It was 3:33 a.m., that pocket-sized hour when the air is thick as gelatin and the stars whisper in Morse. The jackhammer was silent. The silence had teeth.
I woke under the Live Oak again, or maybe I’d never left. The ground had gone velvet and warm as fresh bread, and the tree’s bark had the texture of a Braille poem written by someone on ketamine. I could hear the roots speaking in glottal tones, like someone gargling Morse code backwards. It was either profound or just the side effects of low-dose Lion’s Mane and heartbreak.
Across from me stood a figure in a poncho woven with glowing glyphs—red, blue, and a black so deep it made voids feel insecure. The patterns swirled and jittered like a Zoom meeting with alien symbols. I recognized one of them from the carved hummingbird I’d flung into Shoal Creek: an angular sigil that looked like a question mark having an existential crisis.
The figure handed me a cassette tape labeled “Floravores, Vol. IX: Compost Jazz for Spiral Glyphs.”
I said, “Cool,” because that’s what you say when confronted with psychic apparitions dressed like an Etsy prophecy.
⸻
The next morning, everything smelled faintly of warm plastic and cilantro. Central Library’s rooftop garden was humming again, but not in the electrical sense. No, this was a barbershop quartet of bees crooning in a key known only to basalt and late-stage extroverts.
I’d agreed to meet my ex there, under the misbehaving wisteria. She arrived in a cloud of sunscreen and bitter almond, holding the divorce paperwork like a cursed manuscript. “The Petition is final,” she said, her voice the same tone she once used to say “your sourdough starter smells like trauma.”
We sat in silence while a Floravore tendril looped itself into a cursive L, then an A, then—possibly—a screaming mouth.
She said, “You still growing mushrooms?” I said, “Only the ones that don’t talk back.” She said, “Ha.” I said, “Ha.”
Then we were quiet again.
⸻
Later, I found myself walking the library’s sub-basement, where the glyphs from my dream had appeared on the floor tiles—red and blue repeating like a forgotten brand logo from a haunted fast food chain. The lights flickered in sync with a rhythm I could feel in my teeth. Each glyph pulsed like it was trying to speak, or scream, or sing. Maybe all three.
I pressed my palm to one of the symbols and felt a wave of warm carbonation rise through my bones. Suddenly, I was in a diner with owls for waitstaff. A jukebox was playing a song that sounded like Twin Peaks and MF DOOM had a lovechild named Beatrice who only communicated through kalimba loops.
The waitress owl hooted: “You want pie or closure?”
“Is there a difference?” I asked, tasting cherry and grief.
⸻
Back in the real world—if you could call it that—I sat under the Live Oak again, phone off, Qigong forgotten. The tree’s branches looked like they were spelling something in American Sign Language. I half-expected a squirrel to descend with a subpoena.
Instead, a hummingbird landed on my knee. The same one, or a reincarnation. It was wearing a tiny red glyph on its back, shaped like a love letter on fire.
It blinked at me. I blinked back.
The jackhammer started again.
But this time, it was in my chest, in time with the glyphs, with the Floravores, with the owl waitress and the mushroom spores spelling out my next mistake in bioluminescent cursive.
I laughed, the dry kind of laugh that leaves salt crystals in your throat.
Then I whispered to no one in particular: “Let the compost jazz play on.”
⸻
Want to keep spiraling deeper? I can bring in the mushroom network’s intelligence, the origin of the glyphs, or the city’s bureaucratic cult that maintains the Floravores.