It begins as a slow itching, as a thought radiating outwards and filling the space between my skull and scalp. It snakes down my spine and settles somewhere more physical. Occupying fleshy space that I cannot touch, in defiance of my hands attempting to explore my own body. A space seemingly just behind my left kidney, and no amount of twisting or wrenching allows me to do more than wonder at its exact location.
I simply cannot reach this forbidden space, so I tiptoe to the bathroom to peek at the root of this now burning sensation. My roommates are all sleeping, and despite my rogue-like efforts to navigate the 50-year-old house I now inhabit, each step causes a reverberating creaking to spiderweb its way through the hallways. The bathroom door squeaks its way shut and closes with a final slam.
Living with roommates at 30-years old. All four of us, beginning a new decade of life together. We chose trades and paid for an education. Oh, the places we went, and what places we could go, but instead, we are stuck in this slowly dying house together. We are a school of poor little millennial fish, sardines stuck inside a rusting, metal tin. Canned fish that also eat canned fish.
I flip the bathroom light on, and as my eyes adjust, I slip my shirt off and grab my phone. I try to focus the lens on where I am now feeling pins-and-needles. It’s difficult to make my limbs complete the actions that my thoughts want, but eventually I narrow in on a particular spot. And now that this fear is physical, I wish I could return to hypochondria.
A pore of my skin has opened, bloomed like a tiny flower, and a pin prick of something hard and…brown…has poked out. No bigger than the nib of a pen, but unlike any pimple or mole that I’ve ever seen before. I reach for a hairbrush and manage to scratch at the new growth, but nothing budges or breaks apart. “A tomorrow problem,” I tell myself, as I slink back towards my burrow.
The steady pulse of whatever is on my back has slightly deafened, but the heat of it remained during my entire date this evening. I’m sprawled in Jonathan’s bed, wrapped up in arms, and petrified that at any moment he’ll realize that something has started sprouting out of my skin.
“You seem a little out of it tonight, is there anything wrong?” he asks kindly, as always.
“Yeah. I mean, no. Not really. There probably is something I should tell you. And no, nothing is wrong, not bad news, at least I don’t think.” Despite my tepid reassurances, I can feel his arms tense slightly around me. “Have you ever noticed anything on my back, just about here,” I attempt to point to where I can feel the growth, “I only noticed it this morning, and I don’t know what it is, but I am a bit worried about it.”
He flips me around a bit and settles his fingers near the spot. “Oh yeah, sure, this mole?”
“I don’t think it’s a mole.”
“Are you sure? You’re literally covered in freckles, it’s probably been there forever.”
He means well, but Jonathan has likely never truly looked at a single one of his moles before, let alone noticed any of them warping, shifting, making a ponderous journey across his skin. “You’re probably right.” Outwardly agreeing, inwardly doubtful.
I am now certain the only possible explanation of my mysterious growth is fungal in nature. It is now the size of a thimble, and there is a burning sensation and expanding redness that is warning me to expect more fruiting bodies. I am officially growing mushrooms, species and genus to be determined.
I visited an autumn fair once, with an exhibit showing how mushrooms are cultivated. Little mountains of fungi growing out of heaping piles of shit. It raised general concerns amongst my friends about the origin of their favourite pizza toppings. However, I was primarily focused on how a business could procure so much crap. What is it like to have a bottom line that relies on poop? What kind of genius is it to sink your entire living into making money off of the things that other people flush away? What kind of foolishness requires gathering up that which is meant to disappear?
If I am growing mushrooms, how much of me is shit? And perhaps, the more pressing issue, how much of me is fungal? I imagine a war between the two currently being waged inside of me and feel bad for the innocent third party that is the rest of my body. It feels better to imagine being slowly filled with a fungal network, like the fine fibres of mycelial strings, all unravelling themselves into joints and winding around bones.
Do I still control the wiggling of my fingers, the blinking of my eyes, or the rolling of my ankles? In my imagination, tiny spores of a bursting cap travel through my body by way of rivers of blood. Somehow a successful exchange occurs between oxygen and fungi and then back to oxygen. Could it be that every passing wish to jump off a high bridge or throw myself in front of a moving car was just the fungus within me? Is the thing jutting out from my skin what’s to blame for my inability to sleep through the night?
A few days later, I’m at the grocery store desperately trying to remember which kinds of sweet potatoes are yams, when I get a phone call from Ian.
“Hi hi,” I say, with as much affection as someone at the grocery store can muster.
“Hello! Is this an okay time?” he asks excitedly.
“Sure,” I say, while trying to determine if it will be my date or I that is more disappointed by accidentally choosing the wrong kind of root vegetable.
“I just wanted to run some of my plans past you. I miss you, and I would love to hear what you think is the best thing to do next!” He launches into a detailed explanation of where his travels might take him next, and I patiently listen to each option. Ian and I have been dating for close to a decade, and he is currently on a year-long sabbatical. Exploring the world. As much as I wish I could be travelling at his side, I felt the need to stay, to work, to put down roots. I guess I have let something take root in me, instead.
After a few laps of the store trying to figure out if canned beans are in the vegetable aisle or the soup aisle, Ian asks, “So what have you been up to?”
“I think I’m growing a mushroom out of my back.” A fellow shopper gives me a side eye and subsequently shuffles out of my peripheral vision.
“That’s nonsense, couldn’t be happening.” A small reassurance, but maybe not exactly what I need at this moment. “What makes you think that?”
“There’s a mushroom growing out of my back.”
