First published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.
I only travel to the golden head when the dragonflies are in season. It’s Piack and me this year, rafting up the river past the lilies and arched trees. While I steer us through the river’s gentle snarls, he sings about lost keys to pass the time—he’s always had a thing about lost keys and the doors they’ll never open, the places we’ll never find.
“Are you going to eat what the head gives you?” asks Piack. He’s one year older than I am—nineteen. With the sun behind him, his form swims in light.
The dragonflies buzz around us, brush their wings against our faces.
Piack’s scent is like apples after harvest, and the soft smell of bark, and some deeper, stranger thing. The first time I saw him, he was running through flax fields for the joy of it. I dropped my basket to join him, feet smashing through fallen stems. We were two wild children, stomping across logs, burrowing into fleecy snow, cracking open walnuts like badgers and scuffling through the shells. That feels like so long ago, now.
He brushes dragonflies from my cheek, and as he cups his hand, it looks as if he’s catching the setting sun.
•••
The golden head sits on the bank of the river, far from Alaga and the other river towns. It towers over the arched trees, a sun coming up over the mountains. The face has two spaces where the eyes should be, like doors leading to a world that looks like the one you left, but isn’t. Once, the head had a crown, but now the top is a jagged ruin. The gold is run through with molten green, tiny rivers caressing the metal.
I touch the blunt teeth and the head shudders awake. It recognizes me, the mouth creaking open. A golden tongue emerges, presenting a mushroom, as it does every year.
Perhaps my fear of the golden head comes from my desire to see it again, to hold close what it gives me.
And Piack, he’s here because I am. And because this is the sort of door he could never open on his own.
Last winter, I found a sapphire key under a snowbank. The jagged edges left indentations in my palm, and underneath the paint, bits of rust shone through. It reminded me of the golden head, the way the corrosion ran through it, a once-loved thing, now forgotten.
When I showed it to Piack, he tucked it into his pocket. “I’ll see if I can find what it opens,” he said.
•••
Every year, the head gives me a mushroom laid out on its golden tongue. Each time, I imagine how that mushroom came to exist, how a sprawling web of hyphae had to converge, each tendril working its way through the soil.
I have a theory that the head was once like me, a person who had an obligation. Little gods often are. It could have been a simple responsibility, perhaps to mend a bridge after a blustery storm or to make sure the beehives were tended. Perhaps the head was once a person who knew where to find the best mushrooms, the ones that weren’t poisonous.
When we find these little gods in the world, we have to tend to them, don’t we?
And all this one seems to want is for me to take the mushroom that it offers. This is a simple request, and so I fulfill it, every year when the dragonflies emerge.
This year, the mushroom is rough under my hands, still clinging to bits of earth. I wash it off in the river.
I have never eaten a mushroom that comes from the golden head. Instead, I take the mushrooms to my garden, spreading their invisible spores, letting the earth reclaim them.
Piack pokes his head into the mouth, curious. “It’s getting too dark to see,” he says.
Against the falling light, the jagged edges at the top of the head silhouette themselves like blackbirds. I think of where the crown should be and wonder if the head ever misses it.
“Let’s wait until morning to raft back.” I put the mushroom into my pocket, intending to bury it in my garden next to the patch of lavender. Perhaps this mushroom will spiral around the roots, interlocking there, sending hyphae into the cool darkness underneath.
“How many times have you come here?” asks Piack as we turn to go back to the raft.
“Seven times? Eight?” The sun has truly set now; the stars burn like keyholes in the door of the sky.
“And it’s always just you? You never find anyone else here?”
“I’ve wondered about that, too. The way I found the head was strange. There was this scent, like the best thing you’ve ever smelled, and I followed it. Ever since, I’ve been finding hidden things.”
Piack pulls out the sapphire key, a shadow in the dark, then disappears it again. “You’ve always been good at finding hidden things.” He grows playful, jumps behind me, and tugs at the back of my shirt, like he used to do when we were children playing branch and badger. “But you don’t always see everything.”
