#abuela-issues

Hell was other people. He was tired of it all, the idiocy, the selfishness, the squabbling, and the demands. The frustrating way no one ever had their shit together and couldn’t seem to stay the hell out of his way. Lumbering animals, no better than livestock. Blind to how giving a fuck about what everyone else thought of them guaranteed a miserable existence - yet so quick to criticize someone else when they hadn't done shit with their own sad little lives. He wanted to be as far away from humanity as he could be. He wanted above it, beyond it. The only thing that tempered his anger was to trek deep into the forest, for as long as he could. Giving himself to the untouched wilderness, to the primal depths of nature, both welcoming and fundamentally uncaring.

He stared above, hypnotized by the wind blowing through the gaps between one tree and the next in the canopy above, swaying like the alveoli of massive lungs, expanding and contracting. All at once he thought of a rhyme he had nearly forgotten, from so long ago it could be one of his first memories. He couldn’t recall the story it came from, not quite, but it was something that had been melodically read to him by his mother, or maybe his grandmother, as he fell asleep. 

“Here in the forest, dark and deep,” he recited to himself, eyes closing. “I offer you eternal sleep.”

He knew the next line was the child’s reply, etched in his mind in the way of nursery rhymes. The forest is lovely, dark and deep, but I have promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep. 

Fuck those promises, he thought to himself. He took pleasure in the roots cradling his back, in the damp smell of leaves turning to dirt. He felt like he could sink into it so easily, as if his body longed to become part of the earth. He slowed his breath, imagining his body growing as cool as the damp ground beneath him. He started from his toes, willed one piece of his body at a time to relax. To stop churning, to stop beating, to stop pumping these fluids and gasses around and instead submit to something so much more powerful, so much greater than himself.

Smiling faintly, he slowly worked the words this way and that, until they formed a different reply. “I accept your offer, deep in the forest, to sleep peacefully in your roots. I give you my body to keep, while in my eternal sleep, to grow flora anew as it reconstitutes.”

Mateo breathed out long and slow, easing every bit of air from his lungs. Eyes still closed, he paid attention to the smell and the sound of the forest around him, the strength of the ground beneath him. He really could sleep here. The forest could have his body, if it meant becoming part of the forest. It wasn't that he wanted to die, but he didn't want to be alive for a while, didn't want to be anywhere or expected to do anything.

His head turned sharply when he heard the shifting of something very heavy. There had been a fallen tree on the slope nearby, so massive the trunk was nearly as tall as he was. The roots had been left shorn from the ground, the far branches snapped and disintegrating, and a new colony of moss and mushrooms thriving between the splintering bark. A great creaking groan chilled him to the core as the rotten trunk rolled over, a sift through the deciduous mulch around it collecting the pale bones of small rodents and an aged carcass of a deer, flesh dark and hard where it strewn between the joints.

Mateo was frozen where he laid, but his mind was frenzied to come up with some explanation for this. It wasn’t an apparition. This wasn’t a creature. It was neither dead nor alive, somewhere in between yet neither. A demon, or a god. Maybe no god humans would worship, but something venerated by the roots and praised by mycelium. It didn't belong in the forest - the forest belonged to it.

Fungal threads expanded among the bones, replacing tissue long dissolved. It rolled its shoulders forward and lifted its head to turn toward him. Massive horns sprouted and veined through the air. No, not horns. It was more like something that spread and branched across a gnarly petri dish. Like roots from the eyes of a tuberous stem searching for soil. Something like an eye opened, in a place where an eye shouldn’t be, and shifted into the socket of a deer’s skull. A lateral root stretched to the other side, a bud blooming into a matching eye.

It continued to shift uncomfortably, as if this wasn’t the shape it normally took. He got the feeling that this was something it was trying to make for his benefit, which was all the more unsettling. Gradually it slowed, then crouched to simply stare at him. Confused, as if it hadn't expected Mateo to be there, either.

He knew he had lost his fucking mind when a deep, damp voice said, “Lo siento, Mateo. You weren’t supposed to be here yet.”

A terrified, hysterical laugh burst from him. This-this thing, this wretched cryptid of the appalachian forests of central New Hampshire, shouldn’t sound like his abuela. “Why the fuck would you speak spanish?!”

Mateo screamed as something happened to his head. Swamped with buzzing, sharp static, like the screeching feedback of a microphone next to a massive speaker. Its absence was almost as bad as the sound, his ears ringing. Somewhere in the cacophony, the creature had asked, “What language would you have us speak?”

The question had been asked in all of them.

“Ok, ok, ok,” he whimpered. He wanted to press his palms to his ears, but his limbs were so heavy, rooted even as they trembled. “S-speak however you want.”

It crawled closer, and that rich tone grew contrite. “You are not supposed to be a part of us, not consciously. Not yet.”

As it looked over his prone and paralyzed body, a small breeze lifted his hair like fingers petting through the roots. Every inch of his skin prickled cold.

“You always come to us, eventually, though. Once your bodies have cooled from their suffering and grief. You commit an act of unbirth, and pieces of you seep into the ground to be drunk up by the grasses and the trees. You change your forms so often - billions of years of evolution, trillions of different species. But we always know you."

"Fuck, fuck, fuck," Mateo cursed on each panicked breath, struggling to get up. "This isn't-! I'm not-! N-no, no, fuck this! What the fuck are you talking about?!"

“None of that, mi dulce niño. Be proud of your place in the cosmos. It is small, but it is."

The more he struggled, the tighter he was held, until he felt himself sinking into the dirt and tree litter beneath him. He bucked, kicked and clawed at the roots he could reach, but as soon as they ripped apart there were more to replace them. He could do nothing to hurt something so immense.

“No," it sighed, watching him sadly. "You think we are unfeeling? You are wrong. We feel everything.”

Mateo couldn’t hear himself scream this time. The acidic burning. The thick, choking grip of exhaust and oil and rot so foul it couldn’t be natural. Pressure, immense pressure, crushing past bone and breaking him into dust. It was all so hot. His mind simply shattered.

“The horror of what you have done covers us,” it whispered. “That pain? That poison? We will never truly get used to it. Sometimes we think we may conquer it, sometimes we lash out and hurt you back, but then you just find a more efficient, more devastating way to destroy us.”

It didn’t stop, but faded. It left him arid, bleached and splintered, but he could breathe again. 

He should breathe again.

“Oje, but we could never hate you for it. We miss you too desperately.”

With mounting terror, Mateo realized he was dying. He couldn’t move as he was swallowed into the earth, mosses and mushrooms coating his body as it sank, as roots pushed down through him. Breaking him into pieces.

“You are not dying.” Soothing, like cool water. “You are coming alive in so many places.” 

He wanted to go back. He wanted to wail and claw and dig back up to the surface. 

“You're early, but that's alright. You can let go.”

“No,” he begged, though his tongue and jaw were no longer where they needed to be to make noise.

“Al mal tiempo, buena cara,” it chuckled, as if comforting a child. “This is what you wanted, isn't it, Mateo? At last you are free, and no longer have to be anywhere.”

He could feel his thoughts coming apart like beads scattering from a broken string, flung into an abyss so endless it made him wonder why he ever bothered.

“You will no longer be one person. How lonely that must be. It’s a small wonder you cause so much suffering, when you are in such great pain"

There was such an immense, heavy weight before him, an infinite depth below.