[Issue 2026.75]

‘Fruiting Bodies’, Lyra Meurer

Art © 2026 L.E. Badillo

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Fish shimmer above her like a rainbow in flux, sipping on the tears that fly up from her face. This house—which, she keeps remembering with horror, is now hers alone—has been as lively as a reef since The Unknown swept across the world, tangling and unspooling and recreating its matter.

None of the other houses on the block turned out like this. She knows because she has spent ample time in them these past months, hiding from him and his moods. Their former owners lie rotting among haywire halos of exploded electrical cords, glowing fungi, and floating phantoms of miniature moons. In other houses, her tears fall to the ground, but here they always fly up, whether they’re born of anger or terror or despair.

Why would anything change now he’s gone? The fish watched it all with impassive disc-eyes: the screaming, the beatings, the comforting, the sex, the last time he went out the door, never to be seen alive again. They will see what happens next: the last seed of him growing in her body’s parched soil, the sickness and swollen legs, the baby who will, with her luck, come out looking like him.

Does she want that or not? Is there a choice? The human race is decimated. The government is in ruins but has decreed that all pregnancies must be carried to term for the sake of repopulation. But does she, citizen of this new world, want to play mother to his last reminder?

Lying on the floor hurts her shoulder, but her body feels leaden, like an anchor forgotten in the depths. She crosses her arms over her belly and rolls onto her other side. Tears tickle her as they brush over her nose. The fish under the couch watch, their mouths opening and closing, their gills filtering gloomy air. “He will never come back, he will never come back,” she murmurs in a singsong voice, unsure whether it is a lament or a celebration. No more fast-flying fists and insults, but also no more nights of sighing devotion, no more bouquets of glass flowers plucked from overgrown verges.

She could go to the birthing colony in the McMansion down the road, or the one in the mall. They were the first outposts of civilization to pop up after The Unknown. Moments after burying their dead, people rallied around the cause of repopulation. For this they cleared away the rubble, the bodies, the heaps of plastic gems, the bony tumbleweeds and the other inexplicable trash of a nonsensical apocalypse.

She could fall into the arms of the surviving medical professionals, into the mission to make life as it once was. She could waddle among other pregnant people and turn her fingers to the task of retwisting the electrical wires The Unknown had unspun. She could return home in eight months with a baby and try, alone, to raise it to be a different human than its father.

Her back hurts. Exhaustion fills her limbs, fermenting into pain. The musty popcorn smell of the carpet makes her stomach churn. Will his shadow never leave me? she wonders. This, until the birth pains, and then what?

Her limp hand, moving idly, brushes the algae that waves from the walls. Knowing strikes her like lightning. She sits up and tears algae out by the handful, stuffing it into her mouth. She has never been hungrier for anything, even though she hates the heavy marine taste of it, the way it compacts into claggy mush in her mouth. When she is full, she sleeps on the bed they once shared, twining with the sheets.

In the morning, she is woken by deep pangs in her abdomen, a griping pain that presses downwards, ejecting thick, sweet-smelling blood. She sweats from the pain, cries out to the empty neighborhood. By nightfall, his shadow has left her body.

Lighter than she has been in years, she sits on the back porch and watches the fish stream out of the house, into the night. She knows they won’t come back. The crickets, which sing new, impossible songs, provide a night-long symphony for their departure, and finish at dawn with a perfect cadence, closing from the five to the one.

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He’d never thought much about the end of the world before it happened, and so was taken aback at the realization, in the months following the Unknown, that the apocalypse was forcing him into a transient lifestyle. Before, stability had been key to getting his hormones. Now, he must follow the supply wherever he can find it if he wants to live as himself.

He’s formed a routine. He stays in some country town, some derelict suburb, until his seller says they’re running low. He finds a car that still works (many of them had their insides transformed into paper, noodles of dry clay, or other such nonsense, and gasoline everywhere is going stale), and putters on to the next town. If the shady pill-pushers camped out at the pharmacy have nothing to offer him, on he goes, following whichever roads aren’t blocked by abandoned cars and nighttime force fields of uncanny light.

When he finds a supplier, he settles in a house that isn’t too randomized—preferably one without corpses in it—and finds whatever work and barter he can.

Company is slim in this lifestyle. No one trusts strangers nowadays—many are ill-intentioned, more of them are illusions. By the time he’s convinced people he’s real, it’s time to move on. Sometimes, he runs into other trans people. If it’s another trans man, he leaves, not wanting to eat away at someone else’s dwindling hormone supply.

There had been someone once, briefly. He’d been staying in a house that had cloaked itself in feathers—perfect in the dead of winter, even if he was constantly congested. He befriended the man next door, who had a toothy smile and a squeaky laugh. They checked on each other daily, shared a few meals, then tumbled into bed together after a night of drinking and crying about all they had lost.

