Appetite

Rowan Tate

Armillaria moves beneath the leaf mold, sending its fungal finger-threads through earth rot-rich with lignin and decay. It is a silent network, older than the tallest tree. The veins of life. No one has mapped its reach. It takes what it’s given, making a meal of all fallen things. A wet cradle for the soft collapse of everything. At the tree line, he squats, tilts his neck to trace the arc of shelf mushrooms climbing a yew’s spine: white moon-fruit purling among the sun’s spider-lines. One breaks beneath his finger, its tissue part marrow, part sponge. Was it here you buried her? Softening enough to be digested. He listens for the carbon and nitrogen moving underground, exchanged in chemical language. Pit and pulp. Every body is a soft fruit for the soil to open. Some animal impulse in him, like a larva chewing through meat, compels him to lie belly-down and stretched out, as if to let the hyphae learn his shape. He thinks about his instruments. He thinks about all the things nature has made that man cannot immitate: lignin, chitin, keratin. He thinks about skin. A beetle clicks beneath his boot. The boundary between self and soil begins to blur. He kneels among many little moons. God is nearby, mouth open, waiting.

ROWAN TATE is a Romanian creative and curator of beauty. Her writing appears in the Stinging Fly, the Shore, Josephine Quarterly, and Meniscus Literary Journal, among others. She reads nonfiction nature books, the backs of shampoo bottles, and sometimes minds.