Mushrooms

The mushrooms around my house glow when the moonlight hits them just right.
The house had come cheap because of them, the box-shaped planks sagged under the weight, the mushrooms’ gorgeous tapestry bleeding into the grain. A cloud of viridian, billowing at snail’s pace across the faded grey, seeped into the crimson dye tracing the cracks, to form golden black where they met. The mushrooms were enchanting.
She’d been standing across the oiled, many-hued asphalt, glowering at me with indigo milkcap eyes, her morel hair hanging in a tangle to her shoulders. Her dress was a classic toadstool, flowing in a scarlet cap from her waist. The mushrooms had been overtaking her produce, she said, killing her livelihood. I needed to rein them back in before she sued me, and took the house I could barely afford. Before she took the precious mushrooms. The mushrooms were endearing.
It had been a lilac night, the type where the winds swayed the oyster mushrooms as they crept up the surrounding birches. The dark clouds dripped like inky cap fungi, the moon a single, perfect champignon de Paris. I’d come home from my shift, stepping out of my car and plodding wearily back to the comfort of my door, when a glinting canister caught my gaze, then slowly drew it to the facade of my modest dwelling, now pale in the moonlight, nothing left to glow. The tapestry had been stripped away, the skin of the wood raw and new to the harsh gale. I couldn’t hurt my little friends, and so the girl with milkcap eyes had taken them to empyrean for me. The mushrooms were heavenly.
The next night of note was the last. The skies were suillus this time, the shade of the soil they loved so. The amanita phalloides snuggled up to my skin as I returned the weed-killer to the toadstool girl. She tossed her hair over her shoulder in the doorway, spilling down her veiled lady cardigan, posturing deceptively sweetly to hide the venom in her words. I threw on a smile, drawing my lips up against my gritted teeth in her garden, shrinking into my lion’s mane shawl, posturing deceptively apologetically to hide the poison in my hands. The mushrooms were tactful.
The morning was amethyst deceiver, the wisps of vapour sulphur shelfs. She was still in her doorway, the milkcap eyes as milky as they sounded, staring up blankly at the sky. A trickle of bleeding tooth mushroom fell from her lips. The eyes of the neighbours were milk caps too, after taking from her garden, her dear livelihood, but she was the only one I was after. The mushrooms were peaceful.
Her hair was morels, full of them too. Her toadstool was faded. With time, my tapestry fell back over her, flowing from the bottom of my boarded house, and her milk caps grew tall in the hollows of her skull.
The mushrooms around her corpse glow when the moonlight hits them just right.

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