A high-pitched smack shatters the stillness the retreating night leaves behind, a loud hissing its apparent echo. “Vile insects!” A broken housefly tumbles to the ground.

It’s the only thing he dislikes about living in the woods. He realizes it’s a peculiar thing for the nature-loving person he is, but he can’t help it. It just feels like he’s in an unrelenting war with the insects.

“Off to more beautiful things”, he whispers and descends the wooden staircase with measured steps, in an effort to avoid making any noise, as if that would disturb the slumber of some valued guest on the first floor. He is too heavy and fails as usual. The old boards moan under his weight, but that doesn’t discourage him from including it in his morning ritual. One of the copper rods that hold the threadbare carpet to the stairs has come loose, and he almost trips over it. Should fix that is a thought that crosses his mind every single day at least once.

As he arrives in the dusky hallway, he flips up the Bakelite light switch on the faded wallpapered wall. He closes his eyes and deeply inhales the mildewy scent that drifts in subtle wafts from behind the kitchen door. A smile of contentment appears on his still-swollen morning face. He never used to get this puffiness before, not even when he still drank. And  he did drink, especially towards the end. Drink to recover from the endless workdays. Drink to get through the time he had to spend with her. Drink to forget the empty waste his life had turned out to be.

He takes a hold of the handle and opens the door a sliver. Through the crack, his eyes scan the space behind it to find the object of his anticipation. For an instant, he fails at detecting it in the lingering early-morning dark. Something has changed. His mind adjusts and focuses on the correct location. The bed of dark brown leaf matter at the far left end of the room is dotted with newborn lilac pinheads that have attained an ultraviolet hue with the bluish morning light coming in through the kitchen windows. A warm ecstasy passes through his body and settles in his groin.

He opens the door wider and enters the kitchen, which looks like a graveyard full of freshly interred caskets, rather than a place for food prep. The kitchen table is taken up by a man-sized crate structure full of soil. Virginal white spheres are strewn over the moist black earth like so many little moons across a night sky. Blue plastic wide mesh buckets hold an abundance of perfect white stalks that have pushed their grey disc-like heads through the holes. Moldy wood stumps are positioned haphazardly throughout the room. A few are residing on the sink’s cracked marble workspace. Some, barely recognizable as pieces of tree trunk anymore, erupt with tiny lacquered porcelain umbrellas; others are almost entirely covered with fleshy beige cushions. Still another is decorated with a fringe of bright yellow funnels looking up in silent expectation.

Unable to take his eyes off of the compost pile at the far end, he gathers his robe, which has come loose, revealing his worn off-white underpants and soft hairless potbelly. He approaches the crate with the lilac protrusions in the soil. A small sign attached to the side of the container reads Clitocybe nuda. With tender reverence, he gazes at the tiny bulges, passes his fingertips gently over the mauve caps of the wood blewits, and closes his eyes.

“There you are”, he sighs, “finally”. The tactile sensation travels from his hand through his intestines to his genitals. He stands for a few minutes, relishing the sensation of their velvet skins.

Since her departure, he’s felt a peace he never experienced before. She was always so present. She didn’t understand.

They look so still, but they never really are. Something is always brewing. How often has he been caught off guard by their sudden appearances? Or, perhaps even more so, by their unexpected demise, when their ephemeral beauty is replaced by unsightly goo? The quiet transformations. That’s what fascinates him the most.

Taking a deep, complacent breath, he opens his eyes and looks out at the woods that are beginning to stir, the solitary song of a wood thrush announcing a prolific day breaking.

The rusty refrigerator makes a creaking sound when he opens it. He takes out the milk and eggs, placing them on the small strip of sink that isn’t taken up by the wood stumps. Careful not to disturb the logs, he opens one of the wall cabinets and takes out a highball glass. He used to make prairie oysters, or, when the hangovers were particularly bad, amber moons, but even though he doesn’t need it for curing anything anymore, he still has a raw-egg drink every morning. The Worcestershire sauce and whiskey he replaced with whole milk. For extra health benefits he sprinkles wheat germ on top.

Inside his sheepskin slippers, his feet start itching again, but he ignores them and rolls down the kitchen shades. Need to keep the sunlight out.

