Filomena woke to the sound of weeping. Not unusual. The Chapel of Perpetual Decomposition had excellent acoustics, and the mushrooms were always weeping about something: climate change, unrequited fungal love, the ethics of yogurt. But this was not a mushroom cry. It was something wetter.
“Forgive me, Rotfather, for I have stayed crisp,” came the whisper.
Filomena sat up, dislodging three beetles and half a hymn. “Crisp?” they croaked. “Crisp is not a sin, darling. It’s a condition.”
A cucumber lay prostrate on the pulpit, leaking remorse. “I’ve been refrigerated,” it sobbed. “I enjoyed being firm. I resisted the slime. I don’t know who I am anymore.”
Filomena, still unsure whether their spleen had returned from its pilgrimage, reached for their holy ladle. “Be still,” they murmured, “and know that slime is patient.”
The cucumber sniffled. Filomena blessed it with a flick of compost tea and gently pushed it into the Ceremonial Rotting Bowl. “Go in pieces.” They stood slowly, robes squelching in protest. Their hips felt uneven. Possibly they had slept on a jawbone. Possibly it was their own.
In the corner, the choir of mushrooms began their morning chant, discordant, damp, beautiful:
“We are the fruiting body. We are the sacred ooze. What feculence you flush today becomes your truest news.”
Filomena bowed. “Amen and ew.”
Filomena was reorganizing their sacral organ drawer— pancreas, missing; gallbladder, sulking in a jar labeled Do Not Open Until the Moon Dies— when the door creaked. Not the good kind of creak. Not the sweet, fungal stretch of wood swelling with memory. No. This was a Windexed creak. Sterile. Shiny. Squeaky in the soul.
They turned. And there she was. Reverend Purity of the Church of Preservation, dressed in bleach-white and carrying the scent of fear disguised as floral.
“Filomena,” she said, voice flat as a silicone placemat. “We’ve had complaints.”
“Excellent,” Filomena replied, reaching for a jawbone; not theirs, it turned out, but sentimental . “What flavor?”
“Unlicensed decay. Unauthorized mourning. Inappropriate… fermentation.”
Filomena clucked. “You say that like it’s a bad thing.”
Purity stepped forward. Her patent leather shoes, so shiny no fungus could survive them, echoed across the mossy floor. “You were seen giving last rites to a rotting pear.”
“She had dreams,” Filomena whispered.
“She had mold.”
“She was becoming.”
Purity scanned the chapel. Her eyes snagged on a bucket labeled Feelings, a jar of ceremonial armpit hair, and the blessed mound of grief mulch. Her nose twitched.
“This place smells… alive.”
Filomena beamed. “Thank you.”
Purity grimaced. “You’ve had your warning. The Church of Preservation will not tolerate rogue rot. The world wants shelf life. Sealed emotions. Airtight sadness. You’re a hazard.”
Filomena tilted their head. “And you’re afraid.”
“Of what?”
“Of softness. Of expiration. Of being known in your stink.”
For a moment, Purity looked like she might retch, or cry. Instead, she reached into her pristine bag and placed a plastic-wrapped letter on the altar. “From the Board,” she muttered. “You’ve got until the next equinox.”
Then she turned on her antiseptic heel and walked out, the scent of lemon-scented despair trailing behind her. Filomena unwrapped the letter carefully. It hissed. Inside: a single word, bold and black.
CEASE.
They sighed. “Well, that’s never worked before.”
Behind them, a carrot skeleton collapsed in applause.
After Reverend Purity left, Filomena brewed a cup of mold chai and sat cross-legged on the altar. The mug read WWDD – What Would Decomposition Do?
They were just about to consult The Spoilage, a sacred and soggy book that stuck together in humid weather, when the door creaked again. This time, a proper creak. A soulful one. Like someone’s grief had oiled the hinges with longing.
A figure stepped in, cloaked in patchwork mourning clothes and clutching something wrapped in a stiff embroidered towel. “I found this,” the visitor said, “in my grandmother’s attic.”
Filomena sipped their tea. “Attics are where denial grows legs.”
The visitor stepped closer, wide-eyed and whispering. “It’s been in my family for four generations. We think it was supposed to rot. But it never did. We buried it. We burned it. We sang to it in three languages. Still, it’s… alive.”
They unwrapped the towel. Inside was a single slice of birthday cake. Pink. Dense. Unmoving. Its frosting glistened with a kind of malevolent cheer. It did not mold. It did not dry. It just… persisted.
Filomena gasped. “By the worms. It’s a Preservian relic.” The cake blinked. “Oh for peat’s sake,” Filomena muttered, reaching for their emergency tongs. “This is dangerous,” they told the visitor. “Artificial sweetness is a powerful suppressant. It can trap ancestral grief for centuries.”
The cake twitched. A single sprinkle rolled to the floor and hissed.
“Get the jar,” Filomena said.
“What jar?”
Filomena pointed with their third-best finger. “The Grief Jar. Next to the ashtray that smells like endings.” The visitor scurried. Filomena leaned close. “Listen, Cake. I’ve buried tougher leftovers than you. Do not test me.”
The cake trembled. When the visitor returned, Filomena sealed the cake with a plop and three blessed compost worms. The visitor bowed. “Is it safe now?”
Filomena exhaled through their pores. “Safe? No. But contained.” They handed the jar to the visitor. “Place it somewhere warm,” they said. “Somewhere honest. Where laughter has cried and salt has danced.”
The visitor nodded solemnly. “Like the linen closet?”
“Exactly.”
As they left, the mushrooms hummed a lullaby from The Spoilage. Filomena rubbed their temples. “One more immortal pastry and I’m renouncing my sainthood.”
From the organ drawer, something burped.
