The Life and Times of Coprinus Comatus
fiction • #8
Coprinus Comatus is no different than any other species on this earthbound plane. Birth, willful intent, death: It's what you've come to expect.
By Maressa Voss
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You are fungus, a kingdom unto yourself. The illustrious Shaggy Mane, best-loved of the genus Ink Cap. “Call me Coprinus,” you say. “Coprinus comatus.”
“It means hairy dung,” you’ve often put forth, prompted or otherwise.
Your life began as a spore, carried on a north wind from a southerly section of the well-fertilized green of a distinguished and mildly dilapidated English manor. You and your fellows have been vegetating for months beneath the surface of the well-groomed ground, branching and intertwining your myriad hyphae to form mycelium, the mass that makes ecosystems sing.
It’s a dinner party down there, the bacchanalian kind, the best kind, with invigorating—sometimes bawdy, never crass—conversation, delicious morsels, strong drink, and more people than there are seats.
Decomposing organic matter. It’s what’s on your plate, in your chalice, on every serving tray and table.
You and your mates grow fat with intellectual stimulation and a never-ending buffet of nitrogen-rich fare. But you know you can’t carouse in limbo forever. Nobody can.
Eventually, upon the conclusion of a particularly raucous evening, it’s the warmth of a spring rain that encourages you out of doors. The air is splendid, so splendid that in that moment, it seems you’ve eaten and drank and pontificated your fill. The only thing left for you to do is step outside and luxuriate in the elements.
At the mossy base of the statue of a fat baby cupid—indiscriminate granite arrow raised high and aiming somewhere east—you rise from the firmament. A slender cap with rather fetching white scales—understated, of course—you are larger than life, rosy-fingered as the dawn that breaks around you, replete with promise.
You decide to let out your skirt, an avant-garde statement piece with a hem as black as night. How marvelous the air does feel. If someone were to look beneath your equipage, they’d see your gills. A delicious thrill, that.
The rapture is short-lived. In minutes, you come to understand that you’ve made a grave error. Your body has begun to absorb the moisture of the air around you. It is a vague sensation, but feel it you can, and you know what it means.
You’d heard the word not long ago. Deliquescence. The chap with the pince-nez and intensely feathered eyebrows was nattering on about it, down there in the loam. Only now do his words mean something to you, something sinister, something bleak.
“It’s a feature quite unique to our kind. Fascinating, really. Deliquescence, the process of liquid absorption from the air, turning that which is solid into an aqueous solution. A change of state! And rather a gory one at that,” he’d said with a chuckle. You’re not chuckling now.
Perhaps you should have stayed beneath ground, you think, had another glass, worked up the courage to speak to that fellow with the richly brocaded cape and delightfully quirky ears lurking by the punch bowl.
But there’s no going back now. The door has been sealed. If you were to press your ear to it, you’d hear the sounds of merrymaking behind it, revelry that is no longer yours in which to partake.
In hours, your skirt is dripping, the edges gone all gray and dark. Black ichorous slime that might be intriguing were it not so dreadfully unseemly begins to drip from the tips of your gills. As a bit of a think, you determine—with no small amount of nobility—it best to accept your fate. Tall and proud and oozing you stand, watching as the day falls into night and then again to day.
At least the air is clement, the elements in rare form.
“Ew!” A small child points at you the next morning.
“That’s a judge’s wig!” Another says, crouching low to observe your grotesque form.
“No! It’s a lawyer’s wig!”
I much prefer Linus, you think with mildly ruffled dignity.
The largest of the three flicks your disintegrating body, sending black gloop hither and yon. You’re never quite as erect again after that.
“We could’ve eaten it if it was younger and not quite so drippy,” the largest says, pulling a face of regret.
Isn’t that just life, you think, a soporific sigh escaping what might once have been your lips.
You haven’t much of a skirt now, just a flimsy beret slow-evanescing to slime. You’re a bit of a sopping mess, on your last leg, at the end of your rope.
You tilt your head so that what’s left of your gills is on full display.
Let them see, you think, dauntless.
At long last—though it isn’t too long, you realize mushily, just a short night and one and a half days, how brief the glory—you sort of just… collapse. In and down on yourself, an inky spore-laden puddle on the threshold, black as a night with no moonlight.
“Would you look at that,” you whisper as you fade into oblivion. “I’d never thought I was the child-bearing type.”
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Maressa Voss is the author of When Shadows Grow Tall, a literary fantasy published August 2024 with Roundfire Books. She has forthcoming short fiction in Trollbreath Magazine. A seed saver, seasonal fruit enthusiast and lover of liminal zones, her writing tends to explore the intersections of ecology, systems of power and the wider boundaries of the heart. IG: @maressakate www.maressavoss.com
