by R. Karas
Mira’s psyche was indistinguishable from the wet, decaying wood underneath her boots. Tadeo had convinced her to hike through the dead forest to clear their minds, to savor what was left of their once beloved thicket. The pumping of her heart did feel nice, although it barely lifted her spirits as she walked through the cemetery of trees. Every few steps, Mira imagined what she would say to Tadeo once they were clear from the woods. Starting off her tirade with I love you, but… until she fleshed out the reasons their excursion had drained every bit of hope she had left. Next time she’d convince him to walk through the abandoned neighborhoods instead. Those decrepit monoliths didn’t dismantle her quite like the dead trees.
She had gotten ahead of Tadeo already, although not far enough to lose the rhythmic swish of his hiking pants. Seeing the forest so barren was like witnessing the festering corpse of a loved one, and she had no intention of looking longer than needed. Mira reached a patch of the forest previously unseen as she walked on with her head down. The light grew and undulated underneath the barren branches, as if the foliage had thinned out ahead of her, and she paused, bringing her eyes up, scanning the threadbare canopy above her for once. She trudged through massive downed trunks and crackling dead leaves, amazed at the change in umbrage. If Tadeo had called for her, asking where she was going, she wasn’t sure she’d have an answer. The rustling curiosity in her sternum led her further.
A glimpse of a clearing flashed between the trunks, and for a dizzying moment, Mira was certain she saw lush, bursts of color. She pulled herself through the dead limbs more fervently, scratched and brutalized by her insistence. Mira finally emerged between two gnarled trees to find an impossible scene. The clearing was so verdant, so full of life, Mira could only stand there, astounded. Ferns with deep green hues, saplings, and swaying wildflowers stood defiantly before her. Nothing grew in such a way anymore. Saliva pooled across her tongue; the foliage reminded her of leafy greens and fresh crops she hadn’t eaten in years. And although she wouldn’t be sampling the inedible plants, it was enough to awaken her yearning. Humanity subsisted on chalky, lab-grown supplements that burned when swallowed, a side-effect Mira abhorred, yet found fitting. She heard Tadeo’s footsteps through the thicket and his gentle gasp shortly thereafter. Mira gently ran her fingers through the wildflowers: prairie smoke, dwarf lake iris, and cheerful trilliums.
“Holy hell. Mira, what is this?”
She looked back at Tadeo with tears in her eyes, her jaw slackening when his umber eyes confirmed it wasn’t a hallucination. Elation throbbed within her as she scanned the tiny verdant corner. She nearly threw herself to the ground, still careful to avoid crushing any plants, searching for the source of their nourishment in the soil. She carefully pulled at the stem of a trillium flower, and just underneath its leaves was a shrubby, coral-like lichen. Mira hadn’t been seeking out lichen, hadn’t even considered it as a soil replenishment option, but it was as if the symbiotic colony was meant for her eyes only. It had been years since she saw a healthy patch of colonies, and the seemingly magical algae was a relic of a better time. When she was a child, she was often found hunched over in the backyard, watching lichen’s gill-like appendages splayed across rotten wood. It seemed out of place, a vibrant outsider in a world of grass lawns and earthy tones.
Later in life, during her undergrad, lichen found a way to bloom into her life again. The ancient vegetable garden near the biology department, tucked in a sunlit courtyard, was a place she still dreamed of. Lined throughout the patio, like a legion of faeries, sat rocks blushing with various shades of lichen: an electric teal, lime green, a few yellow. The lichen was part of an experiment that the department had been conducting for years. She remembered her advisor smiling up at her as she dug through the dirt in a huge sun hat, explaining how the first step to breaking down the rocks and unlocking their nutritious potential was the formation of the strange lichen colonies they watched under microscopes. Although, by Mira’s senior year, the garden had shriveled and died completely. Such devastation was a common occurrence by then: the slow decaying end of various natural entities. But that year, when the vegetables turned to mush well before the harvest, other flora around them began to die violently fast as well. The lichen no longer helped; the erosion had washed any soil sustenance away, and eventually, the government outlawed any pleasure gardens at all, claiming that any and all nutrients had to go to the large-scale farmers. Even their sparse tomato plants stole too much from the soil.
