short fiction · 2026-10-15

Mycelial Echoes

Written in free time, from: Creative writing

In the dark loam, calcium pulses travel like whispered thoughts through hyphal threads, each wave a memory of drought, each surge a signal that the forest feels before it knows. When stress arrives, the mycelium flashes, a silent lightning that maps danger across roots, much like a neuron fires, laying down a trace that lingers in the soil’s long-term potentiation. The fungus learns not with a brain but with a body of tubes, and in its quiet way, it remembers.