Roger Workman was a normal man of normal beliefs and normal stature. He was single, mostly due to his horrible hygiene habits, which had resulted in an awful case of tinea pedis (commonly known as athlete’s foot), which he had been suffering from for years. He woke each morning, got ready for his dead-end job in furniture sales, prepared a bowl of cereal, and watched the morning news. This morning was different.

He turned to channel 7 to a computer-rendered model of a meteor, the one the scientists said would arrive sometime last night, but Roger had forgotten all about it.

Initially, everyone in the NASA community said it would miss the earth and be mostly harmless, but in the night as it was supposed to pass harmlessly by, something peculiar happened. NASA had missed something, or kept it quiet because they didn’t know what to do about it. It was actually grabbed by Earth’s gravity and pulled down to the surface. As it fell it seemed to be glowing green in the moonlight, only it wasn’t emitting green radiation. It was actually spewing an alarming amount of an unknown gas into the Earth’s atmosphere which, after the surprisingly uneventful initial impact of the meteor, had spread globally in the air currents. The general community had been alarmed in the early morning hours while Roger slept, but the authorities were already stating on channel 7 that the gas was “completely harmless.” Hearing this, Roger shrugged off the strangeness of the situation, finished his cereal, and finished getting ready for furniture sales.

The day before, Roger had finally invested in a topical treatment spray for his pedal fungal infection. He had seen it a few times on commercials being endorsed by a famous sportscaster. Today, Roger had planned on changing his routine for the better, and a green-gas-spewing meteor wasn’t about to change that. He walked to the bathroom and grabbed the sealed pharmacy package, ripped it open, and removed the first step in his cure to the “Single Disorder,” as he called it.

For months Roger had been planning on changing his ways: better hygiene, better cologne, a nicer house away from the ‘burbs, a cooler job, no more athlete’s foot, and hopefully, a pretty girlfriend to boot. This plan stemmed from a disastrous evening out with friends where he attempted to open a conversation with a lovely woman in her late twenties with “What did you think of the new release of Steel Cog Liquid 4: Weapons of the Patriot Act?” Needless to say that was the beginning and the end of the conversation. As mentioned, the fungal treatment was step one. Should it be step two and he got a girlfriend sooner than expected, Roger feared that his feet would run the poor girl off.

“Shake well, apply to affected area, do not swallow” were the directions on the bottle. Roger shook it and his feet seemed to tremble: a sensation similar to a lack of blood flow to his feet, like dull pins-and-needles.

He stopped and examined his feet, fearing he would pay for all those years of fast food with some odd sort of mini-stroke that maybe, in this case, affected only his feet. His feet were fine; they had stopped trembling when he stopped shaking the bottle. Roger aimed the bottle between his toes, and sprayed.

His foot jerked in an awkward side-swipe manner and made a sneeze-like sound. Then, without warning or command from Roger, he started to walk out of the room in a zombie-like stride.

“This is it, I’m having a stroke,” Roger thought, but he couldn’t recall ever hearing of strokes involving hallucinations. His feet carried him to the front door and kicked it until he felt that his toes might start to bleed at any moment. In a confused stupor, thinking that the pain meant that this was all really happening and that he was about to break a toe, Roger swung open his front door revealing a shocking sight.

Mushrooms. They were everywhere on his front lawn, screaming at each other in miniature mumbling gibberish. They appeared to be waging a sort of ancient-looking battle using blades of grass and small twigs as rudimentary weaponry.

Roger could only think of how changing his life for the better probably wouldn’t be so easy anymore. After all, he obviously wouldn’t be going to work that day, or meeting any nice girls for that matter. His feet and their tinea pedis had just become the secret weapon of the diabolical Amanitas mushroom men.

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