We Shalvit are mushroom people, grown from our parents’ spores and cut from mycelia that roots us to our substrate like an umbilical cord. From there we grow legs to walk, lungs to breathe, and brains to connect us all through microscopic hyphae in the air—The Hive—branching out from our frontal lobes to link us to every other Shalvir on the planet. We speak in colors, textures, sounds, moving images: we speak in experience itself.

My mother produced me asexually; I was the only seed out of hundreds to successfully take root in the garden behind our hut. She taught me English, a human tongue, when I was just a sporeling, before my brain was developed enough to access The Hive. I remember these years about as well as a human remembers their first steps.

Life did not start until I perceived depth for the first time. Mother ushered me into a grove outside the village and guided me towards a fallen tree, pushing me one step further when I tried to sit down too soon. Then, as she stepped back at an angle, she vocalized: “Look, honey, look straight ahead,” and in front of me, my outstretched arm grew smaller and smaller until it reached my hand. My world was no longer two-dimensional.

Shalvit are desperate for each other. Our longing cries cross oceans in seconds; our thoughts are a roar of whispers in a crowded venue. We understand the intention behind every unspoken word, the love in every neighbor’s eyes, the fears, the wants, the needs—and that total knowledge we share enriches us completely. We have nothing to hide, for we need each other to see.

My name in Myca—our unspeakable, unwritable language—is a single birch sapling in a patch of pines, set in the salmon-pink glow of twilight as are many Shalvic names. In English, it transliterates to “Birch.”

Birch. Just Birch.

I had never seen a real human, outside of visions from The Hive, until my 25th year of life. Puberty had sprung up, forming lamellae over the skin beneath my mushroom cap of a head. To celebrate, Mother took me to a city full of horse-drawn carriages and unreadable faces. We stuck out like fungi on a tree. When the coachman asked for my name in a tone I could not decipher, I stared as if his wooden-brown irises would reveal something to me.

“Her name is Birch,” Mother said aloud.

«Human is being polite,» she thought to me.

I understood humans about as well as I understood an ant. The way they collapsed in and out of groups, opening shutters one moment and closing them the next, confused me. I did not, could not, see the point of locks on doors or curtains on changing rooms. Humans seemed to scuttle through their lives with their intentions obscured to one another. They could keep secrets. They could lie.

Mother held me tight that week we spent in the capital, in a wet, creaky inn. One morning she crouched down beside the room’s rainwater collection bucket and showed me how to clean the build-up of spores out of my gills. After several rounds of scrubbing, she guided my hand inside the bucket until the cloth disappeared into the cloudy puddle at the bottom. Streaks of gray dripped down my arm as I lifted the rag to my lamellae.

For how much we add over centuries to The Hive’s pool of knowledge, we Shalvit do not know everything.

The village doctors, when we returned from the capital, did not know why my mushroom cap was swollen or why my gills were oozing blood. There was nothing lodged in them, no rock or piece of glass. My newly-formed sporangium was inflamed, burning even at the brush of cold water on my scalp. Mother sent me memories of the soft painlessness of drifting to sleep as she squeezed my palm, but the throbbing across my cap kept me awake.

She could feel it, too—phantom pain transmitted through mycelia. The doctors could feel it, the neighbors, the people in a nearby village—it was contagious. Shalvit are only supposed to endure such excruciating pain for a few moments before our bodies release endorphins to numb us. Instead, I writhed on the medical table while the doctors wiped my blood away and wrapped my lamellae in gauze. One held the scissors in a shaky grip while another held him from behind. One bit back cries through clenched teeth while another desperately tried to yell over my agony in loud, flashing images.

Being so young, I did not yet know how to keep any of my thoughts from spilling out into the rest of The Hive, let alone sensations so strong they made my vision blur.

«It’s becoming too much,» a doctor said.

«Are her gills infected?» another asked. «Weeks to treat. Days before pain stops.»

«Sedatives won’t work. Something stronger?»

He swept my bangs aside and tapped the handle of his scissors to my forehead. Emergency measure, for the best.»