Mira was reminded of that magical little garden as she waded through the plants, how the lichen had enriched the soil so deeply that her professors regularly gifted big, blooming gift baskets full of vegetables during exam season, when the students were at their most malnourished. As she pressed her face against the cool earth, she found that the lichen covered the ground completely underneath the flowers’ canopy in a deep burgundy hue.
“Tadeo, look. I’ve never seen lichen this color before.”
Tadeo gazed with his mouth open and smiling at Mira, shaking his head.
“Of course you would stumble upon this,” he laughed.
She smiled and turned back to the plants, while the back of her ears burned with his tender gaze. Tadeo was the outgoing one, so easily open with strangers and the rotating activists and scientists who streamed through their community. Mira, to the benefit of her research, kept her head down, always looking for the details, her mind racing for an answer. How Tadeo was ever able to lift her chin from her chest and pull her into his life, she’d never know, but she was grateful. Something glinted from the corner of her eye while she gently prodded the lichen with a stick, and she saw Tadeo offer a test tube so she could gather a sample. Mira heard more glass beakers clinking together in his fanny pack, and she couldn’t think of anything more romantic.
They were silent as she pulled small bushels of the burgundy fungus with tweezers. She only took a few samples, hesitant to disrupt the colony. As she pulled another part away, murmuring thanks to the pieces she would soon sacrifice to the microscope altar, something caught her eye underneath the all-encompassing patch.
Underneath the lichen was a strange rock formation. Mira gently prodded at the spaces below and confirmed that the rock took up a good portion of the area. The wildflowers had draped themselves over it as if they were protectors.
“What the hell is under here, Tades? A fossil?”
Mira carefully pulled the foliage to the side while Tadeo crouched over, his breath whistling through his nose.
“I have no idea. It looks…really fragile though.”
The rock seemed to be a warm-toned limestone, that much Mira was sure of. In the tiny area where she had taken a sample, Mira found a triangular shape, filled with thousands of small circles that fit inside. Mira thought it looked like the cross-section of veins and arteries, some fossilized circulatory system that the lichen must be feeding on. But it didn’t make sense. In all of her years of research, she had seen a wide array of lichen breaking down plant matter and rocks, but never on such a strange geometric shape entrenched in rock.
“I don’t want to disturb it, but I think I need to take some of this rock too. If this process has anything to do with the booming of plants around here…then I really want to figure out what it is.”
“Definitely think you should,” Tadeo said, looking at the sky and forest around them.
“What’s wrong?” Mira asked, standing up straight, suddenly nervous, he saw a helicopter or a drone in the sky.
“I want to make sure I remember landmarks so we can find this place again,” he told her, tapping his fingertips on the bark of a nearby tree.
Mira sighed with relief as she placed the strange, crumbling rocks into another test tube. She found another in her hand before she had to ask Tadeo at all.
“I know how much pressure you put on yourself, and I don’t want you worrying about the team right now…and I don’t want you to feel like a failure if it doesn’t work out,” Tadeo whispered to Mira in the kitchen, shortly after arriving home.
Mira knew he was right. A sighed escaped her, and she gave Tadeo the vials without meeting his eyes. The kitchen was empty, but there were voices upstairs. If Tadeo stopped by the lab to drop someone off into the cooler, no one would bat an eye. If Mira were to enter the lab, everyone would stop, curious as to what their resident field scientist was up to. Mira waited until she heard the squeak of the upstairs door and their muffled greetings before heading upstairs as well.
They had lived in the abandoned mansion for a little over a year with fellow rogue scientists and nonconformist friends. A once-gaudy home now housed some of the most “dangerous” academics, hidden away in a part of the city no one bothered to investigate, filled with decrepit houses. After shit had fallen apart, after they knew no one was coming to save them, Mira and most of her friends had left their jobs with the DNR, various ecology positions, watershed researchers, even wildlife rehabbers, working as synonymously as lichen on the decaying forest floor, to preserve what was left of the wild. Most of the time, this meant chaining themselves to industrial refineries or big ugly drainpipes at the edge of lakes. Although Mira was best tucked in a corner, looking at samples and thinking for far too long.
Tadeo had stolen most of the equipment for Mira at his biochemistry job. He was so beloved by the security guard, so beloved by everyone really, that no one questioned the duffle bags he dragged out through the automatic doors. She could still picture the way his curly hair flopped with every strained step he took while she waited in the “getaway” car, which was nothing more than a rusty Subaru with snarky environmental stickers on the back. It still sat in the garage just underneath them as they splayed out on their bed.
