©2024 Mel Reynes do not re-publish without permission
4th place in the first quarter round of NYC Midnight’s Short Story Challenge 2024
Blue Mushroom FolliesAfter work, a waiter is taken down into the city’s abandoned train tunnels and has an adventure out of this world.
“Do you wanna have some fun?”
When Stef the sous chef offered to have fun, it was worth it to take the chance. Working sixty hours– and smoking nearly as many cigarettes–per week gave her a live-hard and die young vibe.
“What you have in mind?” I asked innocently. Secretly, I was already going to join: it was get onboard with her adventure or your loss.
She only clapped me on the back and told me to be ready at the shift change.
After work, I’d expected to go to the library and study for class. Instead, I transferred my phone, cash, ID, and a credit card with the highest limit into my pockets. The nights could get chilly and who knew how long we’d be out so I kept my jacket. My books and water bottle stayed in my bag. I hid it all behind a fifty-pound bag of flour in the pantry. I’d grab it after my next shift.
Hopefully.
I was bouncing on the balls of my feet as I cashed out my drawer and wished everyone a good night.
I met Stef at the back door. She was wearing a black tank top and a baggy pair of cargo pants. Her boots, heavy and black, looked like they’d gone through a meat grinder. Probably they had. The tail of a tattoo disappeared under her messy short hair. It was hard to tell what creature it belonged to. Could be a rat, could be a dragon.
“Ready?” she asked.
“Er, sure!” I tried to sound enthusiastic. My palms were already sweating and I shoved them in my pockets.
She took off down the alley. Even though I was taller, I had to sprint to keep up. She seemed to know the back alleys well and soon we were in a part of the city I didn’t recognize. There were a lot of neon signs for all-night pawn and vape shops.
“Hey, just so you know, I’ve got a test tomorrow at 1 pm. Gotta be back by then,” I puffed. She was really clocking it. I genuinely had a test, one I should have been studying for at the library. My average in that class was currently good. I could risk failing one test, but I didn’t want her to know that.
She didn’t say anything and we kept moving.
All of a sudden we were at a part of the river I didn’t recognize. Under the old orangey street lights, I could see the weedy river bank and dull metal trash washed up on the shore. The river was also wider and deeper here. It moved darkly and quickly.
She was humming to herself as she sped along the river bank. I think we were going north, didn’t all rivers flow from the north to the south?
“What shoes you’d wear?” she asked. She looked down at my dark sneakers. I felt embarrassed not being prepared to her standards.
“I should have told you to bring boots.” Before I could reply she scrambled through a break in the railing and headed down the rocky embankment. It was expected I’d follow.
The rocks were smooth and flat enough that I could climb down if I was careful. Near the rolling river, the street seemed very far away. I couldn’t hear any cars, just the river and scrape of shoes on rocks.
Then, like magic, Stef disappeared into the rocks. I was so focused on not falling into the water. I screamed and started scanning the water for a body.
Stef laughed with an echoey chuckle ahead of me. I paused and approached carefully.
In the rocks was a hidden cave.
Stef stood on some old train tracks. Impossibly, they emerged from the water and ran into the blackness of the tunnel. She was panting from the exertion and her arms were covered in a layer of sweat, but I shivered under my coat. Near the water, it was much colder than on the street.
“Cool, right?” she asked as she reached into a deep cargo pocket and pulled out a flashlight. She flicked it on.
I looked around the cave. Other people had definitely been here, a small comfort. The walls were covered with overlapping graffiti. Every genre and style of phallus conceivable, a dank museum of dicks. It was comforting to know we weren’t the first humans to discover this place.
She took off down the tunnel. Smaller hallways branched off every once in a while. As I followed, I remembered hearing that they’d stopped up the river at one point. This seemed to be a tunnel that cut through the hill and crossed the river when it was just a dry gully.
Fuck, were there bats in here? I’d heard rabies shots could be terrible. I couldn’t afford to lose time at work or school. The tunnel extended up so far above me that I couldn’t see the top. I pulled the collar of my jacket up further.
