Misha Rai

The meeting in the children’s playground is almost one of chance.

            The man is young and tired looking. He has walked off the usual path people take to go about this small town, down a grassy slope to come to an abrupt standstill, his feet inches from where the ground is mudded flat. The woman, when she senses him standing next to her, cranes her neck up to take a look at him, and notices, across the years and all over again, that he still has the face of the aunt she was long ago conditioned to despise. Whatever other qualities she might lack, self-awareness is not one of them.  

Neither of them speaks. This is the closest they have been to each other in more than a decade. Since November 2012.

            He is looking straight ahead at the screaming children on the red and yellow merry-go-round. She searches through the black, brown, red, yellow heads to see if she can easily spot who he is looking for. She continues to cradle her stomach. It has dropped recently, and she likes to believe that anyone watching her would think how practiced a mother she already is, good at supporting her unborn child. Swatches of her grey hair catch against the New England wind and balloon around her face. She is resplendent.

            “I suppose you came for the children,” the man says.

            The woman remembers immediately how sardonic he has always been with her. No hello, no nice to see you, what a surprise. All these years later, and still, he cannot speak with her without armor.

            “Yes,” she says, gently. “I like to come and see which one of the bunch will realize first that going round and round makes you happy, but also leaves you feeling sick.”

            “Perhaps you want to see how yours will turn out.” His elbow darts out quickly, towards her middle, and then it’s back, tightly pressed against his side.

            Together they watch the children, the two with identical brown hair, a girl, and a boy. The girl is taller and is laughing loudly into a blonde head. The boy is holding his sister’s hand in one of his pudgy hands and the handrail of the merry-go-round with the other. His eyes are tightly closed, his pink tongue thrust out in a shriek. The man and the woman have the same thought; the children are beautiful, blue-grey eyes that he knows belong to his tenacious American wife and her two sturdy brothers. The woman sees her maternal uncle’s sharp nose. She feels perverse, to always be able to conjure up such a clear picture of the man who devastated her family, who is the break between them. She thinks, in the right light the children could pass as full-blooded North Indians.

            “I haven’t seen you here before,” she says.

            “Just how long have you been coming here for?” This time his whole body turns towards her, and he really looks at her. How old is she now, he wonders. When he’s done the math, he marvels at the fact that she is able to be pregnant at her age. He’d heard a long time ago that she was desperate for children. In profile, her mother’s straight back stands out to him, and he likes the fact that she still has the nobility of her father’s wide face, only she is attractive.

“Is stalking hereditary?” He asks, and then laughs thinly.

At first, the woman thinks of admitting to her crime and then realizes what his words imply. She waddles a little sideways, away from him, shifting her feet apart, for comfort, before she asks, “Is he still able to call you?”

Before the silence between them has a chance to lengthen, and really, before she can stop herself, she adds, “One of the groundmen thought he saw a true morel on the other side of the seesaw. Fruiting under a decomposing tree branch. When we looked, we found nothing.”

A whistle blows in the distance, other parents call out to their children, and the man looks above her head. He exhales quickly and shakes his head.

“Okay, Sonal di.”

The di catches Sonal by surprise. She understands that it is a force of habit for the kind of people she comes from to refer to their relations with each other with designated terms of address, but she can’t stop herself from starting to smile at the acknowledgement that she is his sister. Clearly not born of the same parents, in their language there is no word for cousin. Perhaps, this is why familial bonds, rusty for want of renewal, once invoked, continue to hold their people so tightly. He doesn’t see her turn that almost smile into a relaxed line on her lips. He is carefully loping back the way he came, up the slope, then walking rapidly, disappearing around a bend, frowning, trying to keep at bay thoughts he’d rather not think over, and by the time she turns back to the playground, the empty merry-go-round is barely moving.

In her temporary apartment Sonal can’t decide who to call first. She waddles back and forth across the drawing room’s cavernous maw with her mobile phone in her hand. The day’s light is slowly dying out of the multi-pane windows in what she imagines is precise mathematical ratios. The undergraduate researcher who helped bring her bags in when she arrived at The Long Litt Woon House Fungi Research Center pointed out that characteristic in Georgian architecture.

