“Jin Woo, are you alright?” I asked him, maybe he was feeling ill, but didn’t want to say it aloud.
“I’m fine, I’m just the one who added the mushrooms, they looked similar to the ones that we have been eating, so I figured they were the same,” he looked and sounded stricken.
At that, I wheeled around to Oskar, Oskar who knew better, Oskar who had gone on mushroom hunting expeditions with my godmother and me, who had heard the same warnings about look-alikes that I had.
“Oskar,” I breathed out in panicked disappointment, “why did you eat them?” I asked him in Norwegian.
His eyebrows furrowed, but not with anger.
“When I came back, they were already eating. I didn’t see Jin Woo add the mushrooms; I thought you had. You were always better at mushroom identification than I was. I trusted that you would put safe ones in the soup.”
I fought the urge to scrape the skin off of my face in anticipatory grief.
“You all need to puke. Now! When did you start eating the soup?” I asked, as Oskar swiftly pushed his fingers down his throat.
After a few moments of only the sounds of gagging, I received an answer.
“We started eating the stew about an hour and a half ago but Jin Woo and I,” Ettore said calmly, way less panicked than I would have been in his situation, “have been nibbling on the mushrooms for about two days.”
I picked up the two types of mushrooms and held them to their faces.
“Are you sure that you atethesemushrooms and not orangey ones with orangey stems and heads?” I asked desperately, hoping that while they had eaten some poisonous mushrooms today, the ones that they had been eating over the past couple of days were safe.
Jin Woo dashed my hopes quickly.
“No, we ate the white ones and the brown ones. I am so sorry, I didn’t know that there were dangerous mushrooms in Norway.”
Despair swept in like a rogue wave, even as I fed all of the guys a mix of water and charcoal, as I watched them vomit over and over again. I knew the process of these two mushrooms, the real symptoms started after six hours, and the damage was done after two days. Ettore and Jin Woo were probably in the false spring, the time when people felt better for a few hours before the organ damage truly set in, and death came shortly after. They would have had a shot on the mainland, a slim one, but a shot nonetheless. Here, it wasn’t even useful to hope.
The rest of the day passed by in haze.I made Ettore and Jin Woo rest, I made them drink water, and I hovered, watching their faces for any sign that they were going to begin the rapid decline that signaled the end.
They spoke together, quietly, but urgently in Italian, occasionally glancing at me as I sat, as still as a block of stone, watching them.
“Salvatrice, we’ll be ok if you want to take a walk, or move around,” Ettore coaxed, reaching out a hand.
I flinched away. I didn’t see the hurt in his eyes. Instead, I saw him dead, his skin cold and blue-grey, and it would be my fault. Sure, I hadn’t picked the mushrooms, but I hadn’t warned them either. I should have known that someone would make a mistake like this; I should have known, and I could have prevented it, but I didn’t.
Afternoon stretched into evening, stretched into night, and still they showed no adverse effects. Sitting where I had put them, so close to the fire that it made their damp socks steam, they sweated no more than was usual; they had not vomited since the charcoal, and they didn’t grimace in pain as I thought they would, yet I could feel it coming.
My aunt had told me that some of those who had consumed the deathcap mushrooms seemed almost healthier than before they had eaten the mushrooms, but that those who seemed the most healthy had the most agonizing deaths. Not quite the thing to tell an 11-year-old, but most tweens like a bit of horror. I didn’t like it now, I could see everything slipping away from me, and as I scrambled for some control, my mind was made up.
CRACK-CRECK
The first board peeled off the wall easily enough, and the sound echoed in the shocked silence. I was wedging Oskar’s pocketknife into another board in the wall when a hand rested on mine. Oskar.
“Ginne, what are you doing?” he used that name again, and half of me wanted to melt against him, have him tell me that everything was going to be alright. The other half of me, however, was in control and determined. The second board peeled off, making another harsh sound.
“I refuse to watch them die here. We have to at least try to get them to the mainland for medical care. So, we will construct a raft, and we will try to paddle east, where land should be. Ettore and Jin Woo are the most in danger, but I don’t trust that you and Bartosz are uninjured either, not with the potency of those mushrooms, so we will all go. There’s still too much smoke in the air for a signal bonfire, so we’ll have to go ourselves to the mainland.”
I could hear how I sounded, frantic and rushed, the words tripping off my tongue in a gushing torrent. I sounded mad. I felt mad.
“Ginne, Mina,” Oskar said slowly as if it pained him, “they are going to be fine.”
I tore my hand away from him, thinking that if he wasn’t going to help, I would do it myself!
“You don’t know that, Oskar!” I said sharply, pressing his knife between the boards with the energy of someone stabbing into the heart of an enemy.
There was a pregnant pause.
