Hyphae

Happy new year! If, like many people, your plans for 2026 include lying down in the woods until the mushrooms consume you, then here is a story for you.

This week's daily stories

Monday

I had one foot on the railway track when the alarm sounded for the level crossing. I could keep on forward or I could turn back, and it was obvious which I should do. I would clear the crossing in a few steps and be on my way. But the way back was shorter, and a train was coming, and those big CCTV cameras were watching me. My back foot itched to go forwards and my front foot yearned to turn back. I stood still as a sleeper but I felt I was spinning. There were lights everywhere: flashing on the signals, spinning behind my eyes, coming down the track.

Tuesday

It starts with a careful scraping of spade against tarmac, lifting the flattened body from the road. Then a hiss, almost musical, as the special pump gets going. A few moments of silence. The unscrewing of lids. The striking of a match. A crackle like treading on glass. And then a squeak, and a huff, and a snuffle, as the hedgehog pads away into the bushes.

Wednesday

Gracie bought me a hot air balloon ride, three hours in a little basket in the sky. I thought there would be other people there, but it was just me and the pilot, and he jumped out a few metres up. I saw him scamper away, getting smaller and smaller. By morning, I was in a new world, with colours I had never seen before. I sent Gracie a postcard, so she could see them too.

Thursday

Carstone said that they could never try him, for he had not twelve peers in all of England. He was right, of course. They held him on remand while twenty-four boys (doubled up in case of accidents) could be raised up to his degree of privilege and sunk down to his level of wickedness. When they were men, they sent Carstone to the rope with laughter on their lips. The nation laughed too, at how we had outwitted him. But on the scaffold, he smiled to see two dozen fresh Carstones loosed upon the world.

Friday

The first day back at the factory was like any other, stamping out thousands of blank brass scoppets. But now I was wondering where all the brass came from, and where all those scoppets went, and how they were cut and what they were used for. I had never used a scoppet myself, nor seen one used: not one of ours, nor one from any other manufacturer. When the bell went, I followed a cart of scoppets out through the back doors. The men pushed it across a rough yard to other workshed. Coming the other way was a load of fresh brass sheets. I set the worn face of my hammer in the palm of my hand. I had earned enough to buy a salve for my aching shoulder.

Saturday

It was just a snatch, overheard as he passed: “That guy Jamie really butters my crumpets.” That had to be good, didn’t it? It’s the butter that makes the crumpet. But it hadn’t sounded good. It had sounded like “that guy Jamie really grinds my gears”, or “that guy Jamie really gets up my nose”. And didn’t those seem more likely? You couldn’t trust words. People didn’t think about what they were saying. Still, Jamie thought, it’s nice to be noticed.

Sunday

When they chained the sea-thing we all knew it wouldn't hold. A flick of its great winding limbs would break the chains, or else the foulness it exuded would slip it free or eat the links away. It would roar and drive men mad until they loosed it and offered themselves as the first to be devoured. But we were wrong. It sank to the seafloor with the weight of all that iron, and there it lay, whimpering. We watched it there, until it was gone. And that was the end of us.

I have been reading...

• Since it's the new year, I read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, in J.R.R. Tolkein's translation. I've never read this version in full before, only used it as a study aid, but after slogging through Never Again I thought I didn't think my brain was in any condition for reading Middle English. We often feel pressure to hold ourselves to excessively high standards in the new year: Gawain offers us another way of doing things (immediately fucking up so that we have something to look back on when we get too full of ourselves).
• Birds Knit My Ribs Together by Phil Barnett. This is a beautiful collection that achieves a unity between writer and subject that I think is rare in nature writing. The distinction between humankind and nature is often challenged, but in these poems the distinction simply isn't there. Which lets the birds soar off the page, and makes the poems feel as natural as birdsong.
• 'We Are Sorry For Your Suffering' by Joy Deva Baglio at One Story. I couldn't quite get on with the mechanics of this story. It presents a global AI that is established enough to take control of the world but has seemingly never been applied to care work, and it shies away from the enormity of the genocide the story is built on. But perhaps a story narrated by an AI should be this kind of uncanny. I'm drawn to a reading of this story in which the narrator isn't sentient at all.

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This week's story: Hyphae

At the bottom of the bank, the pruned branches piled against the railway fence, and the rain soaked through them, and the mushrooms grew. It was an odd sort of place, seen by many but visited by none. People looked through the windows of passing trains and saw that great bloom, white and grey and a little pink, like clouds at the beginning of sunset. It was mostly children who saw, and adults who hadn't charged their phones, and people sad enough to stare and stare. Not enough people to notice that these were mushrooms never sighted before. They were not in the spotter's guides or the mycology journals. They were only in the rotting branches and the wet earth.

(Or perhaps not they, but it, for it was one connected thing, underneath. What greater being below the surface are we the fruiting bodies of?)

At the top of the bank, Jane thought about the scramble. A lazy zigzag would be best, carving up the gradient, stringing it out long, like that old trick where you cut a hole in a postcard big enough to step through. A long walk through the woods to end up just a few metres from where you started. You could pretend it was magic. Or she could hurl herself straight down, perpendicular to crest and fence and railway line, grabbing at breaking branches to slow her tumble. She could burst through a hole in the fence and out in front of a speeding train, be strung out long by it, opened up like a postcard. She set her back to the sky and walked forward. What use was there now for caution?

She hit the fence at a run, bounced, dropped into a cloud of spores. She lay still. The mushrooms beneath her torso were already flattened, but her limbs rested softly on others. She did not want to shift her weight and crush their delicate bodies. She breathed in deep, air that tasted grey, like it should disgust her. Her shoulders and her hamstrings began to ache and twitch. It was infuriating. The mushrooms could keep still. Why couldn't she?

