Lindy Ray Tate had often been warned by her father not to fall asleep in a field of kudzu. Why anyone would do such a thing, Lindy couldn’t fathom, but Roger Tate's adamancy on the matter led her to believe that he was speaking from experience.
Two or three hours, he said, is all it takes. You wake up and you're trapped.
Ensnared in viney shackles, a fuzzy, green straitjacket holding you hostage until the odd pocket knife-wielding ginseng digger hears your distant screams. Possibly he was exaggerating, but Lindy Ray had never attempted to disprove him.
Lindy’s father had made no exhortations against napping atop a bed of moist humus and last autumn’s leaf litter, beneath a canopy of green, using a rolled up flannel shirt for a pillow. She didn’t mean to fall asleep. She only meant to sit and breathe in the woodland air—to smell the sweet odors of decay and to hear the buzzing, rustling, chirping whispers all around. She lay down on her back on the forest floor, her red curls spread around her head in a coppery halo, and looked up to appreciate the way the sun’s rays pierced the canopy, throwing bright fragments of light into the shadow. She relaxed into the deep crispness of dead leaves, and before her conscious mind could intervene, the symphony of the wilderness lulled her to sleep.
She awoke, not straitjacketed, but with a strange, pulling, gently tightening sensation around her bare feet, her fingers, her arms. It was mildly reminiscent of what it might feel like to be squeezed by a baby boa constrictor (though none are native to Southern Appalachia); not painful, or even unpleasant, really, but unsettling in its novelty. Scared to move too abruptly, Lindy Ray cautiously raised her head to assess the situation. Something white. Velvety soft. Thin and rope-like. Radiating in multiple directions. It encircled her fingers. It twisted itself around her biceps like a fairy’s armlet.
She could feel it climbing up her shoulders, creeping between her toes.
She stared in wonder and disbelief for several seconds before trying to extricate her left hand from its downy, white manacle. The substance released her hand easily, offering little resistance. Freeing her other arm, Lindy sat up to examine the substance more closely. She stared at it for a moment in sleepy confusion, her brain still adjusting to wakefulness. Then, her fourteen years of training by Roger Tate, Backwoods Naturalist kicked in and she comprehended.
This was some sort of mycelium. The substance that had her bound was nothing more than delicate, wispy threads of fungus.
There were two astonishing things about this mycelium: the speed with which it grew and spread, and the unbelievable fact that it jumped straight from its substrate of rotting biomass onto Lindy’s living, breathing body. Had this species of mushroom fungus evolved to feast on human flesh? It seemed unlikely. She knew, of course, of the existence of parasitic fungi that infected the skin of humans, mammals, even fish. But this was not that kind of organism. Its pure white mycelium indicated a mushroom-producing fungus. Lindy could not see how allowing its fruiting bodies to sprout on moving creatures could possibly be a winning evolutionary strategy.
Lindy rocked in the creaky porch swing, her eyes closed as she hummed along to the sound of her father’s fiddle and his deep, steady voice.
The very next time I go that road, if it don’t look so dark and grazy
Roger finished with a sharp thwack on the strings with his bow, and then laid the fiddle across his lap and sighed happily. “And how was your day, little Shady Grove?” he asked Lindy.
“It was good. I went hiking in the woods,” she replied. “Actually, I saw something interesting and I wanted to ask you about it. Have you ever heard of a parasitic mushroom fungus that feeds on animals?”
“Well now, let’s see.” Roger tugged at his wiry, gray scraggles of beard. “Treva Breedlove did tell me recently about a strain that feeds on ants. The mushroom grows right out of the ant’s thorax, killing it, of course. Cordyceps lloydii, it was. Why d’you ask, Lindy? What exactly was it you saw?”
“It was some kind of mycelium. Really, really strange.”
Roger’s pale blue eyes brightened at the prospect of a woodlands conundrum. “Describe it to me, Lindy. You get a specimen?”
“No, I didn’t have anything with me to collect a clean sample, but I remember exactly where I saw it, so I can show you tomorrow. It just looked like normal mycelium, growing on soil and leaves, but it was the weirdest thing. I laid down on the ground and accidentally drifted off and when I woke up, this mycelium was—well, it was wrapping itself around me. My arms and legs. I wondered if maybe it was some kind of rare parasitic strain.”
“A kudzu fungus!” Roger exclaimed, laughing. “I never heard tell of such a thing. I’m gonna call Treva first thing in the morning.”
He picked up his fiddle and began to play again, and Lindy sang with him.
The first time I saw Shady Grove, she was standing at the door
...to be continued.
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Hi! I'm Leslie Starr O'Hara, but my friends call me Starr. I live in the mountains of North Carolina and I am a FULL TIME WRITER who doesn't wait for the muse to show up before getting to work! I write humor, essays, and fiction here on Steemit and elsewhere.
