Ophiocordyceps Unilateralis

TW: Alcoholism

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There’s a type of fungus that can zombify ants. It sounds like a made-up thing, like a subplot of The Walking Dead that was cut before it ever saw the outside of the writers’ room. And the fact that its scientific name is nearly impossible to pronounce and a complete hindrance to spell doesn’t make it the easiest subject to research.

I’ll never forget the first time I saw a picture of it. Senior year AP environmental science. It was a jarring way to start class on the part of my old bio teacher, Mr. Ramsey, who projected the image from National Geographic on the whiteboard without so much as a warning. He seemed to take glee in the way the girls screamed and the guys lifted their fists to their mouths, leaning back in their chairs and harmonizing on a chorus of “ho-hoolllly shit!” but that’s another can of worms on its own. My lab partner Rebecca was sitting next to me, squealing into her palms before thrusting her backpack in front of her face to shield her vision from the picture, which was oh-so conveniently zoomed-in for good measure.

I wished I could have reached for my backpack too, because I couldn’t seem to avert my eyes, no matter how badly my brain was insisting that I should. Funnily enough, I couldn’t even turn my head to force my vision to land somewhere else. It was like looking at a car crash. Or looking at your closest of friends sob into a pint of ice-cream after a break up. Or watching your parents cry. As if you had stumbled upon something you weren’t meant to see, peeking in on a private force of nature that wasn’t intended for your eyes and not finding the courage to turn them away. It felt invasive and wrong, felt like getting caught in the doorway while your friend is mid-bite with mint chocolate chip dribbling down her chin. And you’re flooded with an overwhelming wave of Oh, no. I wasn’t supposed to see this.

Unsettling to the basest of levels, the image depicted an intrusively close-up picture of a carpenter ant, which isn’t a strong start in terms of pictures I’d be comfortable looking at. But naturally, it didn’t stop there, and got about a million times worse. A sort of tendril impaled upwards through the ant’s neck—if you can call it a neck—twisting skyward and spearing the air like a miniature beanstalk without the fantastical, dreamy implications of one. The stalk was lined with puckered spores. The insect's countless legs were splattered out, splayed at the sides of its body, gooey with god-even-knows-what kind of substance—and thank the lord Mr. Ramsey didn’t feel the need to inform us.

It’s known as Cordyceps, Mr. Ramsey went on to explain, a fungus with the ability to hijack an ant’s brain with the entire body to follow. He told us that by the time the ant begins to walk in a zig-zagging, erratic pattern, its life is numbered down to the hours. The fungus will burst through its skin. The spores will fall.

And then it will spread.

All the other kids in my class were disgusted. Rightfully so. They stared and pointed, the bravest (or maybe the stupidest) among them inspiring laughs out of one another. The news was all over the school by lunch—that Mr. Ramsey had showed his AP class the grossest pictures ever. And all anyone could talk about was how disgusting and weird it was. Almost like it should have been a work of fiction.

I couldn’t explain it, but I felt for the ant, and at the time I felt like I felt for it more than I should have. I was deeply unsettled until fifth period. Then, gradually, I forgot about it. And then I was thinking about prom. The pressures of not being asked my junior year. The fear that I wouldn’t get to go this year, either. At the end of the day, Ben Stevenson asked me. I was elated. I didn’t think about the ant again.

In fact, I didn’t think about the ant for many years.

The first time I found my mother drunk, stumbling through the hallway under a shroud of darkness, twitching as she reached blindly for the banister, one foot unable to quite catch up to the other, I was reminded of the ant for the first time since high school. I was home for the summer from college. Twenty. Old enough to be considered adult. To feel the pressures of becoming one. But not enough to feel it. After it happened, I felt just as young and naïve and helpless as I was when I was sitting in Mr. Ramsey’s science classes, prom looming over my shoulders like a storm cloud. It was as if I had been caught in a rubber band and snapped into the throngs of time, rocketing backwards towards my teenage years and all the innocence that came with them. I should have felt like an adult. I was certainly old enough to. I was supposed to. But I didn’t. Instead, I felt as helpless and as sheepish as a girl carting off to her first prom. I hid in my closet until my mother stopped trying to unlock my door.

My dad had passed away just a year before, so at the time, I didn’t hold it against her. I could hardly blame her—when I’d heard the news, I went on a house-party bender at school that resulted in me crying in many a stranger’s bathtub with jungle juice poured down my shirt, leaving a sickeningly pale pink stain all across my front. Who was I to judge her? Grief works in wicked ways, but time heals the most abominable curses.

But it wasn’t a curse.