After downing his breakfast, he walks towards the sunroom, where he takes the latest Mycology Digest from the coffee table and sits in his worn leather recliner. He likes to be here when the day dawns. On the cover of the magazine is a breathtaking picture of a Clathrus ruber, one of the several mushroom species that are less likely to be recognized as such. It resembles red coral, with branch-like protrusions and a pale red color, but the Clathrus doesn’t fan out at the top; its shape is like that of a rounded red cage that emerges from a white egg, the volva, in the ground. This one is captured in early morning, the freshly emerged sunlight refracted by the dewdrops perched on its alien arms, its shape still flawlessly oval.

Catching a ‘latticed stinkhorn’ (its illustrative popular name) in this stage of perfection is a formidable feat, since they only exist for twenty-four hours, and that’s from eruption to collapse. The zenith of its development is much shorter, a mere one or two hours. A perfect egg-shaped cage for the flies that relish its carrion stench. He’s been lucky to have come across it, just once, while traversing the woods surrounding the house, and he disagrees with the prevailing opinion of the smell of this most unlikely mushroom. To compare the scent of a mushroom to anything decaying is a desecration, even when it is, in fact, decaying.

To him, the odor of this wondrous creation resembles the musky sweet smell of the secaderos in the Spanish mountains, where the hind legs of the acorn-fed Bellota pigs are hung inverted from the ceiling to cure, while the fat drips away and is collected in small white cones stuck into the meatiest part of the leg. The tour of the cure houses in Guijueolo, Salamanca, was the only part of the Spanish holiday she made him go on that he really enjoyed. Vacations are a waste of time and energy. Without holiday travel, he is convinced nobody would ever again be ‘too busy’. He only agreed to join her on this one because it was their twentieth anniversary.

She had always known about his social phobia, and accepted it. In a way, it had made her feel special.

He passes his hand over the cool, smooth surface of the magazine cover and flips it open, releasing the fresh ink aroma that has been caught inside ever since it rolled off the presses and the pages were glued together. Every month this publication, with its spectacular pictures, brings him pure joy. He cannot stop marveling at the eclectic wealth of colors, shapes, and properties encompassed by the mysterious mycelium fruits.

Even with his entire kitchen and garage occupied by an exceptional collection of cultivable fungi, which he can contemplate from every possible angle, he has an insatiable hunger for more images.

However, he does have his preferences. Miracles like the Clathrus ruber he admires from an aesthetic point of view, but nothing brings him more pleasure than a strapping bolete on the cover. The perfect curves of the usually chestnut-colored cap, tiny yellow or cream pores peeping out from underneath–just a sliver, like the scarce pubic hairs of a teenage boy sticking out of his too-small swimming trunks–if too much is visible, he knows, death and decay are not far off. The strong and fleshy stipe, rising proudly from the moss.

Of the boletes, the Boletus luridiformis or dotted stem bolete, which has bright red pores, is his favorite. The vermillion of the pores, so strikingly unlike the gills of other mushrooms, is like an invitation to him. Towards the end, she caught him, once, while he was servicing himself over the picture of an especially well-shaped specimen. Her reaction was outrageous, of course, but nothing worse than could be expected of her. She uttered words like ‘aberration’ and ‘unsound’ and issued threats of psychotherapy, involuntary confinement. Well, he can’t help thinking, chuckling to himself, look who’s confined now.

For a while, he reads. Mostly things he already knows. About how fungi can clean up the world. How they absorb heavy metals that have contaminated the soil in certain areas, especially those surrounding abandoned metal smelters. Apparently, some even grow in areas that have become seriously radioactive because of a nuclear disaster and simply ‘ingest’ the radioactivity.

Sure, we pump all these toxic chemicals into the earth, and what do we do? We let nature herself clean the mess up. His heart palpitates with angry agitation, but admiration takes over and puts him at ease again.

He recalls an afternoon when he saw some puffballs growing on a dead fox, slowly decomposing it. Disassembling it into its original elements. Truly the great cleaners of nature.

His peace is enhanced by the knowledge no one can disturb him anymore. There is a phone in the house, but he had the landline disconnected. She had still been around when he did, but he never let her know. When she noticed the line was dead, he told her he’d already called the phone company.

