Spores

The superhero needs to save the city, but there’s a drunk man eating a banana in her kitchen. The way he snaps off the stem and peels the whole thing in one brutal movement is all too familiar. She closes her eyes, just for a bit, and thinks of the cool forest air, her cheek against damp moss, his coarse hands under her blouse. When she lifts her eyelids, the banana peel lies on the stained blue tablecloth as lifeless as roadkill.

Outside, red-furred flying monkeys attack the supermarket. They grab trolleys from the car park and toss them at frightened customers, rows and rows of teeth rotating inside their black-hole mouths.

The superhero should be there protecting the little girl from abduction, the middle-aged cashier from being torn apart, but she knows the man wouldn’t let her. The monkeys can see her from afar with their laser eyes, their shark teeth glistening in the dark. When the man tries to pull her closer, bits of banana flesh on his fingers, she instinctively recoils.

Later, they watch a medical drama, pretending nothing happened. He sits in the kneehole at his desk in front of his grimy laptop, drinking another beer straight from the can. She sits at his side, peeking at the screen from behind the yucca plants, a mini-jungle in this otherwise barren room. The superhero counts the man’s beers. One more, and he’ll get sentimental. He’s just two or three away from waking the Beast inside him.

He drove her to the woods to take her mind off that boy. They walked over a floating mat covering a lake. Holding hands, they joked ‘You’d think it would feel more like a waterbed, but that one is pretty solid.’ The layers of moss under their feet were the colour of surgical drapes.

They heard a sound like a bursting beach ball. Then another. And a few more. Through many punctures in the mat, with a horrendous, multiplied hiss, spouted plumes of red granular matter. The superhero ran as fast as she could among the erupting jets. She turned around to see the man was where she left him. He waved at her through the consuming clouds, completely oblivious to the hundreds of spores entering his mouth and nose and ears.

A rain of starving hearts fell from the sky. Clouds of capillaries shaped into force fields. Cardiomyocyte bombs. None of her many superpowers could save him.

The man chased after her, his eyes full of rage. Each step sent ripples through the mossy mat. The superhero reached the shore and ran into the trees, but now the whole forest was under the Beast’s spell, every root and stem and insect at its ruthless command. A tangle of bramble that the Beast must have summoned trapped her legs like barbed wire. She only remembers falling through the cool air, her cheek smacking against the damp moss, his coarse hands lifting her from the ground.

The Beast’s lifecycle is a complicated one. First there are the spores. Once they find themselves inside a human host, they form a mycelium that plants its roots deep in the brain and spinal cord, taking control of every neuron. This can last anywhere from days to years before it urges its host to hole up in a cellar or hollow tree trunk, curl up into a ball and disappear in an opalescent cocoon. Deadly vines sprout from the cocoon. They slither through the sewage system and underground car parks, feeding on rats and stray cats, leaving behind leathery fruits packed with slimy embryos. The fruits pop several months later to release swarms of murderous winged monkeys. After they’ve had enough human flesh, the monkeys dive into lakes or ponds or rivers, where they turn into furry, bloated, spore-producing bags.

The boy’s heart looked like a frightened animal. She’d done this dozens of times before. Her movements were slow, steady, and precise. She never expected the bursting artery, the bloody deluge, the flatline.

The man keeps the Beast’s spores in prescription vials, but she won’t be fooled. The superhero has mastered the art of hiding them under her tongue. Before they have any chance to sprout, she walks to the kitchen, past the inebriated man, and hides them inside the banana peel. She dumps it all in the bin. On her way back, she glances at the gaping hole where the supermarket used to be. The monkeys feast on bones.