MYCELIUM
Fiction. Published in Island Magazine 170, March 2024.
It was pine mushroom season. Those days of rot and dark fertility when the world was wet and simmering, when steam rose from the tree roots in the harsh mornings and the nights came down quick and heavy.
She was alone. Even the dog had left her, gone missing on a rainy afternoon and found the next morning, leg broken, head in a thick oozing puddle, drowned in half a paw’s depth of water.
Her days had taken on a certain spare ritual. She woke icy-nosed and lit the fire. She sat in the dark kitchen and listened to the flames roar until the kettle screamed above them and she poured herself a cup of black tea. She sipped it as the sky lightened and the birds began calling out their lists of grievances.
The tea was bitter. It curled her tongue and left her cheeks dry. She made hunks of damper that always seemed to be stale. She left the butter out on the bench, though the fridge was probably warmer. It ripped holes into the bread.
Her clothing smelled of smoke, though she didn’t notice. She rarely noticed the things that surrounded her until she had some distance from them, and then they revolted her.
Beside the house, the car was weeping beads of rust from the join where the mirrors met the chassis. Its battery had died some time ago but she had no jumper cables and no companion vehicle to complete the operation and so it sat, sullen and quiet in the drive.
Sometimes she woke in the night and padded out to stare up at the stars wheeling bright and silent overhead. Then the wind would rush through the pines. Where she stood, it was still, but the branches tossed high above her, and the leaves sounded like suppressed laughter.
She had always had a knack for finding them. Before, there were people pontificating about where and when, scanning maps and weather charts, clutching their little curved knives and dainty brushes, elbowing each other out of the way to fill their baskets. They shoved coins into the tin box on the fence in exchange for access to the property, a stopping point on a council trail designed to invigorate the area.
She could always tell the day that the mushrooms had pushed the dead needles aside and found the air. She would squat near them, observing their fleshy, orange hide, their unsettling rime of moisture. It never pleased her to eat them. They were too alien, too entirely of themselves. It felt wrong to cut them, to let the stalks bleed green as they oxidised. She disliked the darting eyes of the hunters, how they trotted up behind her, crowing with delight and carving through the stems.
She took to walking at first light, her breath a balloon in front of her, eyes unfocussed. She stopped at each patch, fingers drifting over the caps in greeting. Three weeks later, they were gone. The hunters with their fleecy hats and hiking boots, their hot, harsh voices and their running noses, went too. The mushrooms were still underground, she knew. Burrowing into the roots of the trees, spreading slow and silent. Waiting.
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Full piece in Island 170.