The further we went, the more train tracks were more broken up. No graffiti anymore, no other humans have come this far.
I kept a lock on her tail tattoo as I nearly jogged behind her. The cold autumn hadn’t reached in here yet and the train tunnel was muggy. My jacket was now too warm. I took it off and wrapped it around my waist.
Deep and deeper, we kept following forks in the path Stef had memorized. I’d be absolutely fucked by my curiosity if she ditched me. Live out my days as a hairy cave troll that survived on lichen and haunted the local teenage ruffians.
Suddenly, we were in a larger space. The darkness felt even bigger and heavier on top of me.
The ground was dirt instead of rocks and gravel. The walls were closely packed stones. No train tracks, just carts and train gear strewn around.
How had humans ever conceived of architecture like this?
What engineer had sat down and plotted a maze of tunnels and tracks on paper?
Who had dug into the bowels of darkest earth and emerged successful?
Maybe this place was already haunted.
Against the far wall, the gray stone wall had collapsed, and black soil bled into the abandoned storage space. Stef headed towards it.
As her flashlight approached, I could see that the earth was speckled with blue-violet. Like clusters of stars in outer space.
They were mushrooms.
Hundreds, maybe thousands of mushrooms.
The rich dirt absorbed all light, a slash in reality that led to another cosmos. The mushrooms were violently bright. They grew on long dark stems and reached out of the firmament at us. Their smell wasn’t a normal mushroom. It tingled my nose hairs like before it rained, but somehow sweeter.
She set down her flashlight so it illuminated the wall mushrooms and dragged a new-looking ladder over. Of course–she’d been here before.
“Stellae Vivaent,” she said without me asking.
“They’re supposed to be extinct since the time of colonization, maybe even a myth. They only have a couple of diary entries from some priests in the 1500s that prove they might be real.”
I kept staring in awe at the fungi. They glowed faintly and I could pick out specs of mushrooms thirty or even fifty feet above my head. I wanted to walk into the velvety blackness with the stars.
“Since no ones even sure they’re real, no one knows what they taste like,” she climbed up the ladder and stood at the top. It swayed under her. The dirt floor was very uneven. I rushed forward to steady the ladder. She didn’t notice.
“Except me, I know what they taste like,” she flashed a wicked smile down at me. “I tried them grilled, then with a butter sauce, and all different kinds of meats, even fish.” She pulled a yellow plastic grocery bag out of one of her pockets and started picking the topmost mushrooms.
“Fish was…a mistake,” she said as she rapidly picked the mushroom caps. She left the dark stalks. Closer to the wall, the mushroom caps were as big as golf balls. The stalks looked like dark rhubarb.
“You’d think with the way they smell, they’d be briny or bitter. They’re not. More like an allium. But another savory flavor I’m still trying to identify.” She’d already filled one bag and let it drop to the floor. The caps were so light the bag gently drifted down.
She pulled out another grocery bag and a whole wad of bags fell out. I grabbed an empty bag off the ground and started gathering caps.
I realized her cargo pants had four large pockets. She’d brought a lot of bags.
She kept explaining all the methods she’d tried, “They’re too meaty for delicate dishes. Chicken, fish, pork–it’s like eating something spoiled.”
“They can be dried. Can’t do that easily with all mushrooms. Some burn or lose flavor.”
“Are they, um…like, do they get you high?” I asked, aware I was probably going to be asked to eat these. I wasn’t sure I wanted to get high off mystery mushrooms on a Tuesday.
“Don’t seem to be, but I have a high tolerance,” she didn’t elaborate.
I wanted to seem cool about the possibility of dabbling in mystery psychotropics, so I stayed silent. We worked silently to pick as many mushrooms as possible. She didn’t have anything more to say on the history of this place or her culinary experiments.
Stef was much faster at picking the mushroom caps. I was just trying not to crush them as I plucked. I wiped my hands on my jeans and they glowed in the dark.
