THE BLETTED WOMAN

REBECCA CAMPBELL

When a medlar is ripe, it is hard and mouth-puckering, but a few weeks after it falls, cell walls rupture and enzymes convert starches to sugars—a process known as bletting. Incipient decay renders the medlar’s flesh fragrant, like caramel and rosehip. Judith told Ben (though he didn’t listen that time because he’d heard it all before) that every bletted medlar is a reminder of what the world used to taste like, when our milk ripened to yoghurt in the dairy, and we seeded pecorino with Piophila casei maggots to make casu marzu. There is, she lectured, a whole catalogue of flavors eliminated if you insist on the preservation of flesh in its first or even second youth.

“Rot is not a failure,” she told Ben when he saw her eating the first medlar she picked and bletted. It was November, and the world had not yet ended. “Rot is a transitional state of matter.”

Normally he would accuse her of Judith-splaining, since he already knew her theories on the material afterlives of flesh, but this time he was so horrified by what she was eating, he only said, “Jude, are you serious? It looks like—”

“I know what it looks like. I really don’t need you to say—”

“It looks like—”

“I know!”

She dug her spoon between the pips, squeezing the thin, papery-wet skin—loose with age—so the last brown flesh oozed out. Slack like honeyed apple sauce, but with the fragrance of a golden plum.

“Delicious,” she mumbled and licked a brown smudge from her finger.

So it is with our bodies in their long afterlives.

Judith’s mother was sixty-two when she died, six years after a diagnosis of early-onset dementia, so Judith had already guessed what caused her new disorientation, her emotional lability and frustration and forgetfulness, the failures of taste and smell that made the medlar bitter. At first, these had just seemed the new order of widowhood in the wake of Ben’s death. Having learned a lot from her mother’s decline, she was already well organized. She had an elaborate note system that synced across all platforms automatically, and she installed a shelf by her front door on which she instantly placed her keys, wallet, and phone, so that even on days of strangulating disorientation, her body might still remember the location of her keys.

Judith settled on the medlar as her emblem in the last waiting room of her diagnosis (which smelled not of death, but of some leafy fragrance in a diffuser). The doctor confirmed what an earlier DNA test had already suggested. He talked about managing symptoms. He talked about her team. A social worker. A neurologist. Medications. Therapies.

“Okay,” Judith said limply. They sat for a long, quiet moment. A computer chirruped.

“Is there anything you want to ask?”

“There isn’t a cure.”

“Not yet.” He paused, like he expected something more, then, “Are you here alone? Can we call someone? You probably shouldn’t drive.”

Judith nodded. Waited an appropriate amount of time. Drove herself home, enjoying the sensation of choice while she still had it.

At work she wrote a training manual. She sat on the hiring committee for her replacement. On October first, she carried medlars in from the back garden, taking care not to overload her back. Then she wondered if her back was something she should bother guarding. She looked up at the translucent blue sky, and for a moment allowed herself to stop the busily resistant schedule she had established for herself. This schedule existed mostly to protect others from her own impending death, to shore up her living will, and to ensure that at particular milestones she would be removed from her job, her car, her stove, her home. She would not plow through a summer festival on a closed street. She would not set off an explosion with an unattended stove. She would not be pried out of her house like a living corpse, throwing grocery bags full of shit at the public health officers.

Then one evening she came home to a message from a soft-voiced woman representing the Institute for Advanced Study. There were possibilities. She had been recommended. For the first time since before Ben she felt something like hope. In another leaf-scented room, she sat with a folder open across her lap, in it a list of questions regarding her diagnosis and her mental suitability to undertake an experimental procedure that would allow her to experience the afterlife of the flesh. The right responses to the survey seemed obvious: she answered dishonestly that she had never considered suicide, honestly that she had often—since her diagnosis—thought about her death.

She was nothing if not reasonable, and the list she made only expanded as she decided to take up the Institute’s offer for a useful death: Fill out the form. No suicide. Much death. Make a second genetic profile to see if I am suitable for the Procedure. Sign an NDA. Do the interviews and follow the course they have set out. A bacteriophage. A new and toxic strain of Streptococcus. Certain genetically altered flukes. An invitation to local strains of yeast and mold. Pentobarbital. An ending.

