Aglow

'Tis the season to brave the woods and flee the light, to walk past snaking root and under writhing branch, eyes astray and attuned, as the day fades and muscles dilate, to the glow of fruiting bodies that feast on the fibres of fallen wood and release, into the drift of nocturnal upwellings, a cloud of spores, an unconscious stream of free-floating bodies that form the expendable multitide of a mycelian assault. Boards creak, leaves crackle and soft fruit crumble as tortured soles stumble on, inching forward with little inkling of what lies beyond the glare of fickle torches and seeking, laces askew, to be shocked, stunned and disappointed by the spring of a field frog, the rustle of an arboreal spider, the leap of a cricket or the tell-tale end of a bronzebacked serpent as it scales darker heights.

'Tis the season to question your words, to wonder at the strength you still show in silence amid all that is keeping you from what should be familiar, friendly and frightfully so – yet, in these boulevards of broken things, which chart the slow, sure decline of a beastly realm, there is still room for thought, for the entertainment of every surge in desire and every slip of despair, for invisible queries and unreturned glances, exchanges of inaptitude and evasive nods of acknowledgement for the courtesies of a sober age, in which reticence is shunned and revelations celebrated with scant regard for the sanity of those who have little to say and everything to lose when private daemons are betrayed to angelic hordes. The signals are mixed, or messed up, rather, with every show of heart that follows these quiet deprivations, with each day of hope that slides, tongue unchecked, into imagined conversations that always end in brutal turnabouts and threaten to wreck the pulse of minds that'd soon fall torpid, and to pieces with time, but for these slight, stubborn detours to paths with minuscule ends.