There was a jackhammer in my chest this morning, or maybe just across the creek, but the distinction didn’t matter. Its rhythm became my pulse, an arrhythmic metronome that synced with something lodged behind my sternum. At first, I mistook it for anxiety—the kind I used to chew like old gum when she and I still shared a kitchen, splitting eggshells into the compost like nothing was rotting between us.
The hummingbird was watching from the bookshelf, just above the divorce paperwork. Carved from pale wood, beak sharp and wing-frozen in a posture of endless offering. My grandmother gave it to my grandfather the year they stumbled across Fun Valley, a Christian-themed RV park she swore God had led them to. On the base, in her jagged hand, she’d written: “56 years” in red ink, almost bleeding into the grain. I always thought the bird looked more like a woodpecker.
This morning I flung it—no ceremony, just a quick wrist flick, almost casual—into the paved channel they still had the audacity to call Shoal Creek. The water barely made a noise. I waited for something symbolic to happen: a sign, a splash, a sudden bloom of wildflowers. Instead, the jackhammer groaned through its next breath, indifferent.
At the Central Library, I tried to focus. I stood in the atrium for a while just watching the escalators hum, people riding their arcs of motion like they were conveyor-belt deities. Above the reading porch, the Floravores had begun to bloom again. No one knew who’d seeded them—some claimed it was a guerrilla horticulturist with a grudge against AI-generated real estate, others swore it was a secret city pilot program—but the result was the same: devouring vines with variegated leaves and psychedelic blossoms that smelled like lemon zest and static. They fed on the calcium-rich walls of the annex, digesting the biomaterial of the city’s cheap post-boom prefab shells, metabolizing ambition into pollen.
I stepped outside for a call from the lawyer. The Petition was moving forward. Theresa's lawyer had brought up the mushroom thing again, her voice nasal and pinched in the voicemail: “We believe Mr. Reyes—has been operating a fungal-based side business without formal disclosure…” A taboo we’d buried beneath years of compost and microdoses. The irony stung; she’d once helped label jars.
I found the old Live Oak and stood beneath its vast canopy. The same one near Seaholm where I practiced Qigong, planting invisible roots down into the limestone, pulling imaginary silk threads skyward through my palms. As I pressed one foot into the soil, the vibrations of the jackhammer melted into a kind of sonic moss—vivid green, rough against the nerves. My breath tasted like powdered sugar and copper.
The lawyer spoke in measured tones, crisp as dry crackers. I nodded in all the right places, though I wasn’t listening. I was watching a hummingbird—real, not carved—hovering just above a cluster of blue mistflower. Its wings shimmered violet. It made a sound I could feel behind my eyes. A high whine like the glint off polished aluminum.
“Fun Valley,” I whispered to no one.
The bird didn’t answer, but for a second, I thought I saw it wink.
Beneath me, the roots shifted.
⸻
Let me know if you’d like this chapter to take on a different shape—slightly more surreal, more grounded, or to start weaving in other side plots like the Floravores’ origin, the mushroom network, or an unexpected alliance at the library.