{Originally shared as an entry to the Whimsy Sisters #spookywhimsies story contest in October 2022}
A witch went foraging for bolete mushrooms one balmy afternoon after a rainstorm. She frolicked through the red fescue, trailing yellow skirts stained with the muddy earth, her leather pouch bouncing on the belt at her waist. Sweat glistened on her forehead and her smile glowed right off her face.
Once she broached the glen, the light went dim and shadows played tricks on her eyes as she searched the wet ground for signs of any porcini. She bent beside a redwood to peep into the witch-sized hole in its trunk, hoping for a bolete cache… when suddenly, a yellow blobby forest spirit sprang from the hole, scurried over a gigantic tree root and disappeared, leaving a cloud of tiny purple spores in its wake.
The witch reeled as the spores filled her nostrils, her vision blurring… then going dark… at last her gaze filled with pinprick stars. She wondered if she had died. She wondered if she was still on the way to unconsciousness…
She realized she was floating through space.
A quick glance around revealed that her body was totally in tact and unchanged in any way - except that it would seem she was somehow transported by that mushroom dust to a distant galaxy where she was now disconcertingly untethered, floating, in deep black nothing.
She felt utterly bereft. She feared she had stupidly stumbled into her own astral banishment and would never again emerge fresh from the forest and lousy with porcini. She fretted she would never get to simmer them in butter before serving them to her friends with just a sprinkle of parsley. For a moment it felt as if the breath had been torn from her chest…
And yet she was in fact breathing normally, no spacesuit to speak of! Come to think of it, those blobby forest spirits are known for some pretty fancy parlor tricks. She resolved to try to end the hallucination with a chant:
“Sky above. Earth below. Fire within.”
She repeated the words and repeated them, over and over until she felt dizzy. Finally, the starry blackness appeared to be ripped from her vision like a table cloth off of a table, revealing the canopy of the good old redwood forest where she made her home.
“Sky above. Earth below. Fire aaaaaants FIRE ANTS!!!”
She abruptly stopped her chanting and leapt off the ground beside the redwood hole, realizing in a whole new wave of terror that red ants were gnawing at her ankles and neck as she lay paralyzed by the forest spirit spores. With no time left for frolicking, the witch sprinted to the pond she knew nearby, shrugged her dress off at the pond’s edge like it was aflame, and still shrieking, dove in.