The Mushroom

Jude had decided on mushroom soup for dinner. One by one she prepared the mushrooms she had picked out that morning, brushing the caps free of dirt, cutting off the stems, chopping them into even slices that she would later throw in a pan. The repetitive work was a mental refuge, one she sought out on most days. A busy mind welcomes busy hands.

Her knife hesitated on a porcini mushroom. The cap was flatter and larger than others. Its underside, which she had just rid of a stem, opened in an almost perfectly untouched fan of gills. There was something uncanny to the symmetry, a feeling of wrongness unexplained. She knew this unease, though she had not paid it much mind for a long time.

It happened when she was perhaps eight, or five, or anything between those loose markers of childhood existence. She remembered an old castle, repurposed halls, long yards of grass. There were adults about, a chorus group, though no voice came to her through the fog of memory. She remembered a friend being there, scouring the halls with her, playing hide and seek amidst the century-old furniture. Her friend’s mother was part of the chorus, the children tagging along for the annual group practice in the countryside. Whether Jude’s mother was also part of the chorus, or whether Jude had tagged along as a guest, she did not know. Her young mind had discarded details, keeping only sensations.

On one of those summer days, as she occupied herself in the yard, or simply passed by, alone or with her friend in tow, she remembered seeing a wild mushroom. It towered over the low-cut grass, its cap smooth and glossy in the sun, immobile. She had never seen such a large mushroom before, in her plate or outside, and she stood, transfixed. It was a beautiful thing. A foreign thing. One that could jump at her and eat her while remaining perfectly still. She thought, surely, she must have stared at this mushroom for a long time.

Jude had a terrible phobia of spiders back then. The instinctive freeze at the sight of a spider web, the impulse to jump at the brush of a hair on her nape, and the uncontrollable flinch at even the thought of an eight-legged crawl were how she conceptualized fear as a child. Not the fear of the mind, which she was not at an age to fully understand, but the stupid, bodily fear of the animal protecting itself. She remembered a day when her friend had suggested playing tennis in one of the courts outside. “It looks abandoned,” Jude said once they’d taken in the state of the decrepit fence. “The door’s still open,” her friend said, “come on, we brought rackets and all.” Despite her insistence, she let Jude walk in first through the door, a game of chicken Jude was proud to win. Only when Jude walked to the center of the overgrown court, turning around to gloat, did her friend point at her with a hesitant hand. “Spider.” And Jude looked down at her chest to see it covered in webs and dead bugs.

She did not wait to confirm whether any spider was indeed present. Throwing her jacket off, she screamed and patted herself hysterically, running around like the chicken she had just tried to prove she wasn’t. All the while her friend, who did not share her irrational phobia, attempted to calm her down with all the success of a grass shoot trying to calm the wind bending it. Finally, when Jude’s body had stopped revolting, they shared a look and exploded into laughter. “I’ve never screamed so hard in my life!” she remembered saying, teary-eyed, and her friend joked that she should join the chorus.

Fear of spiders was easy. Her brain would say, “Get away from the spider,” and her self-control would be set on pause while she obeyed the command. This, she understood; the feeling she got from watching the mushroom, she did not. She was faced with an entity that did not belong to the world as she knew it. A threat that was harmless. A being that was not alive. A creature that was neither plant, nor animal, nor object. “Riddle me this!” said her brain.

There were other children scattered across the castle grounds. Some they would play with, surely, though they were boys and therefore too brutish. She thought she may have had a crush on one of them, or perhaps her friend did, or perhaps not. In truth, she knew the existence of other children only through the memory of one, and not for who he was but for what he did. As she stood watching the mushroom–for how long, she wondered; perhaps she had come back the next day to find it still there, just as incongruous–a group of boys came by. They might have been running, playing soccer or the like. They might have been walking. Whichever way they were going, one of them found the mushroom, as she had. But instead of stopping and staring, as she did, the boy kicked the mushroom and walked away.

She remembered, with uncharacteristic clarity, the sensation of wrongness that flooded her then. The corpse, for that was what she saw it as, lay sprawled in bits of white flesh in the grass. It was the most horrifying thing she had ever witnessed. She ran from the scene of the crime, the image burned into her mind. When adults later asked her why she was crying, and she said that she had seen a boy kick a mushroom, they thought her sensitive and kind, crying for the poor mushroom’s sake. They did not, could not comprehend what had happened, because she could not comprehend it herself. All she knew was that something truly terrible had happened on this strange, unplaceable day.

The oil sizzled in her pan. She jerked out of the memory, faced once more with the upside-down porcini cap on her chopping board. For a moment, she thought the mushroom might be peering at her through its gills, watching her as she’d watched its likeness years ago. Hidden within, she thought, was a riddle she had never quite solved. One, perhaps, she had only grown out of.

She chopped the mushroom into six sizable pieces and dropped each one into the pan. Salt, pepper, and three minutes on each side. Busy hands, busy minds.