Authors: Trinie Dalton
I sometimes wish I could write Plath to explain my discoveries.
One recent Friday night I had some mushroom tea brewed from dried
Psilocybe cubensis
and spent the evening alone.
I can step into a vortex of minutiae. My apartment has teal green walls covered with miniature paintings and small tchotchkes stowed on every shelf. My current favorites are a half-inch-tall ceramic Jawa mounted on a broken cuckoo clock, and a quarterinch plastic Fly Amanita resting beside a one-inch squirrel holding a mini acorn. One night alone with a mug of mushroom tea can turn this situation into a microcosm of amazement.
After I’d examined the squirrel’s hair patterns (the way they swirled in bristly waves over his hindquarters) and its nose, which was smaller than a pinhead yet meticulously tipped in black, Sylvia Plath’s book (the one with the mushroom poem in it) started glowing yellow on the bookshelf. It looked as though it were pushing itself off the ledge into my hands. I opened it and proceeded to listen while the poem was read to me in the voice of a woman whom I believed to be Sylvia Plath in the afterlife. Her voice had a low, Lauren Bacall quality. As the poem’s lines were recited, I visualized each stanza while making scientifically accurate associations. Each word in the poem
—bedding, hammers, earless, crannies, nudgers—
began to seem like the microscopic reproductive units called
spores,
which are discharged from mushroom gills and dispersed on air currents. The letters that formed the words became akin to mushrooms themselves, which, by the way, are actually the fruits of the fungus—a thing that gives birth to other things.
Life forms such as mushrooms appear immortal because they are basically impossible to eliminate. When you pick a mushroom, the spores that float away will encourage more mushrooms to grow. Dead mushrooms generate life. Look at letters arranged on a page, and they too become a growing puzzle: of words, that is. The more I eat mushrooms, the more I feel related to mushrooms. We both communicate with the dead, in a way.
Sylvia’s ghost deduced from my half-formed thoughts that I wished to share my fungi learnings with her. She in turn taught me that words, like mushrooms, are capable of communicating to the living what the dead are trying to say.
Don’t write to the dead,
Plath taught me.
We’ll come for your thoughts when we want them.
Though I don’t sell mushrooms anymore, I do read books written by deceased authors. One can learn a lot from a ghost, and vice versa.
Amy and I pushed our beds together to make an island piled with stiff, green camp blankets and stuffed animals we’d brought from home. We hung by our knees from the headboards and took pictures of each other with monster hair. I looked like the Bride of Frankenstein. She looked hot like a red-faced rock star chugging Gatorade offstage. That’s the kind of life I wanted—to be the lady in tight leather pants who wiped her sweat off with a bandana—not the lady cooking chili at our Girl Scout Camp.
We spent Saturday horseback riding, not out on a trail through vines and waterfalls, but in a metal corral. Amy, who was riding behind me, said, “Remember in
Friday the 13th
when the girl gets stabbed in the bathroom?”
We’d been watching horror movies. Amy was a year older than me, so her mom did the renting.
Friday the 13th, Hellraiser,
and
Repo Man
were the first R-rated movies we saw. We chose them because we liked their boxes.
Repo Man
was boring—something about green glowing stuff and dumb beer guys taking cars away from people for some unknown reason. The others I got into—men gone on killing rampages. I knew a house up the street from mine where the son killed his parents with his dad’s shotgun because they wouldn’t buy him a Texas Instruments computer.
“Remember that scene when they’re playing strip Monopoly and smoking a joint?” I asked, not really knowing what a joint was, much less that strip games were real. I said that extra loud, so the other girls in the corral would hear.
“Last summer I went to a camp that looked just like that one in the movie,” Amy said. “The manager had a witch room where he took girls to do spells on and stuff.”
I believed her. We’d written several spells ourselves that were effective only when recited while riding our bicycles in circles inside my garage. One went,
Father time,
Father clock,
Make us disappear—
And reappear around the block.
We’d ride our bikes around the block, always winding up in the garage again, then circle the water heater five times while looking down at the ground. The dizziness this induced convinced us that the spell had worked.
“Did he do any spells on you?” I asked, only guessing what kinds of spells a man would employ.
“You wish,” she said.
