Neal Sandin

Crickets and Fungi

The ground is too hot. It burns us to walk on it, shears our skin and breaks our limbs, and our children, our dear children thirst for water. The air is filled with sounds that push, make walls shake and blur, sends us hiding in cracks and shadows.

Once, we sang songs in the night, leaping from leaves of grass to greet and to love. But ours is a species withering and dying like the trees in this forest now made small and smaller still. These creatures, these people, who walk on two legs instead of six, who build so much but see so little, who create mountains where there should be valleys, streams where there should be rivers, attack us all as we slink back further and further.

We hobble together in the night and meet and plan and act. We scurry quick to one of their cathedrals, wood and cement and poisonous things. We do not eat but crawl over walls, bore inside them, finding breaks in their armor. When the sun rises, light piercing through windows, we swarm, crawling up their legs and arms, into their mouths and eyes, filling their ears with song. They sing too, high and screeching, running and crying for mercy. Then we leave. We do not stay for we know what is to come, and we go to the next.

But it isn’t us alone. With us is a They; a They that has always been here and everywhere,  linking the trees with tendrils of white, relaying messages from species to species, land to land. The true rulers of the forest, pale against the green. With us, but not of us. We carry their spores on our bodies and into these people’s mouths, and as we leave, They stay, growing inside and within, piercing their defenses, whispering thoughts we cannot speak.

And it works. As we move, house to house, day to day, month to month, building to building, these people, those of two legs and soft bodies, leave. Signs go up, lights go out; the night air quiets. But it is not enough. We do not stop. Nor does the They. Using their pale network, They reach out, and They tell others, spreading the word.

We hear stories of victory, of cockroaches in the city swarming drainpipes and shorting out electricity, of grasshoppers clogging threshers and devouring the grain. And all the while, They remain, hissing into the people’s ears and minds, telling them to leave, to die, to disappear.

We celebrate. We have won. We have land and water and food and quiet and peace.

But They don’t leave. They come for us.

Neal Sandin (he/him) is an independent market researcher by trade and arm-chair historian for free. He has traveled extensively across Asia and Europe and has even explored the exotic land of New Jersey, although he currently lives in upstate New York with his wife and three cats. He can be found on Twitter @nealsandin and occasionally posting things on his website: nealsandin.com.