RELEASE DATE: 01 October 2022
The silver silence out in the forest refreshes Lily’s spirits after being housebound with her family for the last three weeks. Hoping for mushrooms, instead Lily finds… something else. Something unidentifiable.
Something with the power to remind Lily of everything truly important in her life.
A lush, vivid story with mystery elements, for readers who love the soul-deep quiet of the outdoors and value finding peace in the everyday hustle of modern family life.
More Than Mushrooms
The silence was not golden, because the breeze was just a little too fresh for that, but it was definitely silver, or some other kind of precious stone. It was the kind of silence you only got out of doors, away from the buzz and hum of city electricity, away from humanity.
Lily, as an extrovert and an optimist, generally approved of humanity. But she defied even the most optimistic extrovert to remain entirely upbeat after three straight weeks housebound with two small kids and a restless husband, whose introverted nature was taking a pounding.
Hence: the silver silence of the outdoors.
Here, in this secluded gully full of knee-high bracken fern, bordered by radiata pines in drunken, staggering rows, the wind was the only thing Lily could hear right now, and as cliched as it felt to call it that, it was utterly refreshing.
Somewhere down below, at the bottom of the gentle slope a hundred or so metres away, were her husband and the kids. They hadn’t gone far, just beyond sight, with but the pine branches hiding them and the wind sweeping their chatter away from her, Lily might just as well be alone.
She smiled. Leaned back on her wrists, adjusting one as it slipped a little on the emerald sleeping bag they had brought from the car as a makeshift picnic rug, the actual picnic rug that lived there having gone temporarily and mysteriously missing.
In front of her, a little cloud of midges investigated the mostly empty plastic picnic cups, the last dregs of pink milk in the bottom of them apparently intriguing the little insects. The taste of the milk still hung at the edges of her mouth, sweet and sugary like decadence and family intimacy.
The breeze changed directions for a moment, and Lily wrinkled her nose at a familiar smell: she’d spent quite a bit of time hiking around in pine plantations, and every so often this smell, the one that smelled like the kids had left the toilet unflushed after a particularly intense episode of use, reared its head.
It wasn’t quite like poo, she allowed, turning it over in her mind as she inhaled. How would she describe it? Poo-ish. A little more like dirt. Like decay. Perhaps a touch mildewy or mushroomy.
The mushroom bit might make sense. Half the reason they were here, after all, was that her husband had gotten it into his head that he wanted to try mushroom hunting, come after the saffron milk caps that had an apparent affinity with pine forests the world over. They were easily identified, moderately easy to find, and reportedly quite tasty, according to a bunch of local YouTubers.
Benjamin, their eight-year-old, had supported the idea with unbridled enthusiasm. And both the kids needed a run, and Lily was happy to get out in the fresh air, and so after double-checking the permissibility of their actions, here they were.
Thank goodness the national parks were still open in their area.
Lily breathed deeply again, feeling the tension drain away from her shoulders, her chest.
There hadn’t been any mushrooms here at the top of the gully, and maybe her family would have more luck down in the bottom where they’d gone exploring, but even if they returned home empty handed, not a one of them would return home empty-souled.
And at this point, that was all Lily could ask of the world: all she wanted was for the kids to get through this with a minimum of trauma, for them to be happy.
Another deep breath—the air fresh and clean again now, the wind having swung back around—and Lily smiled. A tiny slice of heaven, that’s what this was.
Her gaze lit on something across the other side of the gentle gully, maybe ten, fifteen metres away just in the border of the pines. The rusty needles were lifted and scuffed in places, as though perhaps a new crop of mushrooms were rearing their heads underneath—they’d check, but the only ones they’d found in that area so far were slippery jacks, with their spongey yellow undersides, and her husband was a little suspicious of eating those even though they were, notionally, edible—and just there, a couple of trees back in a hollow between the dry, needleless lower branches, was something vibrantly green.
Lily stared, curious but too languorous to get up and investigate. Too bright for anything natural, it was a limey-sort of green, and shiny. Probably litter, from prior mushroom hunters. Her husband had said after his preliminary investigation that it did look like others had been here recently.
Litter made sense.