Ophiocordyceps unilateralis

The cabin in the woods had been abandoned for years, but one night, a candle burned in the window. March would disappear onto the freeway to the cabin she and her twin sister owned, but hadn’t been to in years, in order to really get away that night. During her shift at the hospital that day, she had texted Joey that the morning had been “unfathomable.” For Joey, at the other end of the message, there was something about the language, the brevity, and the timing of this message that seemed peculiar.

Unfathomable wasn’t a word that she usually used, and she usually had much more to say. She also tended to end things with hopeful positivity, which Joey found annoying and charming. March was typically conscientious and thoughtful with everything that she said, communicating more with breath-syllables and sighs than with words, because she never wanted to say anything untrue. Joey had suspicions that something was a little off. She had been working overtime that week, as there was a shortage of physical therapists in the summer. Maybe she was overworked, and tired from the weekend.

At the nail salon the weekend before, Joey’s manicurist seemed soporific and erratic. As she was pressing the sharp metal against her cuticle, she slipped the point deep into her flesh. March had been watching trustingly and carefully. But once the metal was stuck in her finger, her jaw dropped, locked, and her eyes turned pink. The manicurist’s hands were shaky as she stumbled to grab solutions. She spilled over the alcohol and tools fumbled all over the desk, while she tried dabbing her hand with the towel. Suddenly, it became too much, and the manicurist walked to the back and never returned. When they left, March, in a haze said, “It’s just one thing after another after another.”

“Yeah,” Joey added, “Things happen in threes.”

“No, I mean, at work I had a patient who is usually cordial and communicative with me, but today, she looked at my stomach, and it seemed like she was looking right through, as thought I weren’t there. And then I must have faded back in because she reacted to me there, but then looked scared again. I felt like I was flashing in and out of existence.

“I think you need to sleep more,” Joey said, confused, concerned, squeezing the little blush red kleenex that was glued by blood to her finger.

Twin sisters have uncanny experiences that invariably affect who they are and what they feel. Joey and March had inexplicable simultaneous sensations when meeting anyone new. It could be the chin moving in an indiscreet way, or the way the eyes moved around while they were talking. Anything could give a person away, and Joey and March joked that it was a superpower they had. Or, maybe people just got nervous around twins. They’d never know.

When March got home, she felt like something must have gone wrong when she gave blood to the hospital earlier that week. She felt an itch under her skin, her knuckles felt tight, and she smelled an odd floral scent that hadn’t come from her plants before. She laid down. And then she, oddly, but confidently, felt like climbing to the top of the roof.

*

Joey was a librarian and sat at the reference desk in Oakland and told people about books that were coming out, books that were at other locations, and books that hadn’t been published yet. She loved talking about stories. Although, sometimes it became tiring. Reading is an isolating experience, and she sometimes felt like she was giving people assignments to stay distanced from each other. It’s not why she went into the profession. She wanted to build community around knowledge. It made her sad that people were quiet in libraries, silently found books, and didn’t really talk to each other anymore.

Later that day, when Joey received another message from her twin sister that was pure nonsense: “akjfajha----dshhhf,” she left work 10 minutes early, and called her immediately.

“Hey. Are you okay? Did you mean to text me that?”

Her sister’s breath slid through the speaker, “um, yeah, yeah. I’m fine.”

“Oh. Ok.”

Silence.

Joey felt panicked. Twins can hear the heartbeat over the phone in the other. They are ultra sensitive to every sound that their counterparts make. It’s been the truth since their beginning. They thought they were lucky.

As children, when their parents slammed doors, or whispered manipulative secrets to each other, they were able to just look at their sister’s face for answers. Coded in eyebrow twitches, mouth twists, or completely blank countenances, were wavelengths of how they felt, what to do next, and whether or not to stay still and frozen.

When her sister left work, which was what she was doing at this time of day, she would usually spend the entire car ride on the phone, even though it annoyed Joey how often she went in and out of reception. But it wasn’t awkward when they missed the middle of a word, or were reconnected after the static. They could easily spend nights into mornings on the phone with each other.

“Do you want to come over?” Joey asked, instinctually, knowing that there were only 2 miles between the hospital where March worked and Joey’s apartment.

“Mmm, no-yeah. I’ll come for a sec.”

“K.” Joey said, “See you soon?”

“Yeah.”

It usually only took 4 minutes for her sister to get in her car, pull away from the maze of the hospital crosswalks and expedited lanes, and get to her street.

