An encounter in a forest

I guess I wanted a break from the conversation. I wanted to take in the tranquillity, if only for a few moments. I haven’t done much shrooming. Just enough to know a handful of species with confidence, and enough to know not to try my luck on anything else.
I wandered away from the others. The trees swallowed their voices quickly. The light mist clamped around me until only my crunching steps and huffing breath met my ears.
The screen in my hand showed three broad sweep of a white fungus, clinging to the side of a rotting log. The white almost glowed against the deep brown of the damp wood, the bright green clusters of lichen ran in horizontal streaks below the mushrooms and a dark green wedge of rising forest crowded the top half of the shot. But it wasn’t as clear as the other two. Swiping through, this photo was better; the angle a little higher so that each fungal crest seemed a little nobler, the focus pulled more tightly so that drops of dew could be picked out on the rim of the white gills.
I discarded the other two shots and kept the good one. There were others. This was my mushroom photo collection. It’s not like I spend my life doing this or anything, I just really like taking photos of them when I see them. Poking through leaf litter, thrusting from a stack of excreta or clinging to logs at all angles, fighting their way upwards and outwards.
I should have been paying more attention to the ground in front of me. There was no path here, just a thick forest floor sloping gently downwards. The small log running length-ways in front of me seemed inconsequential. I barely looked away from my screen as I stepped over it. My boot sank, deep and I pitched forward. I wrenched my other leg under me but it was too late; the more I tried to stay upright, the faster I propelled myself out of control. What followed was less of a fall than a desperate scrabble, followed by a long prolonged and confusing tumble. 
I lay face down in the damp. The earthy smell of humus welled up through my jacket, which had wrapped itself about my head. I pictured my phone arching out and away into the forest, somewhere near the start of my fall, back when I was almost upright. I cursed myself for a Pratt, wondering at how I would be received, crawling back to the others with a broken leg and a bloodied face. I flexed and rolled upright, wondering if I would find my phone before nightfall. I slapped my sides and stretched my back, relieved that, miraculously, I seemed un-damaged. I was just dusting the leaves from my head when I saw it. 
A wizened stump. Mere paces from where I sat. Too large and old to sensibly exist in this manufactured plantation, but there it was. Wider than five times my outstretched arms, looming like a broken tooth and scratching at the canopy far above. And not dead. A single, sinewy arm stuck from its side and up, fanning out and tipped with impossibly bright leaves. Not pine, but oak. An oak in a pine forest.
I was standing then. Impressed by this preposterous remnant. I reached out and touched the leaves. The forest was so still that I could hear them brush against my skin. Some powerful awe then came upon me. I felt compelled to circle the great stump. Time stretched. My footsteps came from far away. I felt no surprise when, on the far side of the stump a great hollow presented itself.And in the dark base of that hollow, cocooned from the world lay a smooth dome of fine mulch. A dome from which rose a grand and solitary mushroom. A stalk like a ships mast, as thick as my shin, rising to a broad dome; a rounded platter the like of which I had never seen. And dimly I wondered if I had hit my head, because the colour, it was not quite blue or was it not quite yellow and now was it russet or mauve? It seemed to take on a new colour for each moment I considered it, and threatened to damage my eyes with a slight but dazzling glow.
I dropped to my knees before this majesty.
Without knowing how long I knelt, I watched a dark spot appear along the smooth horizon of the mushroom’s cap. It grew until it was the size of my thumb. A slug perhaps, or maybe a caterpillar. I bent forward, the tips of my outstretched fingers sinking in the soft humus, trying to get a better look at this smudge of a creature. The glow from the mushroom fought against my eyes. I leaned closer still, trying to bring it into focus. I saw no legs propelling it, nor any slimy trail following its journey. The slow scintillation from the mushroom wove slick patterns along its oily body.
The slug reached the top or the dome and paused. Two pale dots appeared. It lifted its front end and those dots sharpened to pinpricks. It appeared to point itself at me. My face mere centimetres from it.
“Greetings.”
I felt my body listing as the word passed through my mind. Alien and disconcerting. It was not my word. I squeezed shut my eyes then peered again at the little slug.
“Yes. That was me,” it came again.
I felt like I was too close to an immense bell. The tolling was too deep to be audible, but rather it rolled through the water of my body.
“It is alright, human. I am no threat to you.”
Although its appearance had not changed, the slug was smiling. I knew it was smiling.
“What are you?” did I say it or did I think it?
And the slug twisted and extended itself. Curling into a helix. Its eyes split away from its tip on hair thin tendrils.
“I am a Djin,” came the voice. “I am an agent of chance. Of chaos. I may grant wishes to those who find me.”
The dark helix softened. Light blue hair sprouted all down its length. The eyes grew wide and round, staring at me. Now bright orange legs pushed out and it was a caterpillar.
“Am I awake?”
“You are not. But you are not asleep,” The caterpillar lay back down, stretching out in the dusty softness of the shroom. “You are in my moment, while it lasts. My little realm.”
Out of the ramble of my thoughts came a Why.
“Even I cannot say. But I have waited longer than you can comprehend. And now I hope you will release me.”
