Morels

You can’t find morels without your father’s eye trawling the deadwood and bramble for you. Thrashers thrash in the canopy, busking their duplicitous song while chipmunk and squirrel weasel through foliage, striped firecrackers. A tree has fallen across the path you and your father carved out three years ago, back when he could lift the chainsaw without shaking. Today, he holds only a bucket and won’t let you carry it, though you know his left side is numb. The Laetiporus on the tree trunk is orange but unripe, and the puffballs you saw near the rusted, stripped Camry a hundred feet back are bloated with spores, too mature for the butter and garlic baptism you would have given them at supper. Summer and Fall battle over the maples’ chlorophyll, but the trees’ shadows do not change. Your father says this is the week for morels, so you must help him harvest before the mosquitoes die and the ticks vanish. Before the longlegs curl up dead and the hummingbirds depart and the wasps slumber in their paper nests and before he shakes too much to hold anything at all, even a bucket. He still hasn’t told you how to identify morels. You don’t know how you’ll find them when he’s gone.

This piece was featured in Volume 4. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

When the Veil is Open

Before the web, there was the web of connection, no endless moving trains of news, global distractions, or any sounds all day and night. I remember the silent wind with my mate at age nine on bicycles along Suffolk roads between house paths, on country tractor paths, mooing at dairy cows we passed. I looped a plastic sack around handlebars with two potato-crisp sandwiches, prawn cocktail flavour, crushed well between caked-bread slices, with a Cadbury Flake for afters. I didn’t know what a spirit was, a duppy, or any spirit at Salvation Army or Cub Scout meetings, as I do now. Wondering if King Solomon did enough to imprison the demons and gins. In a house, a darkened room packed with friends and family, dutty-wine-dancing, filled with gin and rum, while us kids were distant, checked in and out of the coat room. Did the lovers rock, heavy reggae bass-tones, the grown-folk groove, tear the veil as Gnawa Guembri to those beyond? If I discerned enough—could I see wandering duppies bring us closer, tighter as the drink-mix loosened bones within. Each soul here, hips and groin, gyrated with deep-dropping bass and drumbeats, dripping skin with sweat. Bodies open and release in the beguiled state, my breath empty. I wonder which crows or blackbirds were watching us back then, hidden in the darkness beyond our windows or in the morning blazing sun. Ancestors on power wires, brick pub corners, or the magpies in my yard, presently watching me as I see them. Ancestors appear more in the Spring, collecting souls, bargaining lost hope broken-glass with the gins, not during the stale-tree stick-life loneliness of Winter. Maybe that’s why there is so much silence in the palatinate forest, before buds open, sails of swishing leaves begin, before the woodpecker is pecking a new home, or releasing Morse code warning to those awakening in their seasonal rebirth. This woodland place where webs were frosted statues, thawing out their connection to each beech tree, oak tree, without the noise humans created, recalling the stillness where we once played, where we once began.

This piece was featured in Volume 4. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.