Lucy found a blueprint labeled “Secret Justice Fungi Room” hidden under bits of crumbling ivory in the tower basement, behind the urinal she perched over because the women’s restrooms had been closed for cleaning since 1993. She had come to dig through long-abandoned boxes of personnel reports on her quixotic quest to digitize the past when nature sent her a 9-1-1 page. As she debated whether to use the urinal facing toward or away from it, she lightly rested her hands on it, and the urinal simply fainted dead away from the wall like a gothic southern heroine who had always relied on the kindness of strangers. As Hephaestus was its witness, it could take no more.
And thus did the urinal reveal its unknown treasure: a hidden file cabinet behind a thin plaster wall. Lucy’s tender archivist heart trilled in her breast.
She gently sighed and the rest of the wall fell down at her feet. The file cabinet’s rust gleamed in the fluorescent flickers. The first drawer: locked. The second drawer: home to the past souls of a dearly departed mouse family, for whom she said a small prayer to any listening gods. The third drawer: the blueprint.
The blueprint was drawn on parchment thin as onion vellum and decorated with mildew in the shape of hyacinths. Underneath the title, in feminine script with hearts over every “i”, it read: “You’d be so pretty if you smiled.”
Lucy frowned, which was actually just her natural resting face.
Her bladder politely requested her attention once more. She took care of business, apologized to the fallen urinal, and decided that “archivist” sounded close enough to “architect” and “archaeologist” and therefore began her Investigation.
Clutching her weapons of choice (clipboard, pen, neon pink paperclip), she tiptoed through the hallways, around bends, over abandoned cubicles, and past fraying motivational posters until she reached the promised land: a custodial closet. She tapped three times on the door in case any ghosts needed to throw on a bathrobe, then jimmied open the lock with her library card. (She would have used her credit card, but it was a bit overwrought with her recent mod pod splurge and required recuperation time. The paperclip seemed a bit perturbed at being left out of the lockpicking process, but she reminded it that they were new acquaintances, whereas she and the library card had a shelf’s worth of history.)
The door groaned in protest as she gently pushed it open. It had been sleeping for a decade—maybe longer—and who was this upstart archivist-architect-archaeologist to disturb its slumber? Lucy had no time for the door’s moans of complaint, for her eyes demanded the entirety of her cognitive capacity to make sense of what they beheld. Or rather, to not make sense of it, for there was no sense to it.
The moss-covered walls glowed their faint greeting as she stepped forward, her feet sinking slightly onto the fungal carpet. A shimmering lattice of bioluminescent mycelium strands wove their threads across every surface. Lucy could hear their electric pulses scrawl patterns on her amygdala, trip daintily over her hippocampus, and come to rest with a sigh in a deep corner of her cerebellum. Also, her teeth buzzed a little.
She touched the wall and a small mycelium thread laced itself around her pinky finger for a moment. It left no mark, but her pinky finger had never felt more loved.
And there, in the center of the room: a delicate, three-foot-tall mushroom with a stalk the color of clean cotton. Its cap was the blue of the sky on the day she’d picked and eaten the most perfect peach on her grandmother’s farm. Lucy’s body thrummed in memory as the mushroom, Mycena interrupta, introduced itself and beckoned her to sit beside it and read it a story.
So she pulled a file from her clipboard and read it the story of Gary, who in 1987 told his supervisor, a fiercely capable manager despite her uterus and ovaries, to make him a coffee. The mushroom glowed in delight as it absorbed the words from the page. To her surprise, the mycelium webs on the opposite wall began to dance, slowly spelling the letters: G-A-R-Y. Lucy felt waves of serotonin curl and sway from her eyebrows to her anklebones.
Somewhere in the world, Lucy felt a Gary sneeze. She felt it in her tibia, right where she’d kicked Micah after he tried to look down her shirt on the playground in third grade.
Mycena leaned an inch closer to Lucy as if to ask, “More?”
Lucy then read the story of Jeremy, who’d offered to put his coworker Amanda’s name first on the white paper she’d stayed up all night writing if she gave him a blowjob. The letters J-E-R-E-M-Y waltzed dreamily on the ceiling overhead, and Lucy heard the dulcet echo of Jeremy’s explosive expulsion of flatulence in the middle of his career-defining conference presentation. She felt the embarrassment sear its brand across his face, but to Lucy, it felt like the last rays of sunset on a coral-pink beach.
Like raindrops down her spine, the Mycena poured its love into Lucy, who read it story after story. Eventually, she ran out of papers, all the words siphoned away to feed the glowing fungi. Then, Lucy whispered her own story. At this, the mycelium threads wove themselves into a blanket across her lap, braiding their strands into her hair. They promised they would remember—and so would he. They would make sure of it.
At last, Lucy had to leave. She kissed the Mycena on its cerulean crown and it kissed her back on her soul, where the rip had been but was no more. She wound her way back past the motivational posters, over the forgotten vales of cubicles, around the bends and through ancient hallways, back to the crumbling ivory and the fallen urinal.
Later that week, as Jacenia whispered her confession in the last working women’s restroom (“I didn’t think I was leading him on,” she gulped as she quietly cried onto the university toilet paper), Lucy hugged her…then quietly slipped the blueprint into Jacenia’s arms.