cee-cee manrique

Winner — Editor’s Spotlight Award in Fiction

We are the mycelia in the soil that remembers

At what point in the morning do the mycelia recede? As she rises or as she gets up to leave? Or do they remain in her outline—the mycelia in the soil that remembers? They know something of her, something she doesn’t even know of herself, something that she will not come to know until she is returned to the earth.

Seen from above, curled about each other, are the remains of a woman and a bear. The man can only imagine it as a moment of violence.

1. Loph has run away from some men

She has made it to the holloway, breathless from running away. She sort of fell in—to the crash and flutter of leaving birds. The ones who remain watch quietly, unseen. A tawny owl that she has heard so many times but never seen is motionless, pressing itself ever-so-slightly farther back into a hollow in an old beech tree. The small, wood-bark-patterned owl that Loph has worshipped as a disembodied spirit is watching over her now, the black and blinking eyes of a tree.

How has it gotten to this point? Loph thinks.

She knows this holloway so intimately, even in ways she isn’t conscious of. She has been here to rest so often, cradled in the rough old arms of gnarled hawthorns, legs dangling from long-uprooted ash trees that now bridge the holloway banks, their skirts lifted, exposing their root systems. They have been tipped back to the earth by a windstorm on its next lap of the planet. She has awoken here on dewy mornings, slung under the canopy of a sycamore in a hammock like a bean pod, plucking slugs from her restless hair.

But she is too tired to understand how she has gotten here now, in this moment, chased by men from her home. Her body writhes with feelings like thousand-legged invertebrates crawling beneath her shins. Her shoulder aches and spasms like the turn of some deep earthworm washed up from near the soft mantle. She remembers the tired, juddering, last flaps and throes of slick pilot whales she saw from the clifftops as a child. How did she get here now—chased away and full with the desperate need to stuff her mouth with leaf litter countless seasons deep, and full of twigs that jab her gums and worm casts that dry against the backs of her teeth? Beetles, in shock, dart from her open mouth. She wears a beard of moss, her tongue a creature of the soil again.

2. Loph stops to rest her aching body

In her exhaustion, and despite the impending panic attack, the banks of the holloway invite her to rest. She wants only to pull the entire earth over her as a blanket—the whole land—stripping the hills of their meadows and gorse and heather, tugging the grass from beneath the hooves of wild ponies, upturning ewes and sending the moths and butterflies into ceaseless flight, draining the eyes of ancient pools and scattering the tadpoles that writhe now in the jelly of her own. She wants only to tug at the entirety of the surface of this land that she knows, screwing and bundling it up like a blanket as she rolls onto her side, stuffing it beneath her chin and the crook of her arm, clattering down all of the gates and fences. Though she knows the men will be coming for her, she needs to stop. She buries her face in the humic layer and screams a silent rage that turns immediately to rock.

It is a curse that one day some man will splinter his elbow against as he tries to dig for bones, his spade jarring against the basalt of a woman’s ire. He will find her bones and call them a man because what woman could have died hunting a bear? What woman could have faced a bear with a flint-knapped dagger? Seen from above, curled about each other, are the remains of a woman and a bear. The man can only imagine it as a moment of violence. This excites him; wait until he tells everyone and has his name attached to his discovery. His man and his bear, who fought alone in the woods together.

And yes, they fought, but no, they weren’t alone—there just aren’t any remains of the others who were there.

But she is getting ahead of herself, Loph, untethered in time by her panic attack in the holloway. How could there possibly be a bear or any man in any future? What hope of a future can she dig for through the soils of time as she finds herself bellowing into the belly of the earth? Because it all feels too late, too far gone.

You have to ground yourself, she thinks, even as she reaches upwards desperately from beneath the weight of her panic and the sweet dampness of the holloway banks that rise around her. She feels sunk in the ground, and this thought makes her cackle at herself. Some soil tumbles down her chin. She spits the rest onto the moss.

Who cares if they hear you? Scream into the air. Who cares if they come for you, sister; let it out.

