Now

“So, ok boss, yes, you probably should have attended to the mold beneath your shower head before it got to this point. Shoulda being the operant word here. But shoulds only count in wouldas and couldas and explosions—we’re here now and we have to deal with the reality of the situation. See those tendrils, that’s what you’re hearing scurrying around in the dark at night, the rattling pipe noises like, what did you call it, a lawnmower running out of gas, yeah. That’s what that means. Bad news. So what’s going on is the mold’s trying to wrest itself free of the tile, lovely choice by the way, and enter the world as a crawling, endless thing bent, by its nature, towards the consumption of the dead and dying. That’s a sign that mold has left its teenage years and entered full-fledged fungal adulthood. I mean, technically, slime molds, which this is, aren’t fungi, but that’s just some inside baseball. Slimeball. Whatever. As I see it, you’ve got two problems. One, once you’re seeing mold this advanced, it’s likely the whole wall is shot through. I can take the whole wall down and show you the roots of the thing, which will, and this brings us to problem numero two here, will likely spell out your name in a webbed madness of rot, but once we do that, you’re committing to a full on removal process which will, you know, cost *mold expert rubbing his thumb and fingers together.* The second problem being you have not learned to love the soft animal of your heart, and like any soft animal without love, it’s rotted in your chest, maybe because you’re carrying a lot of shame about how you just left for college and never texted one of your high school friends ever again and now you’re in this new apartment in this new city and most of your college friends seem to be doing the same thing to you, and you’ve let whatever weird noxious shame you’ve got sitting, unexpelled in your small intestine convince you that you deserve the slow death of loneliness—wake, work, walk, work, sit, read, cry, eat, masturbate, sleep, rinse, repeat—and so these kind of molds, they love rot. Big picture? It’s gone and fallen in love with your reflection while you were too busy hating yourself. Now before you say something like oh thank god it’s only fallen in love with my reflection in the smudged bathroom mirror really Windex is like 6 bucks a bottle, dude, let me assure you that this is more dangerous than if the mold had fallen in love with you. Because you, it turns out, don’t treat your reflection all that well—seriously, I’ll just leave some Windex myself if you just promise to use it. It feels you hate your reflection, peel your furrowed brow apart, smooth the lines beneath your eyes, pinch—more cruelly than any of your middle school bullies could have dreamed up—your stomach and grunt angrily. And what’s worse, it’s watched you do nothing to change the way you address yourself. You don’t take care of the thing it loves, so it hates you, which, and I cannot stress this enough, is absolutely not tenable. A buddy of mine, mentor really, taught me everything I know about sentient bathroom slime molds, told me about how a bunch of scientists built a map of Japan, used oats to recreate population centers, and then watched as the slime mold they released onto the map basically perfectly recreated the existing Japanese subway system. And that was just for oats, imagine what they’re capable of doing for love? So, that lays out your issue. So here’s what you’re looking at. Not only do we have to worry about the removal, but due to the whole sentient nature of it you’re also looking at a handle, care, and relocation fee, which will cost just as much as the work, because certain rules and regulations and even laws come into play, and as I mentioned this will mean tearing down at least one bathroom wall, so you’re looking at, assuming I can get all the parts delivered in a timely manner which, just cause I’m an honest guy I’ll tell you, has only happened once, and frankly, you’re looking at a minimum of a month without an apartment and at least a five or six thousand, when all’s brick and mortared up. The other option *mold expert looks from side to side mischievously* which will save you a bunch of money and get me chewed out by my bosses, is to start loving your reflection as much as the mold does and pray that it will spare you, or that it’s open to a kind of trinogamous relationship. And look, it’s not my business to tell people their business. My business is the identification and removal of sentient slime molds. But I think learning to love yourself, herculean as it might seem, is probably going to be good for you in, like, a holistic sense. So maybe call some work friends and take a chance on rejection and ask them out for drinks, or at least like I don’t know, clean your apartment a couple times a month. You can start small: Slime molds appreciate effort even more than results. Their pseudo-neuro-mycorrhizal minds grok effort better than results anyways. Sorry, I try to avoid jargon. Point being a little could go a long way. And before you say anything, yes there are health consequences to letting your apartment slowly be consumed from the inside out by mold, but there’s health consequences for living in desperate self-hatred, too, and—Ahh ok. You’re getting the checkbook. Cool. I’ll call back in a few days to schedule with you. Look. Since the slime mold heard you hear all this and is right now watching you choose the money, I’d say try and get a hotel. I don’t know how safe it is here for you.”

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Spencer Nitkey is a writer of the weird, the wonderful, the horrible, and the (hopefully) beautiful. He lives in Philadelphia, and his stories have been published, or are forthcoming, in Apex Magazine, Diabolical Plots, Flash Fiction Online, Lightspeed Magazine, Weird Horror, and many others. You can find more about him and read more of his stories on his website, spencernitkey.com.