“That’s why I have you,” I say, running behind him to tug his shirt, accidentally pulling him back so that he stumbles against me. We steady ourselves in the darkness. The raft is up ahead.
His tone grows serious. “Why haven’t you brought me here before?”
“I didn’t know if you would want to come,” I say, unable to voice the true reason. Something has changed about Piack, or myself. I imagined us together in this secret place, with the golden head that would not speak, with the mushroom I would not eat. Other people would have asked a question which meant this: Why not let this small god dissipate? It is not a great power to produce one mushroom from the earth, a simple mushroom that could be rooted out by pigs or dogs. But Piack never asks questions that are judgments. There is such a comfort in not having to explain oneself. The truth is that this was one thing I could do in the world, so I did it.
On the raft, Piack curls up on a fishing net. “There’s enough room for both of us,” he says, and the scent of apples and bark and some stranger, deeper thing swirls around me.
I think of mushrooms calling with their bright smells to the animals who will carry them in their mouths and stomachs, these scents that lure us to underground places.
I touch the edge of the raft, feel it dipping into the water, a barrier that I want to cross, but can’t. Not yet.
•••
Last summer, I found a ruby key covered in fungal spores, hidden in the dewy grass behind the cottage on the hill. I tried every door before I came to Piack, jamming the key in all those locked spaces.
“I don’t know what it opens, either,” said Piack. “You keep that one.”
•••
I wake to the smell of bark and the river. I am slumped against a fallen log. Strands of bark have worked their way into my hair.
I find Piack in front of the golden head. He’s examining the mouth, but now the blunt teeth have shut.
“I wish I could give something back to the head,” I say. “Every year, when I take the mushroom, I think of this.” I look to the top of the head, where the crown should be. I would run my hand against those sharp edges, but they are too high for me to reach. “I wish I knew what the head longs for.”
Piack sighs, as if he knows all about unfulfilled longing. “What happens if you come here your whole life, taking a mushroom every year, never eating it?”
In the wet soil of my garden are the spores from the golden head. Their mycelium networks connect underground, and above ground, the mushrooms sit like knobs to a door I’ve never been able to open.
“I don’t want things to change,” I say.
Blue dawn light wends its way down to us, turning the eye gaps in the head a lovely dusk.
Piack takes my hand. I imagine our arms are like hyphae reaching out, like one mycelium network searching for another.
When I kiss him, it is like the sky opening up, one vast blue river. I smell apples, and bark, and some deeper, stranger thing.
“I’ve wanted to kiss you for so long,” he murmurs. His hands are soft as sorrel. My hands are dusted with dirt, but Piack doesn’t seem to mind.
Slowly, the sun rises above us, one bright doorway in an infinity of blue.
•••
A golden head. A golden light. I stare into the eye sockets of the head, wondering about lost keys and the places we find and the places we don’t. Wondering about the places we make for ourselves, carving doorways in dirt and sand and air.
Piack sits next to me. He brushes an arm against me, and I lean into the hollow of his shoulder. I feel as if I’ve been buried under snow and have come up to the sun, like a hidden key, like the shell of a walnut, like a mushroom finding the light for the first time.
I take out the ruby key, watching how the light pushes into the shadowed teeth.
Beside me, Piack pulls out his sapphire key.
Some doors you walk through, and you can never walk back.
“We never did find what these open,” I say. The river churns in the distance, steady as a heartbeat, going where all rivers go.
I enfold him in my arms. We lean against the golden head. Slowly, the head shifts, until two keyholes emerge under the chin, melting from the gold like a river flowing around stones.
With trembling fingers, I push my key inside. Piack does the same. The head absorbs the keys. The green corrosion melts away and travels upward, forming a crown which sits at the top of the head. The head smiles, looking upon us with beneficence.
“We’ll come back next year,” I promise. “When the dragonflies emerge.”
Gently, it begins to rain. Mushrooms bloom all around us.
