Page 101 of Shroom for Improvement

We marched out of The Night Cap’s exit and down the tree-lined drive. Blossoms had begun to drop, and the ground was littered with pretty white and pink petals. Then, the compass took us out beyond the house, in the opposite direction from the paddock. Forests and steep hilltops disappeared into the horizon.

Sonny and I spent the first five minutes of the walk giggling. We didn’t know what to say given the instructions we were following. Occasionally one of us would chime in with “Ican’t believe we’re doing this,” or “I wonder where it’ll lead us,” or “At least it’s not raining.” Which would bring about a fresh wave of the giggles.

Until Sonny got distracted by all the different fungi. The path wound through the woods, along a brook, over fallen trees, and through clearings. He would run ahead excitedly, then beckon me over.

“Look, green elf cup! Isn’t it beautiful?” he said, crouching down next to some blueberry-sized blue-green mushrooms sprouting on a felled tree. “They grow on the dead wood and help to break it down. Look, here...” He leaned over the trunk and picked up a branch from a different, much older and more rotted tree. “The fungi dyes the wood a turquoise colour. They use it in fancy furniture inlays and things. Cool, huh?”

“It is pretty cool,” I admitted, though I would never have thought as much a couple of months ago.

“Ooh, ooh, this one is chicken of the woods.” Sonny stopped by some yellowish, grooved mushrooms growing out the side of a tree like frills on a dress.

“The mushroom is called chicken of the woods?” I asked the question slowly in case I’d heard him wrong.

“Yeah,” he said, making me feel guilty that comparatively, I knew nothing about my own kind.

“Can you eat them?” Chicken of the woods sounded very... edible.

He nodded. “You’d love them. They’re very meaty.”

And then a few moments later when he spotted what I initially assumed to be a wingball.. .

“Giant puffball! Ah, these are my favourite.”

Those I had heard of—and seen—before. An enormous white globe, about a foot tall and a foot wide, nestled into a clump of wild grasses.

“What is it you like so much about them?”

“Just look at them, they’re massive!” Sonny was practically giddy with excitement.

“So, you’re a fan of very large things?” I aimed for a wink, missed by a country mile, and half blinked, half grimaced at him.

Sonny assessed me with his head tilted to the side. “Claude Stinkhorn, was that... banter?”

My face flamed, but I was smiling. “How many times in your life have you seen a giant puffball?”

“Hundreds, maybe thousands. They’re still my favourite.”

As we walked farther into the woods, I let Sonny’s words bounce around in my mind. He got as excited as a child on Winter Fest at something he’d seen so often before. He wasn’t bored, or disinterested, or tired of seeing them. Why did that stir an achiness inside my chest?

At the twenty-five-minute mark, I felt Jenny’s boundaries drop away, meaning we’d left the property. It was like the air pressure changed. Like my ears popped, and it was suddenly easier to breathe.

“Did you feel that?” I asked Sonny.

“Feel what?” he responded. That was a no then.

“I think we’re no longer in the Stinkhorn Manor grounds. Jenny, can you hear me?”

Nothing.

I took a step backwards, felt the weird popping sensation again. “Jenny, are we venturing out of your boundaries?”

The house sighed. “Yes. Beyond that stupid line lives a different network of mycelium. I can’t see you. Go do naked things in peace. Spoilsports.”

“What did it say?” Sonny asked.

I faltered for half a beat. “It can’t see or hear us once we pass this invisible barrier... right here.” I demonstrated withmy hands where the edge of the boundary was. “It said it belongs to a different network of mycelium.”

“Huh, of course,” Sonny said, apparently to himself.

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