The wood flooring was rough and uneven. She had feet like a boy’s; soft, un-calloused, vulnerable. The walk from her place near the fireplace to the stove every morning was to her feet like staring into a welder’s torch was to the eyes. Her coffee mug always had the earthen grit of coffee grounds at the bottom, no matter how gently she poured. The bicycle ride into town was long but not unpleasant. However, the blizzard ruled that out as a possibility. She’d poured pot after pot of boiling water into the wash tub that day and it was the last time she’d bathed in this or that many days. It was supposed to be a romantic retreat. It was supposed to be a working vacation, out here in the sticks, writing with pen and paper. Her editor had recommended it. Her friends had applauded it. Stubble on your legs and under your arms tends to dissolve romantic pretensions surely and swiftly.
The papers lay strewn about the small, wobbly table, sparsely annotated here and there, ringed in Olympic rings of spilt coffee. Only her pens were in a row. She laced her boots with her back to the flames and was determined to find, out there in the cold, inspiration for this day’s writing. There would be writing today. She was sure. With her coat about her throat and her hands buried in its deep pockets, she shouldered the door open against the gathered snow. She trudged calf-deep about where she believed the trail would lead. Green and youthful pines bent supply under a weight of collected snow in their branches, like the daughters of landed gentry might before suitors at a ball, their sixteenth birthdays only so recently behind them. The hoof prints of a deer led across her projected path through the narrow and magickal clearing, culminating in a pressed bed about a fallen tree, where on a recent night the lithe and musky figure had found a break against the wind.
Upon the finishing of her walk, she stepped through the sagging gate and noticed, amongst the spread of even snow, something previously missed; a mushroom, bare itself of snow and emerged where a garden might be found in another season. She stepped wide of the slate-colored thing and crouched. She ran a bare finger along the frilled underside of its cap, like you might scratch the chin of a kitten. She sat her heels there for a long time. The dull glow of the sun behind the clouds shifted uncertainly towards the horizon. After digging away the snow towards the frozen soil and taking firm grip about its stem, she finally plucked it from the snow and held the mushroom there for a moment, its immense cap spread out like the sheltering hand of god over her own feeble fingers.
What little oil she had left went to frying the thing in its meaty, earthen flavor. Sliced across and laid about some hearty rice, she ate well and slept better.
Often enough, to save some miraculous thing precisely as it has been found is only the surest way to bring about its dissolution before the eyes of God and Man.