They stayed up all night in their bedroom across the hall from the lab, waiting for the rest of the team to go to bed. She avoided secrecy in her research at all costs, but the special lichen was something they needed to protect until they knew more. At the very least, she was thankful for the big, winding house for the ability to hide when need be. Hours later, after they had kept themselves awake, cheeks red with tiredness, they heard the last of their roommates leave. Mira was frozen when she heard the door close across the hall, and only moved again when Tadeo nudged her. He stood by the door like a sentinel while Mira gathered herself, and did the same moments later at the door of the lab. The tiny sample had remained a deep burgundy red, and Mira was thankful it was hearty enough to survive outside of its habitat. She mumbled gratitude at the lichen before placing it on the microscope.
It looked normal, nothing too remarkable about its winding structure and tentacle-like appendages. She’d have to run its DNA to determine exactly what made this specimen so different, but until the results came through, she’d just have to decipher what she could observe with her much less telling eyes first.
Tadeo had set up a camera to capture a time-lapse video—insistent that they observe how quickly the lichen was breaking down the rock. And then, hopefully, if the lichen flourished, Mira could consult the geology and soil experts, and they could tell her what made the soil so special. She’d eventually have to bring other teams in; she knew that the moment they’d found the lichen, but for now she enjoyed being its sole researcher. The only person who could open the mystery of its cells, and maybe bring some hope to the world around her. Soon enough, she would be up all night, unshowered, researching the precious colony she had found.
“It’s late, Mir,” Tadeo told her after setting up the camera in the back of the lab behind some cardboard boxes. Dawn was already peeking through the blinds.
She could only hum mhmmm in agreement as he squeezed her shoulders, and kept his hands there as he gently led her to the bedroom. That night, as she listened to Tadeo breathing next to her, she imagined a river of glittering red lichen flowing from within the strange stone, so viscous that it looked like blood. The tendrils reached for her so fervently, like a child, and she felt her heart tug toward them in reciprocal need.
The dream kept her shrouded in sleep longer than she’d anticipated. When Mira woke, the bed was cold, but she heard a rhythmic breathy noise somewhere down the hall. She tried not to linger on it—the usual noises in the early morning when you live with a dozen other people. But it seemed to be moving closer to her, eerily consistent until she heard it at her bedroom door. She froze, waiting for something to happen. Mira reached under the blanket, ready to pull it away until she felt something touch her side. She shrieked before she saw Tadeo’s face, close to hers.
“Mira, look,” he said, gasping and laughing, the strange breathy noise revealed as her lover’s astonishment. He turned on the light while she reached for her glasses. Mira searched his face because she couldn’t understand the emotion in his voice—she was perplexed by his reaction in her just-waking state.
The lichen rested on his palm in what Mira thought was a human-like, smug posture. It was the piece they had left for Tadeo’s time lapse. Mira moved the lichen gently with a pen from her nightstand. All that remained, coating the inside of Tadeo’s gloved hand, was a miraculous bit of dirt. It had broken down the mineral in a matter of hours, what would normally take years. The rock they had procured was gone completely, and if her hypothesis was true, the burgundy lichen had worked incredibly fast.
“I need to see that footage,” Mira said.
Three Months Later
Mira tried to mirror the excitement she saw in every corner of the lab, although she had never been proficient at feigning anything. Her mind had already raced past the joy of finding new soil and had moved to other issues. The problem now, that Mira had only shared with Tadeo in the quiet hours of the night, although she was certain some of the geologists knew as well, was that they were running out of the special rock. And despite Mira’s endless experiments on other rocks, she hadn’t found anything the lichen would break down as efficiently. The panic had seeped into every part of her. She had nightmares of her community angry with her, that they attacked her with her own experiments, the lichen acidic and burning on her skin.
Mira’s discovery had been a miraculous one. It led the various scientists and experts in their sphere to the woods, although both she and Tadeo had been discreet about who could see and interact with the lichen. The lichen produced an incredibly rich, nutritious earth. Their modest indoor garden already had sprouts from produce they hadn’t grown in years, with seeds hoarded from the gardeners in the group: pea shoots, broccoli and Brussels sprouts, even the tiny beginnings of an avocado tree. Everyone walked around with such an air of hope, cheeks reddened from laughing and smiling at each other, that things started to feel light again.