It was more like a fungus.

Years passed, and I did what I could to heal. The grief was still a heavy weight on my shoulders that made climbing hills difficult and excruciating. Every summer I went home was worse than the last, and every time, I felt like a child, barring myself in my room and hiding in the closet like an infant until that insistent knocking stopped and my mother curled up on the floor where she’d stay until, sometimes, I was unlucky enough to find her there in the morning.

I stopped going home altogether. Graduating college, finding a full-time job was a good excuse. Maybe I was blinded by the elation of falling into a career that I loved, blinded enough to foolishly think the way home was safe. That my own childhood house, my bedroom was would envelope me and shield me from the monsters like a night-light. I was in my late twenties, visiting my hometown, at brunch with a friend from high school when I called my mother and asked her if she'd like to join us.

She arrived drunk.

Cordyceps had festered deeper. Maybe that’s when I remembered that the fungus had a one-hundred-percent kill rate, but I honestly don’t know, because I didn’t let myself linger on the thought. As she spilled hot sauce down her shirt in front of one of my oldest friends, I decided it was time to take her home, horrified that she had been self-destructive enough to drive herself.

A few nights passed, and with each new moon phase, I was growing more and more eager to return to New York. Just before I left, I told her that she had to make a choice. To choose to stop hurting herself and her family—or to descend down the dark path she’d already started towards. We left on good terms. I left with hope.

I should have known that ultimatums don’t stop the devil.

I was thirty when I returned home a second time, our relationship withered to molding tatters, wind-stripped and frail, ready to crumble at the softest of touches. As far as I was aware, she’d upheld her end of the promise, but I knew if I outright asked, there was a possibility I’d be disappointed. It wasn’t a good way to impress our relationship; walking on eggshells is hardly the best bonding experience. Difficult to believe that after all that time, I still managed to be so blind. It was almost impressive.

That Christmas, I sat down with my entire extended family at the Cheesecake Factory. Not shockingly, my mother had downed three cocktails (we’d driven separately, as I had plans to visit some friends after dinner.) What was shocking, however, was how my mother reacted when my uncle offered to drive her home.

Somewhere in the mess of shouting and utensils clattering to the floor, somewhere in the blur of waitresses rushing to see what all the commotion was, the phrases “you don’t know a thing about my life,” and “if you keep going down this road, you’ll die,” and “how can you keep destroying your relationship with your child” were tossed across the dining hall like stones. I didn’t stick around long enough to see my mom throw her fourth cocktail to the floor, but I could hear the splattering of glass and liquid spray the hardwood aisle as I made a break for it, feeling my heart lurch to my throat, threatening to spill all the anxiety I felt out of my mouth.

I had my come-to-Jesus moment in the bathroom of a Cheesecake Factory while a stranger was using the toilet behind me. The sound of a can flushing behind me was the symphony of my decision to turn my back on the woman who created me.

I had to leave. I had to leave and never come back. I was financially independent. More or less, for my most basic needs, I was on my own. Never before had I thought to cut my mother out of my life, let alone to run the risk of estranging myself from the rest of my family. The realization hit me now like a freight train. And I felt like an idiot for not seeing it sooner.

Gripping the marble-top counters (Cheesecake Factories have weirdly luxurious restrooms,) I let the coolness seep into the pads of my fingers. But it didn’t soothe the hot, angry flush blotching across my neck, like a bad memory trying to strangle me.

I stared into the mirror. It was so strange. As I stared into my own reflection, I almost looked like a shadow of myself. An echo of my innocence. I could see the tendrils wrapping in front of my eyes, the beanstalk sprouting out of my forehead, curling into those stomach-roiling pale spores.

Staring at the image of my infection, I tried to rummage through the confusion swimming in my irises, creating a depth I couldn't reach. Wondering why all along, the tendrils had come for my mind, too. I thought my mother was supposed to be the ant.

But then I remembered what Mr. Stevenson said all those years ago. The fungus grows. The spores fall. And they always manage to seize a new victim.

And my gut surged as I realized that I only decided I couldn’t do this anymore until it was already too late.

She had already taken me, too.

A boulder-sized lump had long formed at the base of my throat. I tried to swallow it down, but it felt like my mouth had been stuffed full of cotton. I looked small.

Small.

Small and unrecognizable in the mirror. Empty behind the eyes, which were the same color but carried a different weight. Something dark flickered behind them now—an urge. Not a desire; it wasn’t that poetic anymore. Fear that I could feel wracking my joints, crippling me to dust, and a need. A need for nothing but the basest instincts.

Hide.

Lie.

Survive.