Under the cover of night, a woman wanders into the forest and strips bare before the largest morel she can find. The mycelium threaded her veins for months before she finally understood it as hunger.
She circles it — once, twice — the way an animal does before it lies down. Then she lowers herself over the honeycomb cap until it kisses her swollen vulva. She waits. How wild she looks in the moonglow, naked and straddling the damp earth, ravenous in ways she’s never known.
Finally, the morchella pushes inside her.
Its delicate ridges slowly swell to fill her, sending long, undulating waves of pleasure throughout her body. She had not expected the rapture of it.
Unable to control herself, she collapses to all fours and bucks and moans into the night. Pulse after pulse courses through her limbic system as it and the morel entangle. She feels herself extending downward and outward, connecting to the ancient mycelial network beneath the forest floor.
Tears roll over her lips, which open in perpetual orgasm. The inside of her thighs drip sweat and come that the earth eagerly drinks. The air smells rich and vegetal. The tang of her own arousal mingles with the deep, loamy scent of the soil, and she can no longer tell where one ends and the other begins.
Her final orgasm causes the entire mycelial mat to tremor.
The morel exhales its reproductive spores into the night air — an invisible cloud rising around her, settling on her skin, in her hair, on the wet of her lips.
Above her, the canopy sways despite the windless night. The woman stays where she is for a long while, forehead pressed to the earth, breathing reestablishing a more human rhythm.
But the thread remains. She can feel it still: woven into the meat of her, running all the way, all the way down.