Tadeo became her rock hunter, and although he did everything he could to keep Mira’s spirits high, she figured he probably enjoyed being away from the dichotomy in their home: his sulking partner paired with giddy, floating agriculture scientists and gardeners. In the beginning, he had focused on rocks with similar makeup—slightly brittle limestone, except none of them had the same consistency they had found initially—with the strange pattern in the middle. The geologists believed it was a fossil, but it was like nothing they had seen before. It seemed to be the cross-section of an animal, although without prying out the full figure, it was impossible to know what they were looking at. They didn’t have the means to waste the rock on an excavation anyway, although there were moments when Mira thought it might be worth it.
One night, shortly after someone exclaimed they were going to throw a party, Mira and Tadeo left without a word. Someone had just decorated clumsy pink rabbits on a batch of cupcakes, and the sickly sweet smell just barely covered the aroma of cigarettes and liquor as they quietly walked out the kitchen door. Despite being saviors of the earth, they still fed their vices, which somehow gave Mira hope. She found their flushed cheeks and drunken smiles charming, a testament to their resiliency, even if she didn’t always participate.
She knew where Tadeo was driving before he turned toward the dunes: to the former beach turned barren wasteland. Lake Michigan had been drained by the federal government when she was a child; the first of the freshwater lakes sacrificed for animal agriculture and whirring AI data centers. A small portion went to Arizona, stuck in its perpetual drought, although the details were never released. Mira had no memory of the lake, but she had a picture of her mother holding Mira in the waves, clad in a blue-striped bathing suit like a little sailor. An ache formed in her chest as she wondered where they might have stood on the desolate shoreline before her. Her mom had looked so proud at the way Mira’s feet were kicking in the clear shallows. Somewhere, those same molecules of water were filtering through a data center, cooling a massive, immortal machine. Tadeo parked the car, and Mira traced the dunes with her fingertips in the air, imagining where the water might have filled the gaps. Once the silence seeped in, Mira could see the tension in Tadeo’s figure from the corner of her eyes. He pulled his hand across the back of his neck before looking toward her.
“Mira, you have to tell them soon. We only have enough rock to keep the lichen alive for a bit longer,” Tadeo murmured, ripping Mira from her daydream.
His words drifted over her like a fog. She looked out toward the dunes and sandy craters that were once the lakebed. Dust scattered in the wind. The stars were darker than she remembered. She reasoned they no longer had the flowing water to reflect their light anymore, gone dull over the strange cliffs that remained. Tadeo’s concerned stare began gnawing at her because she knew she had no words to placate him. Her plans were as desolate as the dried lake. She flicked her wrist and opened the car door, hoping the stars might shine brighter if she could see them outside of the grimy car window, but they still seemed muted. Mira walked toward the beach without looking back, although she could feel Tadeo watching. Each step toward the beach drudged up the sand and dust billowing around her. Once she reached what might have been the water’s edge, she sat down and let her muscles collapse around her like a puddle. Each time she shifted in the sand, she imagined it awakened a domino-like effect underneath her, forever shifting the landscape. The granules had no water to keep them in place, only miles and miles of dunes and craters.
Tadeo was behind her somewhere, quietly shutting the car door as if she were an animal he might startle. Mira had known this conversation was coming and had avoided Tadeo’s prying gaze for days. Now, caught at the edge of the earth, she could only face him. He sat next to her and wiped his hands against his jeans, flicking the sand from his skin.
“I thought I would have thought of something by now…or something would have happened,” Mira murmured.
Tadeo shrugged. He often kept quiet if she was working something out in her mind. Mira appreciated his silence while the wind rocked them gently.
Her mind kept replaying what their team would turn into when she announced the lack of rock for the lichen—petty arguments, various factions assuming their work was the most important, therefore they had the right to overtake the process. She’d have to start locking it up at night, becoming the dictator she never wanted to be. Gossip and dirty looks flying through the house like spores. The memory of every triumphant feeling made her nauseous. She didn’t recognize that person in her mind, who, only months ago, thought she had found a solution to the suffering in the world. Part of her vowed to never let that hope infiltrate her again.