When she could bear it no more she lifted her knees to her chest and rolled up into a squat. Around her the earth was so covered in mushrooms that it was difficult to see them: like the brushstrokes of a painting, like the illusion that covers the real. She reached out a plucked a little piece of the world. It was so light. Were living things supposed to be so light? She thought of all the life of the world pressing down on it, the way she was, and these pale little caps floating up to somewhere better. The smooth flesh she could tear with her fingertips. Then she thought of the mass below the surface, wet and heavy like tar.

She ran a finger around the gills below the cap, feeling them flutter against her skin, wondering what it felt like for the mushroom. She could not see the fine dust on her finger: just a dulling of her skin, a softening of the ridges. She rubbed her finger on her gums, her eyes, her nose. She sniffed the promise of it deep into the back of her throat. She picked another mushroom and another, and kept doing it until she was filled. Then she let herself lie back on the delicate carpet, knowing she would float right on its delicate tips.

A train heaved past, so fast the mushrooms shook. She had forgotten. She rubbed a little of their potency in her ears, too, but not too much. She needed her balance to see her safely up the bank again.

At home the dehydrator sat on the counter, unboxed but still wrapped in its loose plastic bag, the power cable tied up in loops. Jane felt it looming behind her, unnaturally black, unnaturally shiny. She hadn't known what she needed, such a short time ago. She had driven it home in the passenger seat like a friend. But it was a killing thing, a thing for consuming and extracting. It made her think of nuclear experiments, flashes of radiation that killed every bit of you. She would have thrown it away, but she couldn't bear to touch it. A time would come when she could face it, when it would be nothing to her. For now, she set to the business of life.

It had felt wrong to break the stems in the gully, and it felt wrong again to break them off now, but the work of living breaks things sometimes. Now and then as she went along she bent back her little fingers, alternating left and right, though she hadn't the will to push them all the way, not yet. She lay the stems in a little bowl. She had thought she would make tea from them. That was what the hated dehydrator was meant for. But that was the wrong way round.

She set the bare heads down gently on paper, and covered them over with bowls and cups and glasses to keep the life-dust in. This was all they needed. They did not rut like animals or play tricks with sweet fruit or nectar or barbs. They multiplied just by being. A part of Jane wished she didn't know about spores, and could only see the magic of a new thing fruiting like the pattern of it was sounding through the very stuff of the universe. That would have been a truer way to see it. But true is not always useful, and Jane was called to labour.

She turned off the lights, and bathed her swelling hands in cold water, and scattered the mushroom stems on her bed, and slept.

By morning the spore prints looked good, but she had slept more than usual, with long, tendriled dreams, so she didn't have time to attend to them. She took one and folded the paper over carefully, then slipped it into a freezer bag. She placed a few stems in the bottom of her shoes, and left for the office with the paper in her handbag.

The shoes were the same as she had worn yesterday, and on the train she stared at the mud on them. It would flake off on the stairs and the carpets. It would upset the cleaners. But it was good mud, with the stuff of life in it. She picked a little off, and pressed it beneath her fingernails.

At her desk, she itched with emptiness. Everything around her was smooth white and bare metal and electric light. She poked and clicked, lifeless movement through wires, a mockery of the true networks that flesh makes. She pushed out the threads of her fingers and meshed with it, the way they made her, through dead plastic keys. When she pushed them she saw life in the cracks, bits of skin and crumbs of food and a dark little place to grow. She reached below the desk and slid open the little plastic zipper on the freezer bag. It felt evil, now, to have this barrier there, this cruel, impermeable skin over the vitality of things. She slid a finger inside and rubbed it over the paper, then brought it to her face. Nose, eyes, ears, gums. Then, after a moment's thought, the crease of her neck, and under her top to armpit and navel. All the warm, dark places she was supposed to be ashamed of: she knew now that they were what the world needed of her. She felt herself loosen, clean at last. The rest of the day, it was easy to pretend.

That night, she scraped the dust from the papers into boiled, cooled water, then drew it off into syringes. She capped most of them off, but emptied two into a little smoked-glass spritzer bottle. The little water that was left she drank down, letting it dribble over her chin into her lap. It was a waste, she knew. Inside a person is too cruel a place for life. But some day, those vicious human parts of her would have to soften. What if they already had? There might be a new world within her.

She misted herself over before bed, and sprayed the sheets too for good measure. She slept damp and dark and smiling, dreaming of what would grow.

But nothing grew, not then and not for days. She phoned in sick to the office, and they believed it, though she sounded stronger than ever. She ate rough, woody vegetables and tried not to move too much. One afternoon as she returned to bed she saw a shadow of herself, an outline: something growing everywhere she wasn't, and all her body still just her.

She turned the shower up as hot as it would go and scrubbed until her skin was tender. She sucked water up her nostrils and spat it out of her mouth. She soaped her eyes and tongue and she screamed until her lungs emptied. She dried herself all over with the hair dryer until she thought she must have shrunk like a raisin.

Then she dressed in crisp new clothes, hot-washed and tumble-dried, and went back to the railway line. Her booted feet stepped steady down the bank, in a lazy zigzag to string the slope out long. At the bottom, the pruned branches had been cleared, and the mushrooms with them. A shiny new fence pierced the bare ground. The life is still there, below the soil, something whispered to her, but it didn't sound like a promise any more. She sat on the dry earth and pulled the letter from her pocket.

She held it to her heart for a while, and went to chew a fingernail, but she had clipped them down to nothing. After two trains had passed, unheard, she stood. She tore the letter into two curving halves. The first, she folded up tight, and threw through the bars of the fence and onto the railway line. Then she kicked a hole in the earth with the heel of her boot, and pressed the second half into it, and covered it over. As she reached to wipe away a tear, she felt something at the corner of her eye: the thin, delicate stalk of a new life.