This is my second short story. I’ll be publishing it serially for the next several weeks; this time, I’ll try to publish shorter sections twice a week (hopefully Thursdays and Sundays) to keep the momentum going. There will be a short recap at the beginning of each section, and I’ll do my best to keep the link index updated on each post. Enjoy.
Careful how you go into the wilderness east of here. There's something out there in that creeping jungle.
I don't mean just bad people—bandits or deputy gangs or wandering crazies. Though you'll find them there too.
And not just animals, either. Plenty of wolves and bears and mountain lions moving into those ghost counties since the world fell away. But they aren't the only things coming to reclaim what's theirs.
There's other things.
Things you can’t shoot with a gun or cut with a knife if it comes down to it. You can’t hurt them, but they can sure as hell hurt you, if they've a mind to. They’re not cruel, exactly. Not as far as I can tell. They just got their own ideas about what’s good and what’s right, and how we fit into their world.
I’ve seen some of those things.
I think they're sleeping, now that the leaves have fallen off the trees and the frost has come. Hope so, anyway. Don't think they'd like to hear me talking about them. It’s been a long time since all this took place, but they haven’t forgotten me. Word spreads back to them like water trickling through roots.
I think they hear almost everything.
This was back when Tucker and I were growing up. When I first started running magic mushrooms into Madison County.
Tucker and I both grew up in Madison. His family practically raised me. My dad left when I was just little—went up to Utica looking for work at one of the salvage foundries and didn't come back. This was back in the bad days, when the country started splitting up. Lots of folks went missing back then. We never knew if he got hurt, or killed, or just got tired and bailed. My mom didn’t have enough money to pay the cops to look for him. Couldn’t risk going up there to look herself. So she tried to forget him. I never remembered him well enough to miss him.
My mom did the best she could with me after he was gone. But while she was busy with folks' laundry, or mending, or babysitting their kids, trying to make ends meet, I grew up with Tucker. He didn’t have any siblings. His mom almost died having him—it was a rough birth, with the nearest hospital hours away—and she called it quits after that. So I guess his parents were happy having somebody around to look after him.
We probably wouldn’t have been friends otherwise, if I’m honest. Tucker was strange. He was always reading something, even when we were kids. Sometimes he’d disappear, and I’d find him tucked away in a corner, face hidden behind his tablet, reading something he’d downloaded at the library where his dad worked.
Didn’t help that his dad had a real job, either. He had a plum gig working for the government as Madison’s librarian, which pretty much made him the banker and the postmaster, and the welfare office too. The library kept Madison connected to the rest of the world. It was the only place left in town with half-decent Net service, and Tucker’s dad kept it all running. People wanted to hate him for it. Having steady work of any kind made you damn close to royalty in Madison. Working indoors—at a desk, sitting down—seemed almost like a slight against God Himself. Tucker’s parents spent a lot of time helping folks out so their good luck wasn’t held against them.
Tucker probably would have been alright too, if only he wasn’t so goddamn strange.
If I’m really honest, growing up with Tucker was a pain in the ass. He was a year older than me, but I was always the one looking after him. First time I took a real punch was standing up for Tucker on the playground. I tried to help him make friends, introduce him to people, bring him along with me to parties when we got older. Tried to get him to talk to girls.
The girls all thought Tucker was cute, for some goddamn reason, which was annoying as all hell. He looked like a pale little elf standing next to all the corn-fed rednecks in town, with his mop of dark curls and his glasses. I guess that made him interesting, or something. Except he always clammed up when any of ‘em tried to talk to him. Couldn’t take a hint to save his life.
Being friends with Tucker was hard work. Even after I dropped out of school, I still tried to make sure he wasn’t getting lost in his books and spending too much time studying. But for all that, he made growing up in Madison tolerable. He always had some new idea that he dug out of a book somewhere. Oftentimes he’d get wound up talking about whatever he was reading and his mind would take off like a bee-stung mule, dragging me along behind, as if I understood half of what he was saying. Kept me entertained with his wild talk, at the very least. Even if I wasn’t always quick enough to keep up.
Here’s what it is: even though Tucker was an odd duck, he was something different in Madison, proof of a bigger world beyond our little crossroads. He never quite fit in, sure. But that meant that he couldn’t get stuck like everybody else. Never lost sight of that bigger world. Never stopped trying to get to where he belonged.
And, Lord, I needed that growing up.
I hated Madison. Just like every other young guy in history, I had no idea what I wanted, but I was damn sure there wasn’t enough of it in my hometown. The old folks loved to joke that Madison was a one-horse town, until times got tough and they’d had to eat the horse. I didn’t think it was funny.
So Tucker and I helped each other through growing up: me trying to get him to pay attention to what was right in front of him, and him trying to get me to think bigger. We talked about enlisting together after Tucker finished school and got his certificate. The benefits from joining up would help Tucker get to college. I was just bored and wanted to shoot something. And besides, somebody had to make sure Tucker didn’t get himself killed over there in Venezuela or Brazil or some damn place like that.
Except then the mushrooms found us.
This first time was at a party for the end of school, out in the woods north of town. I’d quit school two years ago so it was just another Friday for me. But Tucker was all stoked to be finished, graduated and everything, and he was feeling big enough to go have some fun. I sure wasn’t about to miss a chance to see Tucker loosened up a bit.
We never could figure out how we got ahold of those mushrooms that night. No idea what kind they were. Didn’t know anything about the different strains, back then. We’d been into the hooch already and ended up eating a bunch of them. Lucky for us, they were old as dirt, hardly any juice left, else we’d have been on a rocket ride to the moon. Whoever brought them wandered off. We went back to partying. Forgot we took them, until the world opened up.
