I put Agnes to bed, because she was shaking, and because there are some things we do for the people we love. In the case of the ivory funnel, the estimate is that there is enough muscarine to kill a man in one large mushroom. Agnes had put three or four, perhaps, in his dish, drizzled with balsamic. I got up from time to time to check on her. She lay very still in our bed, not weeping, watching the ceiling. I have always known my lover to be very sure in her choices. I kissed her, and I ate the shiitakes from her clavicle. I went back to Arthur, as the shock set in.

The heaving, jerking motion of Arthur’s body, like a frog on hot stone; I did not feel nothing about this. But if my hands trembled they still did the work of being my hands, which was all they needed to do. I gathered his things. His phone and its charger, his shoes, his torn and bloody sock. Arthur watched me, or at least he turned his head in my direction, and his eyes rolled in their sockets like a horse’s eyes. He had been talking earlier, but wasn’t any longer, the wood under his cheek shining with his own sweat and spit and tears; his mouth opening and closing, his square white teeth. There are good poisons to die from; muscarine is not one of these. But we made do with what we had, and I would not be any crueler than Agnes had decided, and I would not be any kinder. At last, I went and opened our kitchen windows, so that the cool, sweet air poured in.

When he was done, I went and got Agnes up. She tilted her body to my hands on her shoulders, though she was still too far from me in the new morning light. “This could be a very bad thing we’ve done,” she said, and I nearly wept that she said we, instead of I.

“No.” I slipped my finger behind her ear and stroked her there. “No.”

Agnes took his feet, and I took his hands, and we took him off into the woods. We carried him to the damp places, where the leaves decay, and the mushrooms grow. We laid him in a clearing, at the center of it, with the woods growing up around him, with his eyes open. Open, and in perpetual observation of the sky. The woods know what to do with a body.

Only then, after we had walked away from him and started downhill, back toward our bike path, our clearing, our cottage, did Agnes start to cry. Her wet face in my shoulder, her body swaying to my body like a vine around a tree, she cried. I think it was from relief. Certainly I was relieved.