Gyromitrin is the toxin found in mushrooms of the genus Gyromitra, like the false morel. Poisoning leads to liver necrosis, your organs dying in your body. Symptoms begin in as little as two hours. Vomiting and diarrhea. Followed by dizziness, involuntary muscle and eye movement. Death occurs within five to seven days, as the kidneys and liver fail. In severe poisonings, there is a terminal neurological phase. Seizures, delirium, coma, death.

“I just think it’s really amazing.” He reached both his hands out, as if to take Agnes’s body between them. “How did you do it?”

Agnes shook her head, and I loved her for her unwillingness to explain even if it came from inability. Arthur sat forward on our sofa. The threads would be matted with his sweat, the stink of him and his blood. “Did it just happen?” He rested his elbows on his thighs, a casual authority to his posture, in this place where he was not welcome and had not been invited. “Who have you talked to?”

“No one,” Agnes said. She lifted her hand halfway into some uncertain gesture, and then let it fall again. “I’m not sure it would be a good idea.”

“Why not?” The easy, inquisitive cock of his head. I stood halfway between them. I could have reached forward, hooked my fingers in his mouth, and pulled until those white teeth abandoned their sockets. “Don’t you want to know what caused it? What it means?”

“She’s studying it,” I said, though I knew as soon as I had spoken that I should not have given him any handhold. He exhaled, a half laugh or pure animal satisfaction, looking past me, as usual, at Agnes.

“I’m just desperate to know,” he said, with awful honesty, “if you’ll tell me.”

I looked at Agnes’s face, and, horribly, I saw an opening there. A floral expansion. Her poor scientist’s mind locked up so long. Let me tell you, her face said, oh, let me tell you.

She sat down beside him, perched on the raised back of the couch. “It started a few months ago. I don’t know why. I did do some work with the mycology labs, but not extensively. I thought it was cancer, initially. That is—I found a lump. They told me to go in for a mammogram.” She pushed her hair out of her face, and then, just like that, she told him everything.

He kept leaning nearer as she spoke. And she would lean away from him. Not far, not obviously, but like those plants that curl themselves inward when you touch them. Her shifts in parallel to his. “That’s amazing,” he kept saying. “That’s fascinating.” He licked his teeth.

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