Indigo Mushrooms

1886 Words

Indigo Mushrooms

My heart was fluttering. I had just taken a huge bite of what I thought was potato soup only to find it was mushroom soup! And I am really, deathly, passionately, and frighteningly allergic to mushrooms! So I ran down the hall, screaming at the top of my lungs, “Mom!, Mom! I’m going to die – I just ate mushrooms!”

When my mom heard my screams and felt the thunder of my feet as I ran down the hallway stuck her head out the door of her lab – she’s a mad scientist -- tipped her glasses down so she could look over them at me, and said, calmly, “Megan you are not allergic to mushrooms, so knock it off!”

When I was eight years old my dad gave me a hamburger stuffed with mushrooms. I got sick within a few minutes and almost died. Really. I had to go to the hospital and everything. I stayed there for days and days. They told me I had sepelitious medecitious or something like that. So I asked them how somebody gets something like that. They said they don’t know, but I do. It’s the mushrooms. I told them that, but they didn’t listen one bit. And since nobody else got really, really sick from the mushrooms I must be allergic to them.

My dad told me that he thought it was the mushrooms too. But that was before he disappeared. Oh, yeah, I forgot to tell you my dad disappeared the day after I got home. I mean it. One moment he as sitting on the couch and the next -- poof! -- he was gone!

I screamed when he disappeared and my mom came running. It took her about five minutes I think to get me to calm down and tell her what happened. Then she didn’t believe me.

“What do you mean he disappeared?” she asked me for about the tenth time.

“He was sitting right there and we were watching the races – we were both NASCAR fanatics – when I looked up and he sort of faded away,” I told her as I sobbed.

“Faded away?” she asked.

“Yeah, like on TV when they just make something fade away. It happened really fast.

She looked at me like I had suddenly grown another head – I have only one, you know – and then shook her head thoughtfully and said calmly, “We’ll ask him when he comes back.”

“But what if he isn’t coming back!” I screamed, still in a bit of a panic.

Again the calm thoughtful look. “He’ll come back, Megan. Then we’ll ask him, okay!” This was not a question, it was a declaration. And it didn’t mean what it said, it meant “this conversation is over and if you don’t want to get into more trouble you better just agree. So I nodded.

Three days later my mom gave in. My dad hadn’t reappeared. She said, “returned” but I say “reappeared.” The cops came and asked me the same dumb questions even more times than my mom. “What do you mean, ‘disappeared?” they asked. But when I told them they insisted that I must have fallen asleep, looked away, left the room or some other stupid thing I know I didn’t do.

So they finally left, shaking their heads and ignoring my explanations – delayed mushroom allergic reaction – they left. My mom kept telling me that mushrooms don’t make people disappear to which I responded, “but they can make people really sick, can’t they?”

She rolled her eyes at that that I knew better than pursue the subject.

So my dad disappeared, I’m allergic to mushrooms, and nobody believes either.


Later that night – I mean when I almost had to go to the hospital because I took a bite of that mushroom soup – I was sitting up in my bed, resting against my pillow thinking about my dad and his disappearance, when I suddenly remembered something about how he faded. I didn’t know what it meant, and I didn’t remember it until now, but I definitely, certainly, absolutely remembered that right before he disappeared, for just a second he glowed. I mean I remember because he was glowing more than the TV. And the color was really purple – like it glowed. Then he faded away. I don’t know why I didn’t remember it before. Maybe it was important, maybe not. In any case I thought about it and decided not to tell my mom, yet. I mean she still really didn’t believe me when I said he disappeared. Okay, maybe now she believed me a little. But if I went in and told her he glowed purple just before he disappeared, well, maybe she wouldn’t believe me anymore, not even a little. So I decided not to tell her but to do some investigating myself first.

I got out of bed and turned on my computer. It came up slowly so I went and go myself something to drink. I got back and sat down at my desk and pulled up Google. I put in “purple glow” just to see what would happen. I even put it in quotes so that I wouldn’t get everything “purple” and everything “glow” but only things that said “purple glow.” Still I got over 66 thousand hits. Way, way too many. You’d be surprised how many things are named “purple glow” and how many people have to say something about their “purple glow” paint. There are bracelets, shoes, skateboards, and even hand-guns, named “purple glow.” And really, does everybody have to write something about “purple glow” paint? There’s even a movie called “Purple Glow” for heaven’s sake.

