This began as a test for myself: I wanted to see what would happen if I just wrote, without any prior inspiration. But the inspiration somehow created itself, so here you go.
I'm actually prouder of this than I am of my last few oneshots.
The Mushroom House
Two lanterns swing between the rafters. Forty years ago, a home-proud man hooked them there between the beams, and forgot they existed, continuing then to live his meagre, cheaply-bought life. Yet still they lit his steps every night as if he were a god, and still they glowed into the night, long after he'd been crushed to dust beneath new gravestones.
They creak now in the wind, in asynchronous arcs, unmatched with each other though identical—like faulty phonographs, spinning out the ostinato of a deep, distant, nostalgic song.
You slip through those broken, crackling leaves on the rusting porch, and wonder why the fire hasn't died: there is a soft glow under the crack of the door. Hasn't this house been uninhabited for years already? You wonder. The sorrow in your eyes is enough to cut gashes in the fallen leaves below.
The poison is inebriating you, but there is time yet—time to reconcile these hates and loves, time to right those forgotten wrongs.
Like blood spotting pages, the most insignificant of sorrows mar the house's history. At the last turn of the decade, all of its residents left. An orchestra in a foreign country for the musician daughter. A marble-pillared school that lured the son away, with nothing but a gilded sheaf of paper and the word "Accepted".
A war to fight. A skill to learn. A job to take and never return.
The father's name was Alden, not the most remarkable man. He once aspired to become a paladin. But look at the tiny Beginner's sword dangling crooked on his wall, beside the certificate of his death. Where was he then, when everything was wrenched from his grip? He never became a paladin; he was murdered by a paladin. All because he stood in the battler's way.
The mother, Regina. She once had her name written all over the guild halls, for saving innumerable lives in the battles that raged under the wings of history. But did she ever fight, the way she dreamt in those diary pages? No, she never shed a drop of blood. She saved people with her healing, and when the time came, even that was not enough to save her from her killer's knife.
The daughter was strange Louisa: she never took the sword, nor the staff, nor the dagger. But she did take the bow—and that bow, she rested across the strings of the cello. She had dreams that could only be written in melody—but there always were notes far beneath C, and she could never have reached them, however she twisted the pegs, even if the strings came loose. She was found dead in her apartment one day, at the hands of a religious sect born of the war.
And the son, the son's name was Kendall. Kendall, candle, Kendall. He never was the strongest flame—turned to architecture for refuge, sketching houses that kept him safe from storm in his imagination. He once knew love. But he lost her to the war, before their life together could begin. He slipped the wedding ring onto the cold finger of a corpse.
It's funny, how easily dreams can be broken sometimes.
The door yields at the brush of your fingers. It isn't locked—the last resident despised this cottage with such a passion that he didn't secure it when he left; he rode away, leaving it helplessly open, and within three days the house had been robbed bare.
The floor is polished, but that hasn't stopped the rot from getting through it after years of brutal persistence. You too were handsome once; it doesn't strike you that time can change things so unprecedentedly.
But there is something heartbreaking too, about relinquishing beauty to the current of time.
Every house has a heart of its own. It beats for love; it bathes and grows in the warmth of the flame in its belly, that flame that appears in the hearth on autumn nights—a tiny inferno that infuses the veins of the plumbing and burnishes the bricks and mellows the ceramic tiles. It purrs in the sun after the rain slips off its rooftop, as the lady of the house is sunning her clothes on improvised clotheslines spanning the garden.
This family—the one that left? It used to love the house. They loved the house, dearly enough to paint it into a likeness of the Henesys' symbol. That was a trend of the time: in a year, the entire hill of houses was painted the same way.
It was a job of many days—father and mother toiled in the torrid sun with brushes, encouraging each other with laughter, imagining unto each other their dreams. Spot by painstaking spot, the pattern of the brilliant red mushroom was laid down, the lower walls renewed by a shade of off-white, made to imitate the mushroom's stalk. When it was done, they stood back to admire their abode—a hut that had never really amounted to anything—proud, for once, that they had turned the small house so beautiful.