Joey waited in the window, watching the quiet curve of the street below. Three minutes went by… then five… then eight… Joey resolutely became anxious and worried. She sent March a text: “hey. You ok?”

There was no immediate blinking ellipsis on the other end that suggested she was considering a response, or had opened the message. It was static. Nothing. After another two minutes, Joey called her again. It had been fifteen minutes since she’d left work.

One ring, two rings, three rings, almost four–”heyyy.”

“Sister.”

“Mm-yea.”

“Where are you? I thought you were coming over? Are you okay?” Joey’s voice trembled a bit, and her hands were shaking slightly. She’d had control issues, so she didn’t know if the shaking was her frustration at not having control over the situation, or if she was scared. She’d been way more emotionally intelligent last summer, before she started working full time at the library and had to leave herself completely unstunted or vulnerable because of how many needs her patrons had. They needed reminders to keep their jeans above their hips, to keep their incessant giggling to lower volumes, and on and on and on. People needed help with their tax forms, or finding where they were going to get their next meals.

“I feel like I need to go to the cabin.”

The cabin was a real estate investment that the twins had gone in on together, and they hadn’t been there for at least 4 years. They’d become so busy with the obligations of life, that it wasn’t that easy get-away they had imagined it would be. March liked to just get away and be in the silence when the hospital codes and sounds got lodged in her mind, invading her personal thoughts. Joey was an artist and liked using the space to complete projects to get messy without worrying about doing the dishes, or feeding the cats.

“Wait, what? Don’t you work tomorrow?”

“Not anymore.”

“Oh.” Joey stood up in the middle of the living and started doing odd circles in the middle of the rug, “You know, I feel like you might be sick or something. Are you really feeling alright?”

“Yeah, yes. I do feel like my arms are a little numb, weren’t much use today. I dropped a patient…”

“Oh, no. Are they okay?”

“I think so. I left afterward. My supervisor told me to go home.”

“And now you want to go to the cabin?”

“I can’t really explain why, it feels more of a physical need to go… like my body needs it to get back to normal.”

“Okay,” Joey said.

Joey ran March’s entire week over and over in her head. She tried to figure out if there was something that she might have missed that could explain this sudden weird behavior of her twin sister’s. They’d gone to music festival last Sunday but only stayed for a few hours before March’s friend picked them up because the mushrooms made them nauseated.

“Where did you get these?!” Joey asked March after the psilocybin had kicked in and instead of opalescent hallucinations, all Joey could feel was what she described as little tiny hands tickling the inside of her stomach, sometimes with nails.

March shrugged, and handed Joey a beer, allowing the question to lay in rest.

“I think I’m going to come with you.”

“Yeah. Okay.”

“Okay. Okay, great. I’ll see you soon. Do you have everything you need?”

“I don’t think I need anything else.”

And then March hung up.

Joey stood in her living room, still spinning around a little bit. She couldn’t feel the numbness in her arms like March was feeling, like what would have happened when they were little kids. Who knew if their telepathy had been their shared experience phenomenon, or a true connection that transcended their human forms and bonded them together. She only felt worried, and sick. She continued trying to think about what could be causing March to be so weird. She did work at a hospital, so the surfeit of viruses and infections that crawled the sterile white walls offered too many possibilities. She’d been there for 5 years though, and this had never happened, so it wasn’t likely to be from a patient.

Joey decided she was going to March’s home on the East side. She’d try to see if there was anything abnormal, before heading to the cabin.

When Joey arrived at her sister’s house, the first thing that she noticed was the glow from all of the lights on in her living room. That was unusual. She jumped out of her old, 2004 subaru, and punched in the four digit code to open the door. All of this was like her own home, like walking into a kitchen she had designed herself. The smells were the same as their childhood, the tapestries on the wall were familiar though new, and her sister’s closet was 12 percent clothing exchanges from her own closet.

Joey walked into March’s bedroom doorway and scanned the room to carefully identify anything out of place. Blue walls, plants moist and thriving, a drawer slightly open…

Joey’s hand plunged into the open drawer and pulled and rustled around. Her hand clutched a crinkling object. She wrapped her hand around a bag of grey-white stems. Joey’s eyes widened, and suddenly she realized that she hadn’t heard March’s pit bull, Penelope barking in the background. March’s home always came with a dog alarm system. Joey turned around to see the sliding glass door open slightly. She walked outside and scanned the yard where Penelope would be motorized by her nose, investigating what they all knew was out there: succulents, a lemon and an avocado tree, strings of lights, lawn chairs, and a pebble trail. But there was no dog to be found.

