* Author : Beth Goder
* Narrator : Tatiana Grey
* Host : Matt Dovey
* Audio Producer : Eric Valdes


Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction



Rated PG
Mycelium
by Beth Goder
 
I only travel to the golden head when the dragonflies are in season. It’s Piack and me this year, rafting up the river past the lilies and arched trees. While I steer us through the river’s gentle snarls, he sings about lost keys to pass the time — he’s always had a thing about lost keys and the doors they’ll never open, the places we’ll never find.
“Are you going to eat what the head gives you?” asks Piack. He’s one year older than I am — nineteen. With the sun behind him, his form swims in light.
The dragonflies buzz around us, brush their wings against our faces.
Piack’s scent is like apples after harvest, and the soft smell of bark, and some deeper, stranger thing. The first time I saw him, he was running through flax fields for the joy of it. I dropped my basket to join him, feet smashing through fallen stems. We were two wild children, stomping across logs, burrowing into fleecy snow, cracking open walnuts like badgers and scuffling through the shells. That feels like so long ago, now.
He brushes dragonflies from my cheek, and as he cups his hand, it looks as if he’s catching the setting sun.

The golden head sits on the bank of the river, far from Alaga and the other river towns. It towers over the arched trees, a sun coming up over the mountains. The face has two spaces where the eyes should be, like doors leading to a world that looks like the one you left, but isn’t. Once, the head had a crown, but now the top is a jagged ruin. The gold is run through with molten green, tiny rivers caressing the metal.
I touch the blunt teeth and the head shudders awake. It recognizes me, the mouth creaking open. A golden tongue emerges, presenting a mushroom, as it does every year.
Perhaps my fear of the golden head comes from my desire to see it again, to hold close what it gives me.
And Piack, he’s here because I am. And because this is the sort of door he could never open on his own.
Last winter, I found a sapphire key under a snowbank. The jagged edges left indentations in my palm, and underneath the paint, bits of rust shone through. It reminded me of the golden head, the way the corrosion ran through it, a once-loved thing, now forgotten.
When I showed it to Piack, he tucked it into his pocket. “I’ll see if I can find what it opens,” he said.

Every year, the head gives me a mushroom laid out on its golden tongue. Each time, I imagine how that mushroom came to exist, how a sprawling web of hyphae had to converge, each tendril working its way through the soil.
I have a theory that the head was once like me, a person who had an obligation. Little gods often are. It could have been a simple responsibility, perhaps to mend a bridge after a blustery storm or to make sure the beehives were tended. Perhaps the head was once a person who knew where to find the best mushrooms, the ones that weren’t poisonous.
When we find these little gods in the world, we have to tend to them, don’t we?
And all this one seems to want is for me to take the mushroom that it offers. This is a simple request, and so I fulfill it, every year when the dragonflies emerge.
This year, the mushroom is rough under my hands, still clinging to bits of earth. I wash it off in the river.
I have never eaten a mushroom that comes from the golden head.