Leave It Alone

Two kids, a familiar patch of woods, and a small cluster of mushrooms neither of them ended up touching

The woods behind the Millers' fence weren't really woods, not the deep kind, just a wide stand of trees that ran between two backyards and came out the other side by the creek. Owen and Beckett had been cutting through it all summer, ever since Beckett's family moved in three houses down, and by now they knew which fallen log made the best balance beam and which one had the wasp nest you didn't want to find twice.

It was late afternoon, the sun low enough that it came through the leaves in long gold strips instead of straight down, lighting up the dust and the gnats hanging in the air like the whole woods had been sprinkled with something. The ground was still damp from the rain two days back, soft under their sneakers, and it smelled the way it always smelled after rain — dirt and old leaves and something green underneath that.

They'd stopped at the big maple to check on the fort they were half-building out of branches when Owen noticed them first. A cluster of mushrooms, maybe six or seven of them, growing right up out of the leaf litter at the base of the tree, tucked in against a root the way things always seemed to grow there. They were a soft brownish-tan, caps like little umbrellas, some of them still curled up tight and some already opened flat, and they looked, honestly, kind of cool. Like something from a book.

"Whoa," Owen said, already crouching down, already reaching. "Look how many there are."

"Wait — don't." Beckett said it fast, the way you'd say it if a car was coming, though nothing here was moving at all. Owen froze with his hand still out, more startled by Beckett's voice than anything.

"Don't what? I'm not gonna eat it."

"Just — don't touch it. Not till a grown-up's here."

Owen sat back on his heels and looked at him. "Why not? It's just a mushroom."

Beckett didn't answer right away. He was still looking at the cluster himself, at the way the caps overlapped each other, the pale gills underneath the one that had tipped over on its side. His dad went out foraging almost every weekend he could, dragging home paper bags of stuff that all looked more or less the same to Beckett — brown, bumpy, forest-colored — until his dad laid it all out on the kitchen counter and started pointing things out that Beckett had never noticed were different. The gills. The way the stem attached. Whether it grew out of wood or out of the ground. His dad knew hundreds of these things apart on sight, easy, the way Beckett could tell his own friends apart in a crowded hallway.

Beckett looked at this cluster and, for a second, thought maybe he recognized it. Something about the shape reminded him of a picture in one of his dad's books. But the second he tried to actually be sure, the confidence went soft on him, the way it does when you say a word out loud too many times and it stops sounding like a real word. He didn't actually know. He just thought he might, and thinking he might wasn't the same thing at all — his dad had told him that plenty of times, usually while pointing at two mushrooms that looked exactly alike to Beckett and weren't alike at all.

"I don't know what it is," Beckett said finally, and saying it out loud made it feel more true, not less. "Like — I thought maybe I did for a second. But I don't. Not for sure."

"So?" Owen still had his hand hovering there, not touching anything, just waiting. "It's probably fine."

"Probably isn't the same as knowing." Beckett said it slow, working it out as he said it. "My dad's got this thing he says. When you're not sure — you just leave it. Don't guess. Just leave it alone and go find someone who actually knows."

Owen thought about that for a second, glancing back down at the mushrooms like they might answer for themselves. They didn't do anything, obviously. Just sat there in the light, looking exactly as harmless as they had a minute ago, which didn't actually mean anything either way, and Beckett knew that better than Owen did.

"Okay," Owen said, and pulled his hand back, wiping it on his shorts even though he hadn't touched anything. "So we just — leave them?"

"Yeah. We leave them."

Owen stood up first, and Beckett followed, and for a second they both just looked down at the little cluster one more time, gold light striping across the caps, nothing about them changed at all by two kids almost picking them up and then deciding not to. Owen kicked at a loose branch nearby, already thinking about the fort again.

"You could ask your dad about it later. Show him where it is."

"Maybe." Beckett shrugged, already turning back toward the trail. "It'll probably still be here."

They walked on, back toward the fort and the balance-beam log and the wasp nest they knew to avoid, and the mushrooms stayed exactly where they'd been growing, untouched, waiting for someone who'd actually know.