Of course, the world started ending long before Ben died, and before her diagnosis, and before the bletted flesh of the medlar grew bitter on her tongue. The November of her diagnosis she scooped it into her mouth and tasted nothing, no rosehip plum, no dream-apple, only the incipient slime of decay on her palate, fuzzing her mouth like blood. One more disappointment caused by neurological changes associated with early-onset dementia. Or by changes in the microbial processes that had once rendered the flesh sweet. She wasn’t sure which it was.

The end of the human world began with the systematic destruction of human microbiomes, eradicated by refined sugar and hand sanitizer, sparkling kitchen counters and too-clean fingernails and children who never played outside because the cities were gray with 600 ppm. The remaining human microbiome continued its evolution, with once-friendly species dying off, so the guts of the global north turned into a monoculture, then a desert, and we were abandoned to our isolated, disinfected little worlds, as sugary as the garbage bins behind an old-fashioned ice cream shop. While there had been inklings of the possible consequences of this microbial die-off, we were unprepared for just how far-reaching the effects would be: Alzheimer’s, diabetes, obesity, schizophrenia, IBS, any number of mood disorders. And that was just the absence of friendly microorganisms. There was also the slow spread of stranger species, the earth’s microbiota evolving rapidly in directions increasingly toxic to the human body: new descendants of C. botulinum, unsuitable for cosmetic procedures, killed you within four hours of contamination; chlorine-loving MRSA shut down the public swimming pools; and cyanobacteria bloomed in warm groundwater.

Judith had done her part to preserve microscopic life, packing her kitchen with fermenting mason jars, filling the house with the fecal stench of rotten cabbage. She had made kimchi, and sauerkraut, and kombucha. Her charcuterie, her beer, her bread, her yoghurt, all vivid with the tang of organisms invisible, except in the blue-green stains they left on Cambozola and the dusty casing of salami. She had raised and destroyed whole microscopic empires at the back of her fridge and cultivated vital microbiomes even in the middle of the gray-skyed and toxic city where all the earthworms in their garden died, and only poisonous extremophile superbugs and tardigrades could survive. She cultivated bacterial mats deep inside, too, on her skin, her eyes, her mouth, her vagina, her cuts. She rejected bleach. She dug in the dirt with bare hands and walked barefoot until she was host to a benign colony of hookworms. Until the bees died she ate hyperlocal urban honey. She celebrated her microbial terroir, those benign contaminants gathered in a lifetime of travel and ferment. Not that it did her any good, as her brain turned to plaque and she forgot Ben’s name sometimes, and when she did remember—on those temporary clear days, when the coffee shop once again made sense and she knew what to buy at the grocery store— she remembered when her mother forgot the word “Judith” and how it had broken her heart.

The Institute owned a small, chilly island in the north Pacific, more than eight hours’ travel from Judith’s house. When she locked the door that morning, she thought, Good-bye, good-bye forever, then she embarked on the first of four flights. The second-to-last flight landed in a tiny regional airport, where she arrived sweaty and disoriented, glad to be collected by a benign stranger whose face looked familiar. Had she been alone, she would have wept and shouted and given up then, fixing herself to the parking lot and surrendering to her disintegrating brain. But the man shook her hand and held it, and said his name was Sadik, curly gray hair but a young face, and one of those gentle smiles that encouraged confession. They were delayed, he said, by weather in from the Pacific, a sweetly scented chinook, which used to be unseasonable before the climate began its change. Then there was a long, awful moment when Judith could not be sure where she was, and her eyes again turned north, and she thought, This must be the end of the world.

“Do you know,” Sadik said brightly, like a travel brochure, and she was glad he didn’t appear to notice her confusion, “our island was originally a burial ground?”

“Oh,” she said through the noise in her head, and then tried to think of something else to say. “Oh.”

Thankfully, he went on, “It’s a humane and sensible way to dispose of our bodies. Very clean. Supports local scavengers. The council preserved the sites in collaboration with our organization. The monuments are quite moving. We can visit them if you like.”

“Oh.”

