exploded outwards where it did not belong. 

And despite my own battle with humanity, as internal as it was external (a fight of sex and systems that I would spend a lifetime trying to overcome), it was only in that moment I truly realised why it was you hated people, lawless, contrary things they were. 

I think that’s when I’d come to know what you meant to me. 

Over the years people often wondered of us, of our connection. We were the subject of talk in a place where no one had anything better to talk about. We’ve never been what they thought of us, though there have been times where I’d questioned it, and I’m sure you had too, but we’ve always been something else, something simple words and even feelings could never define. 

We’d never said I love you. We’d never needed the words. We were love, in all the best and worst of ways. The act of it. The essence. 

But no one talks about how badly it hurts, when it’s the kind of love not defined by sex and rings and heart-shaped cards. No one cares about the little loves that come before and in between. No one teaches you how to heal from it, because they never teach you how to hurt in the first place. All these countless words, all these arbitrary titles, all these categories they put us in that never quite fit, because for so long you were everything to me, and I to you, whilst others would say it meant nothing at all. 

I place my hand atop of yours, larger as it has always been, tracing its furred surface, mottled white and brown with Jasmine Mould, named so because it’s more common names make my stomach turn, though you’d never let me forget them.  

There’s a tan line on my finger where a ring had been, proof of my sojourn in the outside world that had ultimately meant nothing. A game I had played and a face I had worn, just to say that I had. I wasn’t even sure I could feel those things, but I had so desperately wanted to, because that’s what the human world had told me I’d needed to be. 

I shouldn’t have even tried. 

The man that would become my husband hadn’t liked you. He’d found you reticent and unapproachable, of which I had told him he was wrong, but his opinion had never changed.

“It’s unnatural the way you cling to each other,” he’d said once, “Like a virus, like mould.” 

Maybe I had taken his words to heart, in some careless way, because as the wedding bells rang closer, my distance from you had become painfully apparent, enough so that you had noticed, enough so that it came with confrontation. 

“You want someone you can hide from,” you’d accused, “Someone who hides from you, because you’ve grown scared of hurting.”

You were wrong, in that way. I hadn’t grown scared of the hurt, simply tired of it. 

“I want something else,” I’d said, “Something clean.” 

And I knew instantaneously that I had hurt you in a way I wouldn’t easily redeem. I’d driven the trowel deep, leaving no leaf nor stem nor root intact. I had extracted a part of myself from you, and you from me, and left it out in the sun to dry up, and eventually float away. 

That had been the last time I’d seen you before now. 

You’d been my home for so long that I’d forgotten you were a person too, that you had not simply been somewhere I could leave from like I had my home before that. 

I think I had become so terrified of what we had become that I had thought it easier to break away. 

I’d needed to be a me without you, to realise you’d been right, that this world was not built for people like you and I, fractured from the get-go, forever collecting up the pieces like shell-fragments on a shoreline, or shiny stones in a quarry. We are more work than the universe had intended animals to be, and so we were meant to be something else. 

‘Humans don’t understand fungi.’ And humans never understood us. Like carbon-based minerals our parents had tried to pressure us into diamonds, but we had crumbled into each other instead. 

I say your name again and you say nothing, because maybe you’ve said all you have to say.

You’d always been slight, stunted at conception by things out of your control, yet there is no room for me beside you here, which in a way should have been a sign of some sort, but so much of me cannot stand the thought that I have let what we had rot to ruin in my absence. All I am I have you to thank for; the very first eyes that had ever seen me. 

“Most people only think of fungi as their fruiting bodies, the mushrooms you see sprouting in plain view, but the truth of them exists where most don’t think to look.” 

Is that all I ever was to anyone bar you? A fruiting body: pretty on the surface, with all my complexity, my truth, rooted far into the soil where no one dared to dig, fearful of the git beneath their fingernails? 

A bear myself atop your form, a burial shroud, or shelter. I’m weeping like the walls now, an upwelling of emotion that I have no room for inside. I have been half of myself in your absence, fractured and shallow, incapable of containing anything of value. 

As children I was your shadow, always touching, yet forever strangely out the reach. That’s not enough for me anymore, maybe it never was. 

I dig my fingers between your own, shifting the hyphae aside, planting my own roots in their stead. I want to become one with you, because I think that’s how it was meant to be. 

You’d told me I was like a house plant once, that my care was like an upkeep not so easily maintained by most, but one that you took pride in. But maybe it was you who’d been the house plant all along, a hobby I had taken up as a young child, back when feelings were that of extremes and morals were black-and-white creatures that bound us in ropes of obligation we could not defeat. 

I’ve neglected you all this time, but like a survivor you’d found an alternative source of nutrition, here in this secret home I had abandoned, in this place the world outside of us had all but forgotten. 

I say your name a final time. I say mine as well, lips tickling the salted, dewy flesh that was once your skin. It feels strange saying my name after all this time (I had chosen a different name on paper, as it had felt wrong for this one to exist anywhere but here). 

There are no words from you, only the hushed hum of the heat-lamps overhead, their power source a mystery I have not the time nor energy to source myself; the rhythmic tap of rain on moss, on floorboard, and rock; my breath, your breath, the breath of the not-trees that make up these walls that surround us, protect us, as they always have. 

We are one as only creatures of the forest can be, connected by something greater than humans could every understand. Like fungi we are not animal or plant, but something far greater than even that, a lifeform we have not the language nor labels to define. 

And we will be just fine.