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Love in the Time of Fungi: Nika Murphy’s “The Ghost Tenders of Chornobyl”
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Love in the Time of Fungi: Nika Murphy’s “The Ghost Tenders of Chornobyl”
A story about the beauty found in destruction and decay…
By Ruthanna Emrys, Anne M. Pillsworth
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Published on August 28, 2024
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Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches. This week, we cover Nika Murphy’s “The Ghost Tenders of Chornobyl,” first published in Apex Magazine in March 2024. Spoilers ahead!
Not all the Chornobyl ghosts died in 1986. Radiation exposure produced a years-long stream. Sasha’s a young ghost; he died during Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Trying to “prove to my father, to the world, that I was a man,” he volunteered to deliver supplies. His truck was blown up by a mine. He wandered; eventually fellow ghost Kyryl brought him to Chornobyl. There spirits tend to the trees, mosses, “detritus.” Child ghosts tend to the animals. These days Sasha’s tethered to Chornobyl like a comet to the sun.
Sasha tends the mushrooms that feed on isotope radiation. Under Kyryl’s tutelage, he helps them grow, spread, “bring the land back from the dead.” Some tenders live in ruined apartments or trees. Sasha stays in the shack of a living babusya who tends to animals gone as “wild and free as the spirits.” Lyudmyla senses Sasha and calls him her barabashka, the noisy spirit that keeps her company, and safe.
Extreme tourists and documentary crews were the only invaders once. Now Russian troops approach, and shelling shakes the forest. Sasha’s mushrooms release their spores, making him rush to find them mates and places to settle. Will the war reach them, he asks Kyryl. In the States, his parents spoke Russian, and the only Ukrainian he heard was from distant relatives’ phone calls. Sasha now speaks Ukrainian regularly. Maybe his father would be proud of him.
An invading unit hunkers down in trenches. Mushroom beds to be, Kyryl jokes. Having long haunted the forest, he no longer bothers with living humans, and he offers to let Sasha stay with him. Does Kyryl understand that Sasha’s not a woman? “We’re not anything anymore,” Kyryl says. Such casual acceptance gladdens Sasha, simultaneously feeding his anger for everything lost when he transitioned—his father, his former body, former name. It’s “almost as if [he] died twice or never even lived.”
Tired of being alone with his anger, Sasha joins Kyryl in “woven branches like hammocks, [their] spirits a tangled palimpsest.”
Overnight, defense forces slaughter the Russian unit. The soldiers’ ghosts huddle together. The one survivor rises from the muck and runs towards Lyudmyla’s shack.
Sasha follows. Lyudmyla blocks her door and berates the soldier. He pushes her aside, declaring in Russian that he only wants food, drink and to know where he is. He wolfs down bread and milk. Disgusted, Lyudmyla fixes him a sandwich. He puts his rifle aside and eats with tear-streaming eyes. Lyudmyla continues to scold. She edges toward an iron skillet.
Though Kyryl urges Sasha to let the living settle their own affairs, Sasha summons his ghostly energies to help Lyudmyla. To him, she’s “a daughter of gods, mother of heroes.” In fact, she’s just an old woman. She injures the soldier’s forearm, and his rifle shots go wide. Grabbing a kitchen knife, Lyudmyla slashes the soldier’s thigh. He stumbles, and a pistol falls from his pocket. Lyudmyla goes for it. The soldier reaches it first. Sasha wraps his ghost-body around the old woman, but the bullets pass through him. Lyudmyla drops, her eyes meeting Sasha’s for an instant before she’s gone.
Sasha runs outside to help her ghost, but she’s nowhere in sight. He and Kyryl wait all night, but she doesn’t return. Some spirits don’t want to stay, Kyryl explains. Sasha too can leave whenever he wants. Kyryl will stay twenty thousand years, until the last rogue isotope is neutralized. Sasha says Kyryl’s crazy, but Kyryl only shrugs,
In the shack, the soldier has bled to death. His ghost stands praying in a corner. For weeks he’ll stay, watching his body rot while Sasha supervises Lyudmyla’s decomposition. He doesn’t answer the soldier’s questions. One day he finds Kyryl in a cave under the collapsed reactor. Kyryl emerges glowing with cesium isotopes. Bats hang like dark fruit in the surrounding trees. Many more bats live in the cave, where their guano dissolves the radiation. Kyryl will tend the bats now, leaving the mushrooms to Sasha. Soon Sasha will realize that the land will take him if he wants to depart. Otherwise, if Sasha wants him, Kyryl will be here.
Furious at his own losses and at all the lives devoured by “an insatiable empire,” Sasha shrieks. The bats sweep out of the reactor and shred Sasha’s spirit. By the time he pulls himself back together, it’s dawn.
In the shack, the soldier’s ghost crouches over Lyudmyla, fascinated by the fungi growing from her corpse. Sasha sees how young the soldier was. He shows him how to untangle mycelium roots so radiation-mutated mushrooms can grow. The soldier draws back. He’s sorry, he says.