“Do you believe in an afterlife?” the man asked abruptly.

“I must,” she said. “I’m here, aren’t I?”

She would have said more if she could, but the only thing that came to mind would be too hard to explain, since the rational argument had disintegrated and left only potent and tangled images in her heart. A medlar. A whale fall. A nurse log. The dead laid out for sun and scavengers to transfigure. Their souls—whatever that meant—having fled, but the order they left behind still in those disintegrating bodies. Whales remain, she thought, the presiding form, decades after their fall. You can see the nurse log’s outline in the growth patterns of the trees it once supported. Human beings, she thought, might leave a similar imprint on the world when they pass from it, but it was too hard to explain without talking about medlars. And it was too hard to think of her medlar tree, and how its fruit would fall, ungathered, bletting for the ants, if any ants survived in her garden.

“But you know,” she managed to say in the silence they shared, staring into the gray fog wall, her eyes straining to focus on that nothing, “we’re all something’s afterlife, right? Because everything we’re made out of was once something else. And I don’t remember what it was like to be a turtle, or the left leg of a chicken, or the earthworms that ate the soil that fed the grass that fed the cattle that fed my mom that glass of milk she drank when she was pregnant. But it’s all there. Carbon and hydrogen and oxygen. So there’s definitely an afterlife. It’s just not personal.”

“What if it could be?” Sadik asked.

She couldn’t answer that. The whale fall and the medlars and Ben jumbled in her head until all she could see was rye splashing from her glass and over the gunwale, when the wind picked up and the wave-slap grew louder and faster and they had to turn around, her hands were so cold, she couldn’t grip the glass, so she let it go, too, and return to the sand that was its previous form, somewhere near his already seachanging body. These are pearls that were his eyes. A memory so vital, could her mind really be failing?

“Are you a chaplain?” she asked.

“No.”

“Or,” she said, “or . . . or . . . an exorcist?”

He laughed. “No. We don’t need exorcists.”

The weather broke late that afternoon, sunlight—daffodil yellow— in from the west, under the lifting storm. One minute she was staring at a blank cloud wall, then it thinned and she saw through it to an island. A dark-green smudge on the horizon.

“There,” Sadik said. “That’s it. That’s the island.”

The last island, she thought, and welcomed it. Sort of.

The island was rocky, covered in low Sitka spruce blown permanently eastward by the wind off the Pacific. The facility was set back from the shore, and they approached it along a cedar boardwalk up from the dock where the floatplane taxied in. Ahead of them, a woman in a white uniform carried two coolers marked with red crosses, sprinting to the low-set complex built into the granite.

“Do they worry about sea levels?”

“No.”

That stopped her. “Is this. This. Thing. Supposed to fix it?”

It smelled like rain, which reminded Judith of something sad she couldn’t name. Her heart beat wonky and she tried to find the lost thing. Something. Something about leaves in a garden and rain.

“Nothing’s going to fix that. But if we know more, maybe we’ll have a chance in whatever the world is about to become.” He stepped past her, and she found she had been standing still a long time, so she followed him. At the big front doors—glass, set in a two-story atrium that was warm and rain-lashed, the glass skylights beading with fog, the cedar paneling smelling sweetly of the fire in the huge stone hearth.

“It’s out there,” she said, before Sadik could lead her to the front desk, where another young woman typed on a keyboard made of light. She said, pointing through the building to a wall, “Can I go see it?”

“Yes,” he said. “Tomorrow, if you want.”

That night she slept well in stiff white sheets in a room facing the water, in a quiet wing far from the walled garden. She heard waves. She wondered what other candidates had slept there, who now slept elsewhere, or not at all. When she woke in the darkness, she didn’t know where she was, and she didn’t care.

The next morning, she and Sadik sat at a refectory table made of reclaimed barn wood, their backs to the huge granite chimney and their faces to the plate-glass windows.

“What brought you here?” She had enough experience with interviews to know that he had begun his examination, continuing the psychological evaluations that had begun when she applied six months before.

