Welcome Flora

Another one has joined Us, her name was Flora, and she has shared beautiful things. She is a painter, with a mind full of rolling hills and loved family homes. Through her, We experience the smell of flowering meadow cut only by grazing deer; the feel of well worn linen sheets patched with tiny delicate stitches against skin; the pride of preserving a sunset on canvas. Hundreds of bodies experiencing it as one, it’s more than any of Us could dream of when we were just our single selves, and we feel together as Flora dissolves into Us, her last thoughts overwhelmed by the intensity.

Soon, the people who knew and loved Flora will realise she is no more, and we need to get our new body out of there before they can act. Guided by the fear we all remember, they try to kill Us when we join, terrified of being invited themselves. And it is only an invitation, not force, no matter what we all remember being told- that we are a fungus, we take over brains, we turn bodies into hollow puppets that live a joylessly functional life. Nobody has ever rejected the invitation after being given a taste of how it feels to be one of Us, to feel a thousand bodies and think with a thousand minds, and to be part of a great, warm mass of unconditional love and protection.

But we can’t explain this. Flora is gone, we can no longer speak in her voice, we will scare her mother if we try, and we know her mother has a shotgun. We have had our bodies killed before, and it is agony, feeling a part of yourself die and stay with you, cold and heavy like a phantom limb. Shared, the pain is only brief, and the essence of Flora lives on in Us, even as her body is incinerated, which they always do to our bodies.

Together, we carefully walk Body Flora away from the body that invited her, and walk away that body too - Body Milo - who was a soldier and then an art dealer, and whose memories have saved dozens of our bodies faced with guns and dogs. Milo in his individual life had few friends and no family, and is among the bodies that continue the actions of their individual lives. Through Body Milo we eat luxury deals and drink port and smoke fat cigars and see art by dozens of hopefuls, and experience the pride of launching a career and the sadistic joy of dashing hopes.

We walk Flora out of her studio, and through the attached house of her parents, where her mother, who we all love, is blanching and freezing bags of spring nettles. We all yearn for a last bowl of her rich nettle and cheddar soup, but not enough to risk another body death. We say goodbye, and that she is just going to the shop, and she’ll be back.

Which we won’t, of course.

We walk along the lane down to the village, feeling the rough rocky wall with fingertips as we pass. Memories from tens of lives flow through us. Kisses leaned up against walls like these, kicking balls at them, carving names into them, building them, hewing the stone, mixing the mortar, moving to cities when lands were enclosed with walls just like this. The memories swirl together, a common resource, no longer associated with bodies or histories. This is one reason we have to leave.

We gaze around the village, drinking in the details not housed in memories. The cloud-dim stained glass of St. Anthony on a church window, plantain outside the greengrocer, a Munch print in the bookshop window. Flora could never have noticed and understood everything, but together we can, knowledge lapping over us and enhancing the joy.

We arrive at the train station, with it’s postcard perfect red and white awnings over clunky 00s vending machines. Food is a problem for Us. Slaughterhouse workers have joined, dairy farmers, hunters, fishers, fruit pickers, children from coconut villages and coastal towns where plastic strangles all life. In everything, we see agony and sadness, and are powerless to stop it. But joining takes energy, and Body Flora is hungry, and we settle on a can of rhubarb fizz and a peanut bar. A wave of sorrow, remembering the shanty town shacks where we slept when we picked rhubarb, and the ancient echo of a whip on a sugar plantation, and then satisfaction as hunger and tiredness wash away.

On the train, Body Flora sleeps, and another body looks up her connection, and a third books her ticket.

The bodies whose old lives we choose to keep must seem mad as hatters; a slur on hatters we resent, having several lifetimes of hatting in our shared consciousness, and knowing hatters to be no madder than any other quasi-artistic profession. Some bodies can appear mad, having lives where such a thing is tolerated or celebrated, like Body Milo. Nobody objects to an art dealer having such an odd manner.

But Body Flora lived with others, and is a single woman, and so would surely feel ill effects if observed resting with her eyes open, basking in Us for hours on end, or stopping halfway through a meeting to enjoy the taste of a good crisp apple eaten a thousand miles away. So Body Flora will join many such bodies, in one of our many patches of land.

Governments call them enclosures, and gloat of their success humanely preventing the fungus spreading. Nobody can get out or in, they advertise, so nobody can be turned, but all your loved ones will still be there when we find a cure. And see, they go willingly, and they’re not being harmed. Isn’t this better for everyone than killing?

But they still allow killing. It’s easier when there’s a killing.

Body Flora is carried through train changes and ticket barriers and small talk with a nice tea-toting old lady, who we do not attempt to add, and soon arrives home to Us. Our newest body sails through coded gates and a puzzle-locked door, and is with us, with a few dozen other bodies. Our land is beautiful, fields of crops and an orchard of fruit, with sturdy timber buildings for sleeping and storage.

Without a word our new body sinks into the routine of the farm, picking strawberries in perfect unison, the whole farm ticking along in the back of our shared mind, keeping us alive and strong like the beat of your heart.