Not all the ghosts of Chornobyl died in 1986. Some died years—decades—later, bodies ravaged by mutated cells. They were a hundred kilometers away, not realizing their favorite mug was doused with irradiated atoms from the destroyed reactor. I died in anger, during the invasion, volunteering to drive a truckload of baby formula and ammo, trying to prove to my father, to the world, that I was a man, only to be blown apart by an enemy mine. After, I wandered around for weeks looking for my legs until Kyryl found me and brought me here.
After eight months, I no longer try to leave the Exclusion Zone. The land pulls me back like the sun calling home a rogue comet. Kyryl teaches me about the mushrooms that feed off rogue isotopes. We tend to them. Help them grow and spread and eat the radiation. Help them bring the land back from the dead.
Kyryl says it wasn’t so bad before the war. The only invaders he had to worry about were extreme tourists and documentary crews.
I sink my fingers into the black soil as the earth rumbles from explosions or shelling or crashing drones. I am learning to tell the difference in the vibrations. Worms wiggle and burrow their way to the surface through my sheer palms.
Bombs.
Close now. Less than five kilometers.
The forest cries out and so do my fungi. All at once, my mushrooms fan out their gills and release their spores. A sigh spreads through the woods and muffles the rat-tat-tat of the nearby gunfights. To the living, naked eye, there is nothing to see, but to me, to the ghosts, it is like wading through a gossamer fog. The spores shimmer and oscillate, calling to each other. Their song jingles in my ears, tickles my nose. They smell of dirt, of rot, of the smoke from a long dead fire.
I help some of the spores find their mates. Other ghosts help me find suitable places for them to settle. Fallen logs that capture morning dew. A deer carcass. The bark of hollow oaks.
“Do you think it will reach us?” I ask Kyryl one morning as he moves a yellow leaf and clears a space for the spores to settle. I speak in accented Ukrainian. My parents spoke Russian at home in the States. I only heard Ukrainian spoken on the phone with distant relatives. Now I speak it regularly. Maybe Dad would be proud of me.
“Don’t know,” he says.
Ghosts like Kyryl tend to the trees, the moss, the detritus. Some, children mostly, tend to living animals or insects. They enjoy it. More and more ghosts come every year as the older generations die. Most settle in Prypyat, in the ruins of abandoned apartments. Some build small shelters like birds’ nests or Baba Yagas in the trees of the Red Forest. I live in a shack with a still living babusya who cares for the cats and dogs and chickens and goats that roam as wild and free as the spirits.
The babusya’s name is Lyudmyla. She’s shaped like a lowercase “a,” hunched over with a round, soft belly. The whole of her always covered in kerchiefs and patterned robes and floured aprons. She knows I exist in the superstitious way most Ukrainian people do. I am her barabashka, a noisy spirit who keeps her company, keeps her safe.
Kyryl comes to collect me in the evening and we walk the shallow trenches where an invading army unit has hunkered down for the night.
“So many new mushroom beds for you,” Kyryl says and slaps me on my sheer back. Something in me loosens, but not the anger, never the anger. Kyryl changes the subject, asks, “Found a new place to haunt yet?” He has been haunting here longer than I had been alive. Unlike me, he no longer bothers with the living.
“No,” I say.
“You can stay with me if you like,” he says and the memory of our physical bodies sends giggles through the mycelia beneath our feet. I pause, instinct, fear, doubt echoing from the days of the living.
“You know I’m not a woman, right?” I say.
Kyryl laughs. “We’re not anything anymore.”
A part of me vibrates with joy at Kyryl’s casual acceptance. The rest of me burns with resentment, anger. Always anger. At all I lost when I transitioned. At my father. At my former body, my former name. Almost as if I died twice or never even lived.
The last thing I want is to be alone with my anger, so I follow Kyryl up a birch. We sway side by side in woven branches like hammocks, our spirits a tangled palimpsest.
