Eating Jimmies in the Woods with Cori

[Original; Dramatics]

There’s a little orange tree fungus, or cascade of little orange tree fungi, most prominent in the winters of Vermont — fixed in wooded patches riding the base of the Green Mountains, it could be one of two dehisces. Witch’s butter, a medicinal [ see: edible ] jelly-like fungus said to improve respiratory health and attack parasitic tree fungi, or, an especially vivid case of beech bark disease. The Audubons I had been equipped with at the time, Field guide to New England and Field guide to Trees, barely scraped over winter fungus — and at this point, I’d studied beech trees plenty via verbal on-site education, and the scrap line on mortal disease readily slid off me. Beech trees were healthy! That was easy enough. Come mid-December, the temperatures dipped off to the P.O.N.R. and it could’ve been the raw skin sores where my lips used to reside or the borderline hyperthermia after washing my armpits out of a steel-cold water bucket, but everything reached a heightened state of comedy and delusion, and there was this sudden interest in rubbing charcoals into my waterline for the infected beauty of it, and also to eat bright orange mushrooms. It was less so an act of keeping the party going, but a loaded hesitation with chest full saying Hey, what’s next, what’s next? Cori got the biggest kick out of this, all in theory. A few days of bets and dares all ending with the consumption of the ‘ jimmies .’ It was a kick flip off the North-Eastern use of the word for chocolate sprinkles, it came as naturally as the pathogen. Early in the morning, Cori was going for dry sticks and leaves, I swapped the ice-cracking duty and a new bet arose; crack one edge of creek and walk across the other, a see saw. I can be very persuasive, I say to winter woods mirages as I collect sticks in the crook of my arm. Cori falls shin-deep in the creek, the water filter is off ripping downstream on a jagged and steepening decline, Cori’s panting with their hand to their chest staring up at me with city goose eyes, a little sexy and Scorpio and secretive, also violent and with the air of having experienced every human war — of course they’d have to eat a Jimmy, we both knew it the instant the bet had been laid, they’d just have to suck it up and eat the damn Jimmy. Cori was the type of person to eat a cricket or tree bark but pull the cheese and olives off a pizza to eat the crust plain because it was all ‘too chewy’ before. Cori aspired to write YA novels and live forever, but die rich. Cori wasn’t so much a friend as an actualized incarnation of the dog/man relationship in To Build a Fire, I equated it to survival lust or natural woodland hallucinogens. The cold brings you incredibly closer to untethered bliss, and incandescent drunkenness. If my fingers and toes fell off, they would stay only until I blacked out, and for that I found great respect to flow with nature. Down the hatch, Jimmy and tree bark [ every perfect bite needs a good crunch ]. We may’ve waited a while to see if they’d trip or die or fall asleep. They stared up the length of a hill and I watched over my shoulder here and again, waiting for them to say something. Maybe it had a strange aftertaste. Maybe they made it so that Cori couldn’t talk, their tongue was all swollen. Maybe they were seeing their dead relatives, Hell, maybe they were seeing the pulse of the damn Earth and I now have to eat the Jimmies, too. We’re eating Jimmies from a shared palm and watching the hill, watching the wind fall through the trees and brush past the lighter, powdery snow at our sides. We said nothing for a while, then talked about boats and sex with no consent and dead relatives and the Earth bending, and breathing.

>>>> Published in SOFT Quarterly issue no. 4, 2021.

Art ;

Affable Astronomies, Jack Breakfast 2021

8x10, oil paint

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