– Stuart Snelson
His father he saw every other weekend. Fresh air and education were his watchwords. Activities invariably lined up; their time together was linked to strict itineraries. His father cut the fat of distraction.
It was the beginning of the mushroom season. His father hoped to ingrain a joy of foraging, his son a piglet snuffling for truffles. A badly wrapped gift concealed a field guide. As his son tore the paper with rash abandon, disappointment leaked across his face. It was a book fit for small hands. Humouring his father he flicked through it, admired the pencil illustrations. For the purposes of identification, fungi hovered, freefalling, their soiled roots on show, muted jellyfish as envisioned by mycology’s Michelangelo.
His father, striving to inject excitement into the mundane, warned of the dangers of certain strains. He flicked to specific pages. This will make you sick, he said, pointing to one, whilst this could potentially blind you, and this, he finger-prodded a beige illustration, is the most dangerous of all. This, he said, is the death cap.
As a helpful guide, icons reflected their properties: a smiley face denoted those safe to eat; a cross marked those in danger of extinction; whilst two varieties of skull and crossbones differentiated the deadly from the merely poisonous.
This scaremongering worked, engendered another level to their collecting. He had stared open-mouthed at these innocuous assassins. The death cap looked very similar to non-toxic relatives. At a stroke, the sourcing of ingredients was instilled with a Russian roulette thrill. Thoughts turned to his other hobbies. Philately held no promise of fatalities.
To himself he read odd names aloud: shaggy-foot mummy-cap, old-man-of-the-woods, dead man’s fingers.
They would make a hearty soup upon return. It would simmer whilst they roasted the bird his father had shot from the sky. This would be a future bonding experience, an infant’s finger squeezing a trigger. His father liked to live off the land. This was one of the many reasons why he no longer lived in the family home.
* * *
He could still recall the crunch of dead leaves beneath their feet as they entered the woods. His outfit guarded against all elements. From duffel coat sleeves stringed mittens swung freely. He stomped, jolly in unnecessary Wellingtons. As he hopped, brittle twigs snapped readily beneath his feet, the leaves abundant pencil shavings.
The undergrowth was plundered for treasures. Lamb-like, he gambolled between finds. His father insisted upon guided identification. With dirt beneath his fingernails as flies, drunk, sucked fallen fruits, he plucked wonders free from the earth. A plastic bag housed his yield. The bag and its bobbing contents recalled the goldfish his mother’s friend had won for him at the fair. As the slit bag was upended into a bowl, they had warned him that it may not live long, but it was still going strong. He looked at the mushrooms, grey and lifeless, as they sweated.
He soon learnt not to mention his mother’s partner. The term new dad was particularly verboten.
They scarcely crossed another soul, their day soundtracked by an invisible choir, the hoots and calls of unseen birds.
Having taken the term toadstool literally, he had been disappointed not to stumble upon a family gathering, toads sedentary as they croaked through the day’s events. He investigated other species he would not find in his guide: a caterpillar squirming coyly on the outstretched podium of his palm; a snail snatched from its trail and deposited some distance away.
The air was cool beneath the trees. Dense foliage, golden, sheltered them from what remained of the afternoon’s sun. The occasional gust rustled up a pirouette of leaves.
As the day progressed, his enthusiasm waned. For his father’s benefit, he feigned interest. He would rather be elsewhere. The excitement of the potentially deadly faded. He enjoyed rummaging in dirt as much as the next kid, but this felt different somehow. As he brushed smudges from indigenous fungi, he wondered how his friends were spending their days. Batting bugs, he pictured them in ever more fantastic environments: on rollercoasters, in water parks, at the zoo. Snapped from reverie by an odd howl, he returned to uprooting booty.
* * *
It was towards daylight’s end when he spotted something odd. As dusk settled and the woods darkened, he saw it in the distance, a silhouette broken by branches. His eye keener now, trained to look. Intrigued, he squinted. Clutching the day’s rewards, he ran towards it. Panting, it took his father a few seconds to catch up with him. In silence, in shock, the boy stood pointing. He followed the direction of his son’s arm. He swore loudly. The lord’s name was taken in vain repeatedly.
From the tree’s crooked limb, a body swung in the breeze.
Confused by this sight—a man asleep in mid-air—he stood transfixed. He looked heavy and pendulous, suspended from the tree. A rope, taut, cut into his neck. A rag-doll strung up. His head, empurpled; his earth-toned clothes, soiled.
All the while, he clutched his little bag.
His father lifted him, faced him in the other direction, insisted that he must not turn around.
His favoured thumb, muddied, went unsucked.
Looking away, obediently, he focused instead upon his dampened swag. He removed prize specimens from the bag. Whilst his father grunted behind him, he rolled them between his fingers, concentrated on their textures. His tiny finger poked grey flesh.
From his father he heard further words with which he was unfamiliar.
There would, he realised, be no soup. Such warm reassurance would not be theirs this evening.
He heard his father yank the man free of the tree, the branch snapping at the weight of two men suspended from it. He heard the unearthly thud of their fall.
Having realised that there was nothing more that he could do, his father took him by the hand and led him from the scene. Looking back, he saw the man lying still upon the ground, his face concealed beneath a draped jacket.
Wishing to avoid explaining to a young boy the urges that drive men to take their own lives, his father improvised. He explained that the man was most likely a parachutist who, having drifted off-course, had become snagged in a tree. The absence of a parachute did not prevent his son from accepting this version of events.
Finally, having reached a phonebox on the edge of the woods, they contacted the emergency services. From outside he heard his father’s urgent words, muffled.
He played with toy soldiers whilst they waited for the police.
* * *
His father asked him not to tell his mother what had happened.
The afternoon’s effects presented nevertheless. Trauma finds a way. He dreamt of this man drifting, parachute billowing before complications arose. Each dream would end with his deathly entanglement.
The swinging figure emerged in felt-tip sketches.
About his room, his mother found suicidal soldiers, plastic men strung up from reachable heights. These macabre medallions prompted questions.
The truth emerged.
She resented the fact that his father had introduced death into his life.
Access slackened.
Though he had never possessed a photographic memory, the moment was forever registered. Other senses were invoked: the peaty smell unleashed by a light rain, the sound of the woodpigeon’s elegiac coo, the branch’s snap. All revisited him when he least expected it. Throughout his life, this dangling man haunted him.
He remembered, upon return from their ill-fated trip, his father fretting, unable to settle to any task. For he bore not only his own distress, but also his son’s. He was picturing, he knew now, how his ex-wife would view events, how he would be culpable. And he wept. He had never heard him cry before. Sobs racked the man.
It was not until years later that his father talked again about that day: the tumble from the tree, the loosening of the noose from around the man’s neck, the lolling tongue that mocked him. He never discovered any more about the man’s life, the parade of degradations that had twisted him into his own hangman.
He now felt better able to empathise with his father’s behaviour.
He had his own boy’s hair to ruffle: a shifty kid he saw on alternate weekends.
He hoped that death did not lie in wait for him.
Stuart Snelson
Stuart Snelson’s stories have appeared in 3:AM, Ambit, Bare Fiction, The Bohemyth, HOAX, Lighthouse, Popshot and Structo, among others. He has been twice-nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Links to previous stories can be found at stuartsnelson.wordpress.com. He lives in London where he is currently working on his second novel. He can be found on Twitter @stuartsnelson