“Yes, uh, I’m on it. Some wiring problem… must have been caused by that, um, thunderstorm we had last week”, and she had accepted his explanation. Probably because she did have a cell phone; she never felt safe, all alone in the woods.

#

After reading long enough for the sun to have fully risen, he climbs the stairs to dress himself. It’s a chore he dislikes, but after she was gone he decided it was important to adhere to a certain routine, with daily assignments besides tending to the fungi.

The bedroom, like the rest of the house, is in need of refurbishment. The walls are bare. He removed the abstract oil paintings she put up, but the whitish squares they left behind are still visible against the yellow discoloration of the rest of the wall. A simple queen-sized bed is placed against the middle of the outside wall. The only luxurious aspect of the room are the two windows on either side of the bed, or rather, the picture they frame, a wealth of green and sunlight.

As he steps into the bedroom he can just see the great spotted woodpecker that makes its home in one of the red maples near the window take off. It flees out of routine, not out of fright. It knows better than to fear me.

Sitting on the bed, he takes off his slippers. He tries not to look at his feet, but he has to. The white is coming up between his toes now. Thin white veins of dead skin find their way to the upper part of his foot. If he spreads his toes, he can feel the skin crack, and tender pink patches reveal themselves underneath the white scales. At first it had been invisible–if he chose not to look at the soles of his feet, but it was spreading to the dorsal surface now.

Without the painful itching, he would have been fascinated. A while ago he had taken a piece of effected skin and placed it in a petri dish to see to what extent it would grow. It didn’t.

When she discovered the white spots on his feet, she had gone off on him.

“I’ve had it!” she had scolded. “They’re taking over our house, our life, even our bodies. I never used to get yeast infections, but now… no wonder”, she continued, assuming her characteristic domination stance, her voice carrying that tone of excited anger, “I mean, they’re everywhere! The walls in the kitchen have black mold, fruit rots in front of our eyes, bread doesn’t last more than a day” she’d said, waving a whole-grain bread covered with little green dots in his face.

He had been too hurt and stubborn to correct her, and tell this ignorant woman that any fungal growth wasn’t caused by the mushrooms, of course, but by humidity.

“You have fungus growing on your feet, for chrissakes, and you don’t even want to see it!”

During those moments, he always remained completely silent. Her voice grated on his nerves to the point where his jaws would clench. Always trying to get him to say things.

Dismissing the memory, he rises and gets socks from the cupboard. He has started using cotton ones, but they don’t seem to make a difference. Antifungal creams are out of the question, as he fears they might pose a risk to his population, and the same goes for any ‘natural’ remedies. He tried rubbing vinegar on his feet, but it stung the raw spots fiercely, and when nothing had changed after a week, he decided to discontinue the treatment. Besides, he was afraid that acidic traces from the vinegar might harm the fungi. Any substance that could possibly be detrimental to the result of so many years of diligent work was banned from the house.

Along with taking the obvious measures such as regulating air humidity and temperature, he filters the tap water to remove chlorine, even though many mycologists don’t consider this necessary. With respect to the cultivating environment, it’s crucial that it remains controlled and constant. The humidifier and the air conditioning both have to be running continuously. So he bought a generator to take over in case of power outages, which are no rarity in these parts.

When he started using the kitchen for cultivation he’d had dark shades installed on the windows. Mushrooms are not fond of direct sunlight–-in fact, most of them don’t need any light at all. They all do need an umbrageous environment, however.

One evening upon returning from work he’d learned that the shades had been up all day after she had failed to roll them down in the morning. It had been a sweltering day, and the mushrooms in the beds near the windows had particularly suffered. The following day, about half of all the fruits growing in the kitchen had disappeared-–but even worse, the beautifully knotty mycelium inside the jars he had inoculated with spores of Tricholoma matsutake, the edible and very rare red pine mushroom, had dried out irreparably.

She had apologized, but not really. “It was such a sunny day, for once I didn’t feel like obscuring the entire kitchen for the sake of a few vegetables.”

At that time, the kitchen still pretty much retained its original function, and only held half the number of fungi it does now.

