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MYCELIANS LOVE PRUNES and live under beds, that’s what the book Mycelian Facts and Falsehoods claimed. I placed a plate of prunes on the floor and waited. I was old—eighty-eight—to believe in monsters under the bed, and that’s probably the reason my family put me in here. ‘Here’ is the claustrophobic room in Mountain View, a hospital for the elderly.
The reason I wanted to catch a Mycelian was because they could transport me to a better place. The book said that, too.
I heard three coins drop into the vending machine outside, and a can clatter into the bin. I scrambled to my window to see what they got. As the person passed, I strained to look, but I couldn’t see.
“What did you get?” I yelled. “What did you get, let me see!”
A middle-aged man turned, held up a can of cola, and kept walking.
“Cola . . .” I said. I flipped through the book, full of brightly-colored pictures of the Mycelian and Mycelia, to see if they liked cola. It didn’t say whether they did or not.
When I looked at the plate, the prunes were gone.
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DR. CARTHIAN FINISHED applying her red lipstick, placed the tube back in her purse and pulled the zipper shut. She looked up at me.
“Mycelians?” She said. “What are Mycelians?”
I didn’t like her. She showed no compassion, no understanding. I sat in a hard, plastic chair. This was my weekly therapy session.
“They live under my bed,” I said quietly, looking at my hands in a lap that had become frail over the past months.
“Where did you hear about them?” She jotted notes on a yellow pad.
“In a book,” I said.
“What book?” She asked.
I met her eyes, a piercing, icy blue. I told her the title of my beloved book.
“The children’s book?” She said with a scowl. She rolled her eyes and continued writing.
When we were finished, I heard her say to someone, “remove the books from room 19.”
When I got back to my room, the book was gone. I sat on my bed and cried.
A moment later, there was a tug on my sleeve. I looked down into the eye of a female Mycelian! I knew she was female because of her three long eyelashes on her one large, blue, saucer-like eye. She still held my sleeve in her long fingers. Her little pink lips formed a smile as she handed me the book. She gripped my hand and pulled at it. I got up from the bed.
The Mycelian stood to my knee and wore a mushroom-shaped hat over her long, golden hair that trailed down her back, nearly to the floor. Her cat-like tail lashed as she pointed underneath the bed.
“Am I to go under there?” I asked.
She nodded, fluttering her dragonfly wings. She swept a hand over her eye, indicating that I was to close my own.
I lay on my back and slid under the bed, eyes closed. When I opened them, I was in a mystical land, full of color, like the pictures of the book. Rolling green hills dappled with colorful flowers, sparkling ponds full of rainbow-colored fish, a blue sky with white, cotton candy clouds. Mycelians danced and ran around giggling. I saw people I hadn’t seen in years, thought to be dead; friends from my past.
We joined hands and danced in a circle, reveling in the greatness of Mycelia!
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THE NURSE PAUSED IN the doorway. She turned and rushed down the hall to Dr. Carthian’s office.
“The tenant of room 19 is dead,” she told him.