You know what it’s like trying to talk about your first trip. I was sitting with some people, passing a bottle around, getting loaded, talking bullshit, when all of a sudden I couldn’t stop thinking about how bright the moonlight was. Like I’d never noticed how it shone through the tree branches before, how it painted everything with silver, how solid it looked as it spilled down from the sky, making pools and rivers in the shadows all around. I tried to tell the people I was with, get them to see what I was seeing, but they were too drunk, or maybe I just sounded foolish. Tucker will understand, I thought. I left those people laughing at me—”What’s he on?”—and wandered off to find Tucker.
I couldn’t see anything because there was too much to see. I understood deeper than thinking that everything was alive. Not just the crickets and the peepers and the cicadas, but the rocks and the shadows and the moonlight and everything, the rotting logs dreaming of when they were trees, becoming part of the crawling things that lived inside them. I stumbled through the breathing darkness, feeling clumsy and sheepish, as if I’d wandered into some secret meeting. It was a church service for a religion I wasn’t meant to understand.
I don’t know how long I walked or how I managed to find Tucker. He was kneeling on the ground, staring at something—a clump of ferns in a little patch of moonlight.
“Tucker,” I said. “You alright?”
When he looked at me there were tears in his eyes. “Mark. You ever seen anything so perfect?” he asked me.
Any other night I would have laughed at him. Talking like that made you sound like a sissy. “No,” I said, and meant it, because I hadn’t. Those ferns framed by the stones and moss around them, with the dew glowing on the leaves, smeared with moonlight, striking cold sparks into the air whenever I moved my head, like the moon had chosen them for this, and they knew just how good they looked. They were loving the night just like we were.
Eventually we found our way back to the party and stood at the edge of the clearing. For a while, we watched our friends yell in the firelight and fall over each other, too wasted to see what was all around them. I wanted to show them everything but knew they wouldn’t understand. Tucker must have felt the same way. He turned silently away and walked back into the woods. I followed him. We walked for hours, finding little miracles everywhere, not wanting to miss anything. Hardly spoke a word that whole night for fear of scaring it all away.
Eventually, the shimmer faded. We found ourselves back in our same old worn-out town. Too tired to find the words for what we’d seen. We went our separate ways and slept.
Lord, it was tough waking up after that first night.
Madison had been a junkyard our whole lives. It was always damn depressing. But now we knew—had seen it ourselves—that it was all a hateful lie to boot. After the mushrooms showed us how bright the world could be, the place felt as thin as wet cardboard. The empty shops and sagging porches we grew up with were hiding something from us. People heaved themselves around looking for work or drink, a smoke or a fight or a shoulder to cry on, day after day until they died, because somebody told them once that this was all there was. And nobody questioned it.
Tucker always said that there was more to the world than Madison. Neither of us realized that there was more to the world in Madison, right where we were, even in this dusty God-forgotten place. If only we could see it.
We had to get more.
Turned out nobody else was sure who brought those mushrooms to the party. We asked everyone we could think of. Finally, we heard a rumor that the mushroom guy—somebody’s sister’s boyfriend, just in town for the party—was from over in Morrisville. Got his number, went to the library, sent him a message. Took us two whole days to get a message back from him.
traded my buddy for those shrooms. don’t know where he got em from, came the reply. tell me how much u want to buy and ill ask.
How much we wanted to buy was a problem, seeing as me and Tucker barely had any money between us. So we lied. Said we were looking for as much as he could sell, just to keep him on the hook. Figured we’d take care of the money later.
We heard back again the next day: buddy says he got em from out your way. SE of Bridgewater. only house left on Beaver Creek Road. he’s not buying there anymore. dude’s crazy. calls himself Bone Man. good luck.
Bridgewater would’ve been an easy twenty-minute drive east for our grandparents, before things fell apart. It’s gotten a little better since Tucker and I were young. Back then, even if you had a car and a place to charge it, the old county roads outside of town were a mess of washouts and sinkholes, not to mention the toll booths and the roadblocks put up by the deputies all along the way. Carjack gangs too. Just off the highway were whole towns left empty when folks packed up and left for the bigger cities. The only people still there were hermits living in the ruins. If you had a good car and plenty of money for bribes, probably a gun or two, you’d be alright.
Tucker and I had none of these things.
Couldn’t even get to Bridgewater, let alone find some hillbilly out in the woods. Had no money to buy anything from him even if we did. It was a dead end.
But the days stretched on, and me and Tucker got to pondering.
Didn’t need a school certificate to know about supply and demand. If we couldn’t get our hands on those mushrooms, that meant nobody else could either. And the demand was there. Nearest place to get decent liquor was in the next county over, and mobbed up to boot, so you had to know the right people. There was plenty of moonshine and homebrew in town. Plenty of weed too: every toddler with a cupful of dirt was growing the stuff. Except folks were bored with all that.
If we could show people what we’d seen in the woods that first night, we could sell as many mushrooms as we could get our hands on. Solve all our money problems. Maybe even make enough to get Tucker off to college.
“We could grow them ourselves,” Tucker said one day.
“Come on. We don’t know shit about growing mushrooms,” I said, forgetting who I was talking to.
“Like hell we don’t,” said Tucker. “I looked up how to do it at the library. Have to get fresh mushrooms for a spore print, but it just takes some patience after that.”
“So we just go out there and ask Bone Man for some seeds?”
“Spores,” said Tucker. “I doubt he’d just give them to us. If he’s selling what he’s growing, he probably doesn’t want any competition, even all the way over here.”
“So how do we get the seeds?”
Tucker sighed. “Dunno.”
Then again, we had nothing but time.
Continued in Part 2.
I like this line in particular: “It was a church service for a religion I wasn’t meant to understand.”
The mystique of the natural world?