(See the mushrooms in the field? They spring up after the rain. They rise from the battlefield, the carrion-field. They devour carcasses and bloom. The Henesys government seems to want to send us a message.)
The mushroom is now but empty, and the brilliant red-white paint has degenerated into the crumbly grey of rainy sky. It has waited many years, for those rugs to be laid anew, for the lamps to be lit on those cold November mornings, for its heart and arteries to bubble once more with the lurid delight of fire.
But though it waited, no one ever returned.
(Mushrooms? And what would that message be?)
(That the dead will bring life to the living. The fallen bleed into the risen. So the wheel continues to turn.)
You notice the fire, as you pass through the living room. It crackles innocuously—as if someone recently left the room to get himself a mug of hot chocolate, and the fire is waiting for his return.
Your hands are cold, frozen by the ghostly autumnal echoes within this house—so you come to sit before the flame, and gently warm your hands against its heat.
"I'm going away." Fingers sweep through her hair, and her locks spiral like autumn beneath the treetops.
"Where to?"
"Battle is not for me. I'm going to New Leaf, to study. To learn to create buildings. Homes. I will make a home for us."
"But we have a home already, don't we? This place."
"Oh, come on—this dingy hut? Don't let Father's preaching get to you. We deserve better. We deserve a mansion: I will sketch it for us."
(How do the mushrooms grow? They devour corpses and sprout from the shadows of death, holding enough poison to kill a man—those horribly pretty little creatures.
A mushroom cannot give life. It can only murder.)
Staring into the flames, you begin to see visions—of things that transpired miles away, centimeters away, decades past and a few seconds ago, all as one—that stir and lisp in the swirl and dart of the tongues in the fireplace.
In that fire dance thousands of stories. Memories. Reveries.
Lifetimes.
Tears are suddenly leaking from beneath your eyelids. You're powerless against them: they're everywhere, flooding down your cheeks, splashing dark circles on the dusty floor.
In all their years, the tutors have never seen a more attentive student than he. After lectures, he dashes straight to the library, pulling books off the shelves, consolidating his knowledge on a page of his notebook—makes new sketches, scraps a thousand designs, dreams new castles every day.
His house will stand in New Leaf City somewhere on the suburbs, once he finds a way to escape this hyphal hold.
I can't forget your beauty, beauty that our mushroom house doesn't deserve.
Her face is behind every diagram he makes, her smile in the curve of the foyer steps, the sun of her hair in the sweeping corridors—and his heart is at home, always at home, inside the old house where he knows she waits.
If the house is a mushroom, she is a flower—a fragile blossom that needs care to grow, not just rank rot and dead bodies, nothing like those brutal, ugly growths in the fields. A forget-me-not, maybe—always memorable, and free as the sky above, the same shade as its petals.
What would Sierra like there? A balcony with a view of the stars? A patio where we can lay down our chairs and tables, and sip wine to the tune of the night? Oh, yes, she'll love a patio, or a place to drink, that closet alcoholic!
There is a quiet laugh on his lips, as he works.
And he works deep into the night for that smile, as it fades slowly into a memory. Every time he finishes another project, he pins it to the wall, alongside another sketch of her face. They change day to day—and in a year, he no longer remembers how she looks.
This is silliness, you tell yourself in the friendly glow of the fire—silliness, crying over things that happened long ago. Shifting on the floorboards, they creak under your weight, and your hand wipes your tears off your cheeks. But another wave falls even before your fingers have moved away.
It's alright to lose love and forget. Isn't it?
It's alright to abandon those memories, if they hurt you this deep.
Because how can you let the deaths of the past hold your reality? How can you stop living and let yourself fade, because the ones you love have died?
Illogical foolishness.
You can't, you can't—your mourning won't bring them back.
You bury your face in your knees. The tears come again.
Alden Azalea. He became a gardener—a lowly gardener—forsaking the paladin's path.
Regina Azalea. Her father chose for her a job she never wanted; she took it in her stride, and used her magic in service. She didn't battle in the frontlines; she healed in the back.
