Spore (noun). A usually one-celled reproductive body that can grow into a new organism without uniting with another cell.
The man who abducted Claire’s daughter entered the room via a doorway in the air. Though Claire only had a moment to register what was happening—they’d been mid-argument about some frilly dress her daughter had downright refused to wear to an upcoming party—the doorway looked as if it had been made of fungi as yellow-pale as old parchment. The man himself was little more than a dark-haired blur, clamping onto her daughter’s shoulder, yanking her out of sight. The doorway vanished, the edges flickering even as Claire clawed at them, leaving only scratches on her own palms and a pile of soft debris.
Hysterical, Claire called the police, but they only filled a missing persons report and referred her to a grief counselor to deal with the trauma. They hadn’t believed the thing about the doorway. Or the fungi.
+
Germ (noun). An initial stage from which something may develop.
A week later, she finally brought herself to enter her daughter’s room again. Light gray wallpaper, dark gray carpet, immaculate white furniture. It looked like a car showroom. Nothing like the bright colors she had as a teenager; the sparkly leotards draped over the closet door, dog-eared posters featuring the impossible abs of shirtless, damp-haired boys.
Wielding a dustpan, Claire carefully swept up the remains of the door. The aftermath of the abduction was talc-soft debris spattered with fragments of fungi, entirely unlike her grief which was as sharp and prickly as fallen pine needles. Not knowing what else to do, she took the dustpan down to the greenhouse. Swept a bench clear of soil and tools. Separated the pieces of fungi out, put them into a petri dish.
Her dendrology background gave her a basic foundation with which to work, but fungi were so strange, so small and subtle compared to the simple primary colored-strokes of trees, shrubs, and lianas. In her day, people had cared more about replenishing the rainforests, rewilding wounded land. Now, it was all about getting down into the dirt, using invisible networks of hyphae that communicated in foreign ways. At any moment one could take a casual misstep, causing the entire network to curl up and block you out entirely. Each attempt could cost her another chance to jump the distance to her daughter’s current location, if that were even possible to do. She knew science, but magic? Unknowable. Dangerous. Not to be trusted.
She experimented first with touch, tickling tiny sections of fungi with feather-soft strokes, poking them hard with a sharp needle, setting them aflame, dousing them in ice water. No matter what she did, the fungi always wanted to grow in one direction: south-south-east, upwards at a forty-five degree angle, no matter how she tried to train them or manipulate them to do otherwise. This, she assumed, was the correct spatial direction to follow in order to find her daughter.
Still, no matter what she did, she couldn’t get the fungi to grow into a fully-fledged doorway. Even on her best attempts, she could only achieve a single slender corner.
Amid hot tears of frustration, Claire spent days and weeks staring into her microscope, doing everything she could think of to coerce the fungi into performing correctly. At night, she slept beside the fungi and dreamed of the child who had once grown inside her, turning into an unrecognizable statue of knotted rhizomorphs instead of a delicate-frilled mushroom. In the mirror, Claire’s blue eyes shone like two bioluminescent wounds. Dark eyebrows, hunched together like wet crows over the thin trunk of her nose. Her daughter, whose features so neatly matched her own, would have looked so pretty in that navy dress patterned with embroidered fir trees. If only her daughter had simply acquiesced to wear the dress in the first place, then Claire would not have been distracted, would have been able to protect her daughter..
She returned again to the gray bedroom, studying the neat books, the framed photographs of unfamiliar beaches. So neat it made her sick.
Who could live like this, so bound by lines and rules?
+
Hypha (noun). One of the threads that make up the mycelium of a fungus, increase by apical growth, and are transversely septate or nonseptate.
After months of fruitless study, realization dawned. Maybe the doorway hadn’t been a doorway at all. Maybe the man had been the doorway. This was not a heartening idea; without his presence to create the same thing again, Claire was lost.
Unless she could figure out how to become a doorway herself.
The idea was repellant. A doorway was a two-way thing. Better to be a tunnel, or a labyrinth, with one clear entrance and one clear exit. Better to stick to the biological plans imprinted from birth. Claire put her hand on the fungi, watched as it wrapped around her fingers, seeking something invisible. Bring her to me, she commanded, and the fungi pulsed with the gray-green oceanic swell of grief. She had the strangest feeling that it understood, though the lack of movement told her it wasn’t going to obey. Please, she begged. Please, I’ll do anything, I’ll give anything, just bring her back. The fungi shifted, a tidal wave rolling from one side of the petri dish to the other. Still, nothing happened.
She’d run out of potential options; it was finally time to acknowledge what she had been avoiding. In order to use the fungi, she had to become the fungi. It would mean changing her own fundamental parts, shifting the very foundation of her perspective, giving up the person she’d been. In seeking her daughter, she might well lose her grip on everything that kept her anchored to this world, everything that made sense, everything that made her, her. Even to rescue her only child, the idea felt like a daunting task. Her ex had always said she was intractable, stubborn, unable to evolve.
She’d have to prove him wrong.
+
Mycelium (noun). A network of white filament threads or hyphae.
Claire lay on the floor, covering herself in fragments of sand-yellow fungi at each point where tendons joined bone to bone. In the places where things flexed and were fluid, she had to learn to grow. Let me journey to where she is, she thought, and a thousand tiny fingers dug down into the pale skin of her flesh.The pain made orange fireworks burst behind her eyes but she bit down on a scream, gave up control bit by bit while the surface arms burst into a riot of blue clouds, each as puff-soft as mold.
Finally, a doorway grew from her limbs, hovering horizontally in the air inches from her face. Straining towards the handle, Claire pulled it open.
The man inside was leaning over a desk, holding some old fragment of paper. He turned, blue eyes shining in his handsome face—sharp chin, eyebrows as dark as Claire’s own—and the girl sitting across the table from him was dressed in a loose suit of tightly spun ochre threads that looked exactly the same as the man’s own suit and—
and—
and—
Oh, sweetheart, she said, sorrow blooming deep in her gut. Oh. I wish you’d told me sooner.
I tried, Mom, the man said, his lip wobbling. The parchment fluttered from his fingers. But you couldn’t hear me.
Her hyphae swarmed through the doorway and the man raised his hands, let his own mycelia snake out to meet hers, a thousand electrical impulses and memories sweeping through in an instant of contact.
I’m sorry, Claire signed. I’m listening now.
+++
Lindz McLeod is a queer, working-class, Scottish writer and editor who dabbles in the surreal. Her short prose has been published by Apex, Catapult, Pseudopod, The Razor, and many more. Her longer work includes the novelette Love, Happiness, And All The Things You May Not Be Destined For (Assemble, 2022), her short story collection Turducken (Spaceboy, 2023), as well as her novels Beast (Hear Us Scream, 2023), Sunbathers (Hedone Books, 2024), and A Floral Arrangement (Harlequin, 2025). She is a full member of the SFWA, the club president of the Edinburgh Writers’ Club, and is currently studying for a PhD in Creative Writing.