(Memoir for stupid idiots; a list made during some procrastination)
We drove so long into, over and through this wet, red canyon we came out above the clouds, on another planet made of mist. The edge of it, this island in the sea of clouds, is for making wishes for your next life. Perhaps you will fling yourself into it, that next life, right now because you’re just so hungry. I made those wishes in a past life, holding the hand of an older man who, maybe, was wishing he would never grow up and I would never find out. I have felt stranded before, stuck in the middle of the Pacific, but this time I was hungry and never dry.
Somehow money still mattered up there, so we stole flour from our liar employer one loaf’s worth at a time.
Truly we live in the dandelion dimension! The bitter greens grow everywhere, and here in such density that we got to be choosy about which to pick.
“Hen of the woods!” “No! Chicken of the woods!” “They’re the same thing!” “Who cares, let’s eat them!” It turns out they were chicken of the woods. Bright orange with yellow bumps and grooves. We forced ourselves through more than one tough mushroom- no, not tough, not woody, but mealy the way wood is when rotted, inexplicably dry and full of neverending dust.
I am not sure who wished for lemons, but we found them in our second week of foraging walks. It was cartoonish, this hidden property guarded from the oppressive wet by two lines of sentinel evergreens and a grove of well-spaced lemon trees for the house to look out upon. The sun shone warm here and we had only had fires shine on our skin all this time. Perhaps we were simply losing our minds but it had a siren’s beauty, so we only took the yellow gems of fruit this once, “quick, fill up my bag while I keep looking out,” and never came back.
One of the Formless Daughters 