Mycelium, a web-like mass of tiny branching threads containing one or more fungal cells surrounded by a tubular wall, is the vegetative part of fungus. It’s the stuff that grows, spreads out, running through every cubic centimeter of soil in the world. Every time you step on a soccer field, a forest, a suburban lawn, you walk upon thousands of sentient cells that are able to communicate with one another using chemical messengers. Mycelium helps to heal and steer the ecosystem, recycling waste into soil. Constantly moving, mycelium can travel several inches a day. There have been experiments conducted in Japan that show slime mold successfully navigating a food maze, choosing the shortest distance between two points, disregarding dead ends.
Mushrooms are the fruiting bodies, the reproductive organs, of mycelium. They feed on rotting things, like rabbit poo, and troubled relationships.
The Mushroom Queen was tired of living underground. She can assume any form. Her skin is nicer than human skin, firm and white, and it has no pores, only spores, because mushrooms are self-propagating, which can get pretty lonely. So she deposed herself and came to the woman’s house from the east, traveling west along the shore of a wide green river, over the Appalachians, beneath the Great Lakes, flowing right across the vast midwestern plains. She was born over a century ago in the unkempt garden of a red-brick house that was once a home, then a nursery, then a nunnery, and is now again a home. That is where our woman arrives now, sucked across the country and extruded from the ground beneath a trellis of tangled vines that sprout purple flowers in the summer. They have switched places, the discontent of one calling to the desire of the other. Nature abhors a vacuum.
The man thinks this woman is an improvement over the other. He does not know there’s been a switch, only a sudden unexplainable change in personality. He doesn’t question it, as he is unaccustomed to questioning good fortune when it rains down on his head. This woman is more pliable than the other, more eager. The other one never wanted to make love in the morning. As he sinks his fingers into her flesh and buries his face into her dark curls, he falls in love with her all over again.
The Mushroom Queen has gills behind her ears, but the man doesn’t seem to notice. He delights in her damp, earthy scent, her luminous whiteness, the way her body forms around his. She opens her mouth to laugh at his jokes but no sound comes out. Already the walls of the bedroom are covered in green slime.
At breakfast, the man makes “the usual”: boiled eggs, toast, a wedge of Brie, apricot jam, and good strong oolong tea. The Mushroom Queen sniffs the Brie with its waxy casing of Penicillium camemberti. It wouldn’t do to eat a distant cousin, so she pushes it aside. “You love Brie,” says the man. The Mushroom Queen shrugs. “Maybe you’re pregnant.” A grin spreads across his face. She laughs her soundless laugh. If the Mushroom Queen wanted to propagate, all she would have to do is point a finger and a mushroom would bud out of its tip. She pushes her egg away, too fresh. “What can I get you instead?” says the man.
The contents of the compost bin would be nice, thinks the Mushroom Queen. She would like to take the bin to the guest room, where it is dark and damp, spread it out on the duvet, and roll around in the coffee grounds, potato peels, and carrot tops, but that wouldn’t be good for their relationship.
This is her first time imitating human form, and the Mushroom Queen is not very good at it. One breast has come out larger than the other, and she forgot to grow earlobes—what will she do with all the earrings the other woman owns? Her hair moves by itself, as if animated by a celestial wind, for, unlike human hair, which is just dead keratin, the hair of the Mushroom Queen is alive—mycelium embedded with loam to make it black. Speech is difficult, though not impossible. Moving air through a mushroom is no problem, just look at the spore dispersal of the Calvatia gigantea, the giant puffball. It is the tone modulation she can’t get right. Much easier to nod and smile; the man does all the talking anyway.
The Mushroom Queen bathes in the normal way when the man wants to take a bath with her, but she doesn’t feel fully clean in water. Later that afternoon, while he’s napping, she goes out into the garden and tears open a bag of premium potting soil, rubs herself down beneath the shade of the tree ferns.
