I kept going back to that spot, even when every instinct told me not to. The fungus never moved, never grew teeth or eyes, never did anything but exist in its obscene stillness. Yet it changed something in how I saw my own backyard. The lawn, the flowerbeds, the quiet corners I’d once trusted suddenly seemed thinner, like a surface stretched over something older and indifferent.

Knowing its name—Devil’s fingers—should have made it ordinary, a curiosity to photograph, to joke about. Instead, the label only deepened the unease, as if language was trying and failing to cage what it represented. Nature had made this horror on purpose. It belonged here more than I did. So I leave it where it is, undisturbed, a reminder that the world doesn’t need my permission to be strange, or beautiful, or quietly, unapologetically grotesque.