FICTION
CHARLIE KIEFT
REGARDLESS
“Chanterelle,” Dad unfurls my thumb. “Black trumpet. Chicken of the woods. Porcini. Morel.” He taps my pinky. “That’s our hitlist.”
“They’re all here?” I scope out the maple and pine trunks, the leaf litter.
“They’re somewhere.” He takes a crunching step forward. “Waiting for us.”
*
We slurp mushroom broth from cracked mugs.
“Where to?” I ask.
Dad flips down his sun visor. “Reckon we might dip through New England, by way of the Bible Belt. Follow the Appalachians right on up.”
I grin. “Backroads, baby?”
He guns the engine. “Backroads, baby!”
*
Dad’s tent is Grade A magic. We stake it into Texas hardpan, the soft sponge of Mississippi cedar needles, Atlantic sand crawling with sand flies, root mats, bogs, prairie, parking lot lawns. It never blows away.
*
Takes eleven days’ asking before Dad trusts me with his pocketknife and what he thinks is a porcini.
“Wow, it does cut like Jello.”
“Wait.” He reaches over, takes the bisected mushroom cap, holds it cut sides up.
I gasp. The mushroom flesh turns icy...then bruises to bluebird sky...it holds at the supernatural cobalt of cartoon lightning or blue Froot Loops.
“Can’t eat that one, baby.” He chucks it back into the woods.
*
I two-hand crank my window down. Goldfinches twitter in the birch. “Have we found them all yet?”
“All but morels,” Dad says.
I think of home. “Try the Sun Belt?”
“Nope. Too dry. We’re headed northwest.”
“Oh. Which belt is that?”
“Dunno...Rain Belt?”
“Why’s America got so many belts?”
“Lotta waists.”
*
We spend Christmas on the Olympic Peninsula. Dad’s tent is Swiss cheesed by now, so we sleep in his igloo-car, which reeks of swamp-ass and fungus. Still no morels.
Shivering, I murmur, “I hate mushrooms. I wanna go home.”
Dad just shrugs.
*
He drops me off at Wendy’s, eight blocks from Mom’s house in Albuquerque. “Thanks for the adventure, baby. Most fun I ever had.”
I snivel. “Backroads, baby.”
Dad winks, pulls a U-ey, guns it.
At home, I knock. Nobody’s there. I wait.
After dusk, headlights splash me, sitting there ghostlike on the front stoop. Brakes screech. Mom avalanches me with hugs, sobs, interrogations. “Where is he?” is one she can’t stop asking, eyes wild for shadows.
I show her something I found while waiting, right there in our woodchips. Wrinkled, full of holes. A morel.
“He’s gone.”
I love him.
Regardless.
Charlie Kieft is an American writer living in England. His fiction has been published by Jersey Devil Press, Pithead Chapel, and is forthcoming in Flash Fiction Online. He also runs a small flower farm with his wife and two cats.
