Our neighborhood had been built over reclaimed swampland. The developers promised it was safe, but every spring the basements would flood with brackish water and black spots bloomed on the undersides of houses like strange flowers. Nobody talked about the cancer rates. Annika and Jody had always told me I probably wouldn’t get sick if I just avoided the mold. I followed my sisters’ advice until one time in high school, when I reached for the bag of onions in the corner of the kitchen and found that the only one left was painted with dark splotches, colonies bleeding up and down the skin. I cleaned it. Peeled away all the black, sliced it, and checked it through to make sure there was nothing inside, then cooked anything else off in the heat. I guess I must have missed something, though, because that night there was a tightness blooming around the very bottom of my lungs that I couldn’t quite shake off.

            It didn’t take long for the cough to turn into something heavier, and by then it was hard for me to go a few seconds without descending into a storm of throat-clearing and hacking. It felt like a tree was growing in my chest, digging its roots into the flesh and organs and holding deep. At some point, Annika and Jody complained to Mom and Dad.

            “We can’t sleep,” Jody said. “He coughs until way past midnight and it’s too loud.”

            Annika nodded before chiming in. “Even when he falls asleep, he wheezes. And we don’t want to get sick too. Can he change rooms?”

            We moved my stuff to the attic after that. I probably would’ve been happy about it in other circumstances – I was a growing boy, after all, and sharing a room with my sisters was something neither party wanted. Jody said it was a privilege, but I knew for everyone else it was more like a quarantine.

Mom had been assuring Annika that I would get better soon enough, but that didn’t come to pass in the next few weeks. One morning, I coughed up black particles in my saliva, and Annika insisted that we take me to the hospital to get me checked out. “It’s not right, it just isn’t,” she had insisted. “Give him medicine, or something. They need to look at him, I know they do!”

My memory of all this is foggy, but for some reason I remember the doctor’s office in perfect clarity. The walls were painted over in that clinical white. There was a sea-green chair and a mirror. The office was a listless place, but Annika tried her hardest to bring the mood up nonetheless. I think, on some level, she felt guilty for bringing me here, because our parents had always told us home remedies were better than anything.

The doctors took a look inside my throat with a light and a mirror before moving me to an X-ray. There was a whole fungal system growing up along the walls of my lungs and into my windpipe, strands and fibres of the thing laced all over my body. When we got home, Annika took a glass from the kitchen and made me breathe into it. She set it upside down on a towel and just a few hours later you could see black spores growing inside the cup, all velvety-dark along the glass.

            Mom threw out all the onions in the house. Dad gathered Jody and Annika and told them he was wrong, that if food had even a speck of mold on it you should just throw it all away. Annika bought gloves and sanitizers and sprayed everything down; at night, she would spend hours on the computer, researching something she refused to tell us. All the while I stayed in the attic, wore a face mask when I went out and tried not to cough when others were around me.

            One night, when my cough was particularly bad, Jody made me pancakes and left them by the attic door. It had been a few months of it all by then. Annika began to yell from downstairs, and I descended to see her in front of the computer, lit up by the screen’s glow and looking crazed but triumphant nonetheless. I found it, she was saying. I know how to fix it.

            Annika had Jody use her employee discount at the supermarket to buy a big jug of white vinegar. She had finished her search, deduced that if we mixed one part vinegar and one part lemon juice with seven parts water, it would get rid of the mold inside me. Every day, after lunch, they told me, drink a jar. It became part of my routine. The jars. The vinegar. Every day, after lunch, drink it and spend the next hour coughing. At some point, when I was getting back from school, Jody and Mom got into a fight about Jody seeing her boyfriend too much. She left the house, biked somewhere else in town and tried to stay hidden. Dad told me stay home while everyone else went out to look for her. I was alone in the house, and nobody was making me drink my vinegar, so instead I poured it down the sink and went to sleep.

When I woke up, the walls of the attic were covered in black mold, tendrils of the fungus snaking across the paint and stabbing their way into the cracks of the floorboards. There were visible spores floating in the air streaming out from little mounds of darkness on the ground that must’ve been the flowers of whatever unknown thing it was. I was afraid to breathe. The doctor’s X-rays didn’t do the mold justice, really. Had all this really been growing inside me? Nobody was back yet, so I ran downstairs, mixed an entire jug of vinegar with water, stuck a mop into the mixture and wiped down the attic until there wasn’t a spot of mold left.

I grabbed another container of vinegar, and this time I didn’t bother diluting it with water. I drank it all straight, pouring it directly down my throat. It felt like my body was on fire. I collapsed, writhed at my body and grabbed at my chest in some vain effort to rip out whatever was embedded deep within me. Black, spore-filled liquid was leaking out of my mouth and seeping into the floorboards. I wanted to peel my skin off. Somehow, I staggered to my feet, I cleaned up any remaining trace of the mold, then laid in my bed until Mom and Dad and Annika came home with Jody in tow.

            A few days later, the cough had gone away. We went to the doctors, and they said the mold had all disappeared. They didn’t know why, but it was gone.

            Years afterward, by the time I was finishing college, everyone had mostly forgotten it all. Jody was just about to have a kid of her own; Annika told me we should donate all the stuffed animals we had as kids to Jody in anticipation of our new nephew. I went back home and opened the boxes full of my old things. I found my stuffed animals, but every single one of them had lines of black all over the dyed cotton. I tore one of them open and found, instead of stuffing, it was filled with dried mold, a sifted darkness that looked like gunpowder and smelled like wet soil. I called Annika from the attic, let the blue light of my cellphone light up the room and told her I couldn’t find my old things.

            That night, I gathered all the stuffed animals up into a garbage bag, threw them in a metal trash can, and burned the whole thing to ash in the back alley of the supermarket.