The Death Wish

Muthild Shank is lying flat on her back. She has foraged some Slimy Cortinarius, some Velvet Shanks, and some Herald-of-winter. The basket of mushrooms is on the floor beside the head-end of her bed. She is thoughtful, mulling over the mushrooms’ suggestive names. Muthild Shank is especially taken with Velvet Shank. She pushes its soft shank into her tummy button, wraps its little hat round her earlobe, then eats it raw, and waits for the high. But it won’t happen with this mushroom—a harmless, velvety-shanked sort of chap who’s eager to be popped in a casserole or a frying pan, the end result of which definitely won’t be hallucinatory. So Muthild Shank tries the slimy one typical of the Brandenburg heathlands. When she rubs it dry on her pubic mound, the slime has the fateful effect of stirring up the Reason For Her Death Wish. One by one she squeezes the mushrooms beneath her armpit till a little pile of mush has accumulated, from which liquid is seeping. She slurps this up, then turns onto her stomach and sticks her tongue into the fungal pulp. Not bad: a bit like bread with almond butter. On her back once again, Muthild Shank waits for the high, but it refuses to come because the cortinarius, like the Velvet Shank, isn’t a total villain: he’s just an unctuous little slimeball, the sort you come across everywhere. What next? Muthild Shank crushes the Herald-of-winter mushroom firmly between her bare left foot and right calf, smears the mulch over her ankles, then dozes off into two concurrently unfolding dreams. She flips back and forth between the two, swayed by the adventures of one scenario and the disappointments of the other, unsure as to which one she might best develop to a happy ending—and wakes up seven hours later confident in the belief that she is now dead. She gets herself up to make coffee. The morning is no different from any when she was alive, with the sun gracefully rising beyond the window and Muthild Shank scrabbling about for her travel pass. In former times, she used to work in a hat factory, steaming felt and forming it into head-sized hemispheres, trimming brims and inserting feathers into silk-look acetate bands, sewing rhinestones onto the finer hats, or affixing tulle veils beneath which brides and widows could hide their joys and sorrows. She had qualified as a milliner and paraded through her provincial existence adorned with a variety of hats until the day her factory got incorporated into one of these “Industrial Park” affairs and she was offered retraining as a saleswoman. She had acquiesced. The days of all those old hats in her cupboard were over. Five days a week she had travelled to the nearest big town for a training course. Which is where she met, one day, the Reason For Her Death Wish, a classic model of middle-aged man: big-boned while somewhat on the short side. Head hunched and in a hurry, he was walking past the bakery just as Muthild Shank was in the middle of buying a sandwich for the training course’s lunch break. But now she swiftly grabbed her change and, leaving the baker’s wife holding the bagged-up bread-bun, followed the male who was to be the Reason For Her Death Wish to the job centre. She sat next to him (which he didn’t even register), and bided her time until, looking flushed, he re-emerged from the room into which he’d been sent, stumbled, fell over with a bang, and just lay there. Muthild Shank knew this was her chance. She ran to the toilet, soaked her clean hanky, and within moments was pressing it on the swollen forehead of the eventual Reason For Her Death Wish. The Classic Male came to, having been briefly unawares; a sign, Muthild Shank instantly surmised, of a more profound lack of awareness. He wrapped his short arms around Muthild’s shoulders to pull himself to his feet. During this process, his jacket’s buttons got tangled with her coat’s five buttons so that he was unable to draw back from Muthild’s breasts. Disengaging the buttons took a while, so she was obliged to remain in this position for some time. Muthild Shank stared into the heavy-lidded, rather small male eyes and saw, deep within, imprinted on their retinas, delusions and hurts and a lostness, none of which were strangers to her, and which made her take by the hand the eventual cause of her Death Wish and lead him to the local train, by which means, without a word passing between them, they arrived in Muthild’s little town. They raced up the stairs to the flat and fell all over each other, not pausing even then to exchange words. Muthild Shank remembers it to this day, even now when she’s dead and gone (as she believes), and busy searching her pockets for her travel pass. She’s intent on going to the big town one more time to seek out the now erstwhile Reason For Her Death Wish and see how he’ll take the news that, with the help of some little mushrooms from the local heath, she has done away with herself. But she can’t find her travel pass. The pockets of her coat and jacket offer Muthild Shank some breadcrumbs and a