Nightcrawlers

47

Later, he was still sitting there, content and happy, studying the spores that looked like pulsing blood blisters on the back of his hands. His body was swollen with their secretions, his legs now firmly rooted into the soil, strange tubular growths like ghost pipes rising up from him and spreading oval cups to take in the delicious moonlight.

He thought about Haymarket and Bellac Road, Kenney and the other cops, all slipping away fast now and being replaced by a communal joy that was the body of the mother organism. The world at large would soon know the rapture that was his.

Brushing webbed fingers over his spongy lips, he recalled the reality he had once known with its petty greed and jealousy and meaningless competition. And as it faded into the fog of his mind, he heard the voice of his youth say, “It’s all gone now. It was all just a bad trip.”

Then he lay back, his multiform tendrils and shoots digging deeper into the dark, rich Wisconsin soil of his birth.