A TARDY MUSHROOM

Mutiti closed the door behind her. The loneliness hit her as she leaned onto the door. All that could be heard was the buzz of the refrigerator. On and on it went without repulsion.

“If only I will be as enduring,” she thought.

All the reassuring voices that had been playing on and on in her head were muted. She had searched for the one face she needed to see among the myriads that approached her.

No. It wasn’t there. Tears welled up as she stared at the increasingly blurred motion of black hats, black coats, and bouquets of pink flowers. She felt catapulted to a lost desert in a lost world.

She tapped the lightswitch and felt the persistent stillness of the room. She was then drawn to the long winding scratch on the wooden dining table. She trailed her finger perfectly along it, feeling the variations in its depth: light…….light…..deep….deeper…..STOP. Her finger was just at the edge of the table. The work of a hand chisel in the hand of an eight-year-old.

She maneuvered her way around the table and glanced at the living room. A film of dust coated the neatly placed textbooks on the bookshelf. Maybe she’d find the time now.

Through the glass kitchen door, she gazed at the heaps of medicine bottles all over the counters. Long tablets, short tablets, pink tablets, and brown syrups.

“That should be cleared,” she thought to herself.

Upon taking a step forward, the familiar scents of the medicines halted her progression.

She went into the living room, curled herself into a ball, and sobbed softly on the cold, stiff leather sofa.

***

She had been staring at her now cold cup of black tea when she heard a woman’s voice just outside her window. She couldn’t be less bothered.

She sat motionlessly as the woman knocked for the third time.

“I’ll get it,” she heard him shout.

“No, dad. I’ll get it.”

“You know, I was a cargo unloader for the …”

“WAS dad. Was,” she responded as I raced to overtake him. Alas, she was always a little too slow for him.

She opened the door to a formally dressed woman. She peaked out further to see who she had been talking to. Suddenly, there was a huge camera lens on her face.

“You must be Mutiti Kanyanta, nice to meet you,” She said enthusiastically with an outreaching arm.

She stared at it utterly confused.

“I’m here to congratulate and interview Dr. Kanyanta for a brief period. Can I speak with her?”

She had just closed the door when she realized she hadn’t asked what the recognition was for.

***

Three years hadn’t quite changed her. That familiar but distant face supposedly belonged to her mother. She scrolled on and on reading multiple articles.

“FIRST FEMALE RECIPIENT OF THE PRESTIGIOUS CANONICAL AWARD”

“PHYSICAL THERAPIST TURNED RESEARCHER WINS CANONICAL AWARD”

“CANONICAL AWARD RECIPIENT INSPIRES A NEWYORK TIMES BESTSELLER”

“So this was why she left her dad to rot!”

She got up and thrust her mum’s pictures and frames to the floor. They crushed onto the carpet unharmed. Grabbing a thick textbook, she struck the frames repeatedly desperately increasing the intensity of her blows. Flickers of glass sunk into the carpet.

She rampaged the house picking up and destroying all she could find of her mum. Her special family mugs, CRACK! Her Neal Stephenson novels, RIP! Her designer coat, STUMP! and out the window.

“What are you making dad?”

“It’s a figurine…who does it look like.”

“Umh… a… a… moon goddess or maybe an ancient Athenes lady”

“It’s your mum! Just look closely.”

“Even though I barely remember, I don’t think she looks that godlike,” she chuckled.

“This is how she looks in that red dress you got her.”

“Dad! I was 8 and you bought it.”

“….but YOU picked it out.”

She dashed into her dad’s workroom, flung open the freezer, and drew the figurines to the floor. They cascaded to the ground and chipped into hundreds of pieces. Ignoring the pierce of the charades of ice, she got down to her knees.

What... have... I... done...!

Her vision blurred as she picked up the two pieces of an ice sculpted bowl. She tentatively tried to fuse them together but to no avail. The melting ice trailed down her arms and fell onto her laps. She sat back against the wall. The bowl melted leaving a little red mushroom in her palms. The refrigerator hummed on as the ice around her melted. She was numb, she was cold and she was soaked. Slowly, she sunk to the floor and melted away.

***

She woke to a soft buzz. She made her way to the living room, dripping water along the passage.

“I’m at your door. No rush, I’ll wait till you’re ready.”

***

“Nightfall is approaching. Surely he has left,” she thought to herself.

The door hinges creaked loudly as she opened the door. The cast of light gradually grew to illuminate the lone slouched-over figure sitting at the edge of the porch.

“Why of course he’d never leave.”

“Curiosity trumps emotion,” he stated with his gaze fixed to the sky.

“In that case doctor, you are curious. I am the latter.”

“Congratulations. You’re so overcooked, your analogies are quite accurate now”

“It’s more like a freezer than a stove actually,” she replied as she closed the door and took the space adjacent to him. The crickets chorused into the night filling the silence between them. An oddly warm silence.

“He was a strong man.”

“Maybe too strong,” she responded with her eyes in search of something she was somehow missing that had locked his attention in the night sky.