“It’s all proportion and balance,” the girl said as she pointed at the height of the windows. Someone well-meaning or shrewd had picked an Indian girl, an enthusiastic junior, an international student on full scholarship, who occasionally mixed her V’s and W’s, to welcome Sonal. “Simple mathematical ratios vere used, in the building process, to determine the height of a vindow in relation to its width or even the shape of a room as a double cube.”

In the weeks that followed, whenever Sonal caught a glimpse of the girl at the center, a paper bag and small knife swinging on a rope from her hip or an overladen basket of mushrooms determinedly being heaved by her dirt speckled hands, she felt warmth towards her. They both represented the best their country has to offer and that is something.

Sonal knows she should call her parents. They will quickly divine meaning from this playground meeting in a way she chooses not to. She looks up their number in her contacts, then reasons, it’s late where they are. If she is being honest, recounting the details of the meeting will be cumbersome. Her parents will get excited, and, afterwards, it will send them down a loop of remembrance. There will be days of short, interrupting phone calls after that. It will do none of them any good.

She almost calls her brother, the person she can be her most cutting self with. A forensic neuroscientist, he can be mercurial. She imagines him saying, I don’t care. Don’t call me about this shit. Or he could say, Of course you ran into him. The population is what, 16,000? And you’re there—for six months. What did you think would happen? Or, he could say, Please tell me this isn’t why you took that job? All that rot you gave me (!)…How self-destructive are you? She has no idea which brother will pick up the phone, so she puts off calling him.

Her husband, the composer, is the only person she realizes she wants to call. He will listen to her without saying a word and only when he knows she’s got it all out of her system, he will ask her questions, appropriately meant to lead her to see the meeting in the best light possible. But he is in Brazil, at this moment probably at rehearsal, watching the Brazilian National Orchestra work at the piece he wrote for them. Two performances are scheduled and in between he will fly out to see her. For that week, she has already cancelled her journalism labs and the science writing class she grudgingly agreed to co-teach.

I should have said no, she thinks, knuckling her lower back in circular motion.

The renowned director of the center, a no-nonsense Virginian who has lived all over had bribed Sonal with Britannia’s Bourbon Biscuits and simply nodded when Sonal said, “I haven’t really written anything purely memoir since that one essay. You already know the kind of science reporting I do only engineers and scientists usually read, and that essay was such an anomaly as far as my writing goes.” Co-teaching a class had been the compromise. There was the money too; what they offered was too good to pass on.

Named for the woman who synonymized mushrooms and mourning, The Long Litt Woon House Research Center was particularly interested in the ways in which the study of mycology and the practice of mourning were intertwined. At any given time, they had a wide variety of persons who reflected these same interests in various visiting positions. That Sonal’s essay, full of grief and anger and the eastern jack-o’ lantern mushroom growing in a particular patch of the American south, had been a big part of the reason she had been invited to apply in the first place. Nature had so much to offer and Sonal, considering the circumstance that led to the essay, had latched on to its propensity for death. So had social media.

The essay had taken on a life she never imagined it would. In the early days of its circulation, it seemed to be speaking to the kinds of people who thrived on sensationalized news, seeming to share their worst thoughts online. Her grief compounded—what had she expected, she asked herself. Hadn’t she written the essay quickly, in one spurt? Barely any research had been conducted. It lacked nuance. Then, what had surprised Sonal, is the connection it made with tens of thousands of other people around the world whose grief went hand in hand with unimaginable shame. These admissions made her realize that the kind of grief one can share openly was like the mushroom one saw above the ground, a tiny part of a much larger organism, but grief dogged with shame represented the network made of long shoestring-like cells that thrived, under the earth, in the dark. Here were people who asked themselves repeatedly if they were even allowed to mourn.

Sonal scrolls for a long time on her phone before she finds the name she is looking for. She taps the message tab under it and in one swoop of her thumb finds the first text she was sent from that number. She walks over to the large wooden desk at the far end of the room and lowers herself slowly into the mahogany wheely chair it is a pair with.

Sent eight years ago, the message reads: Can you please call? My father has murdered my mother.

She imagines the man, her cousin typing this message out. He is much younger then. He has no idea why this is happening to him. His fingers move on their own.

