Heaven is a Plate on Earth

My husband and I are out on a hunt. With a machete in hand, I cut of three-headed mushrooms that run rampant in this part of the woods like some vegetal fiend. I avoid the ones that have just the wrong tone of white around the stem, or the ones with sticky yellow petals. My husband is on the lookout, his lips pressed on the tip of a whistle to save us from whatever trouble these woods might have to offer. We’ve been hearing stories of animals with growing appetite for human blood, or the stories of crones who live deep in the black belly of the woods like a thing out of children’s tales.

Past a bend of black rocks, my husband warns me of the angle of the sun, saying we better hurry. Throughout the next few hours we are sorely focused on collecting the mushrooms for the week’s preparations ahead and going back home before it gets dark. Dark enough to make you hear things that are better left unsaid. My mother used to warn me as a kid to avoid this place at all costs, day or night. She claims to have lost a younger brother here to an overgrown Venus flytrap with large teeth, but I knew even then that it was probably just another one of her lies.

I’m busy decapitating a yellowed oyster mushroom when I hear a rustle in the bushes behind me. I crane my neck like an animal alerted in the wild. My husband is nowhere to be seen. His whistle juts out of the mud like a bone, next to a faint imprint of E-sized boots. The clouds are like a specter in the early moonlight, blacker than the blackest beast. I feel the earth under my feet thrumming up and down like a heartbeat. If my mother were here with me, I knew she would tell me to close my eyes. She would say, Just breathe. She would say, Do you hear the woods breathing? She would say, Oh no, it’s probably just a growl, oblivious to the cry of a planet rotating hungrily in this big black nothing.

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A writer of Turkish descent, Sarp Sozdinler has been published in Electric Literature, Kenyon Review, Masters Review, DIAGRAM, Normal School, Vestal Review, Hobart, HAD, Maudlin House, and Lost Balloon, among other places. His stories have been selected or nominated for anthologies (Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, Wigleaf Top 50) and granted a finalist spot at various literary contests, including the 2022 Los Angeles Review Flash Fiction Award. He’s currently at work on his first novel in Philadelphia and Amsterdam: http://www.sarpsozdinler.com