Fruit by Crystal Koo
2900 words, ~14 minutes reading time
Issue 10 (Spring 2026)
My brother is decomposing. His arms are like logs after the rain.
When I hug him, he wriggles away, distracted by a bear-shaped cloud. Slime comes off him, thin and runny, the color of dark tea, clinging to my arms where I’ve touched his skin
Last night, Hei scrawled mushrooms on our apartment walls. Large-capped monsters and tiny, tremulous stalks seeped from corners of the living room, blooming between furniture. I shouted at him, instantly regretful when he burst into tears. He fell asleep in my arms, and I was too tired to paint over the walls.
The traditional herbalist gives us a bag of dried bark and ground tiger bone at a price far less than the Western doctor we can’t afford. I ask him about Hei's inevitable bonesawing; he presses his thumbs on Hei's skin in response. Dark, sinuous lines unspool from each other.
The herbalist shakes his head. I'm grateful for the vagueness of his answer.
Our parents tried scrubbing the gangrene from Hei's fingernails when he was a baby. There's a tree shrine nearby where they used to burn incense and pray, asking for protection from what we could see and what we couldn’t.
I sensed at a young age there was something deeply unfair about all this. How no one else's brother had slimy arms and dark pockmarks. That more was asked of me than the usual older sister.
I was jealous of my schoolmates' uncomplicated lives and their ability to hang around the dessert shops after class, eating fresh egg waffles and warm tofu pudding. Our parents didn't sugarcoat things by saying Hei was special in a way that would benefit him when he's older, only that he needed more help.
Sunken craters began to colonize his face when he was five. I went straight home after school to help teach him writing and math because my parents would not have him out in public like that. Before the sun went down, I would rush out and hike the hills nearby. Sometimes I thought of staying among the bottlebrushes and never going home.
But I did, of course, because I would grow hungry and cold. Hei asked me what flowers I saw on hikes and I'd reel off a string of made-up names in a lofty, knowing manner, hoping I sounded believable, because that's what older siblings do.
When our parents passed from the bird epidemic, I left school and found a job at the post office. We tied ribbons with our parents' names around the branches of the tree shrine. In our first month alone, I came home from work to a burst bathroom pipe and all I could do was lock myself in our parents' bedroom, away from Hei’s cries and the water seeping out of the gap under the door.
My classmates went to university while I took Hei on easy walks through the forest. We found flowers close enough in color and shape to the names I had made up. I told him tall stories, how the bluewine lotus were only used to decorate the governor's palace, how hundred-tail blossoms were grown in heaven, or how I once passed a village where time stood still.
Our train slows to a crawl where it shouldn't. Outside, the green clumps of camphor and sweet gum make strange shapes, like shops and teahouses swallowed by roots and shrubs and crawling vines.
The driver’s voice comes on, mumbling about the transmission line.Then the doors open and we're instructed to make our own way back to the last station. Hei looks at me in excitement; I smile and grab his damp, slimy hand. “It’s an adventure,” I say.
The light is rich with the day’s end. Most people don't notice this, preoccupied with trying to find their way back to the station from the little door of the service fence. Only Hei is peering at the hills, an impenetrable knot of trees. “They're near,” he says.
“Who?”
“There,” he insists, his finger gently jabbing at the dark of the copse. He looks at me expectantly.
I forget how the world is still new to him. He's young enough for instinct to power over any sense of self-consciousness, in the same way that a small bird, frozen on a bough, feels no pity for themselves until the end.
Hei scampers toward the golden trumpet trees, their shadows blurring into the night as the sun begins to dip. I find him on the other side of a thick belt of figs. I grab his hand, my heart pounding. Is this how I would lose him, to a bunch of trees? I try to herd him back toward the direction of the train but he yanks himself away, a strand of mucus briefly drifting between our hands before snapping back.
“No,” he says. And he is gone again, clambering up the incline of the hill and perching him on a rocky outcrop.
It'll be completely dark soon. I look at where he is pointing.
There's a small village in the middle of the trees lit up with lanterns and adorned with flags like it would have been centuries ago. Red and gold are strung together like festival buntings; houses stretch in an unbroken line of rooms in yellow light. Each window pane is a little picture of color and activity.
Receding from us are filaments of light from the railway track. Hei is already feeling his way down on all fours to the village, as if he has always known the way.
My little brother reclaims my hand when I finally join him; it’s only later I realize how strangely dry his skin has become.