Sunday we swam in the lake. This lifeguard, Rita, caught a rainbow trout. She seemed semi-awesome in her Girl Scout shirt since she’d cut the sleeves off and frayed the edges to look like a metalhead. She removed the hook from its mouth and let us stroke the fish with our index fingers. Feeling the fish made camp less dorky—animals were cool. Raccoons dug through the trash dumpsters, frogs hopped along the creek that ran through commons, and ravens swooped down from the sugar pine trees that circled our cabins. That night we stayed up whispering.
“Did you touch that fish Rita had in her hands?” Amy asked.
“Yeah, it was kind of smelly.”
“It reminded me of how tongues are gross.”
“I wouldn’t know,” I said dryly. “You’re the tongue master.”
“Not even,” Amy huffed. She had French-kissed a boy a few months back. “You’re the master. You probably practice with your dog.”
“I wish,” I said. “Dogs are hot.”
Amy was quiet. It took her a minute to decide if I was being sarcastic.
Then she turned her flashlight on under her chin. Her face turned red again, only this time it was glowing and eerie, not enviable and sexy.
“Hey,” I said. “Remember in
Friday the 13th,
that part at the end where the girl’s in the boat after Jason’s mom is dead, and Jason comes out of the lake all slimy like he melted in a fire?”
“I do-o-o-o,” Amy said, in a not-that-scary ghost voice. “Because that girl in the boat was me-e-e-e.”
“I know this sounds stupid, but do you think anyone could live underwater like that? Because when we were swimming today before Rita found the fish, I felt something grab my foot, like a hand.” I knew this was hard to believe but it was true.
Amy blinked at me. “It was probably a fish,” she said, and switched the flashlight off.
Before school let out for summer, we’d been reading
King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.
I liked it because I was sure unicorns would appear in the stories. I figured Guinevere must have had a pet unicorn in the forest somewhere, even if she didn’t tell Arthur or Lancelot about it. The Lady of the Lake freaked me out—she came out of the water looking dead but beautiful, holding Excalibur up to Arthur, who was in the boat sailing to Avalon. This woman in a dripping robe convinced me that people could live underwater somehow. I wondered if she’d halfdrowned and come back to life, or had gills on her sides that were hidden by her white dress. If that was her in our camp lake, it was okay. Still, I didn’t want a lady groping at my ankles while I swam. Also, if that were true, maybe the bottom of the lake was covered with swords poking up.
I’m lucky I didn’t get my toes sliced off,
I thought.
It was a three-day-weekend camp. We waited in line for food all Monday morning, then Amy and I headed back to the lake for more fish and swords. She was secretly scared, I could tell. She stayed around the edges, tiptoeing in squishy mud. I was scared too, but I wanted our camp trip to have an R-rating so I’d have stories to tell my friends at school. Watching scary movies made me think my life was dull until something awful happened. Otherwise, I didn’t see the point. Otherwise, why would my parents have sent me to this craphole? My need for adventure was half horror movie and half medieval. I wanted to rescue Amy from a mysterious underwater sea hag.
“Come out here,” I yelled to the shore.
“No way, it’s too cold,” she yelled back.
“There’s a warm spot,” I lied. Then I pictured a shark swimming under me and got a little panicky. “There’s a shark out here too,” I added.
Amy swam out. I think she took the shark thing as my tease that she was chicken, but I didn’t mean that, really.
“This is not a warm spot,” she said, paddling her legs furiously to keep her head and neck above water. “I’m swimming over to those plants.”
The far side of the lake was thick with lilypads. Dragonflies hovered above them, glittery in the sunlight. No frogs were sitting on the leaves, sadly. Still, I thought the plants were pretty—they looked like dark, shiny bubbles on the water’s surface. I pictured camp counselors canoeing through the lilypads at night, and I thought how romantic it would be to make out while they shined around the boat.
I followed Amy, staying several feet behind her. The lake was actually quite small, like a large pond. The waves were warm but the deeper parts were cold. I worried there were fish huddling together in the cold parts. I felt them brush against my toes. I pictured the Lady of the Lake—fish skimming over her face, Excalibur glinting in her hand. Just then Amy yelled that she was tangled in the weeds. She splashed around so I knew she wasn’t joking.
She was up to her neck in lilypads, and her head looked like some balloon flower.