Emergency measure?

When I met Mother’s gaze, she let go of me and made room for one of the doctors to wheel over a tray of long, pointed utensils. “Emergency measure?” I yelled out in English. “What emergency measure?”
I might as well have been invisible.

The term for “disconnection” in our language is not visual, but auditory. It is the sound of a million cicadas chirping abruptly cut off into silence. It is a word drenched in the weight of every dementia patient who must be severed from The Hive so that their disease cannot burn through the mycelia like wildfire. Disconnection often presages death. The farewell ceremony for a Shalvir awaiting medical disconnection is not unlike a living funeral.

I could feel the tension pulling on the doctor’s hand as the reality of what he had to do rushed through us all in one, solemn moment.

I was the conduit of their suffering. That was the unspoken truth behind each apology sent my way. They knew, I knew, those were the final minutes my mind would be able to perceive the depths of their love and sorrow, their guilt, their Shalvic yearning. I wanted to embrace all of them. I wanted to tell them I was sorry, too.

The impromptu farewell ceremony distracted me well enough from the doctor’s incisions into my forehead, leaving me paralyzed from the surge of goodbyes flowing through my frontal lobe. Mother returned to my side and rested her hand on my cap. Stiff ridges marked her once-smooth skin, threatening to harden into the bark-like texture common for Shalvit elders. Her 341 years of living traced the fingers that rubbed the gauze over my lamellae—over me, her only spore to have germinated.

The scene she whispered to me rang above the whirlpool of voices: a single birch tree, stunted in growth, surrounded by evergreens silhouetted against a setting sun.

With one snip, she was gone.

My entire world went quiet.

Ten million cicadas hibernated.

Or perhaps I simply went deaf.

I remember how close the ceiling appeared.

I remember how she cried over me as if I were dead.

I remember.

I remember.

I remember the wordless stares a crowd of Shalvit children gave me as Mother guided me home. I remember the expressionless faces of my neighbors plastered like unmolded clay on their features. I remember Mother’s painful squeaks once she realized I could no longer speak Myca with her, that she was grasping for someone absent.

Surrounded by my kind, I was alone, unreadable, unknowable. My body trembled, submerged in its lack of stimuli. To fill in the blanks, my eyes pretended to see what was not there—doors on nonexistent walls, sunrises far off on the horizon, people smiling at me.

“You are young,” the doctor said in long-unpracticed English. “The hallucinations might not be permanent. Maybe for only a few decades you will have them. Very young, you will understand this eventually. It will be normal. It will seem very normal in maybe a few decades.”

I did not respond.

“The mind adapts,” he said, more quietly.

I did not respond.

For many months following disconnection, I filled my afternoons by wandering around the village and surrounding woods, cane in hand, watching the world work in secret. Intangible conversations whisked past me in the breeze. With each passing day, the clouds darkened and bloomed over my drift along the recurring town paths.

“Rain season is coming,” Mother announced one morning. She had taken to speaking aloud in short bursts, as if she was fighting a sob each time.

“Rain season?” I repeated.

Despite learning English as a sporeling, I hardly considered it my first language; it is to Myca what a one-dimensional line is to a three-dimensional sphere. My inner monologue as a child was a blend of visuals and sounds from nature even before I connected to The Hive. Communicating in Myca was instinctual. Translating “rain season” in my head evoked a clammy image of a deluge ripping apart the sky in gray blues.

In English it had no meaning to me.

For five long years, nothing did. The knowledge that no utterable collection of words could perfectly capture any vista disturbed me even when I was at my most relaxed, sitting on the hill overlooking the village. I rested my legs there many evenings and hoped I would find my answers in the stars. «What will I do? Who will I become?»

One night without thinking, I asked for the name of a constellation.

The wind brushed me calmly.

“Will I be alone forever?” I later asked Mother in our hut. She was sitting on her knitted bench, staring out the window into the midnight streets. I suspected she was having one of her silent conversations with a neighbor or a friend or a philosopher from the other side of the planet—any Shalvir but me.