Sonal’s mouth fills with saliva, but when she tries to swallow, her throat constricts painfully, leaving her sputtering, liquid dripping down her chin.

The message is timestamped at 7: 04 am, January 22, 2020.

Sonal feels that she can recall that cold January morning in highly specific detail. There is an element of otherworldliness attached to it. This is her flashbulb memory moment, full of heightened emotion.

She is sound asleep on her side of the bed in Woburn. It is not the text message, but the continuous vibration from her mobile phone on her bedstand that wakes her up. She gets out of bed in one movement, with ferocity, snatching the phone up to her face. Even before her brother’s name, flashing like a siren becomes legible to her, Sonal knows something is very wrong.

“What is it?”

Her brother’s voice is pitched loud, shock embedded in it. “I got a message from Nanhe—”

“I told you we should have insisted that Ma and Dad come together for their visit!”

“Sonal, listen, Nanhe—”

“Wait, what? What about Nanhe? Why is he calling you? He never calls you anymore.”

“Nanhe texted me that Arun Mama murdered Meetu Mami.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Nanhe called me at first; I didn’t pick up. You remember Vijay? Meetu Mami’s brother? Nanhe’s Mama? He called to give Nanhe the news. I woke mom up. Nanhe had texted her the same message. My father has murdered my mother.”

Sonal stands there, lurching.

“I don’t understand,” Sonal says. “I-I don’t understand.”

“Nanhe’s Mama,” her brother says, slowing down. “Meetu Mami’s brother, Vijay Mama. He and Meetu Mami spoke to each other every day and when she didn’t respond to his calls or text messages for two days, he called Arun Mama. He asked him what was going on with Meetu Mami. Arun Mama was near Lajpat Nagar, late for a meeting, and he told Vijay that. Also, he had no idea why his wife was being uncommunicative. Vijay didn’t believe him.” Her brother stops to clear his throat. The sound is unpleasant. It’s as if something living is burrowing in there and it won’t come out.

“He brought the police with him to their house. The doors were all unlocked except one door, the door to the master bathroom and when they broke it open, they found Meetu Mami’s body on the floor. It looked like she had been beaten. She was bruised all over. There was blood.”

“I think, I think I got a message too,” Sonal says, unable to fully take in what her brother has just told her. “Hang on.”

The number the text message has been sent from is not one she recognizes, but the message when she opens it is the same. My father has murdered my mother. Mechanically, she creates a new contact profile on her phone. Nanhe, she puts under name, and then in brackets she types out his full official name. She saves his number.  

On the phone all she hears now is her brother breathing heavily through his nose. Probably, reigning in emotions that will overwhelm him if he speaks. When they were little this same baby brother of hers had trouble aiming his piss into the toilet bowl. Their father was working long hours at the office and their mother, exhausted from explaining to him how the thing was done and from cleaning after him, had broken down in tears. Arun, who was visiting for a fortnight had wiped his older sister’s face with a greying, clean handkerchief and said, “Wait, Geeta di, I’ll show him how.” Over the course of his vacation, each time his nephew needed to use the bathroom, Arun accompanied him until the boy mastered his movements.  

The words are out of Sonal’s mouth before she can properly think. Her heart is beating so hard; she thinks it will give itself a fracture. “He must have had enough. That woman.” And then she finds she can’t continue.

Her brother laughs. His laugh has always been high. When they were children, they decided that he laughed like a hyena although at the time neither of them had heard that animal laugh. The idea stuck and now as her brother laughs, she hears despair in his high pitch.

“Let me call Nanhe,” Sonal says. “Let me call him.” As if her calling Nanhe will somehow make sense of what she has been told, maybe even prove wrong what he has written to her.

He picks up on the first ring.

Sonal says, “I am so sorry that you have lost your mother.” She means it too.

She doesn’t flinch from his anger, his certainty. But when he repeats himself, Arun has killed my mother (!), she recoils. She thinks, he’s still your father Nanhe, call him papa.

Sonal says, “You have to go back to India. You know that, right? You have to sort this mess out.”

Nanhe’s response is a bark. “I have nothing left back there. I have nothing.”

