Lovers and Lawyers by Lia Matera

Author:Lia Matera
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road
Published: 2021-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Destroying Angel

“Destroying Angel” was first published in Sisters in Crime 2, ed. Marilyn Wallace, Berkley Books, 1990.

I was squatting a few feet from a live oak tree, poison oak all around me (an occupational hazard for mycologists). I brushed wet leaves off a small mound and found two young mushrooms. I carefully dug around one of them with my trowel, coaxing it out of the ground.

I held it up and looked at it. It was a perfect woodland agaricus. The cap was firm, snow white with a hint of yellow. The gills under the cap were still white, chocolate-colored spores hadn’t yet tinged them. A ring of tissue, an annulus, circled the stipe like a floppy collar. A few strands of mycelia, the underground plant of which the mushroom is the fruit, hung from the base. I pinched the mycelia off and smelled the gills. The woodland agaricus smells like it tastes, like a cross between a mushroom, an apple, and a stalk of fennel.

I brushed leaves off the other mushroom and dug it out of the ground. It resembled the first mushroom. It had a white cap, white gills, an annulus. But a fleshy volva covered the bottom third of the stipe like a small paper bag. It was all that remained of a fungal “egg” from which stipe and cap had burst; characteristic of Amanitas, not Agaricus. The volva was the reason I’d dug so carefully around the base of the mushroom. I had to be sure I’d dug the whole thing out. If I’d left the volva in the ground, the mushroom would have been virtually indistinguishable from the woodland agaricus.

The mushroom was beautiful, pristine, stately, reputedly delicious (though you wouldn’t live to eat it a second time).

But it was a deadly Amanita, a destroying angel, and I left it on the carpet of duff.

I filled my basket with woodland agaricus and I littered the ground with discarded destroying angels. A flock of birds swooped out of a tree and startled me off my haunches and onto my back, and I decided to call it a morning.

I walked the three or four miles back to the road, rubber boots squelching through mud. I watched mist float over manzanitas, drift along horizontal branches of live oaks, drip through mosses, mute the evergreen of firs and redwoods. The air smelled of loam and wet leaves and pine sap. Woodpeckers tapped, squirrels scrambled, and birds drank from curled bark. There were mushrooms everywhere, tiny brown ones no one had bothered to classify, fuchsia-colored russolas, bits of orange chanterelles peeking out of leaf mounds. Most people don’t see anything but leaves and pine needles when they look at a forest floor, they don’t recognize the subtle patterns. But then, most people are content to see nature from a car window, to do their hiking in a shopping mall, to settle for flavorless mass-produced fungi.

Not me.

The museum was ready for the annual Fungus Fair. We’d carried the stuffed coyotes and pumas and the trays of butterflies and beetles down to the basement.

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