The blue and green pillars of the watchtower jut from the earth like a god’s limbs, carrying roofs upon roofs, an ancient notice of the village’s endurance to would-be raiders. The courtyard houses sprawl in geometrical patterns, clan flags waving from the flying eaves, streamers hang from balconies and moon windows.
“Everything is so old,” Hei declares and I shush him, afraid of drawing attention.
But already small patches of people stop on the street to watch us. They're dressed in fur-collared quilted jackets as if they’re in a different climate, their postures proud and self-assured. They know we don’t belong here. A woman points at Hei’s mottled arms and gives a cry before running off. I pull him closer to me.
The crowd thickens. The sky is now fully dark and the charming alleys have turned into vague, foreboding shadows.
“They won't hurt us,” Hei says, as if he can read their minds.
He's right. A recognition starts diffusing among the crowd, emanating from the woman who first spotted Hei’s arms and has returned with what looks like a small tray of food.
She kneels down, sitting on her heels, her face pleasant, and offers the tray to Hei.
The tray is full of soil. The warm, fatty smell of loam prongs through my nose.
Hei's delight is a squirming, honest thing. He grabs a fistful of soil. He stuffs his mouth with it, smearing his lips with earth.
“Stop,” I say but he wards my hand away, noisily digging through the tray. The villagers look at us now with kind eyes, as if we are people they know after all. They cheer when Hei finishes; my little brother’s eyes are bright with gratification and he smacks his lips, looking as though this is the first meal he’s eaten for days.
My head swims. “Please,” I ask the woman, “how do we get to the train station?”
“Look,” says Hei. He lifts his hand. The black rot has disappeared and his skin is soft and pale.
I want to go home immediately but Hei refuses to leave the village. He says he has never felt so good in all his life. He points out that we can’t find our way back in the dark anyway.
A family of three takes us in for the night. The father leads us to the attic, their tiny son stays crouched by the door looking at us with wide, rapt eyes.
Outside, the villagers are carousing. Gongs and drums; the sound of a reed instrument, music soaring joyously through the air.
I draw the curtains shut. I haven’t eaten all evening. Hei's stomach is full of his earthy dinner; mine’s a knot of worry. I must remember to tell the herbalist about what he’s eaten.
Hei drops off to sleep immediately in my arms. Not even the faintest vein of black is left on his fingertips. I try to make sense of this and fail. I hear the family downstairs murmuring and laughing quietly.
I spend the rest of the night looking at the dusty white and cobalt-blue figurines on the shelf of eight little persons having a picnic.
The day breaks and I realize that the eight ceramic figurines are mushrooms, not people. Slender beech mushrooms, golden needles, black fungi, leaning against each other in a half-circle.
I wake Hei and tell him we're leaving. He groans into the pillow and I tell him again, quietly so I don't wake the family, before I draw the curtains open.
It's a ghost town smothered in forest, with decaying wooden remains. The entire village has been swallowed by ferns and vines. The once-bright buildings rise softly from the ground like a garden of gigantic, cube-shaped plants. The overgrown foliage has broken through doors and windows; patches of brick wall peek from the layer of dark green.
Tall, slender stalks of mushroom, each the size of a person, stand on where the streets had been. The mushrooms wear their white-gilled red caps like wide-brimmed hats. Some of them have slithered out of the windows to look outside, their caps bobbing in the air.
Soft, white fur has grown on Hei's arms, tiny root-hairs that wave in the air. His face is untouched; angelic, like newly-carved marble. His lesions have disappeared. He looks like a stranger to me.
I push him out of the room and pound down the stairs, not caring who hears us.
The three mushrooms in the living room don't move. One is reclining on the couch, the other next to a doorway, its stem disappearing below the wooden floor. The small one sits on a rug, its red cap a tiny little bud.
I grab Hei's arm, expecting the tacky squelch of slime but finding only his new furriness, and we burst out the door and into an empire of leaves. The undergrowth grabs at our shoes.
We stumble as I avoid running into the strange, slender mushrooms, these fruiting bodies bending towards us to block our way. Hei almost touches a red cap and I bat his hand away. “They’re asking why we’re running away when we haven’t been fed,” he says mournfully. “We must stay."
I blink away my tears and we flail through the narrow paths of tightly-knotted vines and mushrooms. I spot the watchtower that greeted us when we first entered. It’s turfed in leaves, its gleaming pride hidden away. Then I see the full length of the hill we had climbed over, and beyond it the safety of the city.
