The remains of the tree’s branches were so scattered it was impossible to tell what had gone where. The root ball had shrunk and the trunk lay alone, still sturdy, still recognizable, as it would be for decades to come, despite being threaded with holes and tunnels dug by forest creatures and decay. Decay, the tree knew, was an object lesson in chemistry. Mix a little of this with a little of that and boom, the experiment either blew up or spawned life, which was what the tree had been rooting for all along.
The old oak got its wish: new life. It teemed with it. The more the fibrous trunk broke down the better host it became. Like icing on a cake, a spectacular array of mushrooms bloomed from the rotting wood.
So many species. So many colors, shapes, and sizes. Some were smaller than a baby’s pinkie nail; others were big, and fat, and tall. There were orange ones, and brown ones, and ones with fluted caps. Some looked like quivering blobs of Jell-O, clinging to the rotting wood. They would fruit year after year in the same spots, claiming their territories on the trunk and in a ring of earth surrounding the fallen tree. A fairy ring it was called, when underground mycelium spread out like a net cast in calm waters, and fungi fruited along the rim after the rain.