They have always been scared of a woman in transition, have never been able to face her unnamed parts. They would have no hope to face Loph now in her fullness; dagger, hills, gorsethorn drawing blood from her circumference. They cannot face the women of the earth, those who are sisters to themselves, to the land, to each other.

Breathe, Loph, breathe. Scream, but catch your breath in between, save it for your curses. Come back to now, put your hands on the ground.

She puts her hands on the earth and tries to settle into the moment, to stop her presence from meandering through time as the holloway does. The moment she touches the earth, deep exhaustion passes through her palms and lodges itself in her bone marrow. Quicksand sleep overcomes her. She cannot run away any further. She will not.

3. Loph sleeps and dreams of a bear

During the night and her sleep—and she will never know this—just as her body leaves an indentation in the mosses, so do the mycelia of a fungus rise toward her and form almost a nest of hyphae in her outline. Just under the surface of the soil, the network of tendrils takes the form of her imprint. Not shadow or reflection; more like some sketch or a memory holding the soil together, holding her gently in place, cradling her. Do a few hyphae leave the soil to gently rest against her shoulder, hip, legs, her forearm that holds her head? Do they move as she shifts in the night, turning from one side to the other, recorded briefly in the mosses and the hyphae?

She dreams of a bear, padding the perimeter of a vast tract of woodland. Unbroken woodland, the like of which she has never known, has never even seen before in her dreams. This bear, in her hulking padding and her depth of bellows, commands the perimeter of this great tract of woodland. This bear has risen from it, risen through the soils from a crack in the bedrock. This bear is a deep, compressed memory of the earth. There are no other bears yet, just this one, the last bear, returned now as the first. The burrowing creatures, the scuttling ones, hide from the bear, though they are welcome. It is other creatures that she will tear apart, the men who hunted her kind until she was the last. When she has finished with them, the blackened birds will come and pick away their bones. They will leave no trace of them on the land, no remains to be dug up.

4. Loph awakens

As she awakens, something recedes. As her dream dissolves, she sits up slowly, placing her hands flat against the soil. She feels something withdraw quickly, some tendrils. Not recoiling, but as if shocked by her touch. The clasp of her dream slips away gently, and she remembers a time she felt a beloved life loosen its grip in her hand, softening and releasing before slowly stiffening. She is caught between realms. Her eyes are open, but she cannot yet see what has sprung up around her. She is lost in the static of her dream, stranded in the white noise of something forgotten that she can feel in her gut like a pebble on an unknown shore. Sand washes over the pebble, silk over a slick, wet boulder. She isn’t aware yet that the rains fell in the night. A light fizz of moisture saturates the air, a low cloud creeping in silence through the holloway like placid ghosts lost in some memory, hands clasped behind their backs, heads bowed.

The soils have been inundated with rainfall, and the mycelia are swollen. Thick purple mushrooms have been released into the day, pushing up through the leaf mulch. Dozens of them. Loph half-notices them as she also begins to feel needles poking like a toothache from within the marrow of her bones.

It is a searing, radiating pain. It feels remembered somehow, familiar, like the return of something kept at bay, locked away for too long in her skeleton. From some great internal distance, deep in the red and yellow of her marrow, the pain flickers and blinks into her consciousness like a brand new star pricking through the night sky. Her vision blurs from the pain, a thousand million distant stars perforating the darkness.

She feels suddenly unmoored, adrift under an unfamiliar night sky. These are foreign constellations. She has awoken on some other continent. There is no Great Bear, no ram, no coiled fish. There are only undecipherable new configurations, risen to the surface, a shark in the bioluminescence.

All of this is impossible and yet has risen from within her own body, her own bones. She has carried it all with her as she did her weekly shop, cleaned her home, sent emails.

Loph is slowly realizing something. But she can’t fathom what questions to ask or who to ask them of.

Take a breath, darling, take a breath.

She draws a long, slow breath in through her nose. She doesn’t know whether this is the first breath or the thousandth since she fell out of her dreams and cracked her ribs on this distant continent.

Please, Loph, keep breathing.

