Not This

by Jake Stein

We found it floating in the marshy grass of the riverbank, and we have no idea what to call it.

My partner thinks it’s alive. She cradles it against her chest like some precious treasure, claiming to feel a heart beating faintly within it. She says there are even times that its pulse matches her own.

I suppose it could be alive. I suppose it could be anything.

When my partner lets me hold it, I’m amazed by its heaviness. How can something the size of a small bowling ball weigh so much? It’s always warm to the touch, no matter how dark the woods become, no matter how cold the night. Always warm, marble-smooth, and perfectly round.

Whatever it is, I can’t help but assume we were sent here to discover it. Why else would we find ourselves in the middle of nowhere?

“We aren’t leaving it,” my partner tells me, “not ever.”

And it isn’t long before our new love begins to glow.

My partner carries the orb as she would an infant. Its warm light bleeds through her fingers, washing her neck and chin in a brilliant radiance. It shines brighter when we head in one particular direction.

It’s showing us the way.

Tired, hungry, cold, those human weaknesses grow easy to ignore. All the world is a meaningless blur except for the glow cast before us. The path which isn’t a path.

We are, however, vaguely distracted by the pollen in the air, thick as a fog in some places. We cannot stop sneezing. It’s difficult to see, let alone inhale. We do not ask ourselves where these clouds of spores came from—just like we do not ask ourselves who we used to be—because nothing matters except delivering the glowing entity.

Yet I can’t help wondering what kind of little plants I’m breathing, and what they’re doing to me.

Is it sentient?

It speaks, of course, in the same manner all things without voices tend to speak. But is it… conscious?

We drag ourselves through the days, through brambles and mud. Hearts stammering, coughing, wheezing. The pollen has only gotten worse. Through the emerald haze sometimes a tree or bush looks familiar, and it has occurred to us that we might be going in circles. But we dare not presume that the glow has led us astray.

Who could lack faith in something so bright?

Something, or someone.

“It’s a seed,” my partner says. The first words either of us have spoken since yesterday. “We’re going to plant it somewhere.”

I figure she’s right. The question is, what will the seed grow into?

“Wherever we’re taking it,” she goes on, “I sense we’re getting close now.” Even as she says it, the orb glows noticeably brighter.

“We’re not taking it,” I tell her. “It’s taking us.”

She doesn’t seem to hear me. “Maybe it’s not a seed, but a child. An embryo… Either way, once we get where we’re going, it may need nourishment. Maybe we’ll become its care-takers. Whatever it turns out to be, it will require—”

And then, interrupting herself, my partner says, “Please, help me.”

I stop and look at her in the darkness, and she looks directly back at me, awash in the entity’s warm glow—but there’s something missing behind her wide, distant eyes.

She says, as if she never lost her flow, “We will continue to serve it for the rest of our lives. We may even need to protect it. We will certainly need to feed it.” And then, without any change of tone or expression, “Please, dear god, help me. I know you can hear me.”

Yes, I can hear her. But I can’t open my mouth. Can only stare.

“We have been called to serve. Summoned for…” She shakes herself, and stares in horror at the glowing orb in her hands, as if seeing it for the first time. “Please, this isn’t me,” she says, this person I suddenly don’t recognize. This woman I thought of as my partner, although now I’m not sure why. “It’s in our heads! Give me a sign if you understand! Say something…”

But it doesn’t need me to talk. It only needs me to walk.

The stranger, the woman I don’t know, eventually stops talking, and the silence of this deep nowhere forest is music. Passing through a world of twisting branches and prickly-smelling air, I feel as empty as the vast shadows hanging between the trees.

There’s something wonderfully sedating about being utterly lost. I don’t believe I used to inhabit such calmness. I suspect I was sick all my life with false meaning, stuffed so full of nothingness that I was at risk of bursting. Now, released from myself, I can breathe.

But in the cracked mirror of my mind, I still question how exactly I’ve come to dodge my broken reflection. What exactly brought me here?

We drag ourselves on, squish-squashing through the mud, filling our lungs with sick green air.

The rainy wind is suffocating. Like inhaling water. Some kind of survival instinct bubbles up from my subconscious and convinces me to hold my breath, so I do. And I keep holding it, until my ribs catch fire, and something else happens too: a settling of dust in my brain; the opening of a door.

