The Natural Way of Things

by Charlotte Wood

She drags it across the floor and reaches into it, drawing out each foamy weightless thing one by one, laying each one on the broad surface of the butcher’s block. Once again she arranges them in rows, to inspect and categorise, learning the shapes and markings, the subtle differences in smell. The wide flat brown ones are easy: portobello, simple field mushrooms. Dull to look at, but still she likes to run her fingertips along the under-frills (a memory of Andrew racing through her mind with the shirred-satin flip-flip-slip beneath her touch). She puts those to one side. The others are the ones with possibility, the ones to test. There are the tiny, delicate, silver pinwheels. These are so fine they almost dissolve at her touch; she has learned to pick them at their stalk using two fine twigs as pincers. They melt on the tongue, and beyond a slight bitterness, nothing. There are the ridiculous fairytale ones, bright red with white spots, and the narrow tawny hooded ones, the monks’ hoods with slender pale stalks. Another set of bulbous lurid yellow domes with stained, meaty stalks. When she turns these over the undersides of the hoods glisten with sticky honeyed stuff. It’s this one she must try today: surely there is promise in this acid yellow, those gouts of bloody mold.

My parents noticed but they didn’t know how.