In the apartment, Hei’s arms have darkened again and the stain spreads to his chest. The small white hairs he grew in the village have wilted and fallen off, leaving clumps of delicate shedding on the floor that rot and shrivel up.
His fingers and toes spread out, searching for nutrients even though we are fifteen storeys above the ground. His eyes become sunken and he breathes noisily through his mouth. He barely speaks. He refuses to eat and I don’t want to feed him dirt.
I bathe him with a sponge and sleep with him on the couch, holding his hand. I go to the herbalist, who shakes his head in bewilderment, and tells me to rest.
At night I wander out in the street. There is nothing that surrounds us but the drone of other tall buildings in our neighborhood and the glimmer of their windows. It smells of wet concrete and ozone. I lost touch with my old schoolmates a long time ago.
I come to the tree shrine and the ribbons with our parents’ names. I ask them what they think. I wait until the incense burns out.
The taxi can only bring us to the start of the little path that cuts across the hill before it’s choked by brambles undergrowth. Hei has wilted so much that carrying him on my back doesn't tire me at all. The sun is still high when we reach the village.
Nothing has changed. The houses are still blanketed in green, the streets strangled by tendrils. We are surrounded by tall stalks of red-capped mushrooms that bob and weave in the wind.
Hei murmurs behind me. “They're telling me to be brave.”
I let him off.
Immediately, his feet disappear into the undergrowth and tufts of hair-like roots burst out of his skin like long dragon whiskers, reaching downwards to the soil, curling around the vines. His breathing steadies, his skin clears, and now his fingers have grown into white tendrils that slither their way down.
His face is still his and he looks at me happily. “What about you?” he asks, as if he expects me to grow the same roots and tendrils.
I tell him I love him. I hold the knot of fibers that has become his hand and tell him I'll visit him all the time.
His eyes well up. His arms can no longer move but the roots on his skin clutch my hands, refusing to let go. For a moment I entertain the mad hope that my brother will ask us to turn around and return to the city, to yank him away from this flush of mushrooms and carry him home.
I start sobbing, knowing that if I don’t pull away now, I will never leave him. I crouch down and begin to dig, my hands and fingers full of soil. What creature would he turn into here? What would become of me without him?
I unearth hunks of the same hair-like roots on Hei. Skeins and skeins of the things, fresh and young and white and tender. They are never-ending.
I let them curl around me, twisting around me and dragging me down with a surprising force, bringing me to my knees, my bones and muscle sinking farther into the soft soil. I hear Hei give a cry. Roots slither around me, weaving themselves into a swaddle for me as I’m swallowed into the ground.
Can I see myself here forever, buried under the roots, decomposing and turning into mulch to feed everyone? Becoming a part of all, as the sky becomes smaller and smaller.
The soil is cool and dark, heavy with the smell of petrichor, filling the space above my belly, my shoulders.
Then the ground vomits me out. Roots take me by the wrists and ankles and drag me aboveground.
“I told them no,” says Hei. I’m hunched at his feet, covered in dirt and roots and dead bits of leaf, exhausted and hollowed out.
I look at what’s left of what I can recognize of Hei’s face. His cheekbones softening, mushroom gills on his neck, streaked with damp.
I visit Hei in the evenings, when the village sheds its greenery and is lit up in its red and gold lights. The villagers in their quilted jackets know me now; they smile and bow at me from afar, some of them wave.
Hei lives with the family of three we had stayed with before. They are not a family in the way we understand them; the little boy is not the result of the coming together of the man and the woman. Like all of them, he is a spore that has grown elsewhere and has come back home.
In the attic, Hei shows me the stones and birds’ feathers he has collected. I fuss over him, showing him new flowers from my hiking trails and the names and stories I’ve made up for them.
He appears in a way I have never seen before: a boy with clear skin and bright eyes, lively and rambunctious. My brother has changed.
I leave before the sun can rise and turn him into what he truly is. I bring a flashlight and bottles of water and hike my way through the lonely path across the hill.
I have only ever found the courage once to come during the day, when the village is draped with crawling vines, hidden from sight, and the mushroom stalks stand proud, their heads capped in rich red. I had picked my way through the undergrowth to the family’s house. Two grown mushrooms were in the living room.
In the attic, I found the other two rooted next to each other. One was a little pinhead mushroom. The other was my brother. He swayed in the quiet air, his wide-brimmed cap bright and jeweled with dew.
Then I returned to the village gate, which promises peace to all who enter. Among the sweet gum and the camphor, I hiked my way back to the train as the birds around me sang of a freedom I found strange and unfamiliar.
