a mountain lion or sliding off a ravine.
It lives in the cemetery.
Right, it was definitely right. The buzzing was also toward the right. Bees or wasps. Well, what if there were bees? It wasn’t as if they’d sting her. She wasn’t going to paw at their hive to get honey.
The sound, though. It was unpleasant. It made her want to go in the opposite direction. Buzzing. Maybe it was flies. Flies as green as emeralds, their fat bodies atop a piece of carrion. Meat, red and raw, and really, why must she think these things? Why must she stand like this, with a hand in her pocket and her eyes wide, anxiously listening…
You must look in the cemetery.
Left, go left. Toward that mist, which seemed even thicker there, thick as gruel.
There came the crunching of a twig under a shoe and a voice, pleasant and warm in the coldness of the cemetery.
“Out for a stroll?” Francis asked.
He wore a gray turtleneck and a navy coat and a matching navy cap. A basket dangled from his right arm. He always seemed rather insubstantial to Noemí, but now, in the mist, he appeared perfectly solid and real. It was exactly what she needed.
“Oh, I could kiss you, I’m so happy to see you,” she said merrily.
He blushed as red as a pomegranate, which was not becoming and was also, frankly, a little funny because he was a bit older than her, a man made. If anyone should play the bashful maid, it should be her. Then again she supposed there weren’t many young women fawning over Francis in this place.
She figured if she ever got him to a party in Mexico City he would be utterly thrilled or petrified, only one of two extremes.
“I’m not sure I’ve done anything to deserve that,” he said, half mumbling the words.
“You deserve it. I can’t seem to figure out where is what in this mist. I was thinking I’d have to spin around and hope there wasn’t a gully nearby and I’d go tumbling right into it. Can you see anything? And do you know the location of the cemetery gates?”
“Of course I know it,” he said. “It’s not that hard if you look down. There’re all kinds of visual markers to guide you.”
“It feels like having a veil thrust over your eyes,” she declared. “I also fear there are bees nearby and they might sting me. I heard a buzzing.”
He glanced down, nodding, looking at his basket. Now that he was with her, she had regained her levity, and she peered curiously at him.
“What do you have there?” she asked, pointing at the basket.
“I’ve been collecting mushrooms.”
“Mushrooms? At a cemetery?”
“Sure. They’re all around.”
“As long as you don’t plan to make them into a salad,” she said.
“What would be wrong about that?”
“Only the thought of them growing over dead things!”
“But then mushrooms always grow over dead things in a way.”
“I can’t believe you are strolling around in this fog hunting for mushrooms growing on graves. It sounds grim, like you’re a body snatcher from a nineteenth-century dime novel.”
Catalina would have liked that. Perhaps she’d gone mushroom hunting in the cemetery too. Or else she simply stood in this same spot, smiling wistfully as the wind toyed with her hair. Books, moonlight, melodrama.
“Me?” he asked.
“Yes. I bet you have a skull in there. You’re a character out of Horacio Quiroga’s stories. Let me see.”
He had draped a red handkerchief over the basket, which he removed to allow her to inspect the mushrooms. They were a bright, fleshy orange with intricate folds, soft as velvet. She held a small one between her index finger and her thumb.
“Cantharellus cibarius. They’re quite delicious, and they were not growing in the cemetery, but farther away. I merely cut through here to get back home. Locals call them duraznillos. Smell them.”
Noemí leaned down closer to the basket. “They smell sweet.”
“They’re quite lovely too. There’s an important connection between certain cultures and mushrooms, you know? The Zapotec Indians of your country practiced dentistry by giving people a mushroom which would intoxicate them and serve as an anesthetic. And the Aztecs, they too found mushrooms interesting. They consumed them in order to experience visions.”
“Teonanácatl,” she said. “The flesh of the gods.”
He spoke eagerly. “You know about fungi, then?”
“No, not really: history. I was thinking of becoming a historian before I detoured and settled on anthropology. At least that is the plan now.”
“I see. Well, I’d love to find those little,