Our woman’s body is pressed down through a root sieve, releasing the one hundred trillion cells of her symbiotic microbiome into the soil. They wriggle away in search of a new host. What’s left of her—the approximately 37.2 trillion cells that had once been organized into brain, liver, eyeballs, bellybutton—are absorbed by the tube-like hyphae of the North American mycelium web and fanned out across the garden. In her newly dematerialized state, she is simultaneously nowhere and everywhere. But this is just an illusion, a temporary form of vertigo brought on by the sudden vastness of her being. In reality, she covers a little less than three square acres, one edge dangling in the cool green waters of the Hudson, the other pushed up against the crumbling blacktop of Route 9. A red-brick house squats on her chest like a poorly digested meal. There’s a maple tree growing out of her forehead, its flame-colored leaves the color of her panic.
Days pass. At night the mist rises from the Pacific, rolls up the cliff, and settles around the house, muffling it from the street noise and the neighboring houses. One morning when the dogs step out, they find the lawn covered in mushrooms. The woman used to come out with a weed puller and scoop out each fungus by the root, afraid the dogs would eat them. Her people had been mushroom eaters in the old country, but she’d lost the knack of sorting edible from poisonous. The dogs sniff the ground beneath the nearest jade plant. There’s something lingering among the watery stems of the succulent, a sad, familiar scent of laundry detergent and lemon verbena hand lotion.
What does the Mushroom Queen end up eating? Fermented things, like pickles, soy sauce drunk directly from the bottle, kimchi, forgotten packages of ham gone slippery with pink goo, old strawberries melting into their green plastic basket, glued together by a whitish fur. She hides eggs under the quilt in the unused guest room until they rot, sucks out the yolks, and eats the shells. She drinks beer, endless bottles of beer, though the man is surprised. The other woman never touched alcohol, “empty calories” she called it. But the Mushroom Queen never gains weight, only biomass.
How does the Mushroom Queen feel about the dogs? They’re competitors for the rabbit pellets, and they don’t give anything back, their own waste too rich in erythrocytes from the meat they eat to grow mushrooms. And the dogs are suspicious of her, particularly the little one. It’s a good thing they can’t speak. The man ignores them; he doesn’t even feed them. Their leashes hang limply from the doorknob. The Mushroom Queen can’t risk walking them, can’t expose herself to the neighbors, not knowing their names. Besotted with the myth of personhood, humans have names. Mushrooms have no such cult of personality. All is mycelium; mycelium is all.
It takes a great deal of concentration to concentrate the self, but nothing banishes lethargy like a well-defined villain. At five cell layers instead of one, our woman has condensed herself from three acres down to the size of the lawn in her own backyard, but still flat and thin enough to move through the soil without having to worry about snagging parts of herself on telephone poles and sewage pipes. She’s heading west against the earth’s rotation, gliding through the rich dark loam of the Hudson River Valley as easily as a manta ray swimming through water. She’s heading home, never mind that home is the place from which she had recently dreamed of escaping.
The small dog leads the white dog on a tour of the woman’s closet to check the shoes, but not one pair is missing, not even the pale blue sneakers she wore when she walked them around the block—the only time she ever left the house. The man left the house almost every other morning, coming back hours later smelling of coffee, cigarettes, and something else; something younger.
The woman had taken them on endless loops around the neighborhood, making sure to pass by the little parking lot where the tourists stop to gawk at the cliffs above the ocean, and also to ad
mire the dogs and, by extension, the woman. She needed it, that daily dose. The man used to admire her, a long time ago, back when the dogs were just pups, but then he began spending his days staring into a glowing screen. The small dog liked to snuffle under his chair, looking for crumbs—the man is such a messy eater. He’d get up on his hind legs and peer at the screen, trying to make sense of the sinuous writhing shapes, until the woman walked into the room and the image changed instantly to regiments of black ants marching on a plain white ground.
Born into darkness, the Mushroom Queen cannot sleep at night. She wanders the house picking up objects at random, trying to guess their purpose. There are wedding photographs on the piano, the man and the woman surrounded by smiling friends and children playing musical instruments. The man is ducking under colorful streamers as the wedding party braids them around a maypole. The bride looks young and happy in her butterfly-embroidered skirt. Will she try to find her way back? What will happen if she does? Which one would the man choose?