She was surprised to find that she had an answer already, that the question did not leave her paralyzed with doubt. She drank. She wet her lips. She said, “When Ben died, he was halfway between hospitals. They’d just installed a shunt and found that he’d broken his shoulder. They didn’t know when it had happened. He’d been incoherent for a week by that point, his blood pressure bottoming out again and again. He flatlined twice. I was in a car, following the ambulance. There was construction. It was raining so hard. He was dead by the time I got to Toronto Central. More or less.”

Sadik waited.

“I don’t want it to be like that.”

“Would you like to see the garden?”

Sadik swiped a keycard and they walked through a door guarded by men in black uniforms and unobtrusive sidearms—and then into the circular glass observation deck, punctuated by screens and sensors that recorded all activity in the corpse garden below. At first, it just looked like a large and well-tended park, but as she watched, she began to see their shapes outlined in the green, which meant the more recent candidates must be out of sight, behind the granite boulders, or that tall Oregon grape. She’d seen two other candidates at lunch, but on the other side of the room, wheeled in, limbs distorted by accident or disease.

“Geonauts,” Sadik said at her elbow. “That’s what I call you. It hasn’t caught on.”

“This is where it happened?”

“Where it’s happening, right now. It’s not an event. It’s a process.”

One of the bodies in the grass moved. A faint contraction, automatic like the twitch of a dead spider’s leg. A crow leapt into the air, circled, returned to the spot.

“They’re still alive.” It was the only way to describe what she saw.

“Not in the sense that you and I are alive. I don’t think. Not after this. But the categories of ‘alive’ and ‘dead’ aren’t exactly discrete here.”

Another mossy human shape shuddered.

She rested her forehead against the thick glass. Outside in the grass, once-humans progressed toward their dissolution, but through the Institute’s innovations, still preserved a filament of subjectivity. They were now agents on the other side of death, observing their transformation and reporting back on the experience. The hand on her shoulder was large and its fingers strong, warm through the bulky wool of her sweater. It took her a moment to realize the touch was Sadik’s. It was nice to be touched. For a moment, she thought of what he might look like when— but she banished the thought as frivolous.

“Ben,” she said, “what if I change my mind?”

She realized what she’d said when the word was out of her mouth, and her heart broke, but the hand did not withdraw. She hoped he hadn’t noticed.

“Would you like to sit with them?”

She nodded.

Grass had overgrown the first bodies, but she could see the limbs and hair of newer burials. No scent of rot, just the sweet decay of dead leaves in winter.

“We don’t know what they’re saying, but we know they’re thinking,” he continued easily. “Our system is rudimentary, so the geonauts can tell us very little through the mycorrhizal networks. That’s why we need pioneers. We need more of our kind underground, telling us what they see. Do you want to hear them?”

Sadik led her to a terminal on the observation deck. He swiped his card and tapped a screen and she heard the faint chorus of clicks and hisses.

“That’s them talking?”

“Through the rhizomorphs, yes, electric pulses. Chemical signals, too. It’s rudimentary, but every geonaut brings us closer to open communication with the afterlife. Or not the afterlife, but rather with the huge, networked biomass we belong to but don’t understand. You’re listening to what we used to be. And what we go back to. What they’ve gone back to.”

A click. A hiss. She held up her hand and inclined her head toward the speakers. Then Sadik offered her a pair of headphones, and she stood in the serene hallway, overlooking the corpse garden and listening to electronic pulses from an invisible network.

“The processing is mostly done in Seattle, and we have observation sites all over the world, but this is the interface. This is where we access the network. We’ve known for a long time that trees communicate via their root systems and mycelia. Rhizomorphs. And that’s not even the clonal colonies of aspen, or the huge fungal networks. This is crossspecies communication.”

She gave up on the question she wanted to ask: Was Ben out there, somewhere, despite the distance between here and there? Was he part of the same network, but so far away that his voice would be faint and tiny, translated not just by the filaments of decay—the rhizomorphs— that connected all earthly matter, but by the weight of water? The question did not form in words, and she could only feel the familiar ache of widowhood. So instead she listened to Radio Mycorrhiza. Among those noises—oh, among them somewhere—the legions of the dead might be whispering. Ben. Ben, whale-fallen Ben, speaking the pulsing language of the underworld.

