Assistant Managing Editor Bess Winter: Like Jay Gatsby or the Lisbon Girls, the mushroom at the center of “Reclamation” wholly occupies the narrator’s—and, in turn, the reader’s—attention. I’m not sure I can name another personified literary fungus that does as much work as this one does, its very presence indicative of years of family dysfunction. I think about this mushroom all the time and, after reading Parrissa Eyorokon’s dark and wondrous miCRo, am sure you will, too.
Listen to Parrissa Eyorokon read “Reclamation:”
Reclamation
“There’s a whole mushroom growing out of the wall in the basement,” I say. My mother appears shocked, and rightfully too, because who would expect something this unnatural to be said of their home, so I repeat myself but with more of my hands this time, splaying my fingers wide as if they could adequately capture the absurd image I stumbled upon while clearing out my father’s study. Though he took a job in South Carolina years before, he left some things here for safekeeping and never thought they’d already begun to decompose on their own—neglected in the dark terrarium of our family home. And it was there in that windowless room, behind a wooden desk far too big for the already claustrophobic space, tucked between the carpet and the floorboard and flanked by two bookshelves my father built himself, where the mushroom had been living undisturbed for some time. The growth felt more invasive than the mouse droppings peppering my father’s stamp collection and more upsetting than the fuzzy white and green mold on the fore edges of our family photo albums; our faces forever bloated and warped. More unkind than the soggy paintings from my father’s younger days with their colors now running together: a murky rainbow, dulled and smeared by an untimely stroke. Even more than the stale, musty odor that rushed at me when I opened the seal to this time capsule so I could set about weeding through my father’s treasures. No—this stubborn, fleshy intrusion was by far the worst offense. With no regard for my father’s authority, it had squeezed itself through and into the room we never dared enter as children. Feeding on humidity, coolness, and sunlessness, it stretched and reached with its fetid stock as though its next move would be to take its place in my father’s chair to settle the month’s accounts.
Parrissa Eyorokon, a former professional athlete from Ohio, enjoys scouring the globe for the moodiest coffee shops she can find and spending time with her favorite sibling. Her fiction has appeared in Litbreak Magazine, and she has a short story forthcoming in Waxing and Waning. Parrissa currently lives in Oahu.
