It happened on a normal evening. The house was quiet, almost sleepy. The ticking of the clock and the faint creaking of the floorboards were the only sounds in the room. It seemed like nothing unusual. But sometimes it is precisely from the ordinary that the strange arises.
When it was time to change the bed linen, the woman lifted the mattress — and froze in that very second.
In the corner of the bed frame, right between the boards, lay something that looked like small orange balls. There were many of them — a whole scattering. They were smooth, shiny, and slightly damp in appearance.
The first thing that flashed through her mind was:
‘These are eggs. Someone’s eggs. Insects. Oh my God…’
Her heart sank.
Blood rushed to her ears.
She felt cold.
She had always thought of her home as a fortress. A place of comfort. Protection. But what if someone was living in her house and she didn’t even know it?
The panic subsided, replaced by curiosity. Very carefully, with the tip of a spoon, she pried open one of the balls. It was soft, almost jelly-like, and springy when pressed lightly.
‘Is it alive?’ she whispered to herself.
She put down the spoon, put on gloves and took a photo.
She sent it to a friend — someone who ‘knows his way around the forest’.
The reply came almost immediately:
‘Don’t touch it. It doesn’t look like larvae. It looks like a mushroom.’
A mushroom?
Under the mattress?
It sounded not just strange, but wrong.
To figure it out, she called her neighbour — a calm, even-tempered man who always knows everything about the house, repairs, and wooden beams.
When he saw the discovery, his eyebrows twitched.
‘It looks like slime mold,’ he said. ‘You find that on rotting wood. But…’ He tapped the bed frame. ‘Your wood isn’t rotten.’
And he thought for a moment.
“Slime mould doesn’t just appear out of nowhere. It grows where the wood has been damaged. Where there is a microcosm that we know nothing about.
It’s not dangerous…
But it’s a sign.”
He paused, as if searching for the right words.
“When wood lies in one place for a long time and doesn’t move… it seems to start “breathing” differently. It attracts living things. Even those we cannot see.
The woman looked at these orange balls and felt a feeling growing inside her… not fear.
More like surprise. As if she had touched something ancient. Something that exists quietly in the world, close by, but we don’t notice.
She decided not to throw these balls away right away. She took out the mattress, dismantled the frame, carefully removed the boards and carried them into the yard, to a sunny spot. The neighbour said:
‘If it really is slime, it will soon transform.’
‘Into what?’ she asked.
‘You’ll see.’
Two days passed.
The balls disappeared. In their place appeared a delicate golden film, as if someone had covered the wood with a thin breath of light. It looked almost… beautiful. Mysterious. Unusually alive. And the woman suddenly realised:
This is not an invasion. It is a reminder.
That the house was alive. The materials were alive. The tree was alive. The world around us breathes, grows, changes, even when we think everything is completely under control. The house doesn’t just stand there. It lives.
She treated the wood, cleaned the base, and put the bed back in place.
But now, every time she went to bed, she remembered those little orange balls.
Not with horror, but with quiet respect. Sometimes the most amazing things are right under our noses, in places we rarely look. And if you look closely, the world becomes a different place.