The passion consumed itself within months, flames burning through eager kindling. When the hormones ran out and he announced his departure, his lover didn’t offer to come, and he didn’t ask him to.

Now, a hundred miles from the source, he realizes what has been left in his body. Dizzy spells, appetite that roars then sours within minutes, clenching pain whenever he orgasms. He wanders around his springtime house, clutching his abdomen, telling himself it can’t be happening. But he knows—it happened before, in college, before his transition. The answer then had been a swift abortion, but no one offered those any more, not even the pill pushers.

He languishes in the house, neglecting to find money or food or hormones. He can’t bear to be seen.

That’s the worst symptom, the same this time as the last: his body doesn’t feel like it’s his. It’s dangling on a fishing line far below him, yet it encases him in uncooperative flesh. This hideous thing—it adheres neither to what he wants from it, nor what anyone else wants from it. He feels like he is spilling out of himself, like his skin might split from the sheer pressure of all this expectation. He longs to cut himself open, to hollow himself out.

Whoever had previously owned this house hung a mirror in every room. Before the pregnancy, his reflection was a delight, an affirmation. Now he finds himself lingering, running a hand over his belly to check if it has swollen yet, twisting to observe how hatefully narrow his shoulders are, running his hand through his scruff to see if it’s still growing. Stop, please just stop, he begs himself, and finally, after several agonized days, he summons the courage to collect the mirrors and stack them facedown outside.

Still, he glimpses himself in the windows at night—a twiggy elbow, which he despises, a slender hand, which he despises, a certain gesture carried from before, which he despises. He grinds his teeth, draws the curtains tighter, and sticks his nose (which he despises) in a book to forget.

There’s a birthing colony nearby. When, hungry and sick, he struggles to sleep, he turns the possibility over in his mind. You could go there. They’ll feed you, you’ll give birth, then you’ll leave.

But it’s not so simple, is it? The potential outcomes are as diverse and frightening as they were before the world ended. What if they turn him away, as doctors so often used to, insisting they weren’t equipped to handle an oddity such as himself? What if they accept him, but with judgment edging every word, shaming him for getting pregnant while on T? What if they swaddle him in pink and call him a woman, detain him with obligation, imprisoning him in his old body?

The answer comes to him in a dream: Death, with robe and scythe, drifts through a darkened forest, touching certain objects with its long fingers. It leaves him with a kiss on his forehead, soft as a moth’s wing.

He wakes in the night and stumbles through the trees behind his house, carving a path with his flashlight. He plucks the gibberish pages that sprout from the branches in place of leaves, he finds a glass eyeball growing like an acorn, he unearths a ruby necklace from between the roots of a tree.

In his house, he wears the necklace and spreads the pages around him according to some instinctual order. He rolls the eyeball between his hands, and thus spends the rest of the night in a trance.

The bleeding comes by morning. He cries tears of relief. Already his body feels like his again.

When it’s done, he leaves the mess and finds another town, where the ruby necklace becomes his next round of hormones. He feels no regret.

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Every night, she must lie on her back in bed and tilt her head to the left. The muscles in her neck, her shoulders, down to her thoracic spine, feel stiff and sticky, like lacquered twine. They creak as they relax, releasing their grip on her vertebrae, which grind and snap as they settle into place. The key is to breathe in deep, stretch slightly and slowly but without trying too hard. When the muscles feel overextended she tilts her head to the right, breathing deep, stretching without straining, until her body quits its creaking.

Then she can roll on her side and try to sleep.

This, at least, is exactly as it has been since before The Unknown. Whatever it did to everyone and everything else, it didn’t explain or erase her body’s hatred for itself, it didn’t unwind the tension in her muscles. But, of course, it turned their comfiest couch to stone.

As she tries to sleep, listening to her husband’s peaceful breathing, her hip aching where it presses into the mattress, she thinks that people like her aren’t supposed to survive apocalypses. In movies and shows they’re the first to be devoured by zombies, to be swallowed by the waves, to take a bullet to the chest—always in a self-sacrificing way to show the disabled character was good, that their death wasn’t for nothing. But those stories are now so much tangled tape, so much shattered plastic, and she’s still here, tired as ever.

Her husband does what she views as the hard work: back-breaking labor at the co-op, scavenging in abandoned buildings, fashioning devices to generate electricity.

She stays home and tries to transform their backyard into something productive, like a medieval wife with a kitchen garden. Not the life she imagined when she graduated from college, but the one pain and circumstance have forced on her.

This is hard labor to her: pulling weeds, lugging around buckets of rainwater, poring over a gardening book from the 1950s. An hour or two and she’s a delirious, quivering mess, lying in bed and waiting for her nerves to stop screaming.

All this, and the garden yields so little. Cabbage worms whittle the Brassicas to twigs. The peppers wilt in the heat before she can revive them. The peas grow heartily, then one day their leaves become seashells and drop to the ground. Her husband compliments the few tomatoes she manages to harvest, which don’t count for lunch, barely even a snack.

