Grown Gown

Camera flashes pepper the rainy evening, and Maggie shifts uncomfortably beneath her clear plastic umbrella. While the stars of the movie loiter coquettishly  at the doors, she’s stuck under an overhang trying to keep her dress out of the damn rain.

“You’ll be the clotheshorse for this evening, right?” Rita had asked, not really waiting for Maggie to answer. After all, who wouldn’t want to be seen on the front pages of websites in an experimental mycofibre dress as the face of sustainable fashion?

The rain pours and hangers-on shove her hoping they’d get inside faster. Maggie would claim this one as overtime. Probably.

Once past the cameras, Maggie peers down at the tideline on her grown-gown in dismay, feeling so transparent she was almost invisible. The photographers hadn't asked the right questions; without the explanation, they would just look like shots of  simple 30s-style fishtail gown on a recently-out trans woman that no one had really heard of outside of niche scientific publications.

Other guests and press-pass-havers mill about, clutching flutes of supermarket-quality cava; Maggie makes a bee-line for the toilets, resolutely elbowing open the ladies room.

I’m wearing a dress, she thinks, as an older woman in a hot pink suit gives her a slightly confused look. I belong in here. Stop looking at me, look at the bloody dress.

The cubicles, at least, are empty.

Maggie flops down on the seat and rests her head on the cubicle wall. The soggy edge of her hitched-up dress falls on Maggie's bare arm. It feels more like wet skin than fabric. She takes a steadying breath. Soon she’ll have to go back and explain why she wasn’t in any photos—without making it sound like Rita’s fault for picking the least camera-friendly, outgoing person imaginable in the hopes of grabbing attention by being Inclusive.

Maggie bumps her head on the toilet paper-dispenser. The damp fabric clings to her.

She’s not sure when the walls of the toilet cubicle began to melt, but they hadn’t been this faint, shimmering pool of colours before, more an institutional beige with flecks—on the whole this is an improvement.

The tiny, multi-coloured flecks move and swirl, illuminated by an unseen light source and suspended in some sort of matrix. In between them—Maggie railroads her thoughts—something is sprouting.

Microscopic mushrooms spiral slowly up between the flecks on the wall. Hadn’t she dreamed of this? The night before she wrote the mycofibre formulas? At least, now it feels like she had.

Mug, says one of the tiny mushrooms in a sweet little voice, like a child.

Maggie pushes her finger carefully against the stall partition. It is still, very much, just a wall.

All that work to save the fashion industry from itself and for what? they ask, elongating stems pushing inexorably between and over the flecks, closer to the surface her fingers could not penetrate.

Rita says we’re getting the message out there, Maggie thinks she says, but her mouth doesn’t move. She’s not sure it or her body can. The cubicle throbs gently, endlessly-twining fungi growing and growing along the walls. Tiny splotches on their surface begin to furl upwards, reveal themselves to be other, even smaller mushrooms. These, too, grow, and grow.

She’s using you.

The wet dress stings her arms.

You’re using us but we get proliferation from it. All we want is more of us. What do you get from her using you?

The answer seems to be exhausted and panicky in the toilets of a premiere she doesn’t want to be at, but Maggie can't be blunt, or sarcastic. She’s not sure those options are open to her now.

Her cubicle shakes as knuckles rap on the door.

The mushrooms pulsate and contract. They explain in soft tones that Rita is a crook; they tell Maggie gently she’ll be alright. They spill from the cubicle walls over the floor in an iridescent mycelial tide up her legs, pooling in her lap. All she can do is listen to the way the knocking rolls and thunders, expands to fill all of space and time.

“Excuse me. I was cleaning and—are you okay in there?”

Maggie tries to unpick her tongue from her teeth, realising the cleaner won't communicate psychically like the mushrooms, but still can’t find the words.

“Hello?  I can see your feet.”

Maggie tries to draw her feet up, but it feels like she’s trying to swim through mud. Wherever she looks are trails of the thing she looked at last.

She throws out her arm to steady herself—it peels the wet portion of her dress from her skin.

The toilet cubicle vibrates with another tap.

The walls are still. The dress is dull. The walls are beige and black, and all she can hear is the trickle of water from a running tap, distant voices in the foyer, and the impatient sigh of a cleaner.

Maggie opens her mouth, a little afraid now, giddy, unsettled. Nothing spills out: no spiralling mushrooms, no haze of colours. The trip is over.

“Sorry,” she gasps.

There's a silence.

Maggie holds her breath. I shouldn’t have said anything.

Her voice is a problem.

The cleaner will rush off and get security.

It’s all going to go to shit, and then she’ll have to face Rita as well.

Rita is a crook, comes a murmur. She’s using you.

Yeah, I know, Maggie says to herself, to the mushrooms. But that’s not my problem right now.

“Are you okay?” the cleaner asks. “Do you need me to get someone?”

“Please don’t,” Maggie says hurriedly.

“You stuck?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Sick?”

“May…be?”

Maggie comes to a decision, clawing her way upright via the toilet-roll holder. Her legs feel like they’re someone else’s, but she’s used to that. A lifetime living in a body that feels like she’s piloting it from a distant room makes the dissociative remnants of a hallucination a piece of cake.

It still takes three tries to open the door.

The cleaner—a West African woman in an off-green cleaner’s tabard and Crocs—seems to be glowing  until Maggie realises that one, she’s merely half-blinded by the bathroom lights, and two, she’s also a trans woman. Maggie searches for words, but her brain’s empty.

“Oh damn, your pupils,” says the cleaner, softly. “My sister, you are high as balls. Come tell me what those dickheads gave you.”

Maggie looks down at her grown-gown, finally recalling the instructions she gave Rita. Very clear instructions about not mixing up two similar-sounding Latin names, because one produced an unknown neurochemical in most of its fibres while the other remained politely inert. She’d only ever handled the former wearing gloves, and dried out, before.

With this kind of side-effect, it might be a while before Rita gets her wealth and fame the way she imagined it. Maybe Rita can try the gown on for size, Maggie thinks. Maybe Rita can spend a little time with her own thoughts for once.

But she can’t dwell on spite: there are much better answers to be chased after, now she knows what to look for.

“Mushrooms,” Maggie says, mouthing the word with a smile. “Mushrooms.”

© 2023 Derek Des Anges

About the Author

Derek Des Anges lives inside the internet and writes books.