Truffle Season
Otto N. Tynham
In this searching, intellectually curious story, Otto N. Tynham examines existential longing as it flickers through the rhythms and vagaries of modern life. We enjoy the deeply textured language and how the piece snowballs into something both unsettling and sublime.
—Dina, Senior Editor
you wake at a nameless hour aware of what it is like to die; somehow you remember dying before
time is not a panacea time is a measure of your pain
this occasion dies within that cavity where moments are unquantifiable the more real this moment becomes it requires too many words or no words at all trouble remains eternally imminent as a shimmering hidden valley breeze with a tenor which from your corporeal horizon beginning at the convex rim of the bowl around your kale & berry salad can’t be predicted language is a retrospective unraveled in a cocked and uprooted presence this is no shyamalan Sixth Sense no Spidey Sense no woowoo-espn-pseudoscience of unseen oscillations passing between skulls like the all-new 6G high-speed data no covertly parodic religulousness repackaged and rebranded in spanikopita-paged tomes bloated like their puffy white germanic creators the point is that from one-dimensional Hollywood cliche to hyper-dimensional intellectual cocojumbo there is missing this single thing about which you are reading there is missing the minutia of a human being’s discreet liability that first ignites in a violent struggle to explain itself but never can it’s not a sense but instead a full-bodied etymology that squeals from every category of thought every category of feeling perhaps vestibular or proprioceptive in some off-beaten connection to schematics of the hero’s journey imagine models of consciousness sans mechanistic overtones settling at drawn-up vacant receivers subject to nihilistic informational signals the scent of smoked vanilla the crack of a falling cedar branch these are the ingredients to your nervous system synesthetic dialogues demonstrating the impoverished fabrication of words from our clumsy clobbering bastard compendium called american-english from the seven-thousand or so extant languages and innumerable dialects colloquialisms slang and technical jargon to the very moment of semantic fecundation the so-called language instinct has not birthed a coherent nominal assignment for this other than this so much like the placenta that coats the smooth cheeks of dialectics it must be described by its procreative acts its sexual history and must be described by its process it happens for example in the anesthetized hypnagogia of a Tik-Tok hole
[Tik-Tok ofc the simple & current neologism 4 w/e vacuity of passive media dominates humanity’s attentional reservoir atm, w/e step n the procession of tech which con’t till said reservoir is only a vegetative receptacle 4 the stream of naturally-selected-waste-material-byproduct called corporate advertising & profit share, all this shit wrapped in a thin recycled plastic masquerade of feigned good will, the syrupy residue of these self-righteous orgies where prolific content-creators & honorable ideologues draft up, like icing a toaster strudel, what the rest of us consider the inevitable dystopia]
or the chemical anesthesia of drinks with the besties at the local brewpub. it happens too in the will-testing commute of eternal recurrence. it happens too in that unexpected flow state during useless activities such as reorganizing your bookshelf by spine color; it happens too in a botched Thursday night attempt for sexual validation, what turns out as the most pathetic experience to which you’ve ever subjected your libido, what turns out as just an anti-climactic aggregate of smells and bodily sounds, without even a memory of it for a future solo sesh. it’s happened at your sibling’s friend’s funeral who you remember from high school but didn’t really care or know much about, though maybe you’d made out once or twice, or at least fantasized about it in some particularly lonely hot-box stupor. this phenomenon starts happening where epidermal layers melt into the voracious sounds of goo dripping in the dark. like you’ve said: a full body something, not quite a feeling or a sense. a full body something, not a mere physiological event where designated nerve endings connect to a mole or a cloaked appendage, firing signals into your sensory cortex, zapping the limbic system, etc., etc.