The fruiting body of fungus

Little brown mushrooms started sprouting up in every corner after she decided it was better to never see him again. In her closet, the soles of her shoes, next to the mugs in the cupboards. The ones in dark corners scared her, she wondered what else could grow there. She began to avoid all the potentially dark parts of her small yellow house especially where she knew the mushrooms were growing. But she couldn’t avoid their presence. She had started reading Enneagrams lately, you know, those questionnaires that tell you what kind of personality you are, matches your brain, body and all of your experiences to a single number. One of nine types. They told her she was number six, “The Loyalist.” She wouldn’t characterize it as self-help, more like self-spiritual. She had this memory of wanting to be like Saint Ruth when she was a child, even though she had given up the idea of Saints long ago. Especially Saint Ruth. (She had also thought that she wanted to understand people’s brains then.)

The undersides of the mushrooms that were invading the hall closet looked like the wrinkles of a brain. Each little ridge could store hundreds of words and memories. She started filling the rooms of her house with jars half full of rubbing alcohol because she heard somewhere that it takes all of the moisture out of the air. She thought the mushrooms might suffocate and would rather that would happen than have to pull another one out of her new blue shoes. She thought about how easy it would be to set up her own business on the tenants of the Enneagram. All she had to do was base all nine different personality types on each one of her boyfriends since she was a teenager. She had had exactly nine.

She began to bleach all of her rugs. She just didn’t like the patterns anymore, decided she was sick of them. And maybe it would do something about the mushrooms which were starting to multiply more rapidly than before. She didn’t mind the white blotchy spots on the floors but all of the rooms were starting to smell like disinfectant. When it began to rain at the end of the week, she opened all of the windows and emptied what remained of rubbing alcohol into the sink, they mushrooms definitely weren’t decreasing and she was starting to feel dizzy. She sat by the open window with a bowl full of peanuts and the shells still on them so she could suck all the salt off of their scratchy outsides and mash her teeth into the oily middle. The shells felt like cardboard on her tongue when she was done with them. It took her a while to remember what was really in her mouth.

When it stopped raining, she decided to go on a walk to see the finch’s nest in the old couples’ yard a half a mile down the street on the left. They had a blue mailbox and plum trees lining the driveway. When she got to the nest all she found were little brown mushrooms, and a yellow finch, motionless beneath the plum tree. She knew something was wrong.