Again, more confusion. The caterpillar that was a slug was changing again. The blue hair was showering upwards from its body, becoming a perfumed vapour. Sweet, like boiled lollies. The naked sausage left behind puckered in the middle, sucking at its own length. Four little bulbs formed, blooming like a cluster of roses. The petals were orange fire. When fully grown, the Djin shook like a tiny dog and the blooms abruptly folded and fused into a smooth hemisphere. The Djin now resembled an over-sized lady beetle.
“How...?”
“How do you know if this is real? You don’t. How long will this last? This moment will grow closed soon. So I cannot give you more time to attempt comprehension. Instead, I will tell you how we might help each other, human,” the shiny, rigid bug-body began to relax, like wax on a bright window sill. A dull film covered its lustrous body. 
“I can offer you three wishes,” the creature continued, “Three tiny wishes. Three because it is convention. Tiny, to match my form and power.” Its body dulled, becoming translucent. The suggestion of organs hung in the middle of its form.
“You must make the wishes now or they will be gone. You must make them tiny or you will get none. If you make them just right, I will be free from this form. Free to join the universe again.” I sensed a feeling of overwhelming joy at this prospect. The joy was staggering.
“How long do I have?”
A pale green thing now. From the depths of the ocean. It shrugged its blobby shoulders and continued to shift in place.
I bowed my head in thought. Thought that was panicked. Thought that was running hard with adrenaline. I spied a leaf still clinging to my sleeve from my tumble. I remembered my phone flipping from my hand and an idea came.
“I wish,” I paused, checking the wording, “I wish that I could think of a thing and know where it was.”
And I was a breath of air. I was a dust and a whisp, speeding across the leaf litter to the tree and the rock. And I was my phone, lying warm amidst the leaves. And I could feel it and me and the distance between us. I knew where it was.
“You may do this once for each cycle of what you call a day,” The tolling voice intervened.I was breathing hard. My fingers were buzzing.
“It was a good first wish,” said the tiny pearl lizard sitting on the mushroom. “Now, for your second.”
“I, I think…”
“No. You must wish.”
I thought of things a person may wish for. For riches, as money can buy an easy life. For fame, which I would shrink from. For immortality, which seemed cold and dead and most likely beyond the power of this tiny outsider.
 “I wish to stay healthy and live a long life.”
A brief pain and nausea washed over my body. I winced and shuddered as a wetness felt within my limbs drained towards my chest. My sternum pinched inwards and, like the popping of an immense pimple, a fleshy stream gushed from me, pooling in the space between me and the tiny cat that sat atop the mushroom. The flesh coloured mass became a hanging sphere. The cat pursed its lips and blew and the sphere popped. A putrid tang came and went from the air.
“I can grant you physical health, but not mental health,” the little cat was licking its paws.
“What do you mean?”
“The cost of our meeting is your sanity. You cannot receive a wish without being changed. Although the functioning of your brain will be unclouded, you will never again have that certainty you have always taken for granted.”
“What certainty?”
“That you are alive. That the world is predictable and sensible. If you complete the third wish without failing, you will become one of the un-grounded. One who walks with knowledge of the impossible.”
Precious moments passed. The new warmth of my body and depth of my breathing reassured me.
“Your second wish was wanting. But you have not wasted your opportunity.” The Djin was coalescing into the form of a rectangular pyramid. No eyes, but a pair of mites flitting about its zenith. “And now, if you can, make your last wish. If you can, make it one that will complete us both.”
I closed my eyes and tried to find that last wish. Half formed and flawed they came at me, each one a disappointment. I looked up at the Djin to find it had come to the front edge of the giant mushroom. And it did not seem to be my imagination but the mushroom’s glow was dimming. The Djin was tiny now. The size of the nail on my pinky toe. A bright red mouse. Sitting. Staring and imploring.
A solid blankness was in my mind. And then…
“Your time is…” began the Djin.
“I wish for a familiar," I cut in. "A shape-shifter. Small and unpredictable. Just like you. One that will be with me all my life.”
A long moment in which the gravity of the Earth was joined by another force. A force that held everything in expectant stasis, then an explosion of laughter.
                                       --------------------------------------------------------- 
When I awoke I was lying next to a  huge rotten stump. Long bones of bark and wood lay on and around me. In a dark hollow before me slumped the slag of a large and spent mushroom. I stood up and brushed the wet and collapsing wood from my clothes.
And I knew I had not been dreaming because I could feel the invisible cord between myself and my phone, lying halfway up the shallow rise. I knew it had been real because my body hummed with energy, the shallow pains I knew now only by their absence.
And I knew that it was real because the tiny owl sitting on the dead twig on the side of the rotten stump did not fly away when I opened my hand to it
“Thank you, human,” it said, lighting on my palm.
“Are you free?” I thought at it.
“Not yet, but I am released,” and the bird was already shrinking and turning, “For the price of your life-time, I will be free from this form forever. But until then, I will happily shift in your presence.”
I began trudging, reeling in the steps between me and my phone. In the distance I could hear my friends calling.
“Will they see you?”
The Djin passed directly through my hand, a ball of pulsing colours, circled around my arm and sat atop my head.
“No. They will not. But you will. And I will never be far away.”


  ____________________________________________________________________ (Picture coming later...)