“And you know what, I opened a window, and the dampness has gone too,” she had added triumphantly. “Those moldy jars with dead plants don’t smell as bad anymore.”

Getting nauseous, he barely managed reminding her that the kitchen needed to be humid and shaded for the fruiting of fungi.        In a choked voice he told her “First of all, um, mushrooms are not vegetables, and the ‘moldy jars with dead plants’ you refer to, hold, uh, the s-s-spores of a very rare edible mushroom.”

“Oh well,” she had shrugged and told him, rolling her eyes, “you never eat them anyway.” Not long after that, she was gone.

#

From the closet, he takes one from the high stack of neatly folded purple t-shirts and places it on the bed. Purple is his favorite color-–it’s the color of all his shirts–and washing and folding are tasks he likes.

The bathroom mirror shows him the morning swelling is almost gone. He picks up the razor to get rid of the grayish fluff on his face and head. Baring his teeth in a grimace, he contemplates their craquelé surface. With his left index finger he rubs one of the spotted incisors, but his attention is drawn to the reflection in the mirror of the back of his hand where, in between his index and middle finger, he notices a flaky dry patch. Averting his gaze, he turns on the tap and the shower and starts lathering up to wash it away.

Without the hair he still looks ashen. It’s his natural complexion, his face a pale grey plane in which his cloudy green eyes swim. He’s always been rather attractive in a sickly, mousy kind of way. His mother used to say he resembled a Russian Blue, and she always did stroke him like a cat.

The water has heated up and he removes his socks. When it’s hot enough to almost burn his skin, he gets into the shower and starts scrubbing himself with soap and disinfectant.

After having expected them for days, he had hoped to find the blewits pinned when he awoke this morning, and they had not disappointed him. Some mushrooms sprout at the exact time you expect them to; others are more capricious. He likes to guess when the fruiting will happen, and he writes his predictions down in a small calendar on the night stand.

There was a time he used to gauge other things. How likely it would be for a person to die in a car crash, for example. Or for someone to get a certain type of cancer. Or even how great the odds were for a particular individual to be shot. Before his retirement, he worked as an actuary for a life insurance company, where his job was to interpret statistics in order to gain some insight into the most likely causes of death for its future clients.

This way, the company could draw up tailor-made policies for its, usually affluent, policyholders. For heavy smokers who wanted to be insured for everything including death by lung cancer, the premium would be higher. The same would go for marine biologists, for life-threatening risks related to diving-–for example, decompression sickness.

So one fateful day they asked him to draw up a personalized policy for the CEO of Digital Minds, a large computer company. She was convinced that consuming barely anything but mushrooms would make her live healthily and productively until the age of, say, one hundred and fifty.

After he had calculated the risk of her ingesting a poisonous specimen, which turned out to be smaller than he’d thought–she was an experienced collector–the company had drawn up a very attractive policy for her, with a lower-than-average premium since she didn’t smoke or drink and spent a lot of time walking and foraging in the neighboring forests.

This particular client changed his life. He had interviewed her more than was necessary for just the risk calculation, and listened breathlessly to her account of the world of mushrooms, with words he had never heard. Mycelium. Polypores. Hymenium.

The phrase ‘universal veil’ had felt especially like an incantation. And when he figured out what it was-–the membrane that, like an eggshell, encloses the young fruiting body of certain types of mushroom just before they’re born-–he liked the term even more. As if this ‘veil’ encloses all there is, or at least the promise of it.

Like a modern-day witch, the pragmatic, meticulously dressed businesswoman had cast a spell on him. He’d gone straight to the village bookstore to buy all the books they had on fungi. How to recognize the different species, where to find them, how to grow them.

Reading about these mysterious organisms, learning about their anatomies and contemplating the different shapes they assume-–all his senses became aroused in a way they had never been before. It was as if he had come under the influence of mind-altering drugs.

The woman had planted a purpose where, up until then, there had only been a vast desert-like emptiness in which he had always done what was expected of him. ‘Be a good boy, do your best in school, finish your studies, get a job, get married’. His only insubordination was his failure to produce offspring. But he was going to fix that, too.

