Shape

Once upon a time was a big dark eye. It came in a big dark package that was soft and smelled a little dirty, a lot like river, a hint of corn-chips.

Once upon a time was a restaurant where the people went on the side of a concrete hill.

Once upon a time before this big dark eye in its big dark package was a girl who went to the restaurant on the hill where the corn chips came in warm little bowls and the windows were wide and the street was busy. This was a city.

Once upon a time the big dark eye in its package of darkness and softness and smells took a walk on a hillside in the country. There were railroad tracks and trees and lots and lots of fungus.

Fungus can snuggle and can stand like soldiers, or like figures tending paddies, or those admiring mountains.

Once upon a time the fungus threw a party. The party was a big one, a good one, with many invitations. To the little groves, to the glens, the dales, the nooks, to the crannies, the stumps, the beds of ferns. The cheeks of trunks. Come! Come! Celebrate! On this day at this time in this place you can’t miss us - we’ll be the ones all over the place!

Once upon a time while this party was being planned and the fungus were dressing in their best suits and some were saying I want to go and some were saying I don’t know how we’ll make it and still others were saying I don’t care what you think about this orange, I think I look pretty neat and my curves feel great and more than anything else I’m happy and glow and I’ll knock the socks off this party – as all this was hubbubing along, there was a checkerboard of old fire broke wood resting in red dirt. It remembered its days as a trim little tree when nothing could stop it from growing as tall as any other tree it had seen, taller even, right off the head of the hill and straight through the elements. Oh! Rain up high was colder, and sun that much whiter. The birds nested, and voles burrowed, and worms braided through roots. Sometimes a cat passed by or hid and more than one buck rode out its rut in the area, velvet pressed to bark and scrapes hoofed in the tree's slender trunk that turned brisk with exposure.

Once upon a time the big dark eye trotted past the checkerboard wood. It stopped and put an iris in the light. Down in a swale stood a broad glowing oak, its body green fur, branch tips webbed pale. Perhaps it was old enough its marbles or galls or whatever a tree might lose in old age were indeed being lost. Or perhaps trees grow only wiser. Perhaps what is wise is not always that which is widely believed to be so. Perhaps this and that and the other thing, and that thing over there, too.

Behind the oak and below the big dark eye that still stood with its iris lit grew a small tree, limber in the wind with a dish or nest or crown or catch for its top, all its highest needles curling as many many ears. Receptors. Receivers. Transmission. Cilia. It listened to the checkerboard wood remembering and the duct of the dark eye contracting and the fungus all readying. Goodness! The fungus! So many and they just kept arriving, kept popping up like joy or a keen fox or a salamander in the ditch at the water's face for breath. They were all shapes and sizes and outfits and the little tree knew the big dark eye could see it, and the checkerboard wood could feel it, and so could the oak, and so could it, the listening little pine, and so could all the others whose outsides were perked up in welcome:

You're here!

Turn it up!

Your gills are gorgeous.

May I have this dance.