Free The Long Dry by Cynan Jones

start to die.
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the Mushroom
    Some of the bluebells will still be out.
    Emmy will go into the woods with Zebra to play and she will find a beautiful white mushroom, come up after therain. It looks to her like the dove that came. She will sit Zebra down, with the fairies around her, and have lunch off the table of a fallen tree. This is a secret place of hers.
    She will think that she should not eat the mushroom, but she loves mushrooms very much and it is white like the ones in the field. It will taste different though, sweet like it smells and bitter all at once, and she will stop eating the mushroom and feel bad for picking it, so she will hide it, because it was such a beautiful thing before she picked it, like spoiling a flower.
    The mushroom will be as big as her hand across, and shaped like the floppy felt hat one of her dolls wears, but shiny – like waxed paper. Its stem will look sort of shaggy (she will think, like the skin by Daddy’s nails, peeling off), and there will be a big bulb at its base, as if it’s in a bag. The white gills and the pure white of the mushroom will be like an angel.
    She will find the mushroom nine days from now. In the night, she will wake up and vomit violently, and will be very thirsty. Like she’s burning. She will call her mother and father. They will sit on her bed and pull up the covers round her and arrange her dolls and talk to Zebra while they touch her gentle head but she will not stop vomiting. Then the diarrhoea will start and she will mess the bed. The diarrhoea will come with great pain and it will feel to her as if someone is pulling her stomach with a huge, uncareful hand.
    She will move into her mum and dad’s bed. She will start to sweat hard and in hours she will look pale and haggard. She will look dangerously ill and it will happen very quickly.
    They will call a doctor who will come out and know it’s some sort of poisoning but will tell them that she is over the worst. That children’s bodies react violently to even the little things to keep them safe. That it looks alarming, but it will be okay. He will tell them to try and let her sleep.
    The vomiting won’t stop and by the morning her hands and feet will go ice cold. She will be scared and anxious, like you are in fever, but she won’t tell anyone about the mushroom because it was so long ago.
    In the hospital where they take her because she will not stop trying to be sick and her whole skin will look pellucid and unnatural they will try frantic tests. They will also put a pipe into her stomach through her mouth and pump out the contents of her stomach but by then the poison will be in the other places of her body. Gareth will be sick with worry for her, and will not go to the auction. Then, two days afterwards, she will seem okay.
    They will take her home and she will seem okay and the doctor will say that he was right and that she was just reacting violently to something because she was so little. There’s all sorts of things on farms, he will say. It will seem strange and odd to them that she was so ill. Then violently and unquietly she will die.
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    Amanita virosa is deadly. It’s the amatoxins which kill you, like the Death Cap. The other poisons, called phallotoxins, do nothing serious. Amanita virosa is called Destroying Angel.
    A-amaritin – which is one of the amatoxins – hits the nuclear RNA in the liver cells, causing protein synthesis to stop, so the cells start to die.
    When the poison moves through the kidneys, they try to filter it, but it attacks the convoluted tubules and, instead of entering the urine, it goes back into the blood. So it attacks everything again and again, breaking it down repeatedly and mostly it is better to die then. The little boy she sees comes to talk with her while she is dying, but it is still very bad.
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Chapter Seven
    There is an electric sound of birds.
    The cow slept for a while, or slumbered, chewing the cud of the Timothy grass it had taken from the