Microfiction Monday

My cool regional online writing group has started a challenge – to write a story under 300 words following a prompt each Monday. I surprised myself by jumping on the first prompt and coming up with… something. This actually started out as a somewhat humorous story, but, it seems, it’s easiest to take things to a dark place when working quickly in February!
I don’t have a lot of experience writing this short – in fact, I think this is the shortest story I’ve ever written, so I’m 100% confident it is a complete story. What do you think?

Prompt: Candle (plus, I was looking at something else with mushrooms, so mushrooms became a secondary prompt.)

My companion’s voice spikes out of the dusk behind me. “Are you sure this is a candle, or is it a mushroom?”

“Light it and see,” I answer.

I’m not going to help her. She volunteered to come along on this delivery.
I can see well enough, and my waders are good. My feet are dry, even if standing in a… river.

As it happens, there are mushrooms here, small ones, growing out from the cracks in the concrete walls.

If you eat them, starting with a small sliver one day and increasing the amount each day, over years, your ability to see in these tunnels improves.

Granted the mushrooms smell pretty foul. But put enough hot sauce on something, and you’ll get it down.

I often wonder, if the people who built these tunnels brought the fungi with them, and spread the spores purposefully. I wonder if the fungi remembers who they were.

Tunnel Mother says she does not know who they were or what happened to them. She only knows there were Builders, and there were Scratchers.

And now there are We.

It’s too bright for me upside, after the mushrooms, when the sun shines. But some of We have to travel the Tunnels and make deliveries, between and for We. This is our redemption.

Just ahead of us in this tunnel is the pool with the bird at the bottom in stone. Once the bird held something in it’s talons, but the Scratchers scratched it away.

Still, the water of the pool will ripple and the bird will move.

Behind me, a match flares, and then the woman behind me screams.

It’s not a candle or a mushroom I’ve put into her hand to carry to the pool. It’s bone.

Soon, now, my companion will be delivered.