“No, no.” Between my thumb and my forefinger, the bit of mushroom cap was so delicate. Its gills brushed, feathery, against my skin. I went back to Agnes and spread my hand on the side of her breast. There it was, in the valley where her skin was pressed from the wiring of her bra and earthy with her sweat. I took the mushroom carefully between my fingers. Like pulling a tick out, have to get the whole of it. Agnes gasped.

I held my hand out to her. “Look.” The mushroom lay in two pieces in my palm, half shiny with spit.

“Where—” Agnes began, and with my other hand I rubbed at the skin beneath her breast, which was smooth now. “Oh.”

She took the halves of the mushroom from me, cupped them in the palm of her hand. The bright light shone down on both of them, Agnes and her body. She laughed an airless laugh. “Champignon,” she identified the mushroom. A beautiful thing about Agnes, how readily knowledge came to her lips, like she licked answers off the backs of her teeth. “It’s an edible one.”

Agnes didn’t let me eat it, then. “Hold it,” she said, and gave the mushroom to me. “Don’t crush it any more.”

“Do you want to wait for the doctor?” With my other hand, I was already handing her her bra.

“No.” Agnes smiled, stretched her arms back to do up her own clasps. “I want to take this home.”

* * *

After I trimmed back the last of the mushrooms, Agnes decided to go for a walk. She had always liked her walks in the woods, and used to enjoy following the road into town, even if the walk took longer than her visit. She used to be friends with people near the top of that road, people she would mention to me. A hermited artist, a young couple living in a trailer, the children who ran up to the edge of the woods like the lip of the ocean. When Agnes went out now, I sometimes worried she would go back to town. Fully in bloom, Agnes’s mushrooms bulged cancerously against the limits of her clothing. It would not have been so bad freshly cut, though as often as not the mushrooms did not come away from Agnes perfectly clean. They left fragments of stalk like scar tissue. She scratched or pulled or squeezed at herself, like a teenager with acne, trying to make herself smooth again, and left her skin red and gaping in little open-mouthed sores.