The next morning, she asked Sadik if she could listen to it at night, or if one had to visit the observation deck. That afternoon he brought her a set of wireless headphones, and she heard it as soon as she put them on, a low susurration as of leaves, a sequence of luminous gurgles and chirrups. Between meetings and blood draws by phlebotomists who rarely met her eyes, she lay in her white bed and strained her ears into the hiss of Radio Mycorrhiza. She understood none of what she heard, but imagined other networks and relays that might reach as far as another ocean.

She wished she could ask the others how they came to this place, and what they saw when they stepped into the garden for the last time, but she knew only what Sadik knew: the susurrations and the bird-scattering twitches of the bodies under moss.

Bletting only continues the material transformations called “life” during that category once called “death,” more properly identified not as an event, but as a process during which the temporary patterns of conscious matter—an eye, a set of narrative memories, a brain, a point of view— are reordered into their new state, still present but no longer in the same relation, and therefore losing the appearance of consciousness, which nevertheless may still exist if we accept consciousness as an inherent quality of matter. Ten minutes after a brain dies, delta waves can still appear on an ECG, which suggests that something called “I” might experience its own death, even before further transformations remove it from our understanding of “I.”

In the case of the medlar, that new state is honeyish and fragrant.

She must have successfully converted Ben to her Gospel of Decay, because the week after his diagnosis he was researching alternative burials. He talked about carbon sequestration and rejected the incinerator at the graveyard belching him into the already filthy air. Though he rejected the cemetery, he still wanted some pageantry. He found the canvas and the cannonballs (he paid extra for Napoleonic antiques). Following his directions, Judith declined embalming and found someone who could sew him into the sheet with the cannonballs, then someone to take her and a couple of select mourners out the required minimum of three nautical miles offshore, where the water deepened. There was poetry, a ragged chorus about mist-covered mountains. They drank beer, then shots of stomach-clenching, palate-destroying rye splashed into the water as they dropped him over the side, and it was done. Out past the breakers, the islands, out in the broad Atlantic, in October, when he should have been stacking firewood on the kitchen porch, while she picked the medlars and set them in straw in the garage to finish their transformation.

A whale fall, Ben explained to her at the end of his life, as though she didn’t already know about it. Ben-splained. She listened to his rasping voice describe the way a whale carcass sinks into the cold, heavy waters, and as it decays fuels a whole community of organisms, creatures so far from the surface they don’t need sunlight, but flourish in that strange element. The slow transfiguration of flesh into this new phase, this new state of decay and invention. The whale decays, but that does not mean it’s annihilated. A gospel of transfiguration, he said, knowing she would like his word choice.

A person may blet as well, Judith announced to Wurtzel, her cat—a kitten she had found after Ben died—just as a whale falls. Just as Ben fell and undertook the alchemical transformations of all matter. The Institute did not choose to use that language in the email she received confirming her candidacy for the Procedure. The day she received the confirmation, she carried a medlar in from the back porch to the little sun-room, where she sat and spooned up the brown mush that spilled out of the skin—rendered flavorless by her illness—and tried to conjure Ben’s voice saying, You know what that looks like, Jude? Medlars are composite creatures of rot and stillness, flesh transfigured by time, fragrant like apple blossoms and fermented on the tongue.

She’d have to find someone to take Wurtzel. Someone who’d let him outside in the middle of the night when he was restless, and who would not require too much affection, but let him creep closer and closer to them as they sat on the couch watching TV, knowing when to stroke him diffidently, with just one finger.

You are already colonized, she had said to Wurtzel, and your lineaments are temporary. You have already taken on many shapes, a bud, and a bloom, and a fruit, and then you will fall, and turn gold, and brown, and your flesh will find new forms long after your death. And what follows on that? Only more of the same.

The man. The man. He was wrong. He had said it wouldn’t hurt because of pentobarbital. But it hurt, and they wouldn’t tell her anything. She threw up. She threw up again.

She had done everything right. It was supposed to be—

—she threw up.