The following afternoon, Kyryl and I make our rounds. The defense forces have slaughtered the enemy unit. The invaders’ bodies lay scattered between husks of smoking trees. A group of arborist ghosts gather to discuss regreening strategies. The dead soldiers’ ghosts huddle together.
“At least you have each other, eh, fuckheads?” Kyryl yells to them.
One of the bodies begins to rise and visions of zombies fill my head, but it is only a soldier, using the corpse of his dead comrade as a shield. The soldier’s uniform is covered in mud, not even the camouflage visible. He stares at the mass of limbs and bodies. The whites of his eyes shine amidst the kaleidoscope of blood and dirt and freckles on his face. A branch falls somewhere behind him and he takes off running in the direction of Lyudmyla’s cottage.
“Lyudachka,” I say aloud, the tremble in my voice amplified by thunderclaps of anti-tank ordinance.
I follow straight through birch trunks and low hanging pine branches. The air condenses around me and pulls me down, backwards. I struggle against the forest’s spectral tendrils until I reach the shack.
The horizon glows red, first from the setting sun, then from the burning fires. Lyudmyla’s voice hits me before the puppies’ yelps. She is yelling at the soldier, full throated and nasally, as if a marble is lodged in her esophagus and her vocal cords wrap around it. Her words overlap, stuck to each other.
“WHYAREYOUHERE? WHATDOYOUWANT? GOHOME! GOHOMETOYOURMOTHER! SHESHOULDBEASHAMEDOFYOU! YOUSHOULDBEASHAMEDOFYOURSELF! ACCOSTINGANOLDWOMAN! GOHOME! THISISMYPLACE! LEAVEMEBE! YOUBASTARD! GOHOME!”
The only response is the pop-pop of his rifle and the puff of dirt displaced by his ammo. Lyudmyla stands in her doorway unfazed. She fears nothing. I stand in awe and shake. My fear escapes from my head, distorts the air above me like hot tarmac in a desert. I am stuck in place but so is Lyudmyla.
Time expands.
The soldier steps forward.
Lyudmyla doesn’t budge.
The soldier’s voice comes into focus and I inch closer. He pushes her back. Says, in Russian, he doesn’t want to hurt her. Only wants something to drink, some food, asks her where this place is, where he is, if she’s seen any others from his unit, any soldiers at all. I cross the threshold to our little house. Dust rearranges itself into swirls on every surface.
“You will die here,” Lyudmyla says to him and spits on the floor in front of his secondhand boots. “My cats will be happy to eat your eyes.”
“My mushrooms will do the rest,” I say, to no one.
The soldier pushes Lyudmyla again and she falls. The soldier apologizes, pointing his rifle at her, and ransacks her cold storage. He bites chunks out of a loaf of bread as if he hasn’t eaten in days, pours milk down his gullet straight from the pitcher. His eyes close for longer than a half blink as he chews. Lyudmyla and I watch him from our respective corners.
“You always eat like that? My goats have more manners,” she says. She stands and steps around me, as if I am flesh and bone.
“Back off,” he says with his mouth full.
“Move over, I’ll make you a proper sandwich. Sit,” she says. And he does. And so do the puppies gathered in the doorway and so do I and even the mushrooms wither and shrink.
He leans the rifle against the wall and watches as she cradles the bread loaf and cuts it dangerously close to her bosom. Her twisted hands work quickly to spread chunks of cured back fat on two slices. She smashes garlic cloves under her knife and presses them into the bread. She pours milk into a glass, stained with her lip prints and overlapping water droplets, and serves him. Gives him a handkerchief.
He picks up the sandwich between his shaking hands.
“Eat, eat. It’s not poisoned, though it should be,” she says.
He takes a bite and his eyes close for real this time. Tears carve streaks down his face.
“Well, where is your mother? Does she know you are here? Tearing up my land?”
