TUCKAHOE

TUCKAHOE

"There's a funny kind of toadstool that grows down in the dimmest part of the woods. Tuckahoe, Pa calls them, but Mommas says they aren't like any tuckahoe she's ever seen, and we aren't to eat them under any circumstances. I wouldn't want to anyway, for the sight of them makes my stomach turn somersaults. You never find just one or two, coming up separately around dead wood like regular mushrooms. These tuckahoe like to grow from the heart of a living tree, a hundred or more together in a slippery, gray clump, like overgrown frogs' eggs."

"It couldn't be a tuckahoe, because it was too big, big as a man. Besides that, it was moving, and darn fast, too. Tuckahoe couldn't move by itself, not that I ever heard anyway."

"'Pa', I said, 'I think you should know I saw some kind of strange thing crawling around out here last night, looked like one of those tuckahoe clumps, only almost as big as you are.'"

"There's a crack between the door and the ground, a couple inches maybe. And through that crack came a mess of gray, wet-looking tuckahoe."

Nancy Etchemendy, The Tuckahoe

This one was fun but a bit of a challenge because it's well worn territory. I love drawing fungus humans but I've done it before. I had to figure out a way to make this interesting but different than the others. I liked the concept of these being clumps of small mushrooms and I added "gills" to the neck area. 

I had a lot of fun imagining the creepiest guy I could, skittering through the woods on all fours....but as a mushroom.

This was first published in the anthology Shadows 8 edited by Charles L. Grant with a cover by Margo Herr and then again in Nancy Etchemendy's short story collection Cat In Glass with a cover by David Ouimet.

Tomorrow's creature is a truly bizarre weirdo that was a bit more of a challenge to draw.