When Sonal insists that he has to be there for the funeral rites, he is his mother’s only son, it is his duty to light the pyre, he mutters something. She doesn’t ask him to repeat himself.

She tells him she is in shock. The family is in shock. They have no idea what to do or how to respond. She will call him back again.

The whole conversation is over in less than a minute.

When Sonal calls her brother, she says, “I thought she would die of the cancer, you know. She deserved to die a slow, painful death after what she did to this family. Then of course, she recovered. People like her…I wanted her gone, but this. If he did this to her.”

And then before her brother can say anything she says, “Do you remember Arun Mama ever being violent? He never touched that woman. If he had, she would have made sure he was arrested.”

A moment later her brother hands the phone over to their mother. She too has called Nanhe, but she’s told him to have faith in his parents, forgetting that her nephew only has one living parent now. Sonal listens to her mother talk through her shock.

When Sonal gets off the phone she is lying down on the other side of the bed. It has been smoothed over and tucked in by her fiancée. A little later when she is in the kitchen, she smells tea he made. His sole mug and the tea kettle are neatly upturned on the drying rack. Her cup is still in the sink from where she left it days ago.

Here is what Sonal thinks she knows—their larger family was divided a long time ago. Her mother never forgave her sister-in-law for supposedly forgetting to feed Sonal’s grandmother for two days when the septuagenarian lived in the flat above Arun Mama and Meetu Mami’s house. Arun Mama was away at the time. A historical black mark against Meetu Mami, she lied about her age at the time of her arranged marriage. That maintained lie cost her the life of her first child, born prematurely, in a hurriedly induced bloody labour. Only when Meetu Mami admitted to her real age, much older than anyone imagined, were Sonal’s physician grandparents able to help her get the medical attention she needed. It lead to the successful birth of her only living child, Nanhe. Meetu Mami’s worst sin is that she never tried to mend the rift between her husband and son when they fell out. No one in the family is sure what actually caused the father and son to stop speaking with each other. For the rest of Sonal’s life, she and her brother were constantly warned about Meetu Mami’s motives. They were pushed into noticing how she treated the men in the family like lords and ignored the women. Meetu Mami’s father was a known devil worshipper who took guidance from a witch doctor in Varanasi, which explained how Meetu Mami had found ingenious ways to have the family wealth transferred under her name.

As for Nanhe, if any of his childhood wrongs ever came to light, a family member would slyly point out how like Meetu Mami he was. When he was born a plump baby, the family was relieved. He was healthy, his complexion clear, a boy to carry the family name. It didn’t stop his relations from calling him Motu Nanhe. Sonal remembers being encouraged to continue teasing him, my fat Nanhe, my fat brother, even when he turned into a beanpole as a teenager.  Sonal can only imagine what spin on these same events Nanhe has been conditioned to believe. She shudders when she thinks about how he must feel about the relatives who thought it perfectly fine to show their growing affection by viciously teasing a young child.

The last few days of January are a blur. There are messages and phone calls exchanged to and from various family members in India and America. Her uncle is nowhere to be found. His passport is missing. The police are checking the Indo-Nepal border and there is an alert out in his name at the international airports. A newspaper article claims that the couple fought over selling their house and that in a fit of anger Arun hit Meetu hard and she fell down, her head hitting the bathroom sink. The bruises on her body though were from the aggressive cancer treatments she was receiving. The article stresses the fact that instead of calling for help Arun left her there to bleed from her head. Sonal’s father, a retired lawyer, asks that the family stop speculating. The postmortem will likely clear everything up. Also, don’t forget the door of the master bathroom was locked from the inside and that is a good thing. Yes, it is bad that Arun is still missing, and his phone is switched off. If he contacts anyone in the family, they have to urge him to turn himself in.

Three weeks later, amid increasing reports that there is a virus making people deadly sick in other parts of the world, Sonal prepares to fly out to interview a life scientist camping in the Cumberland Plateau in Tennessee where he has been studying the ecosystem thriving on a pair of Dawn Redwoods for over a decade. Sonal’s interest is in the homemade tools he has been using in his makeshift lab where he collects and studies all sorts of organisms. He hopes to use this interview in the trade journal Sonal works for as a way to continue pushing the conversation on creating environmentally friendly labs. If he can raise some funds for his research along the way, all the better. He’s recently walked away from his full-time job. He doesn’t explain why.  