She heard a soft slow-cracking sound and looked up in the avocado tree. She saw the silhouette of a white coat with black dots, the orca whale pattern they had attributed to Penelope.

Penelope? In a tree?!

Joey choked on her thoughts, and immediately climbed onto one of the lower branches. From beneath, she could see Penelope’s little claws pressed against the flatter part of the trunk, her arms as high on the branches above her as possible, her head pointed directly upward to the night sky. Still, she was completely silent, “Penny?!” Joey shouted, “Penny!” No sound.

Joey’s heart and body completely froze when in her mind, she remembered: the fungus ophiocordyceps unilateralis. She didn’t know much about it, except that it invaded the bodies of ants, took over their muscular systems, made them into zombies that climbed to the tops of stems or branches, slowly killing them. After time, the fungus would grow a fruiting body called a stroma out of the ant’s dorsal pronotum to then spread spores into the air. A patron had shared this phenomenon with her once, while she was half paying attention wondering whether it was a fantasy story or real, realizing quickly it was nonfiction after seeing all the other science books the patron was checking out.

Joey bolted for the car and raced down the highway to make it to the cabin. She believed that if she could stop her sister from climbing the tree, then she could take her to the hospital and get her treated. She’d never heard of anyone becoming a zombie from mushrooms, but she knew that March had purchased a bag of psilocybin from a friend of a friend for a music festival last weekend.

When Joey got to the cabin, she could hear bass from a speaker shaking the windows, and she could feel the deep pulse in her chest. The noise was a thick, erratic, and buzzing static sound. Something she imagined manifesting behind the mind of a bee navigating the whirring of wind. It was so loud, she couldn’t hear herself think. She ran to the door, which was stuttering open and closed, probably creaking under all of the sound. The living room was fully lit, and the place was in order. The back door was also open, and before Joey ran to the other side of the cabin, she turned down the speaker to a slight hum.

“March!” Joey screamed, “MARCH!”

She ran outside and found herself neck-craned up toward the canopy of trees. They had selected this cabin from four others because it was so isolated, so sheltered in by trees. They loved climbing trees as kids. When they turned twenty and had become barred from sporadic adventure due to lunch meetings, and work weeks, and certifications, bills, and school, they taught themselves how to rock climb on the weekends. On real rocks. Joey suddenly felt regretful of her learning this skill so well. March, as a physical therapist, understood how each and every one of her muscles worked, and she was able to cure them back to health so easily. She would have no trouble climbing any of these trees.

Joey sprinted to each tree, trying to see if she could see her sister’s body high up in any of them. She hadn’t seen her that morning, but knew that her scrubs were usually earth tones, which definitely wouldn’t help her now.

Finally, after a few minutes, she heard a sigh. She ran to one of the highest trees in their cabin’s backyard. She tried to slow her jolting eyes down so that she could carefully peer through the leaves and branches. After breathing in and out a few times, allowing her heart to calm down, she saw it- the white flash of a tennis shoe. She knew those were March’s. Her body was camouflaged by leaves and branch arms, so Joey started climbing.

It wasn’t a smooth tree that was easy to press up against, cause friction to move up, and it wasn’t textured like a rock in which you could easily grab and thrust your limbs up. Joey grunted and began sweating, barely noticing that the tree was braiding splinters into her hands and knees, and scraping bloody streams into her skin. As she climbed up, she kept her head skyward, so that she could know if March was still with her. She started to feel a numbness in her body as she climbed up the tree, and then a surrender.

Joey remembered the festival just as well as March had that week. It was a blur now, and she could recall the feel of wrinkled mushrooms in her palm. She couldn’t wait for her favorite electronic band to perform, and she battled whether or not she would be sober or psychedelic for it. She didn’t remember that she split the dose in half, thinking that maybe just a little bit wouldn’t hurt.

As Joey and March climbed to the top of the tree, they held hands, who knows if it was their own instinct, or the intention of the fungus, spreading itself across the two organisms. March had been so relieved when she heard Joey climbing up the tree beneath her; they’d done everything the same since they were born. They’d started walking on the same day, they graduated from the same college, and their periods had been in sync for years. She thought to herself, knowing for certain that with an eyebrow twitch, and a slight grin, two parts of her body she could still slightly control, I’m so glad you’re here too.

But from the interwoven maze that the two had become, pulsing with the ophiocordyceps unilateralis strumming motions between them, they would never know who thought it last.