Sasha tells the soldier the land will take him if he wants. The soldier nods, and Sasha watches mushrooms siphon up his spirit. Deep in the forest, he weeps out the “remnants of [his] old life, of the body [he] hated. Of the body [he] loved.”
He returns to mushroom tending. Kyryl tends the bats. They walk evenings, sometimes singing with other ghosts, sometimes swaying together in Kyryl’s branch-hammock. Long afterwards, when the war is over and the empire has fallen, Sasha returns to Lyudmyla’s shack, now only scattered foundation stones. A tree branch has lifted her skull high. Of the soldier, nothing remains. Sasha follows mushroom-whispers to his own remains. Chanterelles grow from them and scent the forest. It’s “a fitting place to call home, for now.”
What’s Cyclopean: This story is full of beauty found in destruction and decay: a “gossamer fog” of mushroom spores that “tango and waltz and dip and twirl,” cesium isotopes “like hordes of fireflies.”
The Degenerate Dutch: Sasha’s father wouldn’t accept him as a man, and he’s still furious about his family’s rejection. And prickly about any hint of possible transphobia from fellow ghosts.
Weirdbuilding: Ghosts build Baba-Yaga-style shelters in the Red Forest.
Anne’s Commentary
I found “The Ghost Tenders of Chornobyl” while combing recent magazines for blog subjects. I hadn’t realized that in English transliteration, Chernobyl was the Russian name for the disaster site, Chornobyl the Ukrainian one. Nika Murphy being Ukrainian-born, and her narrator-ghost of Ukrainian descent, Chornobyl’s the obvious choice for this story.
Being a tail-end Boomer, I experienced grade-school “nuke drills,” during which we dove under our desks, assumed fetal curls, and clamped sweaty palms over our eyes, as if that would save us if the Bomb fell nearby. If the Bomb fell farther away, we’d run for our designated shelter. I noticed the school basement cached no postapocalyptic supplies of food, water and first aid; there were, however, plenty of spiders to mutate into giants and eat us, thereby putting us out of our misery.
I had a handbook on how to build a proper fallout shelter. My parents refused to dig one in our backyard. You’d need a backhoe, my father said. Besides, it would ruin the lawn. Backhoe rentals, I thought, were low prices to pay for survival.
Still, it didn’t happen. I was devastated, because I was honestly terrified of the Bomb at the time. My fears rekindled in 1979 with the release of The China Syndrome, which was followed just twelve days later by the partial nuclear meltdown at Three Mile Island.
Disasters come, disasters go. By the early eighties, I’d transferred my worrying to biological threats like the emerging AIDS pandemic. Then came Chornobyl. I followed its real-life horrorshow with dread, anger and fascination. It still remains the worst nuclear disaster in history. According to the Kyiv Post, Chornobyl will not be returned to “an environmentally safe system” until 2065.
Ghost tender Kyryl is thinking more like 20,000 years before the “last rogue isotope” is neutralized. Not that he’s entirely down on rogue isotopes and the mutations they inspire. Look at all the fungi now thriving in the Exclusion Zone! One real-life example, Cladosporium sphaerospermum, contains a pigment (melanin) that may absorb radiation and convert it to chemical energy. Researchers hope this substance could be used to shield humans in high-radiation environments like space.
Not that Kyryl cares about potential human benefits. He “no longer bothers with the living.” Living people, that is. Kyryl’s all about living mushrooms. Eventually he’ll expand into bats and their guano.
Kyryl tells Sasha things weren’t so bad before the current Russian invasion. Previously, only tourists annoyed the ghost tenders. But Kyryl strikes me as an “old” enough ghost to have also endured the “Chornobyl liquidators,” those thousands of civilian and military personnel called in to clean up the Exclusion Zone.
The HBO miniseries Chernobyl dramatizes their work, which included removing contaminated materials, evacuating residents, monitoring radiation, and constructing protective barriers around the hideously “hot” power plant. In one episode, liquidators move into an enlarged Zone to decontaminate the forests, soil and wildlife. The focus is on a team assigned to destroy all the abandoned pets, for fear they’ll carry radiation beyond the Zone.
Murphy’s ghost tenders stand in direct opposition to the liquidators. They don’t view radiation as a contaminant, an attitude they can afford, being dead already. If anything, they appreciate the positive changes it may bring. And they view surviving animals not as contagion-on-the-hoof (paw, etc.) but as creatures with freedom as unbounded (within the limitations of living physiology) as the spirits’ own.
