The Morble

By Zola Mooney

Jul 23, 2023

The square is empty except for three men sitting around the pit that they have been digging, eating sandwiches. They watch as I carry my box off the bus and walk towards them. I ask them if there’s a place I can stay on the island.

“My aunt runs the hotel across from the covered marketplace. She will have a room.”

The digger’s eyes trail down to my left sleeve, where the silk has begun to tear. “She can also repair your suit.”

A bell rings and one of the men gets back up and resumes digging. I notice that the shovel sinks into the ground easily. Sensing that the man still standing in front of me wants to carry on the conversation, I put down my box.

“What are you digging?” I ask.

“This whole square has been sectioned off,” he says, drawing out the perimeter of the square with his finger. “We’re digging up the bad ground before it spreads. You shouldn’t be here actually. They should have been notified that the route had changed.”

The man turns to the third man in the pit. “Do you know why they dropped him off here?”

The man shrugs and returns to his sandwich.

The hotel is close by, and the covered marketplace is swarming with swallows. I see that there is a fig tree in the garden, with long branches extending over the low stone wall separating me from the front door. A woman stands outside watching over a small child who is picking up pieces of rubble from the demolished building next door and licking them. The child is dusty, and the woman is barefoot. I assume that she is the digger’s aunt. I call out to her from across the street. There is a room available, in the attic, she tells me. As she leads me up to the room, she leaves white-dust footprints on the green-painted floorboards. I notice that her ankles are swollen and that the soles of her feet are covered in little holes, as if insects have eaten away at them.

She opens the door to one of the rooms. It is clean and cold. I thank her and tell her that I am not sure how long I will be staying.

She hands me the keys and I notice that her hands are very beautiful and that she has a large lump at the base of her pinkie. I think that it would be rude to ask about it. As she is leaving, she picks up the suit jacket which I have laid over a chair and says that she will mend it. Also that her name is Lenora.

From my window I can see the child licking pieces of rubble and that the figs on the tree in the garden are ripe. I can also see into the window of a bathroom where a man is shaving, and another man mowing the lawn in his garden.

I am the sole sufferer of a skin disease known as nymphatic blech. Doctors still don’t know how I got the disease, nor how to treat it. Late last summer, I met a woman who had been a doctor but has now become a greengrocer. She said that she knew of a plant that could cure the disease. She gave me the seed. “This is the seed of the plant that can cure you,” she said. “It is called the morble. But it will only grow in a certain kind of soil.” When I asked her what kind of soil, she said, “The kind of soil which you can only find on one island.” This was the island that I had come to.

I open the box. The object that I take out is small and wrapped in gauze, which is yellowing and damp. I set it on the table and carefully snip at the bandages. I unwrap the object slowly, removing each layer and putting it aside. At the centre there is the seed. It is like a pea, green and smooth. The surface is completely uniform.

I take out a roll of gauze from the box. I cut many lengths and lay them on the table. Then I take out a pot of ointment from the box and apply a small amount onto one of the gauze sheets. The ointment has the texture of congealed blood. I place the seed in the centre of it and bring up the corners of the gauze to wrap it. I repeat the same thing with all of the layers of gauze, then put the wrapped seed back into the box.

In the evening, I go for a walk. At the end of the street, I find myself in front of a big tree. The roots are covered in patches of fine green bristles. The tree bends to the right and its branches grow downwards, into the ground, like ingrown hairs. Some of the leaves stick out of the surface but most are underground. A woman carrying a spear sets down her large bag beside me, at the foot of the tree. Like the digger in the square, the woman with the spear seems to want to start a conversation with me. I ask her what the spear is for.

“I am a hunter, waiting for the other hunters to join me.”

“And what are you hunting for?”

“Mites. This street especially is overrun with them. The ground here is flabby, so the mites like it. Let me show you.”

The woman guides me to the side of the road. We crouch down. I look to where the woman’s finger is pointing and see that the ground is perforated with little holes, through which I can see into a large hollow space. There is a sound and a slight stench, and I see something yellow and wet move beneath the ground.

“That yellow worm thing is a mite. These holes form when the ground is not properly cared for. We get hundreds of these. They’re unpleasant and we hate them. You have to get them early before the area becomes cystic, because then you have to use more extreme measures, steroids, spironolactone, benzoyl peroxide, stuff like that. Right in the ground.”

I use my eyebrows to show that I am surprised and impressed, but also disgusted. “So how do you hunt these things?”

“Well, the best is not to have to hunt them in the first place. Prevention. Reduce the quantities of casein in the water systems, regular cleansing of the ground, etcetera. But it’s pretty bad on the island. So we have to hunt.”

Another woman with a spear walks toward us. “We’ll show you,” says the first woman.

“This is what we do,” she says once she has greeted the other hunter. “We build this tent thing over the infected area. We know they’re in there. They don’t know anything because they’re deaf and blind and they don’t have a sense of smell. We build this structure. Wood and silk. Expensive materials.” She unpacks sheets of silk fabric from her bag, as well as various tools, some of which I can’t identify.

“First we’re going to apply this,” she says, taking out a white bottle with a nozzle from her bag, “which will peel away the upper layers. It’s completely fragrance-free and good for areas where the ground is sensitive, prone to dryness for example.” She sprays it over the ground under the tent.

“Now, once that layer has come off, we collapse the tent over the mite, so that it’s trapped. And then we stab at it with these.” She holds up her spear.

More hunters arrive and I step back from the group. I hear the sound of the stabbing and a high-pitched whistling like the release of gas.

