Hell is Full of Mushrooms Hazel Nichol Most change comes quietly. It’s not always like a fiery phoenix or a blooming flower. It’s usually quiet, like an edge unraveling, a maggot squirming; something to fight against when noticed, something to fear. Change is decay just as often as it is rebirth. Change is mushrooms. Change is crumbling. As a human, I know change. I am change. The spores in my blood take root in soft places, and before I know it, I am bloated and pale with mushrooms. I have to decide not to decay. I have to fight it with what fire I can find, and the fight is never over. Sometimes I want to break apart. I wonder what I look like on the inside, full of spongy foreign growths white like bone or yellow like cartilage. I feel fragile. I imagine hell is full of mushrooms. No fire, no heat, just the silence of decay, the heaviness of spores in the air. Everything is soft and bloated and breaking open. The air smells sweet and musty. I used to think I belonged there. When I was a child, I created jungles in my mind. Enormous plants in vibrant greens. Strange crisp fruits. Cool moss. I would wander through it while curled up in bed, half asleep. Soon after I began third grade, I dreamed that God told me I wasn’t worthy of having a body. Vines wound through my ribcage, fruits swelled in place of my eyes. I grew roots that tied me to the mossy earth, and a sparrow settled itself where my heart had been. In my dream I was sobbing. When I woke up, I forced myself to cry. I thought of hell a lot back then. It followed me through middle school and into high school, where life got significantly harder, and into another house, where mushrooms seem to grow year round. Church took up a lot of my life. If there was one thing I learned from it, it was that I needed to repent. Children should not be loud, especially not on Sundays. That was a sin. Riding bikes on Sunday was also a sin. Picking one’s nose was a sin. Fighting with one’s siblings was a sin. A girl my age told me she didn’t read books on Sunday, because she wanted to have that day be fully dedicated to church. We were eleven, and now I decided reading was a sin, too. I used to spend most of my time reading. When it happened that I finished one book and didn’t have anything new to read, I would wander around the house in a kind of stupor, aching for something new to escape into. I would browse methodically on the weekly library trips my mother took me on. I looked over every title, pulling out books that caught my eye and reading the dust jacket.
My favorite library at the time had a comparatively small children’s novel section, but I liked it anyway. I was maybe eight or nine. It was an old building, probably from the ’fifties, and the children’s section was part of the original construction. There was a shelf in the children’s nonfiction section of Greek mythology that I remember with particular fondness. I had to stand on one of those creaky, upside-down-bucket library stools to reach it. One summer, my mom, my little brother, and I went methodically through their bookshelf of fairy tale picture books. We checked out every single one, twenty or thirty at a time, and Mom read them all to us. When we returned them at the front desk, the librarian would ask what we thought. We helped them weed out a few really poorly written picture books. There were Calvin and Hobbes compilations and Tintin books in the back, and a summer reading program where you could get little toys for hours spent reading. That was a good time in my life. After coming home from this library one day with an armload of books, my dad plucked out the two children’s chapter books I had chosen and set them on top of a high cupboard. “You can read these,” he told me, “when I’ve made sure they’re okay.” I felt so violated, so unjustly punished. Even after he gave them back to me, days later, his inspection complete, I refused to read them. I’ve gotten too old to enjoy them now, even if I change my mind. I loved learning the names of wild plants back then. It was exciting to learn different uses for them, from eating raw or cooked to soothing colds to dyeing cloth. I would dig up dandelion roots, scrub off the dirt, then dry them to add to herbal tea. At that age, whenever I saw a plant I recognized, my mom tells me, I would proudly announce to her exactly what it was called and what it could be used for. I learned to recognize poisonous plants too, but only to avoid them, of course. My book mentioned some useful plants that had deadly lookalikes. Not wanting to make a fatal mistake at that age, I tended to avoid those altogether. I remember hearing that a candle made with nightshade berries, if left burning in someone’s room, would kill them by morning. I wondered if that was true. I saw mushrooms one day. Sixth grade had started one, two months ago. I looked out into the backyard I thought I knew so well and saw the first mushrooms. Big mushrooms. Flat mushrooms. I hadn’t noticed them growing. School took up all my time from waking up to falling asleep, and I wondered if they would die soon.
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