In any case, I got rid of all the things that were painted “purple glow” and with a lot of work finally got it down to about 100 items. I went through those and they were all pretty much useless, except for the one that discussed purple glow as something called “indigo.”

Indigo, is, I guess a color that comes from oyster shells. Okay, what they use to make indigo is oyster shells. I looked up indigo on wikipedia and found a lot of really scientific mumbo-jumbo. But at the end of the article it said that psychics “claim to be able to observe the aura with their third eye” and that they “associate indigo” with the aura. Pretty weird if you ask me, but if people do have auras, which I don’t know, and if my dad’s showed up just before he disappeared, maybe that’s why I saw it.

“Or maybe I saw it because I ate those mushrooms,” I thought to myself. I mean it would make sense if I ate the mushrooms, got really sick, and something changed in me to make me able to see peoples aura’s.” Okay, it didn’t make much sense to me at the time either, but it was something.

I went to bed after that and dreamed about purple mushrooms. Really big purple mushrooms that glowed in the dark because some fool painted them with glow in the dark paint. They had numbers on their sides and strange fake formulas – at least I think they were fake – and people were eating them and glowing and disappearing. And I felt sick.

The next morning I awoke feeling sick. My mom was sitting on the edge of my bed shaking me. “Megan!” she was practically shouting, “wake up, sweetie!” I opened my eyes and everything was fuzzy. Well, not fuzzy so much as expanded like you were looking at it through a magnifying glasses. I shook my head and asked, in my usual coherent manner, “huh, wha….”

“You were screaming,” my mother told me. “Something about mushrooms and purple.”

“I was?” And then it came back to me. “Oh, yeah. I was dreaming about people eating big mushrooms and turning purple, or something like that.”

My always calm mother said nothing.

“They had these formulas on them, the mushrooms I mean, not the people. They glowed and kept disappearing – the people, not the mushrooms.”

My mother hugged me without saying anything. Pulling away she looked at me with some concern. “You’re burning up,” she declared. “How do you feel?”

Now that she mentioned it, I realized I felt horrible. I was hot, sweaty, achy, and thirsty all at once. I had sat up when she hugged me and now I just fell back into my pillow, and said, “rotten!”

My mom sprung into action. She took my temperature (101.6), brought me some pills to take, water to drink, books to read, a bowl in which to puke (just in case), Kleenex, and even rolled the TV in so I could watch it. Not that I felt like doing so. I mean I was really sick.

So I rested in bed for about an hour before my mom came back in and took my temperature again and did what I could never remember her doing in my entire life. She panicked! With minutes she had me in the car speeding down the road, raindrops splattering on the windshield, headed for the nearest hospital. I was really sick. And I knew, without a doubt that the mushroom soup was the culprit.

Again I stayed at the hospital for days and days. Again they told me it was some strange disease, and again I insisted I was allergic to mushrooms. And again they didn’t listen. This time I gave up a lot earlier. Practice makes perfect.

When I got home my mom put me on the couch in the living room to rest. Not that I wanted to rest much. I mean what can you do in the hospital but rest? She told me that when I went there I had a fever of 104.6 and that it was dangerous. I guess they had to put ice around me to cool me off the first night, but I don’t remember much about the first couple of days. I kept seeing people glowing purple though. I remember that much. Or at least I think I do.

In any case, I rested on the couch that night and the next day returned to my room. As the day wore on I came down to the living room and sat down to watch a NASCAR race. About half-way through the race I suddenly saw a purple glow at the other end of the couch. I screamed and even before my scream faded my dad reappeared!

Mom came running and upon entering the room stood stock still, staring at my dad. Nobody said anything for a long, long moment, then my dad, asked, “what?” as if he hadn’t a clue. Which he didn’t.

My mom screamed and threw herself at him crying the whole time. She landed on him and was hugging him and crying. I hugged them both and joined my mom in crying, I was so happy. My dad just sat there holding us and giving us reassuring pats, though, as he told us later, he had no idea why were acting so strange.

After about a minute we sorted things out and determined that dad wasn’t aware of being gone at all, that he felt fine, that I felt fine, and that, in the end, it must have been the mushrooms.