31_days | [OCTOBER 11] [ORIGINAL] HOMEBODY

Title: Homebody
Day/Theme: October 11, 'the dross of Tuesday'
Series: Original
Ratings/warnings: PG; objectification of women.

Drosserl spread a thick swatch of apricot jam across his slab of rye bread and clamped his mouth down on it. He chewed, slowly, one hand fishing with a fork for pickled mushrooms, little grey-white nubs bobbing in a grime-mouthed jar.

Mostly the local shop sold boletus, filling the jar in split-edged sedimentary layers, or mixed varieties, chestnut mushrooms in brown and cream slices, ceps like small squashy bread rolls, lightly baked. Red pine mushrooms in frilly slivers, sharp and dark and smooth with stopped-up rot.

You had to go five streets further to find a shop that sold cheap little button mushrooms, the kind that came wetly in tins, that when fresh were light and dense as packing-crate polystyrene. Walking through the rain, the mud washed out over the streets from the plots of rubble, the building sites, neon puddling the pavement.

The rain was outside now, on the window.

Dosserl swallowed, his Adams’s apple bobbing. A wide, grainy man with short curly hair, he sat at the newspaper-covered table in his crowded apartment, a grey thing half as cold as the dusty ironing board, the moist plaster mouldings, the piles of old books and the red chalk equations. The curls of sawdust in the corner, the neat new rack of saws and awls and screwdrivers with orange-red handles.

He looked at the wooden girl on the other side of the table, her hands in her lap, her skin cream and roses, her joints invisible through her white cotton sundress and her mouth a perfect O.

He forked up a round white mushroom, leant across and pushed it in.

It fell down into wet darkness, sharp and growing and secret, even from him.