Finished with the upper parts, she smoothly slid down the ladder without touching any of the steps.
She started picking mushrooms next to me. Up close, I could see she had a technique for getting the heads off. Twist and pull straight out from the wall. This severed the stalk just enough that it would break and release the cap. My picking went much faster.
Soon the floor of the storage yard was covered with shopping bags of every color imaginable.
As she started tying bags to the loops of her belt, she explained more, “Last week they put a notice on the entrance of the tunnel.” She paused dramatically.
“Trying to cover their asses if anyone gets trapped in here,” she continued.
“They’re gonna seal up the train entrance. Something about it not being structural and groundwater or whatever. It’s all bullshit. They haven’t looked at that hole in fifty years. It’s because the mayor’s son broke his foot fooling around down here.” She didn’t explain how she knew about the mayor.
I started picking up as many bags as I could hold. Even though the mushrooms were light, the bags bulged and it was hard to hold too many in one hand.
Stef came over and tied bags to my belt loop. Then she took the bags out of my hands and ran them up my arms–tightening the handles so they almost cut off circulation. She had thought out every step to gain the maximum amount of mushrooms.
Even with two people, half the wall was still covered in mushrooms. I realized they may not see another human being for another hundred years.
Or even another five hundred. It was awe-inspiring that I might be one of a handful of people in over a thousand years to see this wall of stars.
Once she was loaded up with the rest, she grabbed the flashlight and we set out to the surface.
Bless her luck, we got back to the river. I’ve never been so comforted to see a badly drawn dick in my whole life. At the mouth of the tunnel, she started to remove the bags from her arms.
“I’ve got a car up on the street. I’m gonna go up and you can toss up the bags,” she told me.
She didn’t say “her car,” she said “a car.” It felt very much like Stef and should have been a red flag.
Every time her fuzzy head appeared over the side of the embankment, I’d throw her a bag of mushrooms. My arms soon got tired. It was like trying to shoot hoops with a very large foam ball that wanted to blow away into the river. Somehow I got them all to her.
“That’s it, all set,” I told her once the last one had been delivered.
I started crawling up to the street. I could see why we’d started further down river, it was much steeper here, and going down would have been dangerous in the dark. The rocks were slippery from the spray of the river.
Up at the street level, Stef was gone.
I really should have predicted that.
Shivering, I put on my jacket. I checked my phone but it was dead.
Looking up and down the street, there was nothing I recognized so I followed the river back the way we came. I looked up at the night sky, but the city lights obscured these stars.
Nothing else happened on my long walk back. Around dawn, I got back into my apartment. I skipped my test and still passed a B average.
My next shift was Friday, but she wasn’t there and it was unclear if she’d left, gotten fired, or just had the day off. To prevent any workplace gossip, I didn’t ask around or talk about our adventure.
But, also, the starfield of mushrooms were mine. It wasn’t for other people.
I was too busy to check on my stuff behind the flour until the end of my shift. When I grabbed my bag, the water bottle rattled, but not with the sound of water. There was a chunky dull sound inside the metal cylinder.
I opened up the lid and found another container inside. It was a plastic spice bottle with the label picked off. A fine blue-purple powder glittered in the fluorescent lights. Stef had used a rubber band to attach a scrap of paper.
The note read:
“Hey, sorry to ditch you! Car only had room for me and the bags. Thanks again, enjoy this on corn. I swear you’ll love it. -S”
And that was the last time I saw Stef at my restaurant. I graduated but still did some catering. Occasionally I’d hear stories about Stef from other restaurant folks. I’ve heard she changes restaurants frequently. Her adventures and the misadventures continued until a hostess told me she left town. I never heard anything about the mushrooms. No one ever bought them, tried them, and they never showed up on any menus as far as I knew.
It did taste great on corn, by the way.
Mildly psychotropic.
NOTABLE:
Placed 4th in the 2024 NYC Midnight Short Story Competition, Group 29 Genre: Comedy
Theme: Selfish
Character to include: A sous-chef