Two weeks into summer I start rotting.

Just my toes at first, mold between them, white and delicate like snow. Then a little mushroom sprouts from my knee, and my legs begin to bruise, brown and mushy like apples gone bad.

My husband asks why I'm wearing pants in 100 degree heat.

Mind your business, I tell the sweaty man.

And he does. He minds his business all the way to his brother's condo.


Leaving me alone in my home, where the rot runs free. It crawls up walls, spreads across carpets like fire. I am living in a fungal forest, my body its progenitor.

I try not to look in the mirror. To see my face, barely peeking out from the ooze. I am myself melted, left out for years and years in the scorching heat.


Flies tend to the residence. Dozens of them, hundreds, thousands even. Buzz, they say. Buzz on the toilet, buzz in the kitchen, buzz through the night and into my dreams. I should be grateful for the company. I try to buzz back.

I was a waitress before I married. Now I wait again, for the rot to fulfill itself, for my decay to be complete.


And then it is, one morning, after a night on the rocking chair, rocking to pass the time, to shake off the loneliness. My eyes open, but the rest of me no longer responds. I'm stuck to the chair, intertwined with the wood.

It's tranquil, this completion. Flies perch upon my shoulders, bounce on my bruises. I didn't see it coming—the rot—but I should have, should have known, it was the only way my life could have gone.


My husband returns to collect his belongings, or make love to me one last time. Either is impossible. He climbs into the house's treacherous rot, calling out to me.

I don't respond, don't need to, don't know how. My mouth is sealed shut.

He enters the living room, using his pocket knife to slash through vines of mold, and sees me, what I've become. He kneels against my chair and sobs into my knees, my fungal, fungal knees.

There, there, I want to say. How do I smell? I want to ask. I should tell him he's better off leaving, before he's absorbed altogether. The rot is expansive, hungry, indiscriminate. Or is that me? He smells fresh, my husband, like pine needles, like outdoor air I haven't inhaled in oh so long. He doesn't scream when it begins, when the rot takes him. It happens too quickly, almost instantaneously. He's melded into the ground, mildewed beneath me, a rest for my feet.


Seasons change, flies buzz, mold proliferates, and every once in a while, a curious little idiot wanders into the house, and we feed on him. My rot and I. Sometimes I look down at my body, what was my body, and see sproutings, new ones, colorful gumdrops, fuzzy little dandelions.

.