…not that. this concerns the whole brain, concerns the whole body, concerns the whole goddamn unified field and everything beyond. everything within and without your event horizon has been hollowed out or is imploding on itself and you wouldn’t be surprised to find yourself the subject of a true crime episode if killing is what it took to fill this void. though you don’t know what goes there, it needs to go there now. it’s a kind of longing or wanting, though that sounds so childishly impotent, so linguistically naive, but you know that every concept will fall equally as short because it’s not tantamount to jonesing for a long pull of God’s Gift or the rumblings of a hot Big Cheez-It Tostada humidifying the interior of your Door Dasher’s monoluminated Impreza. the next proposition sounds inane (w/e, you just need another *$ soy milk latte, these thoughts will subside like the canadian wildfires under the next breaking news story); you have to resort to the tautology that this is the nature of wanting itself, the universality of all existence, the big Mc’D Desire detached from the principium individuationis. this absolute has manifested itself as you, here, this, now. don’t think about the implications of this on your mental health, because your mind is starting to wander that way (defer to the performative half-listening of your licensed therapist). but thinking really has nothing to do with this; you look up from that funerary design, or the thousands of reels of schizoid auto-prolocutors, or faceless, factory-refurbished Tinder genitalia and, well, now you’re in the street, having become the object of torrential profanity from motorists—whose license to drive must’ve been issued out of a miraculous and mysterious divine mercy upon them—delegated to handle 4k lb projectiles at supra-lethal speeds. here you are, in the middle of these monstrous, metallic death chambers, in a kind of crouch, looking at the dandelions growing in the cracks of the yellow lines, arcing your face from side to side, a possessed swine, tracking the scent that, again, is not a scent but a generalized intuition that there’s something which belongs to you qua you, but presently isn’t, is desperately missing. don’t moralize the situation. everyone has a different story. subjectivity has bifurcated from the world of its objects. it is impossible to refute from the outside. even your own, in order to see it, must be projected as a something, thusly constructing a second “I”, covertly a “you”, that can be self-observed. don’t we all commit this sin of self-simulacrum when we fall in line to the march of the content economy and invest our da$ein in a public facing doppelganger, our digital Build-a -God®? the kingdom that has been within you all along quite freudianly disenfranchises the spirit of your lived reality, sets the pretense for you to do the same to others.
oh, but don’t be so cynical
we are experiencing things
that can never be defined
just let it happen for now
as you come back from these obsessive and abstractly apocalyptic thoughts, you are in a mega-department store into where oxygen is pumped to levels unseen since the permo-carboniferous era, where everything around you is blurred in a bright halo of the fluorescent leds that give you blinding damascus visions of frugal destinies. you’re trying to decommission from memory some trivial tidbit about the people of Walmart having sex inside of Walmart—not incidentally, but as a real keystone of the cultural identity. behind your reactionary repulsion is the question: how do they do it inside Walmart, and where? right now, in this empty and vulnerable state, and perhaps due to mild hyperoxia, this idea is extremely arousing. it’s incredibly taxing to feel anything other than a little moisture in the pelvic region, so instead you’re floating fifteen feet above the floor in this Walmart, imagining these people of Walmart stripped of their black sweats, Polos from Target, their mustard-stained Puma sportswear, thrifted Chelseas, t-shirts that have quips like I like the sound of you shutting up, flat Snapbacks with iridescent decals, black yoga pants that compress an otherwise flat ass into a perfect nephroid mold, the Han Solo outfits of aging mid-generational millennials, off-brand Under Armour clothes of the tatted baby-daddies online gambling while one hand pushes the empty stroller. this circle of au naturel hell from which even dante had been compassionately spared is easy enough to visualize. but now, where do they rendezvous in the Walmart and conjugate their staves and holes among the pallets of Doritos and Monster Energy, the coolers of factory farmed Tilapia, crisscrossed racks of fast fashion, Hass avocados robbed from the back of some slave cart in who-knows-where central-america, and cardboard bins filled with human-sized, bubblegum-colored alligators, cheap particle board bookcases, those ring lights that someone’s OF daughter uses to take 8k grool shots, and grids of XBox games and bestselling memoirs by the world’s most mediocre