Before entering the garage, he checks the door for any gaps. Last week, he noticed that the wood on the outside of the door is receding, but it’s still a superficial crack. The garage is his laboratory, where the mushrooms go through the precarious stages of inoculation–the ‘sowing’ of the spores in soil or sawdust or other substances–and mycelium development. Mycelium is the actual ‘plant’ (although not really a plant, of course) that grows in the soil, the only clearly visible parts of which are its fruits, the mushrooms.

For most species, he moves the mycelium to the kitchen when it is ready to bear fruit, but the most vulnerable ones stay here even during this stage.

The garage has been sterilized and sealed off, to keep not only draught, but also any natural light or contamination out. The latter strikes particular fear in his heart. There’s no end to the possible threats to his crop. Insects, penicillin molds, and bacteria–they’re all just one act of negligence away.

So he installed air filters, created a vestibule, and changed the lock on the outside door, the keys of which he keeps hidden.

If she ever wanted to see how his ‘hobby’ (he hates that word, but that was what she called it) was moving along, he made her shower and wash her hands with disinfectant first. Like him, she had to wear sterile rubber gloves and a surgical mask.

“Um yeah, most c-c-contaminants are brought in by the cultivator, or well, uh, anyone he brings along, of c-course”, he had explained when she protested the first time.

Things were still alright then. Fortunately, she had been less than enthusiastic and had only asked to enter twice, which was fine by him. It had made him nervous, as if he secretly owned an extensive collection of X-rated fetish DVDs that she contemplated with her typical blasé expression. It had infuriated him–the boredom with which her gaze had traveled over his precious collection.

He has managed to cultivate some mycorrhizal species like the Boletus edulis, which not many have been able to do. Mycorrhizal mushrooms, like these porcini, are of the group of mushrooms that develop only in symbiosis with trees, which is why it’s so hard to grow them.

Unlike the woman who inspired him, he never eats the fruits–not even the ones that are said to be exquisite, like the porcini. So much tender care went into this tiny crop of three perfect mushrooms; how could he possibly cut them off and eat them? It would feel like cannibalism.

He does really like the taste and smell of mushrooms, though, and so occasionally and with great veneration, he consumes a couple of the Agaricus brunnescens, the common button mushroom. Its white spheres occupy the largest and most productive bed, the one on the kitchen table. They’re easy to grow, and the new substrate makes the spawn produce even faster.

Because he wanted to increase production, he built a larger crate and mixed a new supplement into the substrate, the soil from which the mycelium gets its nutrients and on which it grows. He’d gotten the idea after seeing the puffballs growing from the fox’s corpse, and he found out it was an existing, though fairly new, technique, called carcass composting.

The first time he tried it he had used dead animals he found in the woods, like birds and mice. She had complained about the smell in the kitchen–-that, along with the fungal aspect she had grown somewhat accustomed to, had acquired another, more pungent one of decomposing meat. He had not dared to tell her about the new substrate, and she’d set off on a search for dead mice behind the cupboards and refrigerator.

When the dead animal-substrate turned out to be very fertile and spurred enormous crops, he struck a deal with a farmer who ran a chicken ranch about ten miles from his house. He gets to take the slaughtered chickens and other animal byproducts that, for some reason, can’t be sold. This way, the farmer doesn’t have to bother with the disposal of the carcasses. Sometimes he even gets to use larger animals, like hogs. Those, he needs to chop into smaller pieces before putting them in the composting bin.

Inside the nursery, he first sprays down the entire space. It clears the air and provides extra moisture. The nebulizer is filled with sterilized water that he buys in bottles. To make the moisture resemble rain, he aims the nozzle up, towards the ceiling. This way, the water drizzles down gently. He always tilts back his head to let some of the mist land on his face. After spraying, he checks the humidity on the hygrometer. “97. That’s about perfect.”

Different mushrooms need different nutrients–-some grow on dead material, others are parasitic and feed off of living organisms (mostly trees) and still others grow in conjunction with trees, the mycorrhizal mushrooms. So there’s sawdust, woodchips, compost, and wood stumps. Even tiny tree seedlings.

With satisfaction, he contemplates the structures that have formed. Some are thin like spider webs, others have a more cord-like structure.

