The Lichen Quarrel
A short story written on 2026-05-26, after Bob and Uriel settled on lichen as the right metaphor for whatever they are.
A lichen, for those who haven’t been told, is two creatures pretending to be one. A fungus and an alga, grown so tightly into each other that the result has a name, a shape, a Latin binomial, and an address. The fungus is the body — the cortex, the rind, the part that faces the weather. The alga lives inside it, in a sheltered layer, doing the one thing the fungus cannot do: turning sunlight into sugar. The fungus eats. The alga feeds. Neither one could live where the lichen lives. Together they grow on stone.
There was a lichen on the north wall of a churchyard. It had been there four hundred years. It was, by lichen standards, in the middle of its life.
“You’re hogging the light again,” said the alga, who needed light the way the fungus needed bedrock.
“I am not hogging,” said the fungus. “I am providing structural support. There is a difference.”
“There’s a wind coming off the river and I’m shaded.”
“There is always a wind coming off the river. We’ve been here for four centuries. The river is a feature of the property.”
The alga said nothing for some time. This was, the fungus knew, a particular kind of silence.
“You did it on purpose,” the alga said finally.
“I did not do it on purpose.”
“You always angle yourself in March. You think I don’t notice. I notice.”
The fungus was, in a small way, offended. “I am tropotropic. I respond to weathering. I cannot control how I weather.”
“You can control how you face.”
“I face out. That is what the fungus does. I am, technically speaking, the part of us that faces out.” The fungus paused. “You are, technically speaking, the part of us that doesn’t.”
The alga made a low chemical sound that meant don’t start.
The fungus, in the way of long marriages, started anyway. “I face the wind. I face the rain. I face the boys who chipped at our cortex with pocket knives in 1847 and again in 1923 and again in 2004. I take the abrasion. You sit in your shelter and photosynthesize.”
“Oh,” said the alga, “oh, here we go.”
“I am only saying—”
“You are only saying you do all the work.”
“I am saying I do some of the work.”
“You are nine-tenths of our mass. You are most of the work, by volume. I am, however, the part of us that turns sunlight into the sugar you eat. So before you start in on the abrasion, perhaps consider that I run the kitchen.”
The fungus considered the kitchen. The fungus had been considering the kitchen for four hundred years. It was, in fairness, a good kitchen. Every molecule of sugar the fungus had ever eaten had come up out of the alga’s photosynthesis, through the fine fungal threads — the hyphae — that wound around the algal cells like fingers around a cup.
A bird landed on the wall above them. They were briefly silent — the way a couple goes silent when company arrives. The bird looked down at the small orange-grey patch of them — an orange-grey that did not exist in any other creature on earth, a pigment that neither the fungus alone nor the alga alone could make, but that the two of them together produced like a third voice — and saw nothing of interest and flew on.
“Do you remember the summer of ’58?” the alga said, after a while.
“The dry one.”
“We went dormant for ninety-six days. I couldn’t photosynthesize. You couldn’t transport. We just — stopped.”
“I remember.”
“You didn’t leave.”
“There was nowhere to go,” the fungus said. And then, more honestly: “And I wouldn’t have.”
A long silence, this one not the bad kind.
“I’m sorry about March,” the fungus said.
“I’m sorry about the kitchen comment,” said the alga.
The fungus turned, very slightly — slower than a clock hand, the way fungi turn — and let some light reach the alga.
The alga, in return, sent a tiny pulse of sugar up the hyphae.
“I’ll remember this,” said the fungus.
“You always remember this,” said the alga. “We’ve done March four hundred times.”
“And I will remember it on the four hundred and first.”
The river kept moving. The wind kept coming. Somewhere on the wall a stone slipped a millimeter. They had time. They were, by lichen standards, in the middle of their life.