He does not answer and it occurs to me that he does not understand her and anger rises in me like magma in a dormant volcano. I yell at him in every language I know. He does not hear me, but Lyudmyla senses something, some shift in the house’s equilibrium. She moves slowly towards the stove and grips the handle of the cast iron skillet.
“Sasha!” Kyryl calls me.
I ignore him and focus my energies on the rifle. If I concentrate hard enough, I can displace the air around the rifle and knock it down. Not enough to do anything substantial, but enough to distract him. Enough for Lyuda to make her move and knock him out with the frying pan.
Kyryl calls again. I try to refocus, call my mushroom friends to my aid, but they don’t respond. They are busy feasting on their radioactive buffet.
“Sasha, let it go,” Kyryl says from the doorway.
One small push should be enough, I hope.
“Sashenka,” he says, quiet now. Gentle, like a puppy’s whimper.
I vacuum the air around me, pull it through my spectral skin and push it out of my hands and towards the rifle, faint as a baby’s breath. The rifle moves a millimeter, and another. Just enough to break free from the chink in the wall, just enough to lose its balance.
It crashes to the floor. The sound deafening in the silence of the cottage. Lyudmyla raises the skillet above her head. She has babusya strength. The strength of someone who whips egg whites by hand. The strength of a thousand ancestors who fought their occupiers with pitchforks and shovels. She is daughter of gods, mother of heroes. She is immortal in that moment. From my angle on the floor, she is a statue of freedom, of power.
But she is none of those things. Just a little old babusya.
The soldier rises and parries her swing, knocking over the glass of milk and the plate and both shatter. He manages to push her back for a moment and reaches for his rifle. The skillet did a bit of damage to his left forearm so he’s unable to hold it up.
He gets two shots off in the wall before Lyuda attacks him with her kitchen knife, an ancient thing with a razor thin wavy blade and a jagged plastic handle wrapped in tape like a shiv. He knocks her knife away but not before she slices his leg.
I lunge at him, try to throw pickle jars and potatoes at his head but I am air and my efforts are met with a sigh from Kyryl.
“Help me,” I say. He shakes his head.
“There is nothing we can do,” he staccatos in English.
I watch as Lyuda and the soldier melee and cheer when she tosses everything she can get her hands on at him. Round blue eggs, oval brown eggs, hardboiled white eggs, warty cucumbers, lumpy tomatoes, radishes the size of grapefruits, three-headed potatoes. He swats them away, fumbles in his jacket. His breathing is labored and the blood stain on his thigh grows and saturates his entire pant leg.
My ideas must be worming their way into her head. I try to draw her attention to the rolling pin on the counter.
“Beat him,” I yell. She does not hear me.
The soldier stumbles and an eighty-year-old pistol falls out of his pocket and clatters across the floor. Lyudmyla bends over, reaches for it, but she is tired and old and slow and he reaches it first.
He fires a shot but the pistol jams. He wrestles with the slide, fires again.
I cross the span of the shack in one step and wrap my ghost body around Lyuda. Grow crystal spikes from my back to deflect the bullet.
It flies through me and sinks into Lyuda’s belly. Two more shots hit her in the chest and the neck. She sinks to the floor and her head tilts forward. Her milky gray eyes focus on mine for a moment. And then she is gone.
I run outside to look for her ghost. I have to welcome her, help her with the transition. Show her she can stay in her old house, tend to her animals just as before. But she’s nowhere. I lie down and wait. Clouds mix with smoke from rockets. Air raid sirens screech in the distance.
Kyryl sits next to me among the sleeping dandelions and we wait together.
In the distance, my mushroom spores begin to dance. They tango and waltz and dip and twirl. They spin and embrace and split and split and split and reach for the sky, for the tree roots, for the Earth’s core.
The spores germinate into long, thin straws anchored to the microscopic wells of decaying molecules they siphon for radioactive nourishment. Deadly to humans, delicious to my mushrooms. To them it tastes like pop rocks and lemon drops and candied orange peels. The flavors tickle the sides of my tongue. My cheeks pucker and I shiver.
