Hunting mushrooms (from Cambridge to Catalonia)

As I surface this morning I feel my body swollen, larger than it should be in my narrow bed. Eyes still closed, I swill in this new state, clinging on to obscurity where it can be held; where such ripples may be inwardly explored without the groundedness of lines and alienated objects. Reluctant as I am to credit them with reality, they swim in boldly, and I am painfully alive in my university bedroom. I know there will be the same posters on the wall and the same books on the shelves above my head. I picture them resentfully. Then a voice culls the last roses and I come from darkness into the monotony of expected colours.

“You look different today. Did you have a rough time sleeping?”

Jeremy's voice is smooth. He takes a packet of tobacco from his jacket pocket and begins to roll a cigarette.

“I slept well, actually.”

I am suddenly very awake and my presence in the world is pronounced. I push off the duvet.

“I thought maybe we could go for a -”

He stops. He is staring at my body open-mouthed. I look down at myself.

Oh, the horror! My form is no longer human: I have become something else entirely. I hear Jeremy splutter as I choke on shock. He's laughing fully now, rocking back and forth in his chair, and I take it in, my enormous grey body, withered to elaborate wrinkles which undulate vertically in grotesque flaps. I am a morel.

“You must have eaten too many morels!” I am told, between great talons of laughter.

I move towards the mirror in my wardrobe door and terror leaps back twice as steely in the glass. Even my face is lost, consumed by the beastly hide of grey.

I catch Jeremy's eye behind me and he nods at the wardrobe door, which is slightly ajar. His face is serious now; the mocking twinkle cleaned from his eyes. His mouth has fallen in with that stare, locking me in to the gravity of my situation.

He wants me to go into the wardrobe.

“Find your clothes,” he says, pointing.

A thin strip of black slices out of the wood. Before now, this had only ever indicated a soft, silent cloak around my sleeping clothes, and the contrasting possibilities for sporadic illuminations. An imagined swish and closeness made the gap inviting; a passage into my domain of controlled, known objects. And yet it is no longer tailored to my desires. Its limits and and contents have slyly evaporated before Jeremy's hot, red finger. If a girl's body can become a mushroom in one night, what might that night have done to her clothes?

I slip inside, disturbing the gap's width as little as possible. I must bear witness to my changed belongings without their consciousness of my invasion.

As soon as I shut the door behind me light floods in. A breeze begins to blow. Up above clothes are flapping and they smell good; washed. I breathe in as they pucker out to kiss the furthest points. Then I see that there are rows upon rows of them. I note their resemblance to my dark wardrobe children, but they are not them. Work has been done; enough to make them new and yet still lucid as an ancient rite, re-sown in freshly-turned earth. Colours, lengths and shapes have all been subtly altered.

I walk among them. On either side rows of run-down little huts print their marks ahead, hunching smaller and smaller until their ends cut a halt. Washing lines strung between roofs make an ephemeral ladder down the length of this street, which seems to stand alone in a vast desert. Sand mists whirl beyond the last wires and bricks.

I am still in the wardrobe, whose untouchable darkness has become another haze. It is a deadly white this time, and landscapes are effaced like pencilled nothings to the ignorant beholder. The sounds of wind and washing are pure and they take me down the street, holding my hand. Nothing else moves. It seems there is no life here, but then I spy a known person in the doorway of a hut. He is leaning against the door frame and staring fixedly at something, or maybe it is a lost gaze, for his eyes make passive crystals trained on nought but clouds. I find the hum of oneiric focus rumbling low in that angel face, its perfect bones aglow.

A few minutes later we are in his hut together. His beauty makes me nervous. I have have often admired this face and felt my own flushed pink in his presence, but here alone between bare walls - copied a hundred times on either side, the same burnished white as all the desert laid around - its power gleams, starker than ever. How can physical perfection exist so calmly? Direct contact is unsettling and I begin to flounder. I can't keep looking, it's hurting my eyes, so I look down at myself.

The mushroom body of my bedroom had evaporated wordlessly and freed me on the outside in the open desert, or on the inside of the wardrobe, whichever it was. The lack of solid surfaces challenged only by those flailing, cut-up entrails had stripped away the lumpen grey and I'd been suddenly, gloriously clean and thin in an eyeless world.

In the hut there is sweat and the threat of beauty's raw chunk before me. As my eyes linger shamefully over my feet I catch the old nightmare threading itself back through skin, coiling and uglifying in gradual waves. The froth surges. I form my question.

“What has happened to my clothes?”

They are all there: I follow him to the wardrobe and find them hanging in the dark, dirty with myself. He watches as I rummage and then identify and finger each garment. Nothing is said. An air of waiting continues in my search and so I choose a dress and pull it clumsily over my head. I struggle to appropriate the folds which once slipped over my limbs with ease, for now they strain and crumple, playing cruelly with my ever-morphing body.

He comes over and yanks at the dress.

Somewhere far off I hear a bloody rip but here in the light which pours through a rickety hut window I am fitted out in familiar colours, shrunken back by my own surprise. He sees the shell into which I have squeezed and is pleased. Only I am aware of slick grey folds lurking at the centre.

I turn to let him fasten the buttons. His fingers are warm. I'll remember that.