Even as she panics through the pain, she manages to reason with herself to take another breath. She pulls it in gently through her nose, and as she does so, she remembers some sweet, proud boy heaving in an anchor onto his father’s boat. She remembers the first time a loved one caressed her hair. She remembers her name on the lips of another.

The petrichor rushes into her nostrils and floods her whole system, flushes her. Suddenly and at last, she is spat out on a familiar shore, grounded once again in the dampness of the holloway.

She comes to, surrounded by dozens of thick purple mushrooms. It is as if they have fruited once again, drawn from the soils by her noticing. As she pats herself down, checking for cracks or breaks, blackthorn spines or gorseflower, she feels the sticky fat slickness of two coiled slugs and plucks them from her body.

5. Loph, the men, and the bear

As she gets up to leave, she takes a moment to pause. She is wondering whether to turn back toward or away from the men who forced her here. She knows they will have begun their searches with the daylight. As she thinks, she is looking into the hollow of an old beech tree. It feels somehow full, the hollow, maybe even tense or coiled. Then there is the sudden snap of twigs and the low murmur of another creature or two. In the same moment that she feels a twig snap in her own skeleton, the hollow in the tree blinks twice. As the men enter the holloway, the tawny owl drops from the hollow of the beech tree and flies away from them all in perfect silence. She follows its passage and in some way, departs with the owl.

As the pale men approach, they are confident, set, intent—as is so often their way. To them, what will happen is inevitable. Women like Loph are not permitted. We will not recount their words here, and the earth will reject their actions. The land will not record these men.

As they froth and slather toward her, Loph turns slowly to face them. There is gorsethorn about her midriff, drawing thick, slow rivulets of blood. Invertebrates spiral up her shins and worms from the deep, deep earth stand erect from her shoulders. Moths and butterflies are caught in some thermal that coils around her.

The pale men mean to take her body apart and sprawl it across the land, but that is not how she will return to the earth. Ewes and ponies thud the ground either side of them. A brief meadow unrolls itself in front of their feet until it reaches hers, whipping up its tail-end and vanishing immediately. Off-white, almost lilac tendrils are tugging at her feet. An owl disappears behind her, leaving the holloway, and with that, the beech tree behind her is not so much pulled into the earth but almost crumples, imploding, drawn in upon itself. The old mycelia, the deep, ancient taproot mycelia, the tendrils that touch the bedrock of the earth, strike into the compressed memory of the soils like a dagger of slow lightning, cleaving open the fossilised form of some long forgotten bear.

Just as the purple mushrooms rose into the day, so now does the old bear. Loph is holding her flint dagger, smiling at the men. Beetles tumble from her mouth, mud coats her teeth. It is impossible for them to understand, but they are to be drawn apart by a bear, in a holloway, as the woman they were hunting smiles placidly.

6. We are the mycelia in the soil that remembers

When she is finished, the bear curls her body around Loph’s. Loph, with her hand tucked under her head and her knees pulled toward her chest, has opened her marrows to the soil. Her body has ossified and is at rest with the bear. But everything else of her is taken up by the mycelia. The infinitesimal galaxy of her every moment, remembered and lost, flows freely from the marrow of her bones and out into the mycelial cosmos of the soils. Here she will wait, an unfurling record of endless transition. She will wait for some sister—any sister—to lay her hands on the soil, to reach down for the mycelia as they reach toward her. In this ceaseless moment of transition, Loph is suspended in the soil, dispersed through the earth.

* This piece was originally published in the Global Diversity Foundation’s collection Re-Landing: Writing Eco-connections within Speculative Frames (2025)

cee-cee lives on the land, under a watchful old hawthorn and her attendant mycelia. From there they run a small mushroom farm with their partner. Together they steward two acres of land, from which cee-cee draws a lot of their stories, watches the big skies, stargazes and tends to a small flock of muscovy ducks and geese. They believe that the soils and the mycelia are the memory banks of the land.

Banner Art:
Otto Marseus von Schrieck (1619-1678), Forest floor still life with mushrooms, Unknown Date, Wikimedia Commons

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