Borealice Winters

Listen to Borealice read his story

What should’ve been a relaxing week went taut as Hubert saw the twisting path to the cabin. When he fetched his notepad, it wasn’t to write, as he’d promised his wife Lydia, but to sketch a world where the path was straight. 

He saw over her shoulder how her notebook snarled with cursive as loopy as the path. He flattened a stray bang behind her ear, but it popped back out. “Breathe, Hue,” she said.

Hubert obeyed and hyperventilated.

While Lydia and the other members of the writer’s group thought about stories, Hubert thought about the grid of his office and the grid of all the traffic intersections he’d designed. They checkerboarded his hometown into uniform squares. Nothing and nobody here was uniform. 

The writers traded drafts. Hubert raided the pantry for some chips and went for a walk. Vertiginous spirals around the cabin oppressed him.

Then, hope. 

He found what would someday be dubbed “Hubert’s Mold” on a rock. At first, he thought it was a thin, yellow vine. Then, out of an inefficiency in his neural pathways, he recalled a video his boss had shown him: Japanese scientists had put a slime mold on a map of Tokyo. They put food pellets atop Tokyo’s major hubs. Then the mold, with biological efficiency, stretched its filaments between the pellets in a pattern just like that of the Tokyo metro. The yellow vine looked just like that slime mold.

The first experiment: one chip here, one chip there. Result: filaments in a straight line between them. 

The second experiment: further apart. Result: another straight line. 

The third experiment: chips on opposite sides of a tree. 

Result: without succumbing to any inefficiency of Euclidean geometry, the mold folded space itself and found an impossible straight path from chip A to chip B. Hubert looked through the bend and marveled at trees curved like sickles and a sunset sky condensed to a tube.

When he brought his mold to the cabin, he realized how suboptimal its floorplan was. So he and his mold started making impossible straight lines to every single room, bending space to bypass walls and changes in elevation. 

By the time the others noticed, it was too late. The mold optimized the cabin so much that the space around it creased. It, and everyone inside, disappeared. It was only with the help of his mold that Hubert escaped.

If Lydia was lost, Hubert thought, he and the mold just needed to make some straight paths between the woods and his house. Then his wife could find her way back.

He warned his hometown via its official Facebook page: “adding new roads to town with my slime mold.” Friends and family commented on his post, congratulating him on surviving writing camp and presenting this strange piece of microfiction.

-o-o-o-

On forgotten forums about cryptids or creepypastas, you can find threads about Hubert’s Mold to this day. But, try as you might, you will never find Hubert or his hometown

Borealice’s prompts were: At a Creative Retreat, a Cryptid, Mould

Despite all evidence to the contrary, Borealice Winters is an earthling. He is, however, a bizarre one who loves all the bizarre shapes literature can take, and who loves nothing more than to write funky little words. He writes not from some Transylvanian Castle, but from Colorado, USA.