The first barrel began singing three days after it was tapped, a faint melody bubbling up through the spigot at closing time, something between a harvest song and a marching chant, and by the weekend half the regulars were humming it without realizing they’d learned the tune at all. The cider picked up verses the way a child picks up words, first a line about apples, then a line about autumn, then a whole cheerful chorus about the wisdom of ordering another round, and the chorus was catchy enough that strangers who’d never spoken before found themselves linking arms across tables to sing it properly.
Business became extraordinary almost overnight, and nobody thought much about the pale threads growing beneath the foam, or thought about them just long enough to find a comfortable word for them. The brewer called it sediment. The health inspector, on his one visit, called it fungal contamination and made a note to follow up that never got followed up on. The cider itself, by the fifth verse, had started calling it family, and by then enough of the pub was singing along that the word passed without anyone really hearing it.
The fungus was cordyceps, more or less, though no strain any laboratory would have recognized, content in alcohol instead of insects, communicating through fermentation instead of spores, and it had developed, as far as anyone could tell, strong and specific opinions about sobriety. People who drank enough of it grew sociable and thirsty and strangely unwilling to leave before the final chorus. When the bartender finally tried pouring the barrel down the drain, the whole room objected at once, cheerfully rather than angrily, lifting their glasses into a new verse while thin white filaments crept out from under their collars and the singing got louder to cover the sound of it.
By midnight there was dancing on the tables. By dawn the barrel had been rolled into the street and was being pushed, gently and communally, toward the next pub down the road, and nobody present could have said whose idea that had been. Recordings of the song turned up online weeks later with no clear source, and people who listened to them too many times in a row reported an odd craving for apples and company. The original pub is closed now. On quiet nights, something is still said to slosh beneath the floorboards, and if the street outside is quiet enough, the chorus can be heard asking, gently, whether you fancy one more.
©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys
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