Sonal’s mother calls her when she is almost at the airport. Her mother is weeping with anger.

“How can Nanhe believe his father is a murderer,” she says. “Tell me beta, how can he? Did I tell you what he wrote to me when I tried to reason with him? The only thing I want is J-U-S-T-I-C-E for my mother. Justice, he spelled in capital letters. I know what that word means!”

Sonal listens to her mother hiccup as she talks. Her mother admits that what Nanhe wants and why he wants it is reasonable. What she doesn’t say, is that she sees it differently.

A few minutes after Sonal finishes taking photos of the life scientist’s makeshift lab on one side of the Dawn Redwoods, she goes for a walk across the wooded tract, along a road, and into a neighbourhood. As she turns the corner from a tennis court, she comes across a bright yellowish orange clump of eastern jack-o’ lantern mushrooms growing in the front lawn of a large Collegiate Gothic-style house. She pulls at the collar of her full sleeve top as she counts the number of round, flat- to funnel-shaped heads, each sinking a little into its center, perched one on top of another, crowded, mini umbrella lookalikes. Sonal uses her hands to fan herself. This late February day is unusually warm, stagnant, white clouds barely moving. She gets down on her knees to look under the thirty-seven caps she’s counted. She notices their sharp-edged gills descending the stalk, the colour darkening towards the base. Poisonous, she knows this much. As she rises quickly, blood rushing to her head, her phone vibrates. It’s the family chat. Preliminary postmortem results are in. Death by strangulation. No comment yet on whether any kind of blunt force trauma was used before Meetu Mami was choked to death. Sonal heaves so hard that she has tears running down her face. When she eventually gets back to her room at the local inn, she sits on the bed with her mouth agape for hours. She ignores her fiancée’s phone calls.

             Sometime during the night, she opens her laptop and looks up the classification of mushrooms, of fungi. Her suspicion is confirmed. Carl von Linné, known for his creation of a system of classification of every specifies of animal and plant, a system used to this day over 300 years later, struggled to classify fungi. They ended up being put in a sub-category of the animal kingdom under the title of “Chaos.” Long after Linné, it would be established that fungi belonged neither to the plant nor animal kingdom. They formed their own kingdom, the kingdom Fungi.

            Chaos.

Yes, that is the kind of grief Sonal feels, if grief can be defined in those terms. A numbing chaos that has made her sluggish. She never called Nanhe back after their one conversation. Sonal wrote to him, letting him know that she and her brother and mother, who was visiting them in America, were willing to fly out to help him in any way they could. Since then neither of them has reached out to the other. She will not call him or text him now. Somehow it seems too late for all that. If she could feel clearly, she knows it would be anger at herself. How can she abandon him, this boy she loved as a child when he has been so recently traumatized.  

            When she starts writing the infamous essay she begins with the words, Inaction is a choice. She allows herself to imagine all the other ways in which Meetu Mami could have died to avoid the destruction the brutal circumstances of her death have caused her family. One person is dead, and three lives have been destroyed. The extensive family is splintering in despair. Sonal wants to be able to mourn this woman for whom she felt little affection, but she doesn’t know how to. Lately, at odd times, Sonal can taste on her tongue the ghost of the vegetable curry Meetu Mami made for Sonal’s family when they visited on weekends and holidays. She remembers being inquisitive about the woman who had married her favourite uncle. Sonal was entranced by her long, waist length hair, always taking any opportunity to touch it. She laments at the bioluminescence of the eastern jack-o’ lantern mushroom, and how unseemly it is for it to be so bright, scarily alluring when her aunt is dead, her uncle may or may not have killed her, their son is unlikely to recover from these events without being marked by them, and Sonal’s relationship with her fiancée is falling apart. She marvels that this particular mushroom that induces severe pain when ingested belongs to a family that can break down anything that has a hydrocarbon base, like an oil spill, and that after they’re done breaking down the spill the mushrooms sporulate, which attracts insects, and then birds come along bringing seeds to produce new life.