She threw up and it felt, this time, as if her body was trying to expel itself, peristalsis tearing apart her alimentary canal, as though it could reorganize the body that contained it. Not a snake swallowing its tail, but its inverse, a snake turning inside out. Then there was blood, black and thick. The girl who came with tea that morning—10 ml syringes of cool peppermint tea gave her some relief from the taste of blood—would not look at her. There were no longer any mirrors in her room, so she did not know what the girl saw, only that it must be strange and awful.

“Help me,” Judith said.

The girl started as though she had not expected speech. Judith reached out her hand, which—she could see—looked thinner than it had been, the bones apparent, the flesh sunken and gray at the fingernails. “Will you,” she said, “help me?”

Her eyes fixed on the window, the girl set down the tray just out of Judith’s reach. “Help me,” Judith said again. The girl seemed not to hear, and keeping her eyes averted, she tapped her watch. The hallway filled with a low, musical alarm.

“Please.”

The girl left. Judith struggled onto her side and reached for the syringe. Swallowed tea—green and fragrant with mint—then spit it all up, the cup covered with a dark red-brown smear. Oh, she thought. This must be it.

Then three figures in white suits opened the door, their faces covered by masks, and she felt herself lifted onto a gurney.

“Is Sadik there? I want Sadik,” she said to them. They were shouting.

Then she was in the corpse garden, walking and crawling along the winding paths, past sensors and bodies, with whitesuits following behind. She observed in loving detail the other geonauts, their slight movements, their limbs overtaken by mushrooms or the white roots of grass or submerged in an anthill built industriously over their face, another sunk in water, green-eyed with algae. Their movements were slow, like the movements of plants in response to sunlight. One individual, their skin covered in luminous green moss, rose up onto an elbow, and Judith saw the white roots and potato bugs that colonized the earth beneath their shoulder. Mouth working open and closed as though they were saying something she could not hear, some discourse on the nature of transformation, and the world they perceived through decaying eyes. The only thing that emerged from their mouth was a trickle of earwigs.

“How do you feel?” Sadik asked, his voice a surprise in the darkness where her face rested against the trunk of a tree. She felt the heat of his hand on her shoulder and wondered how long he had been there.

“I think we’d better do it soon,” she said. Maybe she said it. “I’m as ready as I’m ever going to be.”

“Judith—”

Sadik, she realized for the first time, was wearing a white suit and a mask. There were two people in suits standing back. They were stupid if they thought that made a difference.

Judith took a step. She took a step. She took a step. The young whitesuits were afraid. It was all over for them, those fast-moving and disconnected creatures, blind agents of something much larger and more complex, from which their speed and cleverness separated them. None of them understood, surface dwellers. She stared at an intersection of white roots and quartz, ruffled with lichen.

One crusted finger traced the lichen over granite. This was a good place, high enough that she could see over the walls and to the Pacific, as far as Japan if she listened hard to the emerging noise of Radio Mycorrhiza.

“Have you ever eaten a medlar?” she asked, and rainwater fell from her fingers.

“I don’t think so.” Though he looked calm, when he spoke his voice shuddered. That was Sadik. Quick, she thought, with an audibly beating heart, and blood that rushed like river water through supple veins.

It was dark. Her fingers were powdered green, which, despite her blindness, she saw as a pale flame consuming the rock and her body with a chorus of whispers. She was naked. Lichen spilled over her chin to her lip, she could taste it. Water and stone, peaty and slow-living. She would have closed her eyes, but she found she did not need to do that, either, so she lay back against the stone she had chosen, and felt one arm give against it, and thought, That might hurt, the way my arm is bent, then the arm gave way and she tumbled down the boulder, and something wet cracked deep inside her skull. She came to rest facing up, and through the dimming green haze she had her last human glimpse of the stars.

Lichen covered her teeth and crept down her throat. Sometime later, she felt her limbs consumed by underground creatures, greedy things, eating their way through her skin where her body touched the earth.

She tasted rock and the resinous needles of the Sitka spruce, low-growing and bonsaied by the raw little island. During long, damp nights she turned her face to follow the moon, even when her eyes were gone and her sockets grown over with lichen. The beetles crawled across her skin. The beetles crawled through her skin. Then something with many legs rippled where her eyes had been. There was water around her feet. The moon was a lady’s slipper. The moon was full and golden. The air was cold and warm and dry and rain-filled.