Back at the hotel, Lenora is sitting at a table, peeling an orange. She asks me if I want a piece and I sit down beside her. As she is peeling, I notice that she no longer has the lump on her pinkie but a new one, same shape, at the base of her thumb. This time I decide to ask.

“What happened to your pinkie? What happened to your thumb?”

She says: “It’s the same lump. It’s very restless, it likes to move around. Often it leaves my body and forms on the backs of animals or on the trunks of trees. It speaks to me but not everyone can hear it. You can try if you like.”

I spend the rest of the day chatting to the lump. In the evening, Lenora goes to work, so the lump moves to a fig that is on the table, and we continue our conversation. The lump speaks in soft mumbles, as if raising its voice would signify a presence that it doesn’t merit. It is offended when I ask if it is a parasite. It says that it takes nothing from its host. It occupies space by becoming absorbed by the surface it is on and becoming part of it, sometimes even contributing to certain organic functions — metabolism, reproduction, photosynthesis, fermentation, and so on. Although it survives on a diet of sugar water and salicylic acid, which it absorbs through pores and procures by a variety of means, some more mischievous than others, it is also able to collect nutrients that are needed by the host.

Having taken a liking to me after our chat, the lump decides to move from the fig to my leg. It settles in just above my left ankle. Finding this position a bit difficult, due to my habit of lacing my boots very tight, it later migrates upwards and settles between my neck and shoulder.

It is now my companion. It rarely leaves the place where it has settled, except at night, when it moves down my leg and buries itself underground. It tells me that it requires four hours of uninterrupted “soil-breathing” a day and that the ground below the fig tree is very suitable for this.

In the evenings, when I cannot sleep because of the pain from my illness, the lump whispers soothing songs into my ear. I grow used to its strange habits, and its practical jokes. A favourite is imitating the buzz of a mosquito in my ear, driving me to madness as I swat angrily at the air. Once, when it was in a particularly cheeky mood, the lump absorbed the hallucinogenic properties of a mushroom that it had found one night during its underground patrolling, and it brought these with it back into my body. That night I dreamt of vast swamplands and a deep feeling of damp settled in my stomach. I felt the urge to feel my tongue and reached into my mouth but it was a long slimy object that I pulled out, of which there seemed to be no end. It was translucent and eel-like and fell in coils at my feet.

Sometimes, I can tell that the lump has spent time at the library because I awaken with newfound knowledge. Things about biota, for example, or that “species are classified not by appearance but by what they eat”, and that “the earth is a fountain of energy which circulates through a current of soil, plants and animals”.

Feed the lump

One day, after walking for about half an hour eastward out of town, I arrive at a field. A person is walking slowly across it, next to a loud machine on wheels operated by a woman wearing a reflective yellow jacket. The machine covers the ground behind it in thick black syrup. The person next to it seems to be checking that the ground is evenly covered and that the machine is functioning properly. I watch as the machine goes back and forth across the field until it is entirely black. Once this is done, the woman in yellow dismounts and joins the other person. I approach and ask, “What is that black stuff?”

“This is the peel. We make it every day to get the right kind of stickiness. We peel the fields before we plant them. We apply the peel and wait an hour. That’s why we brought this.” She takes out a box from her bag, a board game that I do not recognise. The other person takes out a small card table that is stashed behind the driver’s seat of the machine and sets it up in the middle of the path. The woman in yellow sets up the game and gets out folding camping chairs.

“There are only two. So you’ll have to stand.”

I am confused about the rules at first, but quickly get engrossed in the game. The goal is to collect seeds and eggs and protect your animals from enemies who want to skin them. By the end of the game, I have amassed fifteen seeds and only three of my animals have been skinned.

The lump shows no interest. It naps in my armpit. After an hour, a bell rings.

“What happens now?”

“Now we peel the earth. We remove the peel, which has set and formed a sticky layer above the ground.” says the woman in yellow.

“My favourite part is to see all the gunk that we’ll pull up,” says the other peeler. “Join us, you’ll see, it’s so satisfying.”

The woman in yellow gets back into the machine and sets it going. Positioning it at the corner of the field, facing out, she presses a button and two mechanical claws come out of the front. With these, she seizes the edges of the layer and pulls them towards the machine while it drives backwards. Underneath, the gunk is a dark brownish colour and oily.

Later, as I am rebandaging the seed, the lump asks if it can feel it and travels down to my index. There is a feeling like a deep sigh through my body, like a kind of release. Then I start to itch. A chronic itch that lasts weeks. The scratching is constant. I try everything. I try creams, ointments, emollients, lying in the sun. I try hard drugs. Bathing in milk, in mint, in salt. My body becomes uninhabitable, and the lump leaves me. Finally, I decide that I can’t put it off any longer, that I have to plant the seed.

The next morning, I climb to the top of a hill. The hill is the highest point of the island and from the top I can see water from all sides. Also, I see that there is a lot of activity in the town. To the left of the line of trees on the east side of the village, a woman and three children use large metal claws to pop the pustules of the ground. On the other side of the trees, a group is uprooting some black worm-like material from the earth and throwing it into a large bucket on the back of a truck. Further down the road, an old woman scrapes off the dead earth in her garden with a spoon, as if scaling a dried fish, uncovering the clean soft beneath.

I plant the seed.

The earth responds by a catastrophic overturning of its outer crust. A kind of vast volcanism takes over the entire island, perhaps more. For days we clamber for higher ground as the island is swept over by cycles of violent resurfacing, like some kind of regurgitating of all that it has absorbed, all of its poisons. There are eruptions of yellow liquid and a smell like oil fills the air.