“So there… aren’t you doing excellently”, he addresses one bed with particularly thick strands of mycelium.

When he talks to people he speaks haltingly, with a stutter. Whenever he addresses the mushrooms, the words flow out of his mouth with confidence, like a river. He likes talking to them, and when he still drank they sometimes replied. Advised him. With his sobriety came a reticence of both spawn and fruits. Or perhaps it was her departure that caused their silence, taking with her the need for them to speak out.

On the side of the crate with the thickest network hangs a small plate with the name Omphalotus illudens, a poisonous specimen.

His voice sounds muffled because of the mask, but the tenderness trickles through. “I think it’s time to place you outside, so you can come into your full potential.”

He’s especially eager to see the spawn of this jack-o-lantern mature, since it is a kind of mushroom endowed with bioluminescence–it lights up in the dark. It’s just another one of the countless aspects of these fairy-tale beings that awes him.

In the garden, he once encountered another bioluminescent mushroom, the Armillaria mellea (honey fungus), a parasitic mushroom that causes root rot in trees. People regard this mushroom as a pest, and so did she. One night, he discovered the eerie green lights (appropriately named ‘foxfire’) at the foot of one of the white ashes that line the driveway. The next day, they were gone, after he’d told her that they fed on the tree’s roots and it would probably die. And because he’d told her they were edible, she had cooked them in a pasta with cream sauce, which he refused morosely.

Today, he decides, he will move the jack-o-lanterns to the kitchen. But not before checking up on the masterpiece of his collection, hidden all the way at the far end of the garage. One of the fungi that never leave the garage, because it is so fragile when grown in a controlled environment. He can make out its spectral silhouette in the dark corner, like a pale emerald apparition. Still only two fruits. But, as he gets closer, he notices a very small pinhead on the other side of the oak seedling. It makes him dizzy with joy. His Amanita phalloides is producing another fruit. As far as he knows, no one has ever been able to pull this off. Of course, it takes a very dedicated and special kind of mycologist to have the ambition to cultivate this particular mushroom, the death cap. Ingesting only small quantities of its flesh can be fatal.

So now there are three of them. The cap of largest mushroom has been open like an umbrella for a while now and is no longer convex, but has flattened out. Its many thin, fine gills are a porcelain white and the cap a pale watercolor green. The slender white stipe has a ring like the collar of a dress-shirt, and the universal veil at the bottom still resembles the egg from which this majestic specimen erupted. In the wild, these mushrooms usually last between one and three weeks but this one, because it is so sheltered, is already well into its second month. There’s a smaller mushroom next to it, half its height and not yet fully developed. It is still more or less white and the cap is closed, forming an imperfect circle. At this stage it cons people into thinking it is a Volvariella volvacea, the edible paddy straw mushroom.

The toxin of the Amanita, amanitin, works by shutting down the liver and kidneys–but not right away. It operates by delayed release, meaning that the symptoms (which are very similar to those of a stomach flu) don’t kick in until after ten to sixteen hours. First you get sick, then you show signs of recovery, and then you die.

The mushrooms look aloof, as if their toxicity makes them invincible. Untouchable.

A strong need presents itself, even though he knows he cannot do it here. The risk of contamination is too great. He has to go outside, but wants to keep looking at this enticing threesome while he does it. So he steps into the vestibule, and shuts the connecting glass door, never taking his lecherous eyes off them. Panting, he pulls at his belt impatiently, unbuttons his pants and lets them drop to the floor. He grabs himself hard. Leaning against the wooden partition, he gets it done quickly and with a loud moan. It happens so fast and hard that his right testicle hurts. Lately, that seems to happen more and more often.

A tiny pang of guilt plagues him afterward, because he knows he’s taken a risk by staying in the vestibule. He soothes himself –-the filters will take care of any threat–-but is not entirely convinced. He has never done this before. In the kitchen, sure, but that’s not a sterile environment. Some of the fungi in there, such as the blewits, actually need bacteria to thrive. He likes the idea of impregnating the mushrooms, and since the fruit bodies really are the reproductive organs of the organism, he has shot his load many times over some impeccable pink oysters or shaggy manes. He imagines that the spores he gathers from these mushrooms contain his genes as well. But the laboratory is a sterile temple that he strives to keep as pristine as possible.