“Definitely.”

“But your mother cared too.” He continued softly, aware that what he had just said was not rudimental to her.

“Right!” She exclaimed all the while waving her arm melodramatically. " I guess that’s the new scientific discovery I missed - New fifth force proves that the most selfish people are surprisingly the most caring ones,” she uttered in an accent that mimicked how she perceived a news tabloid would read.

“I’ll leave you this book on her behalf.”

“How perfect! The person I thought understood me,” she thought as she grabbed the book and rose to leave.

“Thank you for being so comforting, doctor,” she said and slumped the door.

He heard her slash the book to the floor.

***

THE MEMOIR OF A TARDY MUSHROOM

A letter to a daughter, from a mother, by a friend.

Written by Dr. Varsaid.

Have you ever seen a picture of one of those unearthed ancient archeological jars? Well, certainly I wouldn’t have much concern for it until I learned that it contained an invaluable ancient text. The sort of thing that would get you attention from the BBC.

Dong! Dong! Ding!

I found such a jar. However, I wasn’t the first.

***

CHAPTER ONE

Jennifer Trash had been a Physical Therapist. She was kicking up bones left and right and stitching together tendons at the Cavends Hospital for three and a half years.

Even though her work was to strengthen bones, hers were actually getting progressively weak. Not because of some medical condition -no-no. It was an emotional one: LOVE.

He was the type of person you’d watch in movies. Really, really bad- low-budget movies. Ones in which he’d play a poorly-thought-out character: The stereotypical GOOD GUY.

I mean this guy is badly good. When I first meet him, lying on a stretcher in the ER room, he asked me how I was doing! Telling you that I’d put my heart into helping him that day is an understatement. He was of that sort. The type you’d put in all twelve fingers for.

Unfortunately, he attracted almost everyone and everything. Smiles, respect, and even rare diseases. Its name? Chronic Myofascia - Staphylococcal Xylocarp. Simply put, imagine chronic muscle pain, consistent muscle cramps, and momentary loss in brain-hand coordination.

What hobby do you think he took up after he was unable to return to work?

ICE SCULPTING.

Yes, the very type of hobby that needed that brain-hand coordination.

I wondered how he did it. He once brought an artifact to my office at 15:10. A perfectly rendered angelfish. That afternoon, I watched it slowly lose its details as the seconds ticked on. Why, I wondered, would you put so much effort? At 15:23, I was whipping a puddle on my desk.

When I watched him sculpt the next evening, I got it. The ice cubes and hand chisels numbed him from his pain. Matter of factly, they seemed to trick his brain and hand to compliance as though they were one of those ridiculously big outdated gadgets. I think they were called VR headsets.

As for Jennifer, she had already discovered this valuable jar and took it for herself a year after finding it.

CHAPTER TWO

The birth of a daughter whose curiosity trumps all emotion.

Curiosity killed a cat. I’m sure you’ve heard that before. What if I told you that I knew that cat. Yeah, me and her, we were tight. She didn’t die though, that’s just a myth. She walked right into the home of a physical therapist and an ice sculptor. She still has seven-point nine eight lives left if you’re concerned.

If you want to know whether she learned her lesson: frankly she didn’t. Her mother once told me that she was on a mission to find substances that could RAISE the melting point of ice when no one seemed to know the answer. Right. I guess it was trying to get daddy’s work to last like a renaissance painting.

She went to college like most teenage cats and not surprisingly majored in chemistry and the arts.

However, there was one mystery that bugged her in her own house: The mystery of mummy’s voluntary disappearance. You see, even though this was a family that ate hot…

***

CHAPTER 3

***

Jenifer too put in all twelve fingers. Under the pretense of pursuing further education, she left her ailing husband and 16-year-old daughter to work in a research lab that she had aided to receive grant money. She was the worrier and a rare disease was the enemy.

If he’d known, he wouldn’t have let her. He wouldn’t have seen the essence in her working, to the neglect of others, on this soon to puddle angelfish. She errored in one way though: she didn’t inform one curious cat.

***

***

CHAPTER 8

It was a warm summer night when the father and the cat sat with an ice sculptured bowl waiting for mother to bring diner.

“I worked hard to make this,” she said when she saw the surprise in their eyes as she brought a bowl of hot soup with a single hobbling mushroom.

Sadly, the bowl had already melted before it could ever feel the warmth of the single hobbling mushroom soup.

The ice fest is over. The bowl has melted in the hands of the feline. Mother and her mushroom are tardy.

REMARKS

This book was written on behalf of a grieving Jennifer Kanyanta, about her dear husband Hudson Kanyanta, to her beloved daughter MUTITI KANYANTA.

***



Mutiti had spent one week, seating in the workroom, reading the book. Two weeks staring out the window pondering what she read and with one week left till the start of her sophomore year, she packed her bags, flew to Southern province, taxied to Hemmings College, and knocked on the door of a Mrs. Jennifer Kanyanta.