Tadeo rubbed her shoulder as she let herself go limp under his touch. And as quickly as the touch comforted her, she felt an incessant need to look out toward the horizon. A strange shape emerged as the wind blew the dried silt and sand away. Mira felt outside of herself as each granule fled from around the object, barely noticing the way Tadeo’s dry hands stuck to her sweater as she shot up from where she was sitting.
“Mira? What’s wrong?”
She didn’t want to talk, didn’t want to open her mouth in the wind, and feel sand slip past her lips and crunch between her molars. She didn’t want her eyes to leave the thing that beckoned her, that appeared like a sarcophagus in the desert that was once a lakebed. Before Tadeo could reach for her, she was gone, running so hard toward the dunes that the sand flew up from her shoes and hit her back.
For a moment, she imagined she was running through water. Tears ran down her face as she let the full weight of loss succumb to her soul. The lake water was running through some devil machine miles away, the lichen brought a flash of hope, but with all mineral prospects gone, she could do nothing but face her grief. And it stung like her never-ending loss of innocence in a dying world; it stung like her favorite childhood animal going extinct.
Mira fell to her knees when she reached the tomb, the casket, the strange-shaped anomaly extruding from the top of a dune. Its form finally materialized in her vision, and her eyes grew hungry when she found it was a large slab of stone. The test tube was cold in her hands while she pulled the lichen carefully from its glass confines. She had packed it secretly before she left, not even telling Tadeo. At the time, she had argued to herself that maybe its presence would help her find its proper stone, or that maybe keeping it close by would be enough to keep it alive with her own flesh.
When the lichen left the tube, she thought she saw its burgundy form move on its own underneath the sheathed sky. Something stirred in her heart as she watched it attach to the rock. The being looked hungry. It looked nearly as forlorn as she felt. Once it was properly enmeshed in the stone, Mira simply stared. Sat on her knees, hands spread across the thighs of her filthy jeans, unable to pull her sight away from the strange, fleshy fungus that had completely overtaken her life. Tadeo was somewhere behind her, silent still, but she could feel his eyes on the lichen as well. Breathless and patient. They spent hours in the silence together, with only their hearts beating, Mira swaying slightly as blood pumped through her.
Blooming swirls of light materialized while Mira watched her precious lichen just as the sun reached the horizon. It was under the pinks and purples of dawn that she could see what the lichen had done, what it had broken down for her. Underneath its slightly pulsing form was a fossil. It had eaten away the limestone that enclosed the former creature. The soil around the fossil was dark, a stark contrast with the tan sand. She threw it in her pockets with reckless abandon, nudging shoulders with Tadeo, who did the same. When the sun was up, casting warmth across their freezing forms, they could see it more clearly now. Unfurled in the limestone were two fossilized sturgeon, fins overlapping, eternally intertwined. The fish that remained unchanged for a millenia, and seemed to be the missing piece in their search for the proper lichen stone. Part of the stone had cracked under the lichen’s feast, and when she pulled it away, she could see the strange triangular form they had seen in the forest that day, a forest that had once been covered with water and likely teeming with the long-snouted fish.
Mira was transfixed on her discovery, happy that she had at least solved the mystery enough for a bit more soil, but still harboring the grief within her that this wasn’t nearly enough. They could haul this stone back to their home lab, but eventually they would need more. It wasn’t until Tadeo nudged her arm that she looked toward the horizon. There were thousands of other fossils within eyesight, many with the same bird-like beak of the sturgeon, waiting for lichen to produce the proper soil for humans to survive. Mira’s tears stained the stone and sand beneath her; a small oasis of her own making in the perpetual desert.
Not even the ever-intuitive Tadeo would realize what Mira had found. Neither of them could know that in a few months, saved by the presence of the fossils, Mira could genetically renew the burgundy Sturgeon Lichen (aptly named by its discoverer) so it could break down each and every rock. Something wonderful was confined in those fossils, but Mira found a way for the lichen to subsist on its own. They only had to sacrifice three precious sturgeon relics before they were no longer needed. And on that day, when she joined her crew to retrieve the last necessary fossil, until the new lichen was born, Mira would find another miraculous discovery. For underneath that looming, ancient sturgeon, was a stubbornly brave freshwater spring, so insistent with its bubbling water, that it might refill Lake Michigan once more. Mira could already feel the minnows nibbling on her feet as the water lapped against her shins.
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