The ring of trees surrounding her were scraggly haphazard and interspersed with jagged gaps like a poorly populated mouthful of teeth. The lack of symmetry made her stomach lurch, and she focused on the smallest and least grotesquely apportioned tree until her insides settled. Then she saw the mushrooms dripping down from the little tree’s branches like slimy-brown icicles, and she laughed out loud, defying the nausea that overtook her at the first sight of decay.