Mushroom Goddess

I stood there all day selling exotic mushroom to tourists trolling the food stalls of the Ferry Building. Didn’t know much about mushrooms, but got the job because I knew how to talk to people. Black morels, chanterelles, lion’s manes that looked like cauliflower. I sold containers of fungi in straw containers at $10.00 a pop. Across from where I worked was a meat counter. Above the display were light fixtures wound with barbed wire and a cardboard sign that said chicken legs were 10 percent off. I thought that was funny, wondered where the other 90 percent of the leg was, since it wasn’t doing the chicken much good. Most of the day, I watched the parade of tourists pointing at stuff like it was the first time they’d seen expensive food. Not a lot of people stopped, most walked by or went to the bathroom around the corner. Not like my last job where I’d worked at a food pantry sorting boxes for community organizations. Men and women came by every morning driving trucks that were held together by rope and wire, checked in at the front desk, hair the color of graffiti; collected food donations and wheeled their cartons out on dollies, and in the afternoon, I made calls gathering left-overs from restaurants. Stayed busy all the time until the building where we worked got bought out from beneath our stacks of canned goods and the city just stood by and watched, which is how I got to sell mushrooms.

I did my part at the fungi counter promoting kits that allowed people to grow oyster mushrooms in wet newspaper.  On some days, I wondered if making rent money was worth the trouble, couldn’t live on my salary even though mushrooms were supposed to be anti-viral and immune enhancing. Some people believed mushrooms were going to save the world. I didn’t know what I believed. Anyhow, one day I got to work early, before the crowds arrived. Rolled up the aluminum siding and got ready to start moving mushrooms into the display from a refrigerator outside near the pier. Before I could do anything, I couldn’t believe it. There was a girl lying beneath the counter, her head propped up on a backpack. She was wearing several layers of sweaters, the last one buttoned across her chest, a string belt tied around her waist, dark hair, full lips, mushrooms growing all around her, ones I’d never seen before, dozens of them, orange and red, some sprouting between her fingers. I figured she had to be a mushroom goddess leaving spores everywhere, a forest of mushrooms scattered across the food stalls. I ran to the ferry booth. Thought they might recognize her.  Maybe she’d come on the earliest ferry from the East Bay or maybe last night. When I got back, she was gone. So were the mushrooms.  I wished I had taken a cellphone picture.  The only way they would’ve believed me.

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