I must pause and catch myself against a tree, so powerful is that dam of thought which breaks loose once I’m not breathing…

The pollen, it’s the pollen…

And the fear comes back, the dread down in my quaking soul.

Get the hell away from that thing, don’t even look at it, whatever she’s carrying, that terrible light—

But there isn’t time. I have to breathe. I have to.

I wave an arm, getting the attention of the stranger walking next to me. “Drop it,” I tell her, spending precious breath. “Let go of it and run!”

The woman only smiles. Whoever she used to be, she’s not that person anymore. She just smiles, and she doesn’t drop the indescribable object. “Breathe,” she says.

But I’m already booking it. Crashing through the dark. How many days has it been, and you haven’t seen daylight? Tripping over an exposed root and picking myself up and tripping again. It doesn’t let you remember. The spores, they’re somehow compelling you to bring that thing to—where? Christ, where are you going? Whipped by branches, sprayed by puddles, the earthy cocktail of mud and panic on my tongue. Who is the woman who insists on breathing and smiling? You should know her but you don’t. You don’t even know your own name. You don’t know why you’re here or where you’re from. Don’t know, don’t know…

Napalm in the lungs. Vision spotting. Can’t make it any farther.

With a reluctant gasp, my chest cavity once more inflates with pollen.

The effect is nearly instantaneous.

I stop and turn back without pause, slowly retracing my steps through the broken black woods.

“Who are you, anyway?” she asks, the stranger holding our precious cargo, once I’ve returned.

And we laugh, both of us. We laugh, and we breathe.

There are others. We see their lights strobing through the trees. The distant glow of their seeds.

They have been summoned, like us, and we’re getting closer, all of us, converging on a single point in the darkness.

There are, occasionally, screams. But those cries don’t bother me, can’t pierce the shell of my possession—even when it’s the person I once called my partner who’s screaming. Screaming because, I assume, she just discovered what happens when you hold your breath. A momentary breaking of the spell.

“What is it?” she screams. “Why can’t I let go—?” But her breath is gone, she must breathe. She gasps for air, and a terrified realization seems to cross her face. For one fleeting instant, she understands. Then her eyes glaze, and when she looks at me she doesn’t see someone filthy and weak and perhaps dying.

I know, because she’s smiling.

“This way,” she says, no longer screaming. “We’re so close now.”

And we continue on, following the glow through the endless night, until it occurs to me that the lights in the distance are going out. Winking away, one-by-one.

“This will do,” the stranger says, stopping abruptly. “The ground is loose here.”

And then I watch as she crouches down and pushes the thing, the seed, into the mud, and that wet earth seems all too willing to swallow it. And now it makes sense why the lights are going out around us. All stuffing our reasons for existing into the ground, where they can’t shine…

“It’s happening,” the stranger says. She’s still pushing the thing down, deeper into the muck. “It’s starting.”

“What is?” I ask.

She doesn’t appear to hear me. She’s not smiling now. She’s crying. “Not this,” she says. “Not this.”

And it dawns on me that she’s not, in fact, pushing the thing into the ground—rather, the thing is dragging her down, pulling her into the ground.

“I still can’t let go of it,” she says.

And I remember: It may need nourishment.

There is a rustling in the darkness. A perceptible rush of shadows. The stranger is down to her elbows in the mud now, and movement surrounds her: the bushes, the forest, the ground itself, something slithering over it…

Vines.

Then everything happens at once.

A dozen leafy tendrils unfurl from the bushes and descend from the trees, wrapping around the woman’s legs, her neck, writhing over her like a nest of green snakes. And with a distinct trembling of the earth, her feet disappear. The woods are digesting her. She’s becoming the undergrowth, flesh fusing with vegetation. And though she gapes in terror, it’s not a scream which emerges from her mouth, but a wild bouquet of gnarled weeds; indeed, every orifice of her face blooms with flowers and mushrooms and a spreading patchwork of moss.

Throughout her transformation, I remain completely motionless. My body feels heavier than cement, and my brain simply can’t fathom…

Finally I do step away from the carnage, but I manage to trip over a vine in the process. I find myself flat on my stomach with a mouth full of mud. The fall knocks the wind out of me.

And without taking another breath, I’m up and running. Just get as far as you can… It will need nourishment… God what the fuck is going on did that woman really just get sucked into the ground—?

