PART

The Orb

By Kirsten Madsen

Puffball mushrooms they’re like globes, they’re like a mushroom that you can eat. If you don’t know about mushrooms you can start with a puffball, I did.

Lycoperdom perlatum. I looked it up, it made me think of pearl, also it’s called a ‘gemmed’ puffball, so that’s an expensive object. Puffballs are so cheap they’re free!

Gemmed is a good word to say. If you care about prosody, the taste of words in your mouth is better than a gemmed puffball fried in butter with a tiny amoeba of garlic thrown in.

You will pull it from the earth and you will slice it with a little knife and inside it will be nothing: white foam. It’s adorable and it tastes just fine. It tastes like the butter you will fry it with.

People who aren’t me think little about the puffball as a delicacy. Nobody’s going to pay grimy fungus prospectors by the pound to ship it to fancy dinner plates. 

Puffballs on a lawn are like puffballs on a lawn so that makes it easy to identify them. Round, white, they aren’t an amanita egg, which might kill you. An Amanita egg is a full mushroom veiled in an egg until it bursts out in malevolence. A puffball mushroom is a puffball mushroom is a puffball mushroom. 

That might make them banal but what could be banal about something so clean, white and new? Its perfect shape mocks us in our gangliness. Humans can’t comprehend life forms with symmetry, which is why we don’t give puffballs and jellyfish the ardor and dedication they surely warrant.

What (this is not rhetorical) is wrong with us?

If you can bear it, you can leave the puffball alone. Leave it pristine and pearly, let it burst with mysterious chub and then let it subside. Let it wrinkle and sag and darken with the unbearable weight of experience. Let it shed its white for brown, for tawny then dusky then wrinkled and dry. It has become beautiful.

Stomp it.

PART II.

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