Pretty flower,
I thought, pushing my way through the watery jungle. I was in a worried daze. When I reached Amy, her legs were so enclosed in vines that I knew I’d have to dive to get her out. She held her breath to stay afloat, puffing out her cheeks, which made her look even more balloon-like.
Once I’d dove down, I knew there was no way to swim back up.
I was too busy struggling to think. But I did see swords surrounding me—which I later realized were only beams of light shining through the lilypads. Peculiar how swords can be for you or against you—there’s no middle ground. Except this time. The swords created an imaginary trap, a cage almost. Then they lit my path upwards. I tried to make myself as tall as possible, then prepared to launch.
Suddenly I was dragged, yanked upwards, and pulled coughing and gagging back to shore. It was the same lifeguard—the semi-awesome one who’d caught the fish.
“Why didn’t you two girls call for me earlier?” Rita asked. She wrapped me in a towel and shooed a crowd of girls away.
“I thought I could get her out,” I said weakly.
She was buff and blond and sun-tanned and nice, and I was just a little Girl Scout loser. Life had moted me hard. My Lady of the Lake was good not evil, and there was nothing I could do but lie about it.
The dog wakes up from a dream at the same time I do. His whimpering wakes me, so I pet his nose to calm him. We were both dreaming about cats. I dreamed that my cat had six kittens, each one a color of the rainbow. The purple one was pastel, the same lavender as the Horse of a Different Color in
The Wizard of Oz
movie. I looked down to see if I was wearing ruby slippers, but I wasn’t.
My dog was dreaming of eating cat food. Most of his dreams are about stealing food from other animals. When his paws twitch, that means in his dream he just grabbed some meat and is trying to outrun a pack of vicious, hungry dogs. One time, when he and I were having the same dream, the dogs were faster than him, and I watched them catch up and rip him apart. I woke up crying. I wonder where you go when you die, but mostly I wonder how it affects you when you die in your dreams, night after night. Are you dying a little each time? Your whole life, you’re dying, but I try not to think of it that way.
My cousin Laura collects glass animals. She dusts them like forty times per day. When I go over to her house, she constantly glances over to her armoire, making sure her animals are safe.
“What’s new?” I ask her.
“Nothing,” she says.
“Like a soda?” I ask, tossing her a can.
“Thanks,” she says, setting it on the table.
“Want to go to the beach?” I ask.
“Can’t,” she says. “I’ll burn.”
“Use sunscreen,” I say. “Maybe we’ll see dolphins.”
She walks over to her shelves and picks up her dolphin. She steams it up with her breath, and polishes it with a diaper cloth.
“Already got one,” she says.
“Jesus,” I say. “Don’t be so melodramatic.”
“You’re melodramatic, coming over here, all beached up and ready to party.”
“What?” I say. “FYI, I’m trying to cheer you up and get you into the sun.”
“I get plenty of light,” Laura says. “I got these natural lightbulbs on eBay …”
“Fuck eBay,” I say, then storm out.
I really don’t know what’s wrong with Laura. She buys and sells animal figurines on eBay so she doesn’t have to leave her house. We didn’t grow up together. But she’s one of my only relatives. Her mom and my mom are enemies. Laura and I are the same age. She has long brown hair, nice skin and teeth, and she keeps her nails painted. Sometimes when I go over to her house she’s in this white gauze gown that looks like it’s from Victorian times. I’m sure it’s from eBay. I’m grubbier, I shave my head, wear cutoffs, and I keep my nails short so they don’t get too much dirt under them. Riding my bike rules my life. I ride my bike around, racing past bums who push shopping carts and ladies who wheel sacks of laundry to the laundromat. Yesterday I saw a lady balancing a box of mangos on her head.
My mom and her sister are enemies because my mom found out that my aunt knew my dad was sick before he died, but she didn’t tell anyone. Dad died ten years ago. My mom feels my aunt was partially responsible for my father’s death, and my aunt swears that he made her promise not to tell anyone, because he knew he was sick and he would’ve died anyway. He didn’t want everybody worrying about him. But my mom says that doesn’t matter, when a man is dying and he doesn’t want his wife and kids to know, you tell them anyway. I agree. Not that she killed him, but right after he died I’d lie awake trying to convince myself that my aunt wasn’t a murderer. She didn’t stab him or shoot him, but she secretly knew he was dying and didn’t do a thing to change it. That’s pretty close to murder.