            When she is done writing, she self publishes the essay and posts it on her various social media handles. She stays at the inn for another week, mostly in bed. At the airport, instead of taking a flight back to the flat she shares with her fiancée, she flies out to Denver where her brother lives with their mother who is visiting. Two weeks after that, in March 2020, the pandemic is declared.

The paperless evite hits Sonal’s inbox at midday. An old family friend’s grandson is getting married. The wedding will be on March 15, 2023. Sonal accepts immediately. She scrolls down to look at the guest list. Already a hundred people have RSVP’d to attend. Sonal finds her brother’s name under 193 People Not Replied. She rolls her eyes. Her brother is better friends with the family friend’s son than she is. It’s when she sees Nanhe’s name next to her brothers that she realizes that the invitations have been grouped in family clusters. That evening she refreshes the page and Nanhe’s name jumps up next to hers. Her palms start to sweat.

            Sonal taps on his name and a message bar pops open.   

            I’m not sure if you want to hear from me, but I was wondering if you’d want to meet sometime before or after the wedding? It would be nice to see you.  

            Nanhe responds a few hours later. They go back and forth and decide to meet at a coffee shop on the morning of the reception. She congratulates him on his pandemic wedding, and he offers condolences about her broken engagement. She hopes he is very happy.

            Nanhe writes back, Did you know that Arun keeps calling me? I change my number and a few months later he finds it and calls.

            The hair on her arms stand.

            I’ve always appreciated your offer to help. No one else on Arun’s side of the family offered. Some people never even called to give their condolences.

            Sonal begins to write back, but Nanhe sends back a wave emoji and he’s gone.

            During the week of the wedding celebrations Sonal’s mother can’t understand why Sonal is always standing on balconies, on the top stair of every staircase, hanging her upper body out of windows, her head moving like a metronome.

            “What is going on?”

            Sonal playfully pinches her mother’s cheeks. “I’m looking for a husband, na.”

            Her mother says, “Your brother needs a wife. I wish he had come.”

            “Keep thinking about your favourite child. I’m chopped liver, right?!”

            With each passing ceremony and Nanhe’s absence, Sonal’s insides begin to knot and then harden. At first she can’t shit. Soon after that she gets loose motions. Her mother chides her for drinking tap water, handing her only sealed bottles of water to drink from. Sonal has forgotten that her gut has become Americanized. Her mother gets the family doctor to prescribe Sonal strong medicine when the diarrhea continues.

            Sonal gives up on finding Nanhe at the rest of the events. One evening the groom’s father tells her that some people are only coming to the reception. Sonal smiles widely. Her stomach settles and she dances that evening. In her room that night she makes a list of things she will say to Nanhe. She groups the list into three categories, the first category being What I Should Have Done For You. The morning Sonal is meant to meet Nanhe, she can’t seem to decide what to wear. She can’t get herself out of the room on time. She figures he’ll probably be on Indian Standard Time. Getting to the coffee shop early or even on time is ridiculous. She lets herself get waylaid by family and friends as she begins to make her way out. The list burns in her pocket. In the end she never goes.

Sonal wipes June 2, 2027, from the whiteboard as her class files out. Wendy, the colleague she has been teaching her science writing class with at the Long Litt Woon House Fungi Research Center taps her on her shoulder.

            “Watch out. I can see Ted headed your way.”

            Sonal follows the direction of Wendy’s eyes. Through the open classroom door, the groundman from the children’s playground, who also works for the college, is slowly shuffling towards their classroom.

            “Best of luck,” Wendy says, hefting her large Telfar bag on to her shoulder and walking out.

            “Dr.,” Ted says. He’s stopped outside the door.

            “I’m not a Dr., Ted,” Sonal says. “Remember, I’m here for two quarters, only six months. More like an instructor.”

            “Dr., I know I saw a true morel this time. It’s clumped near the slide in the playground.” He pulls out his phone and turns the screen towards her. Sonal stifles a sigh and navigates her belly over to see the photograph. Ever since Ted misinformed Sonal about his sighting of a true morel, he has been working extra hard to find one for her. He has an unblemished track record for finding mushrooms for all the visiting fellows at the center. The resolution of the picture is not the clearest, but Sonal can make out not one but two cap shaped stems poking out of the ground, clustered behind a pile of stones that keep the wooden staircase of the slide in place.   