The Mushroom Queen wants to experience love, that’s why she came here in the first place, but she also wants to be known. She has learned about the distinction from the books in the basement of the red-brick house. Seeping into soggy cardboard boxes, she consumed page after page of Romeo and Juliet, Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights, even Gone with the Wind, and realized that to be loved is not the same as to be known. For instance, Karenin loved his wife, Anna, in his own way, but he did not know her. How is the Mushroom Queen going to get the man to see her clearly, to fall in love with her without the use of deception?
There are so many things she can do: Pleurotus ostreatus, the oyster mushroom, to unclog his arteries; Lentinula edodes, the shiitake, with its powerful anti-cancer, anti-viral, and anti-herpes polysaccharides; Ganoderma lucidum, the reishi mushroom, for longevity and sexual prowess. On the other hand, there are the death caps and the Amanita ocreata, the destroying angel—so like the common button mushroom, except for the veil connecting its egg-shaped cap with its chubby stem like a fibrous foreskin. That and its ability to instantly dissolve the mammalian liver. The Mushroom Queen loves these mushrooms, but to win the man’s affection, she’ll do it the hard way, using nothing but the clumsy human heart, or a reasonable fungal facsimile.
The small dog is angry with the white dog. More than once he’s come upon them in the hallway, the big white idiot lying on his back, paws in the air, tongue lolling out of his big stupid grin, writhing under the hands of the Mushroom Queen as she scratches the fur of his belly. Disgusting.
The small dog follows the imposter as the man leads her onto the lawn, to the hidden bower where he and the real woman used to make love in the afternoon. He watches from behind the acacia tree. He had seen before how the man leaned over the original, pumping the essence out of her, making her cranky and bloated, causing her to crave salt and sweet, spicy and sour. He had seen it but what could he do? The Mushroom Queen is not depleted by the man’s attentions. Each day she grows stronger. Even now, as the man leans over her, she arches her neck, her eyes roll back until only the whites are visible, her mushroom-brown lips split apart in a silent yawl of pleasure.
Our woman trails the rains as they sweep across the continent. By early August she’s made it all the way to the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains. She climbs the foothills, the land rising and falling, rising and falling, like a roller coaster. At five thousand feet she reaches a broad, high meadow sheltered from the winds by an aspen grove. She weaves in through the orange paintbrush and chamomile, primrose, fireweed, and horsemint. The air is cool and thin, the soil moist and rich. It would be lovely to settle down in this place, but vengeance keeps her moving. A jagged wall of granite rises above her, a hundred times more daunting than the Appalachians. Up ahead is the timberline, where there are no trees, no soil, and very little water. She can’t go up but she can go through, releasing polysaccharides, glycoproteins, chelating enzymes and acids, creating micro cavities in the granite, but that would take too long, and time is running out—she can feel it in the very tips of her hyphae. She hunkers down among the lupines, pushing up mushrooms as she contemplates her next move.
The man would have liked the paradox of a mushroom attempting to scale a mountain. A paradigm shift is what you need, he would have said. They used to be good at playing games with words—it’s what brought them together in the first place. But over time, they learned that there are only so many stories to tell, and only so many ways to tell them, and in the end, silence is better. At least now, if she made it home alive, they will have something new to talk about.
The Mushroom Queen’s attention is beginning to wander. There’s a hollow spot under the floor near the bookshelf where the termites have devoured an entire wooden slat. Rats gnaw all night long in the crawl space above the bed. The garage roof sinks in the middle like a swaybacked horse, pine roots have buckled the concrete driveway, silverfish scuttle among the cutlery—the house is calling to her and she has no choice but to respond. After all, she is a saprophyte, a primary decomposer of twigs, grass, stumps, logs, and other dead things. It’s what she does; it’s nothing personal. Besides, human love tasted so much better on the page. Already her hyphae are slipping in between the man’s cells, prying them apart. Soon she will dissolve him. The dogs are next. For now their abundant fur has kept them safe, that and their reflexes. But how long can they dodge her sticky threads? The Mushroom Queen has stopped feeding them, hoping to slow them down. They are starving, growing weaker by the day. Even the rabbits have left the lawn.