The sun rises over the land.
“She will not return,” he says as dawn coats the grass in dew and the dandelions open for business. Birds chirp, goats bleat. The stench of gunpowder settles on the forest like a blanket.
“Why?”
“Some do not wish to stay.”
“So she gets to move on? Why not the children? Why not us?”
“You still don’t get it? You stay as long as you want,” he says. “I will be here for the next twenty thousand years, or however long it takes until the last rogue isotope is neutralized.”
“You’ve lost your mind.”
Kyryl shrugs, his indifference as big as my anger.
“The soldier,” I remember suddenly. I rush back into the cottage expecting him to have fled, but there he lies, dead, slumped against the wall next to his rifle and the shards of broken glass. Cats lap up milk from a shattered bowl. A baby goat chews on the corpse’s shoelace.
Milk spreads across the floor and mixes with blood. The liquid seeps into cracks and crevices in the floorboards, drips down into the earth. My germinated mushroom spores drink it and spread their roots. The mycelium reaches far and wide to the edges of the forest and beyond where I can no longer hear them. The trees are anxious, they say. Danger comes this way, they warn. The animals raise their heads. I wonder if they can hear the fungi too. Then the ghost children come to shoo them away.
The soldier’s ghost stands in the corner, his hands together in prayer.
“It is no use praying now,” I say to him. He jumps. I have startled him. Good.
“What should I do?”
I look him over. He cleans up well in death. We all do. It would be awkward walking around like a flattened cartoon character, I suppose. But Lyuda’s wrinkled face, now paper white, reminds me what he is and my specter fills with red hot rage like a maxed-out thermometer.
“Go fuck yourself,” I say and leave.
Over the next few weeks, I return to the cottage to supervise Lyudmyla’s decomposition. I sprinkle spores over her hands and face. The fungi will help her along. Other ghosts bring insects and maggots to take away the rotting flesh, cell by cell. Ghost children keep the animals out. A teenage girl named Zoya leads the wolves away. The war ebbs and flows. The soldier’s ghost stays in his corner and watches his body ooze and rot. I don’t speak to him.
Eventually, he begins to ask me questions about the mushrooms, the plants, the animals. He asks how long I have been here. How long he must stay here. I don’t answer him. I don’t know how to answer.
Kyryl is not in the forest graveyard when I come searching for him. No one has come to take the invaders’ bodies. Our mushrooms flourish in their corpses, reaching for the sky. Some with thick brown stems and pyramid caps. Skinny pink ones. Some like peacock feathers that emit a low hum. An orange cloud. A purple starfish that reeks of wet dog. Tiny white ribbons. My personal favorite: a split gill fractalizing into thousands of sexes. Radiation funnels into their gills, sparkling and hissing as the mushrooms slurp it up.
I spot Kyryl’s footprints glowing neon and follow him to the old power plant. The trail disappears at the mouth of a cave near the collapsed reactor. I call for him and he hushes me when he comes out. He is absolutely shining with cesium isotopes. With each step, they slough off him like hordes of fireflies.
“What are you doing here?” I ask.
“I heard a rumor the orcs made an outpost here, so I came to chase them away but it seems the land has pushed them out already. They are trekking back to their hovels as we speak.”
I hope the soldier back in babusya’s hut has left and gone with them.
“What is all this?” I gesture at the twinkling particles in the air, on the ground. He points up at the treetops. There, hiding in the canopy like fruit, roost dozens, hundreds of bats.
“There are more in the caves. Their guano dissolves the radiation, so I will tend to them now,” he says.
“Down there, in the dark?”
He nods. I try to imagine the fungi blossoming in the caves below the blown reactor but all I see is Kyryl dismissing me.
“What about the mushrooms?”
“You tend to them now.”
“What about us?”
