He blinked and the spores smiled back at him. So they'd finally made it to his eyes after all these years of lying dormant in his throat. It was the beginning of the end and his two hundred years of life would culminate in a cloud of pollen-sized death just as all his loved ones before him. The same loved ones whose faces now smiled among the spores.
He hadn't been able to speak since they settled in his throat - a mercy and a half if you asked his late husband who grew tired of the same old jokes that made him fall in love in the first place. Two hundred years without that dear man gave him plenty of time to mourn and plenty more to consider what he'd say when they met again among the spores on their way to the next host cluster.
He once thought he saw another human driving a car nearby but as he drove closer he saw only the work of cheap brakes and gravity. They would have run for the hills if they'd seen him anyway, especially now that he was on his last years and his skin was a mottled patchwork of mycelium and decaying flesh. Hosts never usually lasted this long but the spores seemed to be aware that there would soon be no more hosts at all.
He wondered what would happen to then all then. All their minds interconnected in the spore-cloud, perhaps adrift in the wind forever, perhaps to grow and change into something better suited for another kind of host like a rabbit or a wolf. Something common and short-lived enough to allow them to spread and allow the spore-mind to grow.
Perhaps they would settle into the earth and become a part of the largest mind - the world itself.
Perhaps he would find another host and it wouldn't be his problem any more.
He liked the sound of the latter the most, setting off south with a whistle on his lips and spores in his eyes.
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