It’s just a pimple, they said. But Jocelyn knew it wasn’t. 

It’s common for a girl your age, they said, even as it grew, sprouting from her chin, its ugly, flat, off-white cap spanning out until it covered half her cheek. She hated that nobody seemed to notice, that she didn’t even receive second glances walking down the hallway. Those that did address her, did so as if nothing had changed. Not even when new sprouts began to blossom from her skin, angry and red, protesting against the infestation.

You’re just being dramatic, they said. At first, Jocelyn stood in front of any mirror she could find, in her room in the morning, in the school bathroom between classes, in the bathroom at night, and tried to tear the fungi from her face. Whimpers of agony would catch in her throat as layers of skin peeled off with the stems, caught in the fine, stained-red mycelium filaments. 

It’s just a phase, they said. She gave up once the fungi began to spread too quickly for her to keep up, the spores reproducing as she slept. She stopped showering and started skipping school, covers pulled over her head in her darkened room, giving in to her skin that split and tore as it tried to stretch to make room for its new inhabitants. 

Mushrooms broke through the soft skin of her bruise-colored under eyes, swelling them shut. She could practically feel the filaments wrapping around her eyes as she lay helpless, a colony forming over her entire body while she became one with the mattress, a bed of flat-capped mushrooms, like the ones she would trample in the yard as she was emerging from her childhood. Maybe that was her mistake—maybe that was when the decay began, she wondered, as, in the blackness, she felt the filaments cradle her heart.

----------------------------------------

Avery Timmons is an Illinois-based writer holding a BA in creative writing from Columbia College Chicago. Her short fiction can be found or is forthcoming with Querencia Press, Wild Ink Publishing, and other print and online publications.