VenCo(42)

And that was when she saw it, there at the base of a papery birch. It was pale and impossibly tall—the biggest morel she had ever seen. How could she have missed it on the way to the creek?

“What the Jesus . . . ?”

She dropped to her knees. There was only the one, no cluster, no pairs. It was almost the size of her forearm from wrist to elbow, and just as thick. The head was honeycombed in tan and brown, with an underlying iridescence that reminded her of oil slicks on asphalt.

She laughed out loud and rubbed her hands together. It was almost too perfect to harvest . . . almost.

She leaned in to study it from all sides. She’d definitely need her knife. She straightened a leg and fished around in her pocket for the switchblade her cousin Gary had gifted her. She pushed the button, and the blade popped out.

“Alright, come to mama.” She grasped the fat stem in her fist and circled it with her blade, scoring a path to guide the knife deeper. She needed a nice, clean cut—splitting the stem would cause it to spoil faster. Circling back to where she started, she applied pressure, tongue between her teeth. The knife bit deep, and the top started to sway like a tiny tree being felled. But then the knife stopped.

Her brow furrowed. Morels didn’t have bones to hold them straight. She pushed harder.

“Christ.”

She pulled her knife out and dropped it. Grabbing the stem below the cut, she took hold of the brain in her other hand and yanked. She overestimated how much force she needed, and when the stem popped, she was thrown back onto her ass. But at least she hung on to the morel, giant, squishy, and intact.

Collapsing on her back, she held it up above her face. The clouds shifted overhead and sudden sun filtered through the birch boughs. “Yes! King of the shrooms!” She laughed. Then the light caught something shiny sticking out the bottom.

“What the hell?” She struggled to sit up and turned the mushroom in both palms. Silver protruded from the cut edge, a smooth, rounded piece of metal. She pushed two fingers into the soft meat and pinched the metal between them, pulling down. It gave a little, but only a little. Without considering the loss, she picked up her dropped blade and sliced, then used both hands to pull back the spongy edges.

A spoon. A small silver spoon with a blackened bowl and tarnished handle. She extracted it, letting the morel fall to the ground, worthless now. The back of the utensil was smooth, but the front was covered in raised designs. Much of it was unreadable, but she could make out some letters—S, A, L, E . . . maybe an N or an M.

What was a spoon doing inside a mushroom in the middle of the bush? Wendy came from a family who hid the cards on top of the cupboard at night in case the devil came by to play, but she had always been practical. She considered the possibilities. Maybe someone dropped it and the mushroom grew around it? Maybe there was an old dump here and it got buried and then pushed up by a spring thaw? Maybe someone was a joker playing the long game and had put it there, anticipating just this kind of bewildered reaction?

There had to be a reasonable explanation. Even so, she placed the spoon in her jeans pocket with her knife and did not mention her find to Auntie Ethel. When she got home, she pushed the spoon into the bottom of a shoebox where she kept letters from her ex-girlfriend and her divorce papers, and slid the box back under her bed.

She made some good money that day, not the beaucoup dough she would have made if the giant had remained intact, but enough to buy some weed. But she didn’t go see her cousin, and forgot all about the party. Instead, she noticed the moon was full and an odd shade of orange, like it was coated in brick dust kicked up from the toppling of a wall. Like something had fallen the fuck down and there was suddenly more to see.

And as soon as she could find a buyer for the house, she was on a Greyhound heading back to university in Toronto. She was going to finish her degree, the silver spoon wrapped in her best pair of underwear tucked into the bottom of her backpack. Even then, she knew it was the most valuable thing she owned.



“How long did it take you to figure out the whole spoon thing?” Lucky asked when Wendy came to the end.

“Oh, things got weird right away, but I didn’t really understand until I found Meena.” She stopped to watch Everett carefully drop strips of pancake into his mouth, stopping in between each one to wipe his lips with the edge of the napkin his mom had tucked into his striped shirt. “Such a gentleman.”

“Did she come to Toronto for you?”

“Well, we kinda met halfway. In Buffalo, actually.” She smiled at the memory. “Back then she wasn’t so good at reading the dreams, so I guess I had to be closer for her to find me. We circled each other for a whole weekend at an education conference. I was starting to think she was stalking me, but I was okay with that, because she was so hot.”

Lettie laughed. “Morticia came to get me. Came right to my door. I thought she was child welfare or something. I tried to fight her off, got real mouthy about it.”

“How did she know where you were?”

Lettie got quiet for a moment, watching Everett chew his last bite. Then she said, “Everett, honey, why don’t you go grab your crayons and paper from the bedroom? Go on now, you can do it. You’re a big boy.”

He gave his lips one more wipe with the napkin, then smiled at his mother and climbed down from his chair. As soon as he was out of earshot, Lettie folded her hands on the table and examined them for a moment, then began her story.