“It’s likely just a mole or a freckle, or maybe an insect bite. As long as it’s not hurting you then you’re probably fine. Look, I have to go, but take a picture, send it to me if you need reassurance. I’m sure it’s nothing.” He hangs up, and I stash my phone, trying to decipher the healthiest bread option for someone with a mushroom on their back.
“And how have your compulsions been?” my therapist asks.
“They’ve been okay.” I’m not lying, they haven’t been that bad recently. “I have been struggling a bit with hypochondria related stuff, like there is a weird mole on my back, at least I think it’s a mole, but I can’t quite tell. Anyways, I think it’s fine, I just need to forget about it.”
“It’s good to hear that you have been navigating your current challenges without too much influence from your compulsions. I know that change and new situations trigger them for you, so you should be proud of your ability to travel through this time without relying on old habits.”
I know she’s right, but I can’t help but wonder if my obsessions and compulsions have moved from within my bones and into the now cluster of mushroom caps. Mental unrest made physical; a fungal trap for all the literal shit travelling in my body, made real out of the presence of something other attached to me. If it was always lingering, perhaps it could have started the process of extracting these thoughts a little sooner. But how deep does it go? If I search through photo albums of blood relatives, will I find a mushroom cap poking out from under a baseball hat? A long-lost great aunt with the world’s most fungal birthmark? I remember what it feels like to recognize myself in the face of a distant relative’s wedding photo, to understand that despite my attempts to distance myself from whatever DNA lives inside my cluster of cells, I am forever linked in some unfathomable way to people I’ve never actually known. Could those people that exist perpetually in a state of black and white, either within the photo album or in the bleak real world, have given me another, more sporous gift?
If mushrooms consume death, if they are the physical representation of renewal from rotted material to new life, then of course not. A fungal presence in my bloodline would have wiped away whatever darkness consumes our brains a long time ago.
Sitting on the edge of the breakwater, Anna holds my hand and assures me that my cluster of hardened toadstools is nothing to be worried about.
“—in fact, I think it’s something to be celebrated. It’s your body excreting normalcy, it cannot contain the patriarchal bullshit that is everyday life, and you’ve transcended from what is expected of you so forcefully, that you are now involuntarily removing the pain from your body in a beautiful form. It’s actually very Capricorn of you, high achieving, consistently working hard, even when you don’t even know you’re doing it.”
I think one of the best parts of Anna is her unabashed belief in all things astrology, witchy, or otherworldly. We’ve been trying to decipher what exactly about my sun, moon, and rising could hint at what is growing on and inside of me. We haven’t come up with much, but I do appreciate her trying.
“Thank you for the reassurance, but I’m not sure I can rationalize this,” I reply, defeatedly. “But thank you for helping me.” I plant a kiss on her cheek, and she responds by squeezing my hand a little tighter.
Astrology, tarot, personality tests, quizzes; what I would not do to have some ten-minute internet poll tell me what is wrong with me. I know the Myers-Briggs test is bullshit, but what does it mean to be more thinking or feeling, if I think the feeling of this growth is unbearable? Journalling each morning just results in an unintelligible string of unrelated thoughts, and my morning tarot card pull just allows me to tie them together with all the grace of a coffee news astrology writer: “today, you may find opportunities for growth.”
I picked up a mushroom foraging publication from my local used bookstore today. I was killing time when I saw it and was suddenly consumed with a realization that I may have reached some point of no return.
I’m comparing the blurry, unfocused photos on my phone to images I see in the identification book; there are a few species that look somewhat like what I can see in my own bad photography, but I can’t be sure. I’m racked with self-disgust with what I have let happen, but it’s not as if I had any control over this. At least all the species that bear any resemblance to my growth are listed as edible and non-poisonous. I let out a small giggle—I am quite literally foraging my own body, how survivalist of me.
It’s time to see if this thing can be removed. I need to make an investment in the land-trust of my own body and cut something out today to preserve the future. I have located an invasive species. Does it make my body more or less wild to remove a tiny part of its new ecosystem?
Grasping an old hunting knife, given to me by an old relative, I carefully saw at the cluster on my back. The act makes me a little nauseous. I don’t feel any pain, but I ooze disgust that this knife that foreign fingers once held, is now slicing through my own flesh. I can deal with that later, right now I’m on fungi time.
An unexpected curiosity weaves its way into what I hope is my imagination, mingling with whatever spores still lie dormant there. I see mothers sneaking a taste of their own breastmilk and contestants on survival shows eating worms. A pig in a pen eating scraps and the primal urge to lick bare skin. The book did suggest I was cultivating something safe to consume. As if controlled by something else, I place a non-stick pan on the stovetop, turn the dial to medium, and drop a few teaspoons of olive oil inside.
The caps sizzle in a very normal way and take no longer than a cremini might to cook. I place them on a plate and grab a fork. I am free of thoughts and purely reacting. Cooked on a plate, the growths don’t seem very menacing. A compartmentalized representation of whatever has been collected and excreted from my body; how beautiful. My therapist would be proud. I stab a small bunch, part my lips, and chew away at a tasteless chunk of fungi. I swallow, and stab another. Bite, chew, and down it goes. It doesn’t take long for the whole plate to disappear. Somehow in this act of vanishing, I realize that I don’t necessarily feel any lighter or heavier for having found, identified, dispatched, and internalized what was parasitizing me. Time to do the dishes.
I’m in no pain, not doubled over and vomiting, no reaction that matches eating something deadly. After drying my hands, I calmly walk over to the bathroom and take a few more awkward photos. I squint at my screen, but there is nothing to see, not even a scar or a bloody mark. It’s like the growth was never there.
I tiptoe back through my creaking house and lie into the nest of my bed. I somehow already know that in the morning, I will feel something burning again.