men? to find this out, you think of flying down and grabbing a box of Trojan ultra-ribbed and a Josh sauvignon blanc to exchange in a little casual frigging with some rando on an inviting pile of Bounty Quicker Picker Uppers (BTGO [BOGO is long dead]) for the thrill of store-brand exhibitionism witnessed by a general shopper in hurried need for a six-pack of two-ply (=14 rolls of competing brands) or by a malcontent officer of the authoritative How May I Help You? yellow vest speed-walking to the break room to take an illegal dump on the company dime. still, you need deeper carnal stimuli, need to satisfy this nothingness, this kind of (couper les cheveux en quatre) ennui, though that term has too much armchair languor to apply itself to the cannibalistic hole in the soft, creamy center of your soul, the hole that is adjacent to, yet unconcerned with, the sexuality of starvation, the drowning, burning, magnified, blinding heartache. all at once every intense emotion is brought together because your comatose receptiveness to pleasure is unable to respond to anything less than an absolute drive to devour the unnamable, feeding on the infinite regression of cerebrally evaporative Suggested Reels, learning you have a craving for a caramelized-onion and Goya chickpea sandwich, laughing in guilt-free delight at a middle-class wasp’s blind suburban circus borzoi thwacking its skull on the door frame, suddenly unearthing moral outrage against children’s bodies violated by exciting new Lavender AI weaponry. this need wrestled with on that pile of Walmart paper towels, coming into a depth beyond any conceivable phallic length, inside a mouth or anus or vesica piscis, into tissues, conceiving at the microscopic level of labor and longing, to hold down employment in a mitochondria, and to live the whole annihilating ecstasy of sliding down a dna coil…
you find yourself starving, horny, dehydrated, exhausted nel mezzo a una selva oscura, or under it, with thick depleted soil squeezed beneath your fingernails, rusty colored pine needles speckling your hair, dead leaves of a previous season filling your mouth with the taste of mycelium, deer ticks crawling through your leg hair toward a moist, dark crevasse of flesh in which to puncture their ruthless nanometric jaws, much like you do now into the dark breathing earth
propinquity with below, below lives hidden, below lives, yet not sentient. it is for your consciousness, entangled with the oppressive unattainability of matter, matter that hides it. destroy the matter to get to it: destroy the earth, destroy life except of this, extract toward a forever brighter future. all is fodder for extraction and destruction and rape and murder and theft, every breach of the false sanctity of the object is a desperate and precluded lurch for the undefinable. so then stigmatize acts of violation so that you and we can feel the titillation of the offender’s damnation. it is intoxication. drink the shame of others, take this hog before you, sacrifice this hog to yourself, this hog that grazes in the metaphysical plane between the rotting fibers of being. the soil dresses you, robes you. the roots, they finger your pores, entering, latching, erecting phallus impudicus across your body. christ is in the fungus. there’s no time to pay attention to your surroundings, you watch your hands. they were only hands in some now-faraway hallucination that feels geologic, but having awoken only mere breaths ago, the arachnoidal digits your primordial mind invented have split into hardened hooves that dig now into the clay layer of this dark forest. the memory is a gradient fog behind the singular urgency of your need…propin quityarach noidalmetaphy sicaltin derd amna ti on…these sounds with no pictures from the closed subconscious system of emotional entropy that nurtures your nightly terrors. horror contrived with necessity, layer by layer atop the archetypes of the psyche reaching heights of absurdity in sounds…vestibularopresivemilenial…sounds meaningless but vigorously repressive, and having risen out of this one sublimated urge that brings you into the earth, farther back into the lightless mother, you are one long arc of waking up—not with your eyes, as you’ve done over and over for millions of days, of tiresome, stagnant days, but the body is now waking up, peeling back the cackling veneer of depth, and feelings, and pain, and memory and I
