The red bowl was for poisons. Blue was for edible. We kept our illustrated guidebook on the kitchen counter. We’d had the guidebook before. Agnes was a botanist. Sometimes she still liked to go walking in the woods, and would come back with berries, and herbs, and wild-growing apples. I guided the knife along the curve of her hip, cut away a small grove of destroying angels with their bulbous white heads. Agnes’s skin was soft, where the mushrooms grew and where they didn’t. “Get the one between my thighs,” she murmured. “It’s chafing.”

A patch of hedgehog mushrooms gave up with barely a tug of the knife and I put them in the blue bowl. I stroked her bared thigh like the flank of a horse. I have always been the one who cooks, in our relationship, who does the nourishing. This comforts me; a need and the ability to fill it. The first meal I made for Agnes, she moaned like she had never tasted food before, like I had just introduced her to the very concept of eating. This is a good woman, I thought, this would be a good woman to love.

Mostly, I buried the poisonous ones. In our garden, under the dark earth. Better there than in the garbage, where raccoons might get them. We were so careful. Everyone has heard stories of those amateur mycologists who could not tell an orellani from a chanterelle. Orellanine poisoning takes two to three days to manifest. Flu-like symptoms, followed by kidney failure, followed shortly by death. You would never imagine you were sick from something you ate days ago. Once, Agnes called poison control over my entirely ordinary flu. These things make you afraid, love and proximity to the unknown.

* * *

Before the first mushroom appeared, the doctor called us. He said abnormal mammogram result. He said come in right away. A pale lump in the meat of her left breast. While we waited for the doctor, I took Agnes’s shirt off for her, her bra, folded them on the blue-rubbery covering of the cot behind her. I slid my hands up her sides, passed the silk of her body through my palms, and stopped at the crease of her breast. I had been worrying the little knob of flesh for days, whenever she let me, my fingers going to it always, pressing, pinching. The lump was distinct, solid in the softness of Agnes’s breast. It felt like, with enough pressure applied, it might pop like a zit between my nails. I squeezed it, asked, “Does this hurt?”