Unloved, unbrushed, his belly empty, the small dog fills his days with happy memories. Like laundry day, when the woman used to dump the fresh load onto the bed and drop the small dog into the heap so he could root and dig and roll around in the warm fragrant cloth. No one does laundry now that the woman is gone. The dishes go unwashed, the floors unswept. Without the woman’s constant ministrations, the walls themselves are caving in.
Back at the timberline, beetles arrive and land on the woman’s mushroom caps, burrowing deeply into her soft pink flesh, piercing through into her spore-rich under layer. How good it feels to be cleaned out like this!
I cook, you clean, the man used to say, preferring the “deep eroticism” of a woman standing at the sink in purple rubber gloves.
Another rainstorm comes and the beetles are picked up by the wind, up and over the mountain they fly, spores clinging to their legs and wings. They settle down near Grand Junction, Colorado, depositing her spores onto the ground as they scuttle away into the fields. She sinks into the mulch and germinates a fresh new webbing of mycelium. Reborn, she waits a few more days to see how many more of her progeny will make the crossing. By early September she’s half her size, but twice as determined.
Hugging the Colorado River all the way to the California border, our woman enters the Imperial Valley. Shimmying along irrigation canals, she runs her mycelium under fields of cabbages and cantaloupe, sucking up life-giving nitrogen as she fans up and out into San Bernardino County. From there she hops lawns all the way to Point Dume.
The Mushroom Queen has established a mycelial perimeter around the house extending from the Pacific Coast Highway to the very edge of the cliff above the Pacific Ocean. Through the septal pores of her naked hyphae tips, she is aware of her rival’s imminent approach. The Mushroom Queen enters the kitchen in black galoshes. She puts on a pair of purple rubber gloves, steps into a couple of trash bags, making sure to tape the plastic securely at the wrists and ankles, and wraps several yards of cling wrap around her head and neck. Then she begins to whip up a batch of poison. The house, the man, the dogs: they all belong to her now. She’s not willing to share them.
Giddy, triumphant, our woman breaks through the cracked terra-cotta patio and surges under the grass, following the lawn mower as the man, recklessly barefoot, paces out wide, even rows. The Mushroom Queen walks behind him in her battle gear, a bottle of viscous liquid attached to the garden hose, saturating the
lawn in the path created by the mower.
Our woman can taste the individual ingredients: olive oil, baking soda, apple cider vinegar. Such wholesome things, how often had she used them herself, but now they are dissolving her. She sinks down through the sod, then the three inches of trucked-in dirt, the chicken-wire gopher barrier, and finally settles into the sand and clay that are the true soils of this land. A fleeting thought crosses her mind: without the artificial lawn, the fertilizer, the monumental water bills—all things that she and her husband fussed over together—the Mushroom Queen could never have gained a foothold in their lives, because nothing grows in clay and sand, not even fungus. Clinging to the underside of the mulch layer, the woman crawls all the way to the back and takes shelter in the shade of the disassembled trellis.
Our woman tries to will herself back into human shape, but it’s no good. She lacks the skill, and furthermore, she could no longer remember what she looked like. The Mushroom Queen, as she can see despite the many layers of Saran Wrap and Hefty Cinch Saks, doesn’t look very human anymore. Her forehead bulges in the middle from the pressure of the cap, her body has grown cylindrical, stem-like, but love is blind.
How can she fight the Mushroom Queen if she can’t get by the poisoned lawn? Perhaps she could enlist the aid of some parasitic bacteria? But that might harm the dogs and the man and, really, she’s never been the kind of person to up the ante out of stubbornness until everything around her lies in ruins.
And then she remembers something she heard as she was driven from the lawn, something whispered to her by the Onychomycosis fungus growing on the third toe of the man’s left foot: the man knows there’s been a switch.