You Fight Back

The moss is damp against your back, a slow, steady chill creeping through the fabric of your clothes and into your bones. The mushroom people have retreated a step, their strange, bulbous heads cocked at angles that don’t quite make sense, their beady eyes glistening in the gloom. Your chest rises and falls with shallow, ragged breaths, and every time your lungs expand you can feel it—the wrongness—nested deep inside.

It’s not just a wound anymore.
It’s something alive.

You shift, grimacing as the stitches pull. They’re tight, too tight, biting into your skin like wire. The forest is still and yet you swear you can hear it breathing with you, inhaling when you inhale, exhaling when you exhale.

Your fingers tremble as you lift them to your sternum. You expect to feel only thread and puckered flesh, but instead your fingertips brush something solid beneath the skin—something that pulses faintly, as if it has its own heartbeat.

Revulsion roils in your gut.

You dig your nails in. The mushroom people stir, their squat bodies swaying. One lets out a high-pitched, piping sound—a warning, maybe. You don’t care. Your nails scrape, split the first few stitches, and a thin trickle of dark blood oozes out.

It burns.

You grit your teeth and keep going, clawing at the wound until the moss beneath you darkens. The smell is sharp and fungal, like wet rot. The thread splits, one stitch at a time, but the thing inside resists. It doesn’t want to leave. It is anchored.

You hook your fingers around it—a slick, fibrous mass, warm and damp—and pull. Something deep inside you tears. The pain is so sudden and so blinding you see nothing but white. You hear your own scream echo back from the trees, and you think you hear the forest scream with you.

The thing comes free in one heaving, nauseating rip. It’s small enough to hold in your hand, but impossibly heavy, as if the weight of the entire forest is bound up in it. It’s a pale, knotted lump of mycelium, twitching faintly like a dying animal, tiny root-like threads still curling in search of your flesh.

The mushroom people wail.

The sound is thin, keening, almost childlike, and it digs into your ears until you want to cover them. They shuffle toward you, arms outstretched—not to comfort, but to reclaim.

You sit up slowly, your breath hitching, and drop the thing onto the moss beside you. The moment it touches the earth, the stitches in your chest begin to move on their own. The black thread snakes and coils, worming through your flesh, tugging the torn skin closed. You can feel it burrowing under the surface, knotting itself tight.

When it’s done, the wound is gone—no scar, no blood, only the faint ghost of pain like a memory pressed into your bones.

The mushroom people ignore you now. They swarm the discarded mass, cradling it as if it’s a dying child. One kneels, stroking its quivering surface. Another presses its spongy mouth to the thing and emits a soft, rhythmic hum. They mourn openly, swaying in unison, their heads bowed.

You take one unsteady step backward, then another.

The forest exhales.

The air is heavier now, thick with spores that shimmer faintly in the low light. Every breath tastes earthy, damp, and old. You turn away from the scene and push through the ring of mushrooms. None of them stop you. They are too absorbed in their grief.

Beyond the circle, the forest feels different. The moss here is darker, almost black, and the trees lean closer together, their branches knitting into shapes that look almost deliberate. You follow a narrow path that isn’t really a path—just a gap between trunks where the undergrowth has been pressed down, as though something larger than you passed through recently.

Your steps sound too loud. The forest is silent except for you, the squelch of wet earth underfoot and the faint rasp of your breathing. You keep glancing over your shoulder, half expecting to see the mushroom people following.

But they don’t.

Instead, the forest seems to follow you itself. The shadows shift when you’re not looking. A tangle of roots that wasn’t there before now blocks your way, forcing you to step over it. The trees have a way of arranging themselves so you can never quite tell how far you’ve gone.

You walk until your legs ache, until your wound-that-isn’t-a-wound begins to throb faintly again. The air feels colder here, and a thin mist curls low along the ground. You can’t tell if it’s dawn or dusk—the light never changes, only deepens into strange colors: a bruised purple, a dim green, a gray that swallows detail.

At last, the forest parts just enough to reveal another clearing.

You hesitate on the edge. This one is empty. No mushrooms, no stones, no sign of anything living. Just bare soil, cracked and dry, as though no rain has touched it in years. And yet… you feel drawn to it, the way you felt drawn to the mushroom circle.

You take a step forward.

The ground gives beneath your weight—not collapsing, but flexing, as though something beneath the soil is breathing. You freeze, every muscle tense, but the sensation doesn’t stop. The earth expands under your foot, contracts again, slow and steady, in time with your heartbeat.

It knows you’re here.

You step back, but the ground pulses again—this time faster, more insistent. Your pulse quickens to match. A deep, resonant vibration moves through the soles of your feet, up your legs, into your chest. For a moment, you feel as though the stitches in your flesh are about to come undone, pulled apart by an invisible hand.

You turn sharply and leave the clearing, pushing back into the dense trees. The vibration fades as you go, replaced by the distant rustle of leaves and the almost imperceptible sound of something following in the undergrowth.

You don’t look back.

The road finds you eventually. One moment there is nothing but forest, the next the trees open and you’re standing at the edge of cracked asphalt, faded paint barely visible under a film of dirt and fallen leaves. It stretches away in both directions, empty and silent.

You step onto it. The solid, dead surface feels wrong after so long on the forest floor, but it’s familiar in a way you didn’t know you missed. You take another step, and another, and soon the trees are receding behind you.

For a long while, you walk without thinking, your mind blank except for the rhythm of your steps. The memory of the mushroom people lingers—those glassy eyes, the sound of their wailing—but you push it aside. You can’t afford to carry it with you.

You glance over your shoulder one last time.

The forest is still there, a dark, waiting wall of green. No mushroom people. No circles. No sign of the thing you tore from your chest. Just trees.

And yet, deep down, you know it hasn’t let you go. Not really.
Something in you is still threaded to that place, a stitch buried too deep to ever work its way free.

You keep walking. The road must lead somewhere.