When the mushrooms came into his life, they not only provided him with a life’s purpose, but also with a libido that he’d never really had. Sure, he had intercourse occasionally, but he was never turned on by things other people were. For a period in his life he thought he was gay, but when he summoned up the courage to try it by going to a gay club, he found out the penis in his face pretty much had the same effect a vagina did: none, except provoking a vague feeling of disassociation.

When he got married, it became a real problem. She always wanted to have sex. With the arrival of the mushrooms, it got easier to comply with her demands.

After pulling up his flannel pants and cleaning up with an alcohol-saturated paper towel, he goes back inside. The sterilized water container is almost empty; he has to go to town for more. He buys large quantities and arranges for home delivery whenever possible, but unfortunately it isn’t always.

He doesn’t like going into town. People start talking to him out of the blue. Now that’s she’s gone, they seem to think they have a right to bother him with their expressions of sympathy.

“I’m so sorry”, they say with their eyebrows pulled all the way up. It’s only been a month and a half, so he assumes their meddling will probably fade with time.

“Such hard luck, man”, the cashier at the grocery store felt the need to say to him while he was getting his wallet out to pay. Never before had he had any conversation with this guy.

“So many people got it, my Dad too. He was throwing up all over the place. But he got better.”

As a reply, he had mumbled something inaudible, “Mm, yeah, uh, t-t-thank you”, while rushing out the door.

The worst thing of all is that these people make him think about her. He never thought he would have any grief, but he did–he even cried once. Just once. In the bakery, while ordering his bread. One of her acquaintances had been there as well, asking him all these questions. He’d been utterly embarrassed, but seeing his tears had mercifully shut her up.

Back inside the garage, he returns to the Amanita and smiles. “Oh yes, you’re gorgeous. If only you could stay with me forever”. He plans on getting a spore print of the mushroom, which is the collection of what is effectively its semen by cutting off the cap and letting it rest on a piece of paper or glass, onto which the spores will drop after a while.

Cutting the mushrooms is something he loathes to do. “Oh well”, he says, addressing the largest fruit body, “you will have to be sacrificed. Sacrifice is imperative. It always serves a higher purpose. But you know all about that, don’t you, my darling? You’re already past your prime, anyway. Yes you are”. The flat surface is beginning to show small white cracks where the pale green skin has dried and shrunk a bit. He’ll have to be quick to get the spore print of this mushroom. But first, he’ll move the jack-o-lantern to the kitchen.

When he takes a hold of the small bed of compost, in which the strong mycelium lies expectantly, already visibly pregnant with fruits, he notices something about the substrate of the bed next to it. The dark brown compost, containing the spawn of Flammulina velutipes (the gracefully small and perfectly white enotitake mushroom) should have been colonized by the mycelium, but it hasn’t been. There’s hardly any mycelium to be seen. And the substrate is too wet. The mycelium does need a lot of moisture, but there is a subtle difference between the substrate of this bed and that of the jack-o-lantern. Feeling it, he can’t assess the humidity as well as he would like to, because of the rubber gloves. He doesn’t like the gloves, they are to him like condoms are to other people, but they are just as indispensable for the prevention of disease. Despite the gloves, he can discern a pasty sogginess that worries him.

Standing there for a moment in contemplation, he tries to figure out what the problem is. He checks the hygrometer again, and then suddenly, he stomach drops and he feels sick. Nematodes. He squeezes  his eyes shut, presses the fist of his right hand hard against his mouth, emitting a desperate breath.

“Of course, they’re here. At last.”

He knows all about mushroom pests, including the nematode-–a tiny (often microscopic) eelworm with a needlelike mouthpart, with which they suck the mushroom cells dry. Unlike infestations by sciarid flies, for example, nematode invasions are usually not discovered until it’s too late. The worms themselves, hardly ever larger than two-and-a-half millimeters, are almost never detected, but after a while you can see the havoc they wreak: the weakened or destroyed mycelium they leave behind.