you will find yourself caked in earth, toothbrush in hand, the flavor of fluoride-free, paraben-free, cruelty-free, plant-based wintergreen flavor on your tongue, mentally composing an email to your scum-of-the-earth gentrifier landgod explaining that you can’t de facto pay this parasite’s mortgage this week due to insurance denying the latest specialist visit regarding a frightening black spot beneath your fingernail. anyway, landleech is going to sell the building in which you sleep, wash, eat, defecate, copulate, and shelter yourself to a development cartel playing the housing crisis like the latest MMORPG, with all the mediocre gusto cut-and-pasted to every top ten up-and-coming american city to now go broke in (can you see it: the glistening of teak-everything in the summer acid rain?). you fantasize a quick jab with the toothbrush into the throat, threading your uvula out the back of your neck, and your body collapses onto the ringed porcelain seat—flush and flush around your body goes through the municipal sewage system and, perhaps, blind and sensorily deadened, you’ll slide far enough down to find the origin of this desire and satisfy it, mount it, become it, let it flood you, ejaculate into you its progeny of multiplicitous and endless urges. are you a boulder or are you a stone? the universe slowly crumbles into smaller bits of particulate: pulverized brick and microplastics and asbestos insulation and lead paint dust and behemoth skyscrapers reduced to ash and dog shit calcifying on shoes and tires shredded apart on highways and tiny bits of dandruff and bone and skin from the bludgeoned spot on your face where a prime cut of uniformed rump roast whacked you with his hyper-tensioned fist while you filmed his tantrum over your right to assemble and voice what you thought were reasonable suggestions that sub-human politicians maybe give up their satanic, nabokovian fantasies for a bit, hold off on excreting fiery ass-plugs over countries they can’t even spell. all you asked was for sewer-dwelling corporate shareholders to keep their greasy, ultra-processed cocks out of our calloused mouths and poisoned gut biomes. you’re not sure what you inhabit, and whether your longing is tiny or huge. down below, perhaps, the answer is found in the miles and miles of shit, human shit dog shit cow shit pig shit worm shit shit shit shit the shit earth covered in shit shit shit like a cancer and there are tons of shit buried beneath shit shit shit seeping into shit-filled rivers and streams and shit into the tap water and shit in the 70% or so of our body’s composition. all things reduce to paper pulp pressed into pages on a shelf in a little cottage-core village bookstore or a few bytes of information stored on a digital collective unconscious tinier than a bit of disease festering in your lungs. you swirl within crystalline blue skyline and flames of soothing emerald, expand like a hot air balloon over abandoned farmlands, feel the fluid pressure of existential unfulfillment backing up in deep arcades of your animal body, read the digits of your commodified body burgeoning spiritually drained dead brain games over a recovering aphasiac in urdhva dhanurasana longing to taste the forgotten joy of an upside-down world. first take this Teams meeting with another altruistic non-profit’s manager as they announce that the savants in leadership came to the revelation that the organization is cutting costs after years of spending on bureaucratic white noise and we need to, with heavy hearts and heavier pockets let you go to make (our) ends meet. who the fuck cares, you think, plugging up the kitchen sink drain and throwing the charging laptop into the basin of water and dunking your head in with the avocado smoothie in the blender, and fuzziness, antigravity, the taste of ethanol, your ankles floating over your crown, hanging on a meat hook, and what you’ve been looking for is right under you on a bloody concrete flooring, nestled in one of the stochastic cracks right out of reach, and, almost flauntingly, it disappears, decomposes right in front of you. swirling rainbow glitter sharp twists through the film of your eyes into the back of your head and bursts of words and memories forgotten lives and days all the longing for something that never happened, never could happen, the longing to reunite with places and people who never were, for your bare feet to step outside on a summer morning and smell last night’s rain evaporating off of the freshly cut grass and hear melancholy inquiries of a mourning dove above you in a tree
[the scene crumples and falls into a mesh wastebasket underneath a desk tucked in the corner of an empty room of an abandoned building collapsing on an uninhabited planet]
Otto N. Tynham is a writer and armchair anarcho-pessimist. He splits his time between the Midwest and the East Coast Tri-State area. When he's not writing, he is likely fixating on the disappearance of Pyongyang's Giant String Cheese Factory. This short story is his first official published work.