A death-released spirit can move on to whatever after-place exists, or it can choose to remain in its life-place. The latter choice doesn’t condemn it to the mournful-vengeful-emoGoth existence we usually imagine. Not that ghosts can’t be as angry as Sasha. Eventually he “shreds” his ghost-self via the bats which embody his screamed-out emotions. It would have been too facile, I think, for him now to “move on.” Instead , he reintegrates into a scarred but—wiser? kinder?—vghost. He no longer sees Kyryl’s “indifference” as rejection but can accept the intimacy that comes from being “not anything anymore.”
Not being anything strikes Sasha as both joyful and infuriating. In life, he craved acceptance for his gender. In life this reality alienated him—most poignantly, most unforgivably, from his father. The unhealed life-wound persists until he gives up his old ghost to the mushrooms, the buds of the limitless mycelium. The connection.
After that, Sasha can feel compassion for the soldier’s spirit. He can return to tending, to the other ghosts, to Kyryl’s birch-tree hammock. Long after the war ends and empire falls, he visits the shack where he once clung to the fiercely living Lyudmyla. A tree has grown up under her, making her skull its ornament. The mushrooms whisper him to the place where his cracked femur nourishes chanterelles. Here’s the fitting place to call home. For now.
I admit it. I’m not sure what this closing paragraph is getting at. Will Sasha finally move on through the chanterelles, making this place his fitting home until then? I don’t know. I don’t much care.
Sometimes it’s enough to bask in the beauty of it all, language, image, story. The spell. The connection.
Ruthanna’s Commentary
War doesn’t make a lot of sense by our usual standards of reality. So it follows that realism isn’t always sufficient to writing about violent conflict—sometimes we need to pull on threads of the fantastic to understand it. Most of our war stories in this column have focused on how human violence shades over into inhuman violence. That can be incredibly effective. My favorites along those lines have been Reza Negarestani’s “Dust Enforcer” and Charlie Stross’s “A Colder War”. Both take the dangers of things we’ve actually done and say “Next, obviously, come elder gods.” (Not that I’m suggesting there’s anything obvious about Negarestani; I wouldn’t dare.) Some stories, like Langan’s “Wide Carnivorous Sky” or Drake’s “Than Curse the Darkness,” engage with violence even more bluntly.
Murphy’s is a quieter sort of war story. Here, ghosts from the current Ukraine War settle in among the old ghosts of the Chornobyl disaster. The 1986 reactor meltdown was a keystone of nuclear fears, of the idea that nuclear power was almost as dangerous as nuclear weapons. A whole separate rant, given that a focus on safety rather than shutdowns could’ve helped us avoid much climactic change—but I was busy at the time wearing “Evacuation Plan—Swim East” shirts in protest of the Pilgrim Power Plant. Twenty-eight years later, though, the Pripyat Exclusion Zone really is ecologically remarkable, full of radiophagous fungi but also just animals who find radiation more congenial than human proximity. Sometimes, swallows really do circle with their shimmering sound. Adding ghosts to that ecosystem makes perfect sense. It lets us look at the war through cracks: from a place that even soldiers mostly avoid, and past death to the regenerative power of decay.
Sasha is held to the land by anger, but that’s not treated as a simple thing. It’s not a story about letting go, precisely. More a story about learning to use the things that bind you. He’s not wrong, after all, to be furious at either the invasion or his father’s transphobia, or at how these things came together to interrupt his efforts to change his life and his body. His friend and sometime-lover Kyryl knows that people can move on, but plans to stay for as long as the radiation does. Ghostly responsibility, the quiet tending of bats and mushrooms and trees, is still responsibility. It’s at least as meaningful as driving across a battleground. It’s just slower, quieter, harder to notice the impact short-term.
The one piece of on-screen violence shows that Sasha can still affect the living—but not much. And after death, even enemy soldiers get a chance to slow down and think, and find something useful to do.
Lyudmyla, whom Sasha low-key haunts in life, doesn’t need death to learn her own quiet power. Like the woman with the sunflower seeds. She tends her house and her goats, and when a Russian soldier comes by she does what she needs to do. The soldier sticks around; she moves on and leaves her body to the mushrooms—not a national symbol, but not so different from sunflowers for all that.
The mushrooms, though, do their work entirely unaware of this short-term symbolism. “They speak the language of eons.” They don’t care about war, or vengeance, or the individuals who find meaning in caring about them. But they make the place better anyway, lemon-flavored bite of radiation by lemon-flavored bite.
And tending them gives the ghosts—or at least Sasha—a bit of that long-term perspective. The reader, too. So, writing and reading in the middle of the war, we can still get a line about “one day, long after the war ends and the empire falls”. How does the war resolve? How long will the empire survive? We don’t know—but we know both those things will eventually happen.
Because wars do ultimately end, and all empires are mortal. And mushrooms make beauty out of their bones.
Next week, the nightmare continues, and communication probably doesn’t improve, in Chapters 27-29 of Stephen King’s Pet Sematary.[end-mark]
The post Love in the Time of Fungi: Nika Murphy’s “The Ghost Tenders of Chornobyl” appeared first on Reactor.
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