            “Two!”

            “I didn’t want you to give up on finding these. Season’s almost up,” Ted says, smiling.

            “Thanks Ted,” Sonal says. “I’d love to check it out, but I don’t think I can.” She rubs her stomach. “Could you show this to one of the research assistants? Someone should have the pleasure of culling them.”

            “You’re sure?” When Sonal nods, yes, Ted considers her and then shrugs.

            But after he has walked away Sonal decides to drive past the playground. She has turned up to watch her niece and nephew play every now and again. Ever since she got pregnant she’s also had a desire to be around children. It’s not as if she ever got close enough to talk to them. That is the line she drew. She’d honestly thought she’d run into Nanhe’s family in town or at some sort of gathering at the college since his wife works in administration, but that still hasn’t happened. She will never admit this to anyone else, not even to her straight-talking husband, but she downloaded a picture of Nanhe’s wife from the website to study it in case they ever ran into each other.

Sonal parks in the street and waddle-walks down. No one is there. She can see a child’s boot near the merry-go-round, and someone has left a water bottle hanging from the seesaw. The slide is at the other end of the playground past a fountain that has dolphins branching out, noisily spouting water.

When she gets to the slide, Sonal has to bend several times before she spots what she thinks could be two true morels. She will have to cut them open to be absolutely sure. In another minute she understands why the photograph was unclear. The two cap shaped stems are in shade, much closer to the underside of the staircase. She will have to lie down on her stomach to get to them.

Damn, Sonal thinks. She hasn’t picked a single true morel this season and now here are two, literally at her feet.

            Okay, she decides. If she can’t pick one, she’ll just wait for one of the undergraduate researchers to come do it. They’ve all turned out to be just as territorial and secretive when it comes to sharing their mushroom gathering spots. This way she can teach them that sharing where you pick mushrooms from with other people can be a kind and fun thing to do. She slowly lowers herself and sits down, resting her back on the staircase post. It feels nice to lean there, she thinks. When she gets back to her temporary apartment she intends to email the amateur mushroom society she has belonged to for the past six years, letting them know the lengths to which she’s gone to in order to see a true morel picked.

            When Sonal wakes up, the June sky above her is finally more dark than light. She has a crick in her neck and her pelvis is throbbing. She has a hard time standing up. She begins to panic. This was a stupid thing to do. She is finally going to have a child at the age of forty-seven and she has been completely careless. It had been a miracle when she met her husband at 41, he was 43, and they both turned out to be serious about finding their person without all the usual bullshit dating brought with it. When they married two years later, she promised herself that she would never do anything to put their family at risk. She puts her hands out next to her and realizes that her phone is sitting on the passenger side car seat.

            Pregnancy brain, she thinks.

            Sonal twists her body until she can lower herself over the sand and onto the hard ground. She puts her hands on her sides, a little behind her back, and begins to gently move on her hands and legs, crablike, towards the more open area. When she looks up she sees a figure in the distance. A man is walking towards the see saw. His head is down, a small backpack flapping from his lean shoulders.       

            “Hey,” Sonal yells. “Hey!”

            Nanhe looks up. He thinks he’s just heard someone call out. He is so tired these days. He hasn’t been sleeping well this past month. Old memories have come back in bright technicolor, like HD streaming on television. He’s had to drive all the way back to the playground to pick up his daughter’s water bottle. Before she goes to bed she has to touch the Dora the Explorer sticker they put on the bottle on her fifth birthday.

            “Help,” a woman’s voice calls out. It’s coming from beyond the fountain. Nanhe begins to walk quickly towards it, but then he hears a cry. The cry sounds modulated to his ears, going from a strong high pitch to a weak one. It is followed by a scuffling sound.

            Nanhe stops. He pulls out his phone and dials 911. As the call connects he thinks, not again. Please god, not again. He can’t believe he has frozen on the spot. Nanhe should be moving forward, pulling back the bastard who is even at this moment strangling her. Given a chance that man will run away, leaving her bruised and bloody body behind for her loved ones to discover, to try to make sense of what has happened and why. Behind him he hears a car pull up, mercilessly lighting him up and what lies beyond him for a moment.