My dead mom’s house overflowed. Potted strawberry plants hung from the ceiling. The
walls curved strangely. Buckets of potatoes and dirt sat under every window. Mom had gotten weird in the end; we’d stopped connecting, so I’d stopped coming around. Last time I’d been here…it hadn’t been like this at all.
In our phone call from this past winter, I remembered her mentioning hiring someone to
help renovate her “hobbit hole,” but I’d been tuned out and had never asked what she’d meant.
This was what she’d meant.
I strolled over to the kitchen, where things only got worse. Mom had always loved to
make food for the two of us. She’d taught me from a young age how to bake bread and dice
various vegetables. She’d said she liked to have a “kitchen buddy.” That was before she’d gone
crazy.
Countless shelves lined the walls. More potted food plants hung and stacked everywhere.
A circular window like out of Pinterest centered the kitchen, showing off…the brick wall behind
it. Overgrown fresh thyme and basil trailed over the countertops and down the shelves. Every
plant’s container was adorned in…I guess you could call it art. Mom had never been good at
finger painting, but she’d finger painted. One of the pots boasted a blotty blue…flower? Another
had what I thought was a dog. Some of them I generously ascribed the category of abstract trees.
No pot lay empty, though. Give her that, she never was one for waste–
And a thought occurred to me.
I counted back the days that had passed, the time it’d taken to arrange her demanded
green burial and funeral “celebration,” and I realized. All of these plants should have been dead.
My gaze slowly spun around the crowded, small house. I eyed every odd vine and dwarf tree.
And I noticed. Everything was green. Not a shrivel or wilt in sight.
My skin broke into gooseflesh. I swallowed, my mouth suddenly dry.
“Psshh, they’re just resilient. Or she asked a neighbor to water them…”
Except she had no neighbors. She had insisted on living in the forest in the middle of
nowhere like a “goofy little woods witch.” And abruptly the thought of being utterly alone for
miles in this house scared the crap out of me. My heart began thumping despite my perfect
stillness.
What was I doing? Everything was fine. This was probably some complex grief thing, me
seeing nothing out of something because the person who’d raised me had died. Me searching for
answers, answers as to why a mentally ill but otherwise fairly healthy woman in her early fifties
would suddenly die in her sleep. Maybe even further back than that, perhaps searching for the
reason why my once light-hearted hippie mother had started growing erratic, refusing to leave
her house, singing to herself in gibberish words when she thought no one could hear her.
I started moving at a snail’s pace through the house, placing one foot in front of the other
again. The logical half of my brain told me I would search the house, find nothing, and it would
appease my terrified lizard brain. The other half…was looking for something, something I
instinctually knew had to be there.
I found myself in the basement. Tears pricked in my eyes, building with my anticipation.
Rounding the last dusty wooden step, I poked my head out into the damp darkness. I recalled
from when we’d gone house shopping for her post-retirement that the previous owner had used
the basement as a cellar for fancy wines, filled the place with dehumidifiers to keep up with the
moisture. Mom had never bothered, it seemed. The smell of old mold drifted up to meet my
nose.
And some primal intuition whispered in my ear something I’d never been told, “This is
where your Mamma keeps her mushrooms.”
A cold sweat broke out over my forehead. My breathing swiftly turned into panting. But
it was nothing. It had to be. My imagination was running wild, but my legs moved without my
control, and suddenly I was fully in the basement, eyes adjusted to the darkness, and I saw…the mushrooms.
—
Brynn Lietuvnikas is a graduating student of Hagerstown Community College under its Early College Degree Program, and she is a lifelong Creative Writer. Although she once thought she had retired her novelist cap, she is giving it another go with a personal romantasy project now reaching over one hundred and fifty pages. Brynn did not want to give up her short story practice either, however. She admits that she has written an unusually high number of short stories surrounding faerie circles, but she’s not about to stop now.