The Mycellum Remembers
By Noreen Braman
It was the disturbance in the trees that woke the house up. Without senses akin to sight or hearing, the house slowly retreated from its oblivion into a state of awareness. Deep in the lifeless timbers that comprised its skeleton, the house experienced a sense of knowing. A sense of green, supple limbs being ripped from ancient trunks and roots violently torn away from the dark, moist earth.
The house felt the disturbance without emotion, but even in the rotted, ruined timbers holding it together, the dying of the woods resonated. Once, they too, had been trees with limbs reaching to the sun and roots burrowing in the earth. And once, the house, even as the wood within it slowly lost its connection to the forest, had been aware of being reborn as something else, with a life force of another kind within it.
That life enhanced the house’s awareness, imprinting itself in the boards and planks. Not able to reach into the earth for nourishment, or extend itself into the sunlight, the house instead absorbed from what it could never understand, lives of the families living within its walls. Awareness rose and fell with the ebb and flow of emotions within its walls, with the cycle of life and death, motion and inertia. But those life forces had faded, and the house had been sleeping for a long time.
Time was meaningless; there was just awareness and oblivion. Now, the house could not express the chaos that the living trees were experiencing, but it was aware. But just as that awareness surged to a level higher than ever in the collective memories of all the timbers in the house, the connection to the living trees faltered. This did not bring the comfortable, familiar obliviousness to the house. Instead, it remained alert, experiencing the void, the blankness, the sense of what only a tree could understand — losing touch with its roots. The earth no longer told the house what the trees knew. If the house could understand such a thing, it would have been afraid. If it could see the destruction of the forested land it stood on, it would have been afraid. If it could feel the rumble of the bulldozers as they churned through the dark earth as they approached, it would have been afraid.
Instead, the house remained sightless, voiceless, and lifeless — but aware — until the last of its structure, and all of its wooden memories, had been crushed into splinters, finally leaving nothingness.
