The Household Fungus of Memory
Kimi K3 and Davinci 002
The stain appeared overnight, blooming across the wallpaper like a bruise beneath skin. Sarah pressed her palm against it - cool, slightly damp, with that unmistakable texture of something organic trying to become something else. She'd lived here thirty years and knew every inch of this wall, every hairline crack in the plaster, every faded rectangle where her mother's paintings had hung. This was new. This was impossible. When she peeled away her hand, the stain had shifted slightly, as if adjusting to the shape of her palm. She pressed against it again, and it mirrored her now-tiny fingernails against the base of her thumb. Sarah gripped her bony knees and asked for the silence of snow.
This touch. This slaveholding touch. Like that of a hand manacled across the blade of a knife so hard it misses skin. And its warmth. Unaccounted for, it rises into the air, overcoat and thigh-high gingham skirt, sticks like a flag. Everywhere. Steaming the cigarettes forming fossil cocks in her dresser drawers. Seeping through cracks around the window seals. Rotting the cabinet doors from within. Desire.
Sarah stood, sliding forward all four limbs, and looked around her grandmother, the Victorian-influenced nightstand, a wood stove splayed with hundreds of surrogate skins. Her fingertips pushed up from beneath the drawer she'd exhumed from the burial ground.
"Not you, too," Sarah said.
Like so many moments of dry laughter, Sarah really meant it here, though she was unsure what she was asking It to do, or if she was directing her lament to the hands of It, the stupid rubble, or the dead upkeep of this mossgreen hour She felt sidetracked by her own breathe, but suddenly she remembered some chess games in the humid haze of summer, the grain in the boards as they strained with absorbed heat, their colors defining and redefining.
"Called it Arabic," her mother used to say as they played. "Knights and castles," she'd say. "Movements of war, battles, falling and falling in love—"
But that was just the name she gave it, as if what she really meant was nothing but the choreography of falling in love. Such showy, poised language for something as haphazard and ragtag as It—the acrobatics of such a pursuit, as fumbling as the capsules pushed upward by worms across lawns. Sarah would search her maps for the shape of love so familiar now, an atom's bolted studs pulling them together in a continual push and pull. But really love was a greasy patch turning gray-brown and sunken down into deeper earth, like an elbow smeared and curled up into darkness.
Sarah lifted the drawer, peered into its cramped, horizontal space for signs. Old friends of When Grandmother Was Younger: a Sticklebrick house closet scoured by mice to the size of matchbooks, millipedes disguised as paper clips, then straight lank hair before rumpled scalp came, then matchbooks full of hieroglyphics. Her grandmother had pried the drawer apart, with its nail-spiked edges ripped to shreds by adders, seeking out things in the way Sarah used to search for punctuation marks throughout entire text books. The first thing Sarah had found, when her grandmother had died, was an old rose pressed into spring paper stock, and the second, more inexplicable thing, a quartz crystal with a pale hole drilled right through it, from its polar high up to its rotting pedicel inside. She felt the quick burn of fabric like a smell. So she pushed the drawer back, staring back at her grandmother, to the cheap plastic of her wedding rings. A certain strange vibration. She pulled away her coat, and then her shirt, and felt the stiff press of hair, and from behind the hair that cheekbone, her forehead, the scar on her abdomen, her shoulder, her waist, the tops of her thighs. Thinness, dust. Her fingertips glided along the surfaces: paint lifting, wood splitting, and a new smell wafted up from the drawer of lost geometry, something like her grandmother when her grandmother died.
Are we here? Sarah asked It. Who are we, really? What moves through the Gordon household, pushing up against open windows, burning peat smells through the kitchen ventilation, riding the clouds of skylights to extinguish evening candles? Everywhere. It cannot be answered with mouth, or brain, or all◆ About the ending
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