Who are you? she asked in what remained of her brain, that network of intersecting electrical currents now intersecting with other networks made of entwining rhizomorphs, hyphae, her breached skin, her thickened blood, filled now with Actinomycetales, richly seething with microscopic life. A Judith-shaped collective that now lived in the cage of her bones. Through them, she heard the glitter and hiss of the underworld’s language. And now, it seemed, she understood some of its intent. Somewhere, someone was calling to her along tree roots and mycelia, so she could hear—at the horizon of audibility—other geonauts, an underworld, an afterlife.

When Ben died, Judith still talked to him. Several people suggested it was evidence of an afterlife, like she must know with a widow’s piercing insight that something of him survived physical death and hung around the corners of his old life. She did not believe them, though she conversed with him about her diagnosis, and Wurtzel, and her decision to come to the island. She scolded him for not ensuring another month, two months, a year, with her. She pointed out changes, where new waves lapped the sidewalks, and told him that the basements of Victoria-by-the-Sea flooded during bad storms. She told him that a child was born entirely devoid of microbial companions, and that the child died of anaphylaxis within three hours of birth. She confided only to him when she began to forget things in a way that scared her. Once when she was shopping and couldn’t figure out how she got where she was—having turned right out of the parking lot instead of left, because of traffic—she talked through it with him until she found a map on her phone and remembered how to read it, doing what he would have done.

From the corpse garden, the bletted woman rose. She had been there for some period of time, though she could not say how long she had spent pressed into the earth, only that it was long enough to have been transfigured by those companions that had lived in her gut and her sinuses and under her fingernails her whole life, which had overtaken the body they previously only cohabited. While she had never been alone— no one is ever alone—she now knew those companions intimately, and the creature who rose from the earth knew itself to be composite. As it had always been composite.

It was good to lend her human shape to the underworld, and so allow the other orders to communicate with the ascendant predators of the planet. As Ben had temporarily lent his shape to a community of sea creatures just outside the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. A vector for newness. A human-shaped interface for the microbial world. We can talk to them, with our human-shaped mouths, and our human hands, and this thin scrim of human-shaped longing that covers the truth, which is the underworld of the minuscule.

The ones above ground? They’re afraid.

The being who tore herself out of the roots and the undersurface of beetles and began to walk from her granite perch—where she had set herself, decades before—was something new, though she bore the imprint of Judith, in her lineaments and in her memories.

There were lots of them. One who had been there the longest walked with a tree grown deeply into their core, a composite creature now, host and parasite both, entwined bones and flesh and rot and insect and larvae and root and rhizomorph and memory and language. Three bodies had fused together, limbs entangled and torsos compressed, walking crabwise on arms and legs and heads, dragging some limbs and dragged along by others. It was good to be close to one another, no distinction between the earth that contains you, that teems with mites and monsters and microbial films, and the body that—for a while at least—might serve as interface for all those microscopic beings and processes. Rot, Judith had once said, is a valid state of affairs.

The shambling body that had once been Judith’s exclusive and isolated home was green with the feathery dust of lichen. She incubated the rich miasma of the new kind, incompatible with the fast-moving, glittering creatures on the other side of the glass of the observation deck. She thought it had been different, once, full of white light and activity, and now dark and nearly empty, but for those frightened bodies overhead.

All you poor orphans in a changing world, you should listen to what the dead are saying, because the new world won’t tolerate you. Having borrowed the human faculty of speech and the technologies of language, she lent the network the only suitable word she could remember from her human life, and heard it go up in a global chorus, over mycorrhizal networks, yes, but also to data processing centers, and out into the cloud, as it was still known. She spoke it, or it spoke her, all over the world: ARISE.

Poor unrooted creatures. Judith—green-lichened Judith—raised her hand and undertook the last recognizably human action of her existence. She opened the door. Inside she found them all, lucid with terror, watching. Among them, the Judith-thing saw a familiar face, though changed by fear and time. She wished to tell him what she knew, but she did not think he would understand, so instead she put her arms around him and drew him close to her bones.