It doesn’t take long to get there. It isn’t far. Everyone knows of the place, but there are superstitious people in camp and so very few will wander into an area ruled so obviously by bad mojo. “You’re a braver man than I’ll ever be,” old Nick says to him on the morning before he departs for this month’s harvest. “Spooks live in those parks—you can hear ‘em, whisperin’ like ghoulies just where that old plant rusts into the river.” Old Nick is one of the campsite mascots, an old man who remembers much of the time before and how the Evacuations have turned the city back into something he can live with. “I grew up without all of that internet stuff, all of that gizmo-life you younger ones were so fascinated with. We had to go out and do stuff if we wanted it done, we couldn’t just sit in front of a typewriter attached to a television and type code. This is what the world was like…all ‘cept for that damn snow. What the hell is that stuff anyway? Somethin’ the Spooks made, I’ll wager.” And the snow is everywhere now. It is warm. It sizzles and pops and turns into steam when you touch it. There are people in camp, Alex foremost among them, who will walk for miles through it with naked feet, savoring the odd sensation of snow popping and fizzing and breaking into sweet-scented steam. He likes the way it tickles between his toes and breaths up his pants legs. Of course, it isn’t snow, but that’s what everyone calls it. It falls like snow, from unctuous, gray clouds. Children play in it—and some adults too, if Alex is any indication. But now, his mind is on the mushrooms, and this week’s harvest. The ‘shrooms are as strange as they snow. No one knows their breed. They’re the size of a large man’s hand and the color of raw liver. Dry them and they induce visions; boil them and they melt into sticky sap that kills head-lice and crabs. Alex is no mycologist, but he recognizes the value of such fungus—or at least the value of scalp and crotch that won’t go itchy after contact with the wrong person. And so with fizzy, sticky shifted snow blown into drifts along the river, he picks his way to the mushroom fields. His backpack is light. Empty. Devoid of the possessions he once crammed into it. He has a home now, and so his wanderer’s ways lie behind him. All because of a stranger in an abandoned building, a stranger who shared his sleeping bag and flask of gin…all because of some nameless nice guy with crooked teeth and a quiet way of accepting the Event in all of its strangeness. He thinks of that stranger now, and of the way he simply left the guy sleeping in that abandoned building, the gift of a map folded in the part of the sleeping bag he’d just left. He has no idea of where the stranger has gone. He has no idea if the stranger is still alive, but it doesn’t matter. Life goes on. He has a new life now, and a new use for his backpack, and by nightfall, he will have harvested enough fungus to sell and to keep himself comfortable. Now, that is all that matters. *** I had no idea where to post this, which is why it's under the Photomanipulation Genre tag. It is a manipulation in that the character is an import, wedged between a vast number of layers. The main image itself is a picture I took while Corey and I wandered along the North Branch of the Chicago River, near a pumping station that'll undoubtedly appear later on. As always, Thank You for viewing and reading and commenting, and I hope you've enjoyed yet another look into a skewed world where a wanderer seems to spend a lot of time walking around in the same outfit that never seems to get dirty or worn out.