Author’s Note:

Undercover

Between the bland landscape, the predominantly bovine fauna, and a culture that shuffles forward at its own pace using a walker and threadbare slippers, Amarillo, Texas is, perhaps, one of the least inspiring places in the world. But every once in a while as I was growing up, after one of our rare rains, there was the absolute magic of waking up to a backyard covered in dew, with mushrooms lurking in the grass. By the time I moved away to college in Arkansas—where the mushrooms are truly intimidating creatures, the color and size of zombie dinosaurs’ skulls pushing through the damp soil—mushrooms had already taken on a certain mystique in my mind. What are they hiding under those caps? Brooding eyes? A little pair of binoculars?

The published story is, at most, a tenth of the original length. I had initially sketched out an elaborate mushroom society, each species working on a communal memory passed down from one clonal generation to the next through reproduction by budding. The protagonist mushroom was the jaded, morose sole member of its species, releasing only a single spore upon its death, because it couldn’t bring itself to create any more mushroom spies into this world to witness the same horrors that it had.

The story ended up working much better with the protagonist actually acting like an actual spy rather than a character off a daytime-television soap opera. But I still like the idea of that underground mushroom society. Maybe I’ll explore it some more someday.