Red. Brown. White. Green.
Yesterday I moved my bed to sweep the floor, and in the corner of my room there were mushrooms. They were growing out through a crack in the wall, rotting away the wooden floor and feeding off it. The caps red-brown, the feet white-green. I ripped them all up, threw them in the garbage bin, scrubbed the corner with soap and warm water before putting my bed back.
Two hours later, I caught a sweet fungal scent from behind my bed and pulled it out into the middle of the room.
Red. Brown. White. Green.
The mushrooms had returned. Smaller this time, but still growing, very much alive. I tore them all up once more, scrubbed the corner, poured alcohol down the cracks, then acid. I stretched out in bed and stared at the corner, waiting to see if this time I had beaten them.
A bead of red formed in the crack, like a drop of blood in a wound. Another, growing bigger. A whole string of red beads in the crack, spreading their red caps and slowly reaching down to the floor once more.
Red. Brown. White. Green.
Perhaps one could eat them. If they were going to keep on living in my home, perhaps at least I could find a use for them. I picked one of the bigger caps, sniffed at it. The smell was not bad; it was sweet and fresh. A lick at it. A hesitant bite.
The taste was just like the smell. I had had much better mushrooms, but it was not in any way bad. Just a bit uninspiring.
“With colours like yours, shouldn’t you at least taste bitter?”
The mushrooms did not reply. They were mushrooms, and mushrooms are too good to speak to lowly animals like humans.
Red. Brown. White. Green.
It was easier to just let them have the corner. Trying to get rid of them was just an act of futility, and they tasted all right. During the night they spread across the floor to beneath my bed where they created a small mushroom kingdom emitting a strange, green-and-violet light. When I rolled over in the morning, I noticed that they had surrounded me and several of them were crushed as I just tried to leave bed. The fully grown ones were already getting darker, dripping a shadowy liquid from the edges of their caps, looking as if they were melting, and when I cleaned them away they left dark red stains on my skin.
The red stains turned brown. My white skin turned green.
The mushrooms were retreating back into their corner crack as the sunlight moved across the floor. The mushroom kingdom beneath my bed remained, hidden in shadow, but no green-and-violet light shone from within it. They had encased the dark space with a spongy, grey wall. The mushrooms in my bed dissolved and soaked into the bedsheet, duvet and mattress as the sunlight washed over them. The sunlight made my head hurt and I understood that it was my enemy.
My fingers turned dark and dissolved into an ink-like liquid.
I kicked at the grey wall beneath the bed until it was coated in dark liquid from my feet and gave way.
I saw a green-and-violet light and crawled into it to melt.
~
by Pao (@Panterdjuret)
Johannes Punkt’s Flaskpost 