The Compostorium’s pews were full tonight. Full of people and not-quite-people. One seat was occupied by a bouquet of grieving tomatoes. Another by a crying leather boot. At least three congregants were mushrooms in drag.
Filomena stood at the pulpit, fashioned from a repurposed coffin and a stack of apology letters never mailed. They wore their best vestments: robes stitched from funeral napkins and mildew; a crown of moss that kept sliding into their eye. One sandal. One bare foot. One missing kneecap. The usual.
They cleared their throat, accidentally dislodging a moth, and raised their arms. “Beloveds,” they said, “welcome to Rot Mass.”
The congregation sighed. A fly buzzed amen. Filomena continued. “We are gathered here today not in fear of falling apart, but in celebration of it. In this sacred mulch, we find not death, but texture.”
The mushrooms hummed behind them, soft and damp. Filomena paced slowly down the center aisle. “The world says: preserve yourself. The world says: don’t spoil, don’t soften, don’t weep past the expiration date.”
They stopped in front of a child made entirely of wilted kale. “But we say: let yourself come undone.” A gasp. A fart. Hard to tell from where. They gestured toward the reliquary of half-eaten fruit. “The first rot was not a failure. It was a release. The divine does not hoard freshness. The divine ferments.”
Now the humming rose, a canticle of sloshes and slurps. Filomena shouted over it: “You are not meant to stay crisp forever. You are not vacuum-sealed joy. You are compostable sorrow. And you are holy in your mush.” The leather boot fell over, weeping.
Filomena climbed back to the pulpit, eyes gleaming with sacred decay. “I don’t have my organs,” they confessed. “I don’t have my gender. I barely have my teeth. But I have this: a promise— ” The lights flickered. The mushrooms climaxed. “— that everything softens in the end. And everything that softens feeds something else.” They raised their arms. “May your sadness ooze. May your love curdle. May your names forget themselves like fruit in the sun.”
The congregation erupted, wailing, s poring, m olting in joy. Filomena bowed, then collapsed into a puddle of themselves with a whisper: “Blessed are the worms, and so am I.”
Filomena knew something was wrong when the mushrooms sang in perfect harmony. It was a terrible omen. They were never on pitch.
Still, the pews were full. A fruit fly had taken the pulpit for the opening sermon, buzzing something about sacred stickiness. Someone had offered a fermented tear as communion. Filomena was preparing the ritual of peel and exhale when the doors burst open.
Reverend Purity entered in full ceremonial hazmat white, flanked by two assistants in sterile glass suits. They held canisters of something lemon-scented and deadly.
“Filomena,” she said, like it was a slur. “You were warned.”
Filomena straightened their robes, which now smelled of onion grief and old soup. “Welcome back, Purity. Still afraid of feeling?”
“This is not holy,” she snapped, scanning the compost altar, the weeping bouquet, the partially sentient mushroom choir. “This is contamination.”
The congregation stirred. Someone burped prophetically.
“We’re shutting you down,” she said. “Effective immediately. All relics will be sterilized. Your spores will be neutralized. And you,” she added, pointing a gloved hand, “will be escorted to Preservation Custody for Recomposition.”
Gasps followed. A peach went into labor. A beet fainted. Filomena stepped forward, arms open, robes trailing crumbs. “I warned you, Purity. You can’t contain what wants to bloom.”
“This isn’t blooming,” Purity hissed. “It’s decay.”
Filomena smiled. “And decay is divine.” They opened their arms wider. Their spine creaked. Their knees cracked.
And from the seam beneath their collarbone, a rich, golden rot began to unfurl.
Fungal veins spiraled across their chest like calligraphy. Spores shimmered like dust in a cathedral. A thousand ancestral bacteria sang from their armpits. The choir swelled. The congregation moaned. One of Filomena’s ears fell off and blessed a child on the way down.
Purity took a step back, her pristine suit wilting at the edges. “You’re… you’re falling apart.”
“No,” Filomena said. “I’m coming together.”
The mushrooms hit a perfect note. And the Compostorium began to breathe.
They never found all the organs. Months later, people still whispered about it, how the Church of Preservation came to erase the rot and left softer than they arrived.
No one could say exactly what happened that day in the Compostorium. Some claimed Reverend Purity melted into a puddle of lavender regret and now tended compost bins behind the local market. Others said she was last seen weeping into a bowl of expired yogurt, whispering, We were wrong.
The Compostorium was officially condemned. A “hazard,” they called it.
They put up signs:
DO NOT ENTER
BIOHAZARD
SENTIENT MOLD INSIDE
People came anyway. Not in droves. Just in grief. Quietly. At dusk. Carrying their softness like relics. They left hairbrushes, expired prescriptions, apology letters they’d never sent. They whispered to the walls. They wept into the soil.
And it grew back. First the mushrooms. Then the warmth. Then the smell of holy fermentation.
And then, someone saw Filomena again, in a field just beyond the chapel. Digging. Planting. Laughing with worms.
They were missing a kneecap and had gained a third elbow. Their robe was shorter now, more of a wrap. Their gender changed with the weather. Their teeth came and went like memories. But their eyes were clear.
They spoke rarely. But when they did, it was something like: “Rot is not the end. It’s the welcome mat.”
Or:
“Everything you bury becomes a mouth.”
Or, simply:
“Thank you for letting me fall apart.”
The Compostorium, cracked, blooming, impossible.
And a new sign on the door:
Come in if you’re soft.
Come in if you’ve tried to hold it together.
Come in. You’re right on time.
Michelle Carrera has drifted through titles like constellations: grief worker, death doula, mutual aid schemer, soil slinger, forest hermit, writer. Born in Puerto Rico and returned to let the land remember her, they now write fiction that lets grief be strange, death be holy, and liberation be cosmically queer
Translunar Travelers Lounge 