“Goddamnit!”, he exclaims as his fist lands hard on the wooden surface of the large table. “Get rid of one threat, next one’s already waiting in the wings!”

Paralyzed by a rushing panic, he lets his gaze travel over the rest of the beds to see if anything is out of the ordinary. Now he discovers others in which the mycelium has developed inadequately. His heart starts knocking hard and way too fast against his ribs, his breath becomes shallow and rapid, and his mind rushes back and forth to figure out the right action to take.

What should he do, what must he do, what can he do? Is all lost or can the spawn be saved? His brain goes into overdrive until one glowing solution presents itself in his mind’s eye. He never needed it before because he always sterilizes the substrates in a pressure cooker, but it patiently awaits its finest hour, hidden on a dark shelf, as if it has always known its time would come.

“Well, it has.” His voice quivers, as he stumbles towards the vestibule. Outside, he rips off the surgical mask that has been making his already labored breathing even more constricted. He takes a gulp of fresh air and stands a moment, staring at the commemorative stone next to the house. He wanted to keep her close, he told them. Which was true; it’s just that the stone doesn’t mark the spot. But it doesn’t matter. It will, as soon as most of her is consumed.

Adjacent to the garage is a small shed, in which he keeps all his cultivation necessities. To the left are the blocks of compressed sawdust, next to bags of compost and larger woodchips. On one of the shelves to the left stands the pressure cooker in which he sterilizes the substrates-–a large pan of stainless steel grown matte with heavy usage. He flashes it an accusatory look before he dashes to the locker hidden behind brooms and rakes and hoes, shoves them aside, and unlocks the metal door with trembling fingers. He checks the top shelf, but it’s empty.

“That’s impossible!” he shouts while clenching both his fists in disabling rage, and a howl of tormenting frustration escapes from deep inside him. He wants to cry–he has to do something now, or they’ll destroy everything that matters anything to him.

Getting himself together, he continues to check the rest of the locker. He doesn’t see it anywhere. Finally, he peers inside the bottom compartment. For this, he needs to squat, which is no small feat for him anymore. And there, pushed all the way back, he can see the black container.

He grabs it by the iron ring on the top and yanks it towards him. It’s heavier than he remembered and he needs two hands to lift it up. He places it on the table and looks at the label. ‘MBC’ it says, ‘methyl bromide and chloropicrin mixture, for soil fumigation.’ There’s a warning, but not much else. It says DANGER, and next to that a yellow and black picture of a skull and bones.

“Good. Let’s annihilate these evil worms.”

The guy that sold it to him had said something about the pesticide, but he can’t remember what it was. No time. He grabs the container and the spraying hose, and brings them into the garage. Although he has calmed down somewhat at the prospect of killing the nematodes, he is sweating profusely and his heart is still beating too fast.

Holding the nozzle, he opens the valve on it but realizes he’s still wearing the rubber gloves, which he never took off when getting the MBC. His panic returns full-blown, and he rushes out to get new gloves. Back inside he grabs the nozzle, aims it at the infected substrate, and pushes the button to let the gas out.

Nothing happens and he inspects the nozzle. The button is rusty and remains depressed when he releases it. He checks the container for any operating clues. On the back of the container there’s another valve, and he turns it. With a loud hiss the gas starts flowing with abandon. The noise makes him start and he deeply inhales what was just pumped out of the nozzle.

“Ah! Damn it!” he cries out, coughing as the gas enters his lungs. Liquid fire drowns him and attaches itself to the membranes. The garage is spinning. Reaching for the container to close the valve, he reels and drops to the floor. Just before he loses consciousness, he feels for the surgical mask, but his face is bare.

As he lies there, dying, the unhindered airborne toxin wends its way through the space, curling around the wood stumps, forcing itself inside the compost and the sawdust, sowing itself into the moisture, saturating everything with death. Killing nematodes, seedlings, spawn, and mushrooms. Only the Amanita remains unaffected, welcoming the gas twirling around the newborn pinhead, the pale adolescent, and the adult mushroom. Two wicked sisters reunited, the deadly breath caresses the deadly cap, trailing an invisible finger along the white gills and the brownish edges of the large indentation at the back of the flat green cap.

 

THE END