I nearly trip again. I catch myself, but can’t catch my breath.

Keep going!

But it’s hard to move again when I look down and discover what I almost tripped over.

The body is largely decomposed. The man has been dead for days. Flowers sprouting from his ears. Patches of flesh eaten away by thick carpets of moss. Mushrooms growing out of his eye-sockets.

He’s not just stuck in the ground: he is the ground.

She said we will need to feed it. Oh, God.

Then I have to breathe—I have to—and the reek of death is so putrid that I’m doubling-over and vomiting. “Please,” I wheeze, even as I gag and retch, “let me live.” Now that I’m breathing again, I’m no longer myself, only a servant to the pollen, or whatever releases the pollen. Is it the forest itself which absorbed this man, and that woman, and all those other carriers of light? Or some darker cosmic entity controlling the forest, just as it controls me…?

And yet, I must not be entirely possessed—even now, breathing—because somehow I am able—or allowed—to keep running, running, until there are no lights, only darkness.

Have I always been alone?

I could have sworn there was someone else.

But I could have sworn a lot of things. Could have sworn I had a reason to exist, a past. Yet I can remember nothing beyond a hundred steps ago. How long have I been wading through this cold black night which stretches on and on?

In an effort to remove myself from myself, I focus on the sound of the rain, the taste of it on my lips; but then it stops raining, and I taste only my tears.

But eventually I hear, ever so faintly, the rustling and crunching of somebody else stumbling around in the darkness.

It takes us an eternity to find each other. The best I can do is call out. But as he finally approaches—whoever he is—I muster the strength to pick myself up, so the stranger discovers me leaning against a tree, not sprawled on the ground. “Can you help me?” I ask him.

The question shatters him. Even in the darkness, I can sense it.

I say, “You don’t know who you are either, do you?”

We talk for a while, but our conversation uncovers nothing in the way of answers. Neither of us know where we are or why we’re here. We’re dead lost. But somehow the amnesia is less terrifying now that I’ve got some company. In fact, having someone else out here—a partner, if you will—gives me the willpower to go on. Because we can’t just sit here in the cold forever. We have to keep moving, even if for no other reason than to stay warm…

But another reason is exactly what we find. A reason about the size of a bowling ball, half-submerged in the marshy ground of a riverbank.

A reason that glows.

My new partner thinks it’s alive. He claims to feel its pulse. Sometimes it matches his own, he says.

I should think he’s crazy, I know. I should run.

“It’s guiding us,” my partner says, shambling along in the light of the orb, which glows brighter when we move in a certain direction. “It may need nourishment.”

“Nourishment?” Something about that word. Nourishment…

A flash of memory: a mushroom sprouting from an eye-socket.

It’s a seed…

Another flash: a dozen vines moving of their own accord, like serpents.

I clear my throat to get my partner’s attention. “Think about what we’re doing. Doesn’t it feel familiar?”

The man holding the glowing orb stares at me. “Why have you stopped?”

“I remember…” What do you remember? Now it’s gone.

My partner watches me closely. I wonder: is he capable of hurting me? If I don’t keep going, will my partner attack me, drag me with him?

He won’t need to. The seed, that light…

“We’ll do anything for it,” my partner says, as if he’s testing my commitment. “We’ll bring it wherever it needs to be brought, and we’ll do it together, won’t we?”

“Okay, yes,” I say, but somehow I know we won’t stay together. The image of a moss-eaten corpse crashes through my mind. Then a smiling woman, and a constellation of distant lights winking out.

“Our past is meaningless now,” he’s saying, the man who holds the warm light of our discovery. The man who will hold it for the rest of his life.

Somehow I know.

“We have been summoned…” he’s saying, but I can barely hear him over the pounding of my heart.

A woman sinking into the ground. Not this, not this.

For a moment, and only a moment, I want to run away. But I’ve lost control of myself.

I’ve lost.

And as we continue on, pushing and ducking through the dark woods, the air seems to grow thicker. With every wet gasp I taste a sickly shade of green. Soon we are sneezing uncontrollably.

I’m convinced this has happened before.

I grab my partner, physically grab him. “How do you know me? In what capacity are we partners?”

But he only smiles and traipses on. He carries the orb like a child, a glowing child, and I have no choice but to follow him.

To breathe, and keep breathing.