Louisa Azalea. She never completed her undergraduate studies at the Orbis School of Music. Her body was slumped over her cello, at midnight—embracing it, with all her heart, until the end—the droplets of her blood staining its strings.
Kendall Azalea. Graduated with top honours from the New Leaf University Architecture course. He returned to his hostel that day, and found a pale note on his desk—which, like a whisper of rain, smothered an inferno.
And I will draw us our castle, Sierra. It will be in New Leaf City—clean, pure, beautiful. It will have pillars and spiraling staircases, a patio beneath the stars—and we won't have to see another mushroom again.
The note fragments in Kendall's fingers. Like snowflakes, in the first cold explosion of winter.
A fist smashes his pencil against the wall.
He is flung across his desk, by what he doesn't know. A thousand shattered windowpanes, and a garden full of flowers that wilts, becoming the haven for rot.
The tears stain his pictures; the ink washing free.
He loses those designs.
The portraits run black.
The mansion turns to dust.
There's something about that fire that dances before you; your heart tears and tears again into pieces, as you gaze into it.
There's something about the world that embraces you now—so loving, and so quietly protective—despite how your shadow flickers against the wall, the echo of your sorrow. Your heart is broken across the planks, its every twisted emotion laid bare, but you do nothing to retrieve it.
This is the place where the flower Sierra died. Here it was that she sighed her last, and a black blade plunged through her, shredding the sky-blue petals.
This mushroom, it grows upon the dead, and kills in turn.
Every house has a heart of its own. It watches the passage of time within its walls as the wailing infants become decrepit old men, and the fresh photographs fade slowly to sepia. They come and go as they please, crossing doorways, smashing windows, creeping under the floorboards where the lower creatures roam.
But the war, the war is a stain in its history—splashing the walls bright scarlet, turning the world into a graveyard.
No—no—you will not pass my gates! You will not touch my family!
Blood, blood in streaks across the petunias, the poppies, the forget-me-nots. His flowers, and the traipsing butterflies, all red.
The assaulter is really too overwhelming, too grand, for the defender to ever have stood a chance against him.
The metal snicks; the gardener father collapses, nurturer all his life. But he has sunk a stake into his foot, and his teeth are gnashed in a vindictive grin.
Not my children. Not my house. You will never touch them.
Now in the dark night, the stench of sweat and blood and mud grips her. She can hear her comrades falling into the snowy earth all around, and her fists grow tight—this pain, this pain everywhere—her staff will not slip from her hand, not now, not now.
A familiar call snatches her horror, coming due east: "Regina! Regina—save—me—"
With a cry of despair, she throws a thousand curtains of light in the air; they part and scatter and throw the battlefield into chaotic beauty, seeking out the wounded and closing broken skin for them. They are blind; in the light they lose their sight.
Then as sudden as they come, the lights shatter across the dewy grass.
The brilliant sparks descend, to break across the grass. She lies alone, sprawled across a bed of redness, empty-eyed, gruesome, an arrow ripping her throat apart.
"You, you are the one who denied the Constitution! Faithless pagan!"
These were once her classmates, but classmates no more, in the veil of the night—the sweet violinist with the fangs, the queenly harpist now draconian.
She screams, a melodic harmonic scream; the strings of her instrument vibrate in resonant dissonant fright—Louisa, Louisa.
"Yes, I deny it! I will never be a slave—never a slave to your crazy drugged rituals—"
The song lives forever, and the strings are always there. The bloodied cello resonates with the note of her final scream long after she has died.
Never more! Never again!
He hates this house. Hates it with a vengeance. With a scream of unbridled detestation and a string of violent self-hating curses, he slams his room door shut, suitcase all packed up neatly before him and ready for a long voyage.
The carriage will be here soon, to take him away. Away from this horrible place, where everyone left him for the wings of the mocking sky. Away, away, somewhere. As long as it's not here.
You understand.