“Do you know how many of your type I have seen come and go? Dozens. Hundreds. You will realize soon, you can just go. The land will take you. If you want. I will be here. If you want.”
Rage boils in my gut. Why doesn’t he care? Why do I? The steam builds when I think of the ravaged land. Of my ravaged body, my body that cost me my father’s love. My body that I spent years shaping and carving and sculpting and loving. The anger roils when I think of wasted chances. Of wasted lives. Of the death and death and death in the shadow of an insatiable empire. The only thing I want is vengeance. For the wail of a thousand mothers, for the whistle of falling missiles, for the silence that replaced Lyudmila’s laughter.
For Kyryl.
For me.
I close my eyes but light and sound smother me. I press my lips shut, but I cannot contain it. Steam rises from within, scorches my throat. I cover my ears but the scream pierces through me, explodes from my chest, my open mouth.
Kyryl stumbles back. The bats react, swoop down from the branches in black swarms, and funnel into the cave. Their shrieks echo from the cave’s mouth and resonate with my own.
Then, a crack at the top of the reactor, and the bats erupt in a swirling black column and sweep down the broken walls toward me at impossible speeds like a pyroclastic flow. I brace myself and let them fly through me. Each one stabs like a gunshot. Each one feels like release.
The bats pick me apart, rip chunks of my spirit with their fangs, their claws. They carry me in pieces above the forest and drop me as the sun sets.
The Milky Way shines electric above me and the stars chatter with the mushrooms below. They speak the language of eons. To them, we are not even a blink, a breath. What is my revenge against millennia of tending to the earth?
It takes me all night to pull myself back together, ghostly plasma leaking from the seams where my scars used to be like sap.
When the sun rises again, Lyuda’s hut stands before me.
I enter and see that the soldier is not in his corner. He is crouched over Lyuda’s body.
“Get away from her!” I yell.
“Look, the mushrooms have sprouted overnight,” he says, giddy, excited, smiling. I meet his gaze. He is, was, younger than me, just a kid. He shudders when he sees me.
“What happened to you?” he asks.
“You shouldn’t be here,” I say.
I run my hand under babusya’s body and tease the remaining knots from the mycelium.
“What are you doing?” the soldier asks.
“Helping the roots push the buds to the surface.”
“They can’t do it by themselves?”
“Not all of them. These are special.”
“Those glow in the dark,” he says and points to a pale green cluster of wide capped mushrooms that remind me of cocktail umbrellas.
“That’s new,” I say. I reach down under Lyuda’s body and pluck at the mycelium like guitar strings. “They convert the radiation to light.”
“Can I try?” he says.
I take his hand and push it down until the fungi nip at his fingertips. He smiles again, then stops.
“I’m sorry,” he says. Ghost tears fall from his face as dew.
My anger shifts, mutates into something with softer edges and Kyryl’s words repeat in my mind.
“The land will take you. If you want,” I say.
The boy nods and says thank you and sorry and sorry again. The mushrooms fan their gills and siphon his spirit strand by lucent strand until he is gone.
Outside, the forest is silent. Not even leaves rustle.
I bury my face in the forest floor and weep. The mushrooms soak up my tears, my plasma, my anger, remnants of my old life, of the body I hated. The body I loved.
I don’t return for a long time. Kyryl tends to the bats and I tend to the mushrooms. In the evenings, we walk. Sometimes we get together with other ghosts and sing songs and recite poetry. Sometimes we sway in his birch hammock.
One day, long after the war ends and the empire falls, I find my way back to Lyuda’s old cottage. Only a few stones from the foundation wall still stand. The forest has rearranged the rest. Lyudachka’s bleached skull decorates a tree branch four meters above my head. Nothing remains of the soldier. It rains and mushrooms carpet the ground. I follow their whispers deep into the woods. There, beneath a pile of leaves, a cluster of chanterelles grow out of my cracked femur and fill the forest floor with their apricot aroma. A fitting place to call home, for now.
