The Mushroom Wars

Chapter 4

What is a prison?

In the abstract, obviously, it's some place where your freedoms are stripped away while you wait for some group of strangers to decide whether you really ought to be in a worse place.

The trouble comes in the stripping away of freedoms. There are no freedoms left to take from someone already shackled by the constant fear of death. For them, the crush of chains is a comfort.

And so it was for me.

In the abstract, I understood that I was in a prison. I understood that the lock and the bed and the walls were supposed to be punishment. It's just that they were undercut by all the luxury.

Even added all together though, they'd at best strip me of the freedom to shit in the hole of my choosing. An important freedom to be sure, but not one I held in especially high regard. Especially when this particular shitting hole came with food, water, and medicine.

Nobody ever cared so much about keeping me alive as when I was a prisoner.

So, in the abstract, I was in prison.

Concretely though, I was waking up in a person-sized sling of cloth suspended from two posts stuck into the wall. The cloth was brown and woven as coarse as my old clothing. It was scratchy - like sleeping in the wrong kind of moss.

The room was built of tree roots growing in dense sheets. Wooden molding drew crisp edges around the roots - trained them to grow into doors and walls and windows. The floor was made of packed earth so flat and clean that it was an even worse bed than the cloth sling.

It was lit with two white LED lamps, like portholes in the ceiling.

There was no telling how long I had been out. The past days were an unending trance of light and dark and sleep and food. It was night now, and a sliver of moon smiled at me through the window above my bed.

Also, I was still naked.

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The door to my room opened. It was built of roots growing with gaps like iron bars.

A woman backed in carrying a gourd and two satchels of banana leaves. Her skin was the color of dry autumn leaves - overtones of gold and brown and red - with a trim of pastel pink around her lips and fingers and neck and whatever other soft skin was showing.

She had a body like driftwood. Smooth, taut, and unyielding with shallow curves running up and down the length of her. Her hair was a straight kind of dappled, dirty blond the same color as the arid plains of the Open Wastes.

She closed the door, I yawned, and she jumped. She turned to stare at me and I saw angry, red spots in the whites of her hazel eyes. They looked incredibly painful, and I just gawked at her for a moment while my mind tried to understand what would compel someone to take on a burden like that.

"You're awake." She didn't sound happy about it.

"Debatable" I mumbled as I stretched out. I felt small puncture wounds peppering my body, and the skin across my chest and shoulders was raw.

"You can feed yourself then." She tossed the satchels onto my bed.

"How long have I been out?"

"Three days." She placed the gourd on the ground next to the shitting hole and turned to leave.

I chuckled. "Figured you would have eaten me by now." I grabbed one of the satchels and it was warm. Prison indeed.

She whipped around. "Nobody is going to eat you." There was venom in her eyes, but it rolled off me like rain. It wasn't half as bad as the eyes I'd seen out in the Open Wastes. "We're going to mix you with our chicken shit and feed you to the mushrooms. The only reason we haven't yet is because you were too pathetic to kill." Her rage was blind and fierce like a child's. Too self-righteous to take personally or seriously.