Page 8 of Shroom for Improvement

I gathered what remained of my flyers—printed on fully recycled and recyclable paper—and tapped the edges against the desktop to neaten them up again. Perhaps I would drop the rest off at my local cafe when I collected the used coffee grounds for my plant fertiliser.

“Do not fuck her,” I said. I hoisted my messenger bag over my shoulder. “You know how I feel about this whole professor-student kink of yours.” Mash was six foot nine, blonde, and borderline fatally attractive. Devastating really. And if you were the lucky—or unlucky depending on which way you looked at it—person he wanted to take home that night, you’d be utterly powerless to resist his charms.

“Come on, they’re PHD students, not undergrads. They’re the same age as us.”

“I’m three hundred and sixty-six,” I reminded him.

“And you don’t look a day older than three hundred and fifty-nine.” He pinched my cheek like a nana. Hard. My blood rushed to meet his touch. “I know, I know, mushroom-jizz face cream, blah blah blah.”

I shrugged a single shoulder. My face cream really was a wonder product. I hadn’t nicked it, like Claude accused me of. I’d made the lotion myself, in my kitchen-cosmetology lab. The jizz part referred to the oat milk, not the mushroom extract, and not actual jizz either, because ew. To collect it, you placed organic oats in a linen bag, soaked them in warm, filtered water and squeezed. What gushed out of the cloth was—yeah, okay, it was cum adjacent, but wow—a moisture miracle in the palm of my hands. Used to treat almost every skin condition you could think of. Eczema, dermatitis, acne, general blahness.

I should stop referring to it as jizz, even if it did look extraordinarily like the substance in question. I’d gotten into a habit, which only served to embarrass me in front of people I wanted to impress.

Mash threw an arm over my shoulder. “Let’s get out of here. I want to get some of that twelve percent moonshine for Friday night. You really not coming?” He didn’t give me a chance to answer before he ploughed on. “What are you gonna do for two entire weeks except whine about some grimy, polluted city allotment? And don’t say work on your paper. You’ve been working on that thing for years and not a bloody word has changed. You can afford to take a breather. Release some of that pent-up... tension.”

“I spoke to him today,” I said, clutching at the mention of my paper. Inwardly, I rolled my eyes. I sounded like a teenage girl with a crush.

“You did?” Mash said, sycophantically. He batted his big puppy-dog lashes at me. “Let me guess, he told you to fuck off?”

Heat crept under my collar, and I pushed away from the werewolf.

“Wait, no,” Mash continued, grinning from ear to ear, oblivious to my reaction. “That would be at least three too many words for a shroom fae.” He laughed at his own joke. “But seriously, what did he say? Did he spill all the secrets of his ancestral glamour? Tell you every piece of knowledge you’ve ever craved.”

For some reason, my neck suddenly became very itchy. “Uh, well, he...” I trailed off.

Mash laughed again and slapped my bicep with the back of his furry hand. “See! You won’t get a thing out of him. You get on this guy’s train every day—twice a day for like, three years. Get into the lab an hour early just so you can see him, speak to him, whatever. You’ve asked him out on a date, how many times now?”

“Not a date,” I corrected.

“My bad. You’re absolutely right. Not a date, an ‘academic’”—he air quoted—“hook-up.” He winked. “How many times has he rejected you?”

“But see, I think he must misunderstand the situation—”

“How many times, Daye?”

I sighed. “Upwards of thirty, I guess.”

“You’ll never get him to talk. Shroom fae don’t talk. About anything. They just sit in their little toadstool houses and crank—cry wank—themselves to sleep every night because they’re all such miserable fuckers. You can’t even ask them how they are without getting a stare-down or a‘Go to hell.’You’ll never get one to talk about ancient mushroom magic they’ve all but forgotten because none of them talk to each other. There’s a reason they’ve been left out of folktales. Nobody has bothered to carry on with the storytelling.”

I shook my head, but I couldn’t counter it out loud. Fae couldn’t lie, even sneaky magpie fae like me. And Mash was right, shroom fae were a notoriously tight-lipped and fiercely self-governing species.

Three years, and I’d only ever received the same monosyllabic answer to the question,“Claude, would you like to get coffee with me?”

“No.”Sometimes—I expected when he felt generous—he would bestow a“No, thank you”upon me.

But I am nothing if not super fucking persistent.

First-hand accounts and experiments from an actual shroom fae could make or break my research project. If I was right, and I was ninety-nine point nine recurring percent certain I was, Claude’s obsolete mushroom magic—not to be confused with magic mushrooms—held the answer to every modern ecological problem.

Not to exaggerate, but it could save the Eight and a Half Kingdoms. Reverse the damage caused by centuries of industrial pollution and intensive farming, and more recently, billionaires joyriding into space. Help people grow healthier, more nutrient-rich food in poorer conditions with fewer resources.

It could change everything. Potentially end famine. All thanks to one teeny mycelium spore and a weensy bit of bygone glamour.

Mycology for the win.

I had that on a T-shirt somewhere.

All I had to do was complete my three-step plan. Step one, locate a shroom fae. Yep. Done. Tick.

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