penknife, two snotty cotton handkerchiefs, a few paper clips with which, when alive, she’d poked out her earwax, five letters written by the Classic Male back in the good times, and some long-since shrivelled mushrooms. She decides to travel without a ticket. After all, she’s dead now; no one will notice her (or miss her either, for that matter). Now she’s dead she can brazenly travel without a ticket. I can have a field day, Muthild Shank tells herself, but feels so guilty about this she starts to cry. For the first time since being deceased, she is shocked: she is still being brought to tears, though she’d promised herself that death would free her of every trial and tribulation. The greatest of these tribulations had been that the Classic Male refused, month after month, to provide Muthild Shank with grounds for the maternity leave for which she’d longed for many years, yearning for it far more than just any old annual leave with a trip to some exotic country. Muthild starts wailing and screaming—after all, no one can hear her. It had been high time she went on maternity leave. She was already gone forty when she hopelessly fell for the eventual Reason For Her Death Wish, but there might still have been the chance of a child, big-boned while somewhat on the short side, with a nice head on which to place the most exotic of the hats. The eventual Reason For Her Death Wish had never really understood what had aroused Muthild Shank so extremely when they met. He smelled of mouse, the same as his musty apartment which he shared with an elderly widow. Sometimes he even smelled of the elderly widow, which only seemed to arouse Muthild more. And he had no money, a fact which was not going to change, however many times he went to the job centre. By contrast, Muthild Shank seemed to him to be settled into a well-ordered life: she was retraining; she sometimes wore really fabulous hats, which certainly took a lot of courage, and she never smelled of mouse or elderly widow. She was certainly a bit younger than him. He could never have imagined she might have such a low opinion of herself. So, what did she see in him, wondered the man whom Muthild had once (due to his stubborn refusal to converse) referred to as Werner and had then stuck with it. Yet Muthild Shank didn’t have Werner down as the Reason For Her Death Wish for quite a while longer; she was busy contorting her body against, on top of, and underneath him in the hope of fulfilling her wish. But it didn’t happen. It was only as the evenings and nights went relentlessly by, never bearing fruit, that she became more and more miserable, sometimes not opening her door, and then not opening it as a rule. On one of these days, the barren Classic Male broke down in tears, and from then on stayed away. Feeling the onset of the menopause, Muthild Shank took the decision to collect mushrooms. And she is now aware of the basket beside the head-end of her bed, and now aware she’s been dead a while, and she’d like to go and give the Reason For Her Death Wish an explanation. Putting on a fragrant feather hat that she never actually dared to wear in her lifetime, she parades to the station and gets onto the nine o’clock train to the nearest big (though not really all that big) town. The Reason For Her Death Wish gets onto the train right on her heels, because for the whole of that long night he has slept, like many other nights too, in the entrance to her building, so he is now in hot pursuit, wanting to get her back. Back to life, thinks Muthild Shank. Back underneath me, thinks the erstwhile Reason For Her Death Wish, and he flings the dead Muthild onto the leatherette bench, the full length of him on top of her, and if she hadn’t been dead, Muthild thinks, it might even have happened. Do you have to die first to make a man give a thought to the future? Muthild is bitter. The ticket inspector walks by. He can’t see me, thinks Muthild, who is now forced to accept that Werner has come over to her by dying himself. How else could they have been united? She now starts to really enjoy being dead. Some time later, she puzzles a little over why they’re not removing her from the flat, into which (at last) the dead Werner also moves. Why isn’t she being laid to rest in a cheap coffin beside the erstwhile Reason For Her Death Wish? Be that as it may, Muthild is soon busy with skirt and trouser alterations, having gone back to the training centre, where everyone behaves as if she is still alive. Evidently that’s how she comes across, so she lets it pass. In death she enjoys frying the Slimy Cortinarius and Velvet Shanks in butter, seeing as they now hold no danger whatsoever. And eventually she gives birth to a child, big-boned while somewhat on the short side, and has a wonderful maternity leave, and takes pleasant walks with the erstwhile Reason For Her Death Wish. If I were still alive, she thinks, none of this would have happened. And she reaches to caress a mushroom beside the path, her own head caressed by the bobbing feathers of her enormous hat.