Mycorrhizae & Me

Kavya Rao and Archer Wright have been each other's person since before either of them was cool enough to admit it. They are a lifelong friendship, a thousand inside jokes, and an easy, familiar closeness that looks simple from the outside-until it isn't. But what happens when conflict begins to disrupt the life they've built around each other, and neither of them is willing to let go of the habits that have kept them together for so long?

Archer: People don't talk about grafting enough, it's genuinely insane. You take two separate plants, you wound them both at the cambium layer - which is this thin layer of living tissue just under the bark, it's where all the actual growth happens, it's the most alive part of the whole plant - and you press them together and if the conditions are right and you've lined them up correctly their cells just start recognizing each other and they fuse. Their vascular tissue fuses. They share water, nutrients, everything, for the rest of their lives. They become structurally one plant.
And I just think - I don't know. I'd want that...with the right person. I'd want someone whose cambium layer could meet mine and we could be one.

Kavya: ... I must be going insane because that sounds inherently like a sexual request. Should I be slapping him like mom said?