The Sporulation of Lucinda Graham - Rebecca Field
The last inhabitant of the farmhouse had left ten years ago, in a wooden box. As Lucinda pulled up outside and turned off her engine, for a second she questioned whether she was in the right place. The farmyard of her memory had been so full of life; the noises of animals and machinery, farmworkers coming and going. Now there were weeds choking the downstairs windows of the farmhouse, the roof had several gaping holes, and the boundary walls that marked out the garden had become indistinct as they fell into disrepair. Only the gnarled apple trees still showed some signs of life.
As Lucinda walked through the empty rooms, she felt as if she was disturbing the ghosts of the past. Mould had sprung up in every corner, and there was a giant fungus of some kind growing from a rug by the old fireplace, where once her grandfather used to sit in his chair. After his death, no new tenant for the farm had been found. All of the animals had been sold or given away, the personal effects removed, and the buildings shut up. The farm seemed to have entered a period of senescence, as if the cycle of its life was complete. Lucinda looked up at the sky through the holes in the roof. To her, it was perfect. After all, she had no further need for people, possessions, or home comforts. She had spent a lifetime fighting isolation, now it was time to embrace it.
The book had said conditions needed to be unfavourable, so Lucinda set to work to create them. First, she emptied the cupboards of all the ancient tinned goods with their peeling labels. She tipped out their mushy contents onto the old compost heap. The house was no longer connected to the electricity grid, but she opened the valves on the stored bottles of propane; she wouldn’t be needing heat. Next, she threw open the windows and doors, letting in the bracing winds that tore through the valley, felt the goose pimples spring up on her bare arms. She stripped the mildewed sheets from the beds and threw them from the upstairs windows, watching them billow and float across the hillside, settling like patches of snow on the grass. Finally, she took off her jumper, then her blouse and trousers and threw them out after the sheets. She was glad there were no neighbours to disturb her or question her sanity as she roamed the house in her underwear.
In a cupboard under the stairs, Lucinda found an old toy pram she recognised as a relic of her childhood; the hours she had spent dressing and bathing dolls and stuffed animals, tucking them up under blankets at the foot of her bed, kissing them goodnight in turn. Later she’d come here at lambing time, nursed the cade lambs, and cried when it was time for them to be sold, feeling bereft and useless. Nurturing new life was a calling she had felt, long before she could have put that desire into words. But she’d gone about it completely the wrong way; she could see that now.
Lucinda’s first sexual encounter was a portent of so many others that followed. She remembered the grey bath mat she had laid upon in the narrow bathroom (the only room that had been unoccupied at the house party), the feel of it as it slid backwards and forwards on the linoleum as her partner moved on top of her, and how her body had felt like it belonged to somebody else. She’d felt none of the feelings she had read about, and instead focused upon a single droplet of sweat that formed on one of the boy’s armpit hairs, watching it grow in size as she waited for the act to be over. Later that month, she had ticked off the days in her diary, studied the size of her belly in her bedroom mirror. When her period arrived, she was not surprised, only a little disappointed.
As she drifted through her teens and twenties, Lucinda never found it difficult to find new and willing sexual partners, each time hoping this would be the last, yet each encounter left her unfulfilled. The men themselves held no interest for her. She wasn’t looking for companionship, or stability; she wanted to feel the growth of a baby in her womb, to experience the pains of labour, the joyous release of childbirth. She wanted her body to bloom and ripen, to stretch and distend, but it seemed her body had other ideas. Each month without fail, her period would return and she wondered why her body was failing in the one thing it was programmed to do; to reproduce.
Then one afternoon, Lucinda wandered into her local library. She browsed the new titles, but there was nothing that sparked her interest. On the way out, on a display of books about nature, she noticed a book about fungi. She picked it up and flicked through it on a whim. Fungi, it seemed could reproduce asexually, especially in times of strife. They could enter the sporulation cycle, creating multiple clones of themselves in the absence of a sexual partner. Why hadn’t anyone told her about this before? All those years of awkwardness with men, messy sexual encounters, failed relationships. She didn’t need a man at all. She didn’t need anyone. She just needed to learn how to sporulate.
*
As Lucinda lay shivering on the damp mattress, she wondered what more she could do to make the environment inhospitable. The yellowed curtains blew gently in the evening air and the light of her candle flickered, making shadows dance on the ceiling above. Of course, she thought. Why did she need to be indoors at all? She jumped up and grasped hold of the old horsehair mattress, pulled it to the top of the stairs and gave it a push. It slid easily down the staircase and out of the open front door. She dragged it to a flat, open place in the garden, away from the apple trees. She would spend this night beneath the stars. It was too soon for anything to happen yet. Though the book had made no mention of sporulation in other species, Lucinda knew instinctively that it would not be a quick process.
As night fell, Lucinda took off her remaining garments, lay down and smiled. It had been a full day since her last meal; her stomach growled and her mouth was as parched as the earth below her. She allowed herself a sip of water from her flask and closed her eyes. Her bones ached; she wanted to sink into the oblivion of sleep, but her violent shivering wracked her body with convulsions and her thoughts began to whirl with images of a hundred tiny children all clamouring for a piece of her.
At dawn, Lucinda woke with the morning dew sparkling in her hair. She forced her tongue over cracked lips, tasted the clean air. Nervously, she traced a hand across her abdomen, perceiving that a slight swelling had begun. She smiled; it was working. Although she had slept, Lucinda still felt exhausted, as if she had been running up and down the hillside all night long. Sporulation must be a draining process, she decided. She drifted back to sleep, this time dreaming that she was being overwhelmed by a flood of small creatures, like mice with human faces, who climbed up her legs, over her body, into her hair, pushing her down until she collapsed under the weight of them. When next she awoke, she no longer had any concept of the amount of time that had passed. She reached down, felt the skin tightening over her distended abdomen and felt relief flood over her; her plan was working.
As the days and nights passed, Lucinda woke only for brief snatches of time. Sometimes the sun was beating down upon her blistered face from a cloudless sky, or her skin was being assaulted by needles of rain. Other times she woke to flashes of pain as her abdomen stretched ever tighter, like an enormous ripe watermelon, ready to spew forth its contents. Once she woke to find herself surrounded by a flock of inquisitive sheep, staring at her with their slotted eyes. The last time she woke, she was surrounded by darkness. She marvelled at the countless stars that swirled in the sky above her, the enormity of the cosmos and the miracle that was her life and the lives she felt growing within her.
There came a time when Lucinda woke no more. Her skeletal frame was desiccated, like the empty carapace of an insect that had outgrown its skin. Only her enormous belly still pulsated and throbbed in the light of the moon, ripples spreading over the taut skin like the surface of a lake hiding a great monster.
Finally, one afternoon, the sporangium that had once been Lucinda exploded, releasing thousands of tiny humans, each no bigger than a grain of sand. The wind welcomed them into the world, gathered them into its chilly embrace and scattered them over the mountains, the lakes, the islands. The wind carried the spores to distant shores and foreign lands where they were deposited onto the tongues of fertile women who took them in unknowingly, nurtured them, and gave birth to them, each a perfect image of Lucinda Graham, each praised as a miracle in their own right. Lucinda’s work was complete.
Originally published by Hencroft Hub Magazine, April 2021
Rebecca Field lives and writes in Derbyshire, UK. She has work in several print anthologies and has also been published online by The Phare, Ghost Parachute, Fictive Dream, Gone Lawn, Tiny Molecules, Milk Candy Review and Ellipsis Zine among others. Tweets at @RebeccaFwrites