“Mother. Mother, please hear my question.”

She turned abruptly towards my direction and dug into me with her blank gaze. When I did not reply, she prompted, “Honey, what is it?” The corners of her mouth twitched in a nervousness, or perhaps annoyance I could only assume to exist, boiling, under the surface.

I hesitated. “Will my brain hurt forever?”

I did not expect her to answer such a question, so purposefully vague. I only meant for her to consider the pain that disconnection had brought me. She had helped me from room to room before I learned how to use my cane, and afterwards she stayed still, watching me hobble on my own. Her touch, as brief and wordless as it often was, had numbed the aching deep within me. Then it, too, was gone.

Mother thought and thought. I wondered who she was consulting, or if it would be worth asking. «Would I know them? Would they know me?»

She returned her attention to me without warning. “You won’t hurt like this forever,” she said in the loudest voice she could muster, “because you aren’t immortal. Eventually you’ll die, and when your body decomposes you won’t feel a thing. You’ll finally be home with us all in the dirt.”

I could not respond.

“I look forward to seeing you there, Birch,” she murmured, “to rekindle.”

The coachman arrived the following week, greeting me with a tip of his umbrella, to take me to my new home in the capital. Many Shalvit in the village had donated a coin or more to pay for my relocation. I had been a walking corpse for long enough, a memory trapped in her own invisible world.

Mother watched me through our hut’s window. Sheets of rain veiled her face, blurring her features like hot wax running down a candle. Instead of a goodbye, the night before she had insisted to me that she would join me in the soil behind our house, that she would have us buried together in the garden very soon.

As the coachman pulled me up into my seat, I stole one last glance at Mother’s unmoving silhouette, hoping our eyes would meet somewhere amid the downpour.

I remember how the silver gates sparkled as the carriage entered the city.

I remember how my human caretaker, a woman called “Fia,” embraced me in the drizzle, her nose rubbing against my shoulder.

I remember the niceties she taught me—“good morning,” “how are you,” “I love you,” and all the phrases we Shalvit never had to say—so as to smooth the transition from silence to conversation. She filled other gaps with humming and smiling, with “oh!” and “well,” with rhythmic steps over the kitchen tile to music only she could hear. One day, she said, she would take me to a performance by her favorite pianist.

“He goes by ‘Eterny’ on stage, but his real name is Robert. Don’t you tell a soul.” Fia flashed me a look I had come to learn meant cheekiness. “We went to school together. He’s always been a private person, you see . . . but his playing is beautiful. I can’t wait for you to hear it!”

Something else stood out to me. “Humans choose to go by different names. Why would they do that? Wouldn’t it be confusing?”

“Well, no,” she began. “My name is ‘Ophelia,’ but my family call me ‘Fia,’ and I have a friend who calls me ‘Ophy.’ I show different sides to them, so they call me different things. Eterny and Robert are like that—different parts of the same person.”

She tilted her head at me. “Did everyone call you ‘Birch’?”

After a long pause, I answered, “Only once I was disconnected.”

“What did they call you before?”

Dissatisfaction drew my mouth closed. Although Fia knew the basic idea behind Myca, there was no way for her to fully appreciate it. I struggled to say anything. “My real name is a scene from nature. It is impossible to say out loud.”

“Is it visual?” she asked.

“Yes,” I replied.

“Could you show me it?”

“No, you don’t understand—”

“I would think your name has something to do with birch trees. Those grow around here, you know. Now, where’s my camera?” In a drawer she found a black box with a cylindrical piece attached to one face and a strap that she slipped around her neck. “I’m by no means a professional photographer, but I can snap a pretty picture or two. Do you think your name is somewhere out there?” She motioned to the forest beyond her window.

I followed her out into the evening’s salmon-pink light, hearing Myca around me in the way pine branches swayed, and stopped at a small glade hosting a single, fully-grown birch tree.

“We found it,” I whispered. No long was I the sapling I remembered, but an adult reaching out from the forest towards a glowing sky. I was alive.