She cannot grow what she wants in the earth, so why does her body grow something so unwanted? It’s like an infection, turning her stomach to acid, her breasts to bloated balloons, her nerves to clogged drains. She caught it in the awkward gap between birth control—which cannot be found anywhere now—and condoms. She denies it until she no longer can, until her husband comes home with a pregnancy test unearthed from the ruins of a pharmacy. The second line is all too clear.

The women at the birthing center are apple-cheeked and smiling as they twist the ultrasound wand inside her and point out the clump of cells clinging to her uterus. Their faces fall when she tells them she doesn’t want it. “We don’t do that here,” they say. “No one does it anywhere.”

She tells them she cannot possibly bear or care for a child. They explain her other options. Of course. Every baby is precious, more precious than the last scrap of her functionality. She has never in her life wanted a baby, but others must have their opinions. Before, people implied in conversation that one such as she should never reproduce. Now they insist that, regardless of her wishes, she must.

Her husband drives her home, or tries to. The car he repaired breaks down and they have to walk the last mile home. Every step jolts pain into her hips, her spine, her shoulders. She bursts into tears when they reach their front door, and her husband holds her, saying, “We’ll find a way.”

He asks around, and from a friend of a friend of a friend, receives a jam jar half-full of sparkling silver dust. This worked for someone else, he is told.

There is a moment, about nine hours after she’s inserted a fingerful of the dust into her vagina, when she can feel that the embryo is gone. Its baleful influence no longer weighs on her body. She feels as light as a feather, exploding with joy as her husband pours warm water over her, washing the blood from between her legs. Since nothing can be wasted, they water the garden with the blood-tinged water, and an abundant crop of tomatoes grows.

She doesn’t think of it often as the months tumble by, except to realize, always with relief, If I hadn’t had the abortion, I would be seven months pregnant now. I would have a newborn now. I would be dealing with a toddler now.

One day, a whisper reaches them from a friend of a friend of a friend. She passes the jar of sparkling dust along, to help someone else reclaim their body.

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Calls and cries pierce the night, carrying across the overgrown fields to the lone figure sitting on the porch of a ramshackle farmhouse. What creature made this hoot or that wail? Is it something that is the same as it was before, or something that was altered? They roll the mug between their palms and stare into the inscrutable night. They grew up in the city. They don’t know what any of these sounds are, but the mystery drives a furrow of feeling into their heart. Why did they wait until the world ended to move to the country?

They finish their tea, grimacing at each bitter sip, and retreat to the house which once belonged to someone else, but which now belongs to them. The waiting begins. Will the cures they researched work? If so, when? Rue, rosemary, pennyroyal, an overdose of vitamin C tablets, swallowed down for several days in a row.

If it doesn’t work, they’ll keep trying—from drinking cow’s milk from the teat to the knitting needles and coat hanger if that’s what it comes to. They came here to be alone, not to live with the seed of the stranger who passed through some weeks ago.

Their meeting and union was an experimental affair, performed at night with far less clarity than this particular ritual. Two people trying to find themselves in each other, to discover, after the collapse of society, what sex means to them. Not much, it turns out, except one got knocked up and the other went onto his next adventure, carrying his conclusions close to his chest.

Finding yourself isn’t always comfortable, they think, sitting at the kitchen table. It sure isn’t now. They think they feel something. Tingling? Pressure? They can’t be sure.

They fall into a trance, watching the moonlight pass over the phalanxes of cans lining the kitchen shelves. Shadows shrink and lengthen. The moonbeam highlights one label, then another—tomatoes, beans, peaches, mushrooms—fruiting bodies never destined to bear offspring.

Once upon a time, they would say, “I don’t want to bring another child into this fucked up world,” a cliché that sounded more meaningful, more excusable, than the truth. The world seems better to them now, with its whimsy, the animal and human faces that pass through the wallpaper, the enormous fungi that thrust spongy spires into the sky only to wilt the next day. Now there is peace and silence, and the hubbub and arguing from before the apocalypse has faded to the back of their brain. They are alone with the calls from animals in the night, dangerous or not, novel or familiar, saying, “I am here, but not too close.”

What is it really, now that the need for excuses has sloughed away? A thousand reasons: a tick in the childhood trauma box, the dysphoria box, the sheer lack of interest box, et cetera. All amounting to, “I simply do not want to.” Why wouldn’t that have been acceptable before? Why is it less acceptable now?

“I don’t want to,” they whisper, and that pure truth floats on the air. Sweat gathers on their brow. The warm night starts to feel hot. They smile. Without any other signs, they know the tea is working. Another self-concept to peel away, so they can become more themself. No other reason is needed.

© 2026 Lyra Meurer

[Issue 2026.75]

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