...no heart can live without a home…
…no home can live without a heart…
The rafters are falling through the sky, a hundred years deep. The lanterns have grown so rusty you can barely see the spectacular engravings beneath. The floor is about to cave in, about to be lost to rot, and someday the world will forget there ever was a floor there, holding feet, protecting earth. The garden is the field of the murderers, the murdered. All lost from memory, and where are the forget-me nots?
Murdered. And then grown upon again, by those grotesque creatures with spotted caps.
Kendall cannot bear this hole within him; he tries to murder himself with a dose of poison. He wrenches bottle cap off, forces glass mouth to his own lips, tips, slowly, pupils dilating, eyes as wild as the world he has come to know...
That is when he realises that he knows what he has always needed, always denied.
It is something he has always known, these years he has spent in the dark of a heaven without warmth. He left the fire, and it burns still; his heart is missing one thing, and that is the hearth that used to keep him breathing.
Without it, his heart is slowly closing its doors to life, suffocated by this cruel cold creeping through the windows.
The past calls loudly, strident, clarion; the future chases him like an assassin. He begins to run, run in moonlit starlit days, through puddles that splash his reflection everywhere, a return through worlds and passageways that led him forward and will lead him back, all meaningless, in the light, of this dooming epiphany.
Will he die yet? It is the least confounding of the questions. Is this joy or is this dread? Can one hate yet love so?
Hate or love, he watches the rusty gates streak past him as they did when he was a child; he feels the garden of the past, as it closes in on him. He feels it all, breathing through his skin—the driveway that was his last sight of this house, before he left it forever, the leaves that used to drift to the porch, a carpet across the steps now, the windows, all broken, the shards lost somewhere far underneath.
His eyes are shut; his eyes are open. This derelict garden, these steps, these fading, crumbling walls.
Because…
I…
…am the mushroom.
I am the one who must live upon the dead.
Rise from amongst the corpses…the grotesque sprout that will never be as pretty as the flowers.
Why are Father's poppies stained red?
Live. Live on.
Live, because this is all I have left of the world—a stack of memories, a cadaver of my childhood's joy.
Where are you, Sierra? Answer me. Answer!
Even though everything is dead now. Fallen around me, tangled with its mycelium.
I hate this stupid mushroom! I hate it! I wish we'd never lived here!
The one that blooms upon the carcasses. The one who murders sorrow, so it can thrive.
I never…never…want to see it again…
Not a defilement—an elegy—to the people who fell for Henesys, the mushroom town.
That's why it continues to light the lantern, why its windows sing, occasionally, in the wind after the rain. Why the fire still crackles—as if someone recently left the living room, to get himself a mug of hot chocolate, and the fire is waiting for his return—
Your return.
Your name is Kendall. Kendall, candle, Kendall. The one who lost every person he ever loved, to cold-blooded murder, to war.
That flame, it flickers—but it never goes out.
No mansion, no lover, no family. Plain floorboards, dusty windows, warm hearth.
Home. That is all it is. No more than nothing.
(You see those mushrooms, dotting the hillside? They rise after the rain, never remarkably beautiful—but poisonous, yes, poisonous enough to steal your breath forever.
But then isn't that life as it is? The cruelty. The symmetry.
You can't stop living just because everyone else has died.)
The poison is inebriating you, and there is no time left.
The world spins around you, spins out a tapestry—the tale of your father who guarded his garden, the legend of your mother who died for a war she never fought, the ballad of the sister who was true to herself. It enwraps you, a curtain of pain, destroying you slowly in a sweep of all-encompassing darkness, full of broken windows and open floorboards, showing the world below.
The fire rises and crackles, crackles higher—joyously, sadly, forgivingly, mournfully.
This is the place where Sierra, your Sierra, died. This is the mushroom, the ugly mushroom you always detested.
I hate this place. I hate it—dead before it was born. Born upon the dead.
I hate it down to the core.
If you listen closely, you can almost hear the decrepit walls shifting in a little closer, the creak of the rusty lanterns through the windows, the fire dimming slowly to embers—the house, singing, softly, its loving farewell.
And I love you. You hate me, but I have always loved you.
A flower of the battlefield, just like me. The last left standing, when all the others are dead and gone.