Hyphae
Filled to the gills with these fruiting hybrid creatures, he hoovered the stairs before he confessed that blackbirds had eaten his job. Incomprehensible, he said to his wife, that not a single colleague had commended his warrior path through the woods to Baba Yaga’s office. He’d obeyed the prophecies loaded upon all of his kind, but nobody thanked him for marking his route with crumbs. Not because he planned to return, demoted to his level of competence, but as an act of generosity: a woman with her eyes to the ground could trace his steps to the prize.
– Blackbirds eat worms, his wife said. Which you’d know if you’d ever done the gardening.
– If you bake the blackbirds in a pie, his daughter said, you can eat your job back. Then can we go to Dreamland?
– Did you know, said his mother, the blackbird’s cousin has a white bib and the family name is turdus?
All swans, these three fates; in league with Baba Yaga. But blank-eyed serenity, submissive poses in the face of his longings, his disappointment – merely above-ground fusions. He knew they paddled furiously out of sight, sifting the earth with their inhuman feet. He dug in the garden, ripped worms with his teeth. Exhumed shards of pottery, jaw bone of fox, miles and miles of flossy white threads. Why had he never noticed that women were weaving the world?
He was onto them now. He tore the mycelial threads, loosened dirt; and a chasm appeared. Women shouldn’t be in charge of husbanding earth. As he fell, spitting dirt, breathing it now, filling with particulate matter, they closed the ground above him. His mistake, to believe he commanded the nuclear forces. Down below, women are building from stair-dust; no glass floor.