Obligatory ‘this didn’t happen to me directly’ but my brother actually wound up in a somewhat similar situation, albeit not quite on this scale. We’d been invited to a family cookout for the holidays and everyone was assigned a dish to bring, kinda a potluck thing. Well, he’d been assigned the task of bringing the side item of peas and mushrooms. Simple enough, right?

Wrong.

You see, my brother kept this old cooking book in his home, a gift passed down from his estranged father. He cherished the thing, as it was the last he had of him after things… fell out. If there was something he wanted to cook, you could bet your ass he’d check the recipe book first, and if there was an entry on it, well microwave-from-frozen varieties simply wouldn’t cut it. There was Just No Respect In It, as he might say.

The trouble started when he opened the book and found “Peas and Mushrooms, A Modern Take.” As he began following the instructions, I began my average Tuesday workday, unaware of the unfolding crisis back at home. A van of migrant workers had just pulled into the driveway, huddling in single file line towards our front door. At their front, stooped over and wearing a cape blacker than rot, *The Foreman* looked on disdainfully. There was work to be done.

As I took my 11:00am lunch break, the first of 19 delivery trucks arrived to our humble cul-de-sac. As I was answering emails, shipping manifests were being signed, and entire grocery supply chain infrastructure was being rerouted and siphoned. As I began my journey home, the third migrant worker fatality occurred after a forklift collided with a mushroom pallet stack. She had two children. One of them was mute.

As I pulled into the neighborhood, the swarm of commotion and hubbub around our home was immediate and worrying. *Did someone die?* I found myself wondering. If only that were the end of it.

I entered the home and was assaulted with the sudden and overbearing scent of body odor, olive oil, seared peas, and about 400,000 pounds of mushrooms sitting at room temperature. I heard cries and whimpers from the basement stair, and naturally my curiosity got the better of me.

As I peered down the staircase, I beheld the Mushroom Sweatshop, where hundreds of callused and bloodied hands processed bulb after bulb of button mushrooms, shearing away tiny flecks of skin and dignity layer by layer, dropping them into piles that withered and wilted on the floor. *The Foreman* cracked his whip and insulted the workers’ God. One raised an arm in piteous warding, which only angered *the Foreman* even further. “Fifteen minute break to whomever kills this pitiful man,” *the Foreman* sneered. As the laborers grabbed their peelers and moved towards the hapless man, I had to turn away and run back up the stairs. *This couldn’t be happening. Something is wrong here.*

When I reached the top of the stairs, I observed with a mute fascination as an entire mushroom-based ecosystem of flora and fauna evolved in our very kitchen. Mushroom deer grazed at mushroom fern outcroppings, and a mushroom lark warbled its shiitake cry in the night. With sudden reverence, the wildlife turned and bowed to their mushroom God, the master of this new Eden for a new time: my brother.

“Brother mine,” I stammered, “what is the meaning of all this?” But he only smiled blankly, his eyes mere pits in his skull dragged down with the unimaginable fatigue of an undertaking of such scale. “You must stop this madness… people have died here.”

His reply was in equal measure cold and curt: “There is not much time before the potluck… I must preheat the oven.”

I gazed around the room and saw it all again for the first time: the dying workers, the piles of mushrooms, the suffering, the sheer cruelty of it all, everything caused by that *damn book.* In that moment, my heart dropped in anticipation of what needed to come next. I looked around the room and my eyes settled on the instrument of these poor, poor workers’ liberation: a peeler, freshly sharpened.

My heartrate accelerating to a near-thrum, I closed a clammy fist around the utensil and prepared to drive it into my brother’s heart. “Goodbye, Able,” I silently whispered, before closing the distance.

I got about five steps before the doorbell rang. It was followed by six curt knocks, in quick succession. A mushroom porter grabbed the handle from the inside, and it swung wide. And there, in the mushroom ashes of Sodom and Gomorrah, I stared at the face of my father.

“Dad?” I gaped, but he ignored me, walking towards my brother.

“You must stop this, son,” he pled, the first words he’d spoken to us in fifteen years. “All this ruin. All this hate. All this pain… you must end this here.”

My brother bit back his tears… “but… the recipe called for 200 ton mushrooms…” he choked through sobs that now threatened to drown him out completely.

“Son,” my father said, placing his arms on my brother’s shoulders, “it said 200 button mushrooms… the text was always really peely.”

Silence smothered the room. *The Foreman* smothered an unsatisfactory worker. My brother’s heart wrenched in two, and then twisted into a black mass of fungal rot.

“There’s blood on my hands now… and mushroom…. so much mushroom…” he remarked in a voice that was suddenly all-too-concerningly small. “There’s no going back from this. I’m sorry.”

I saw his hand close around the tool behind his back, and my cries of *No!* and my lurch forwards arrived moments too late. The mushroom peeler stabbed through my father’s back and into my brother’s own gut, and the both fell to their knees together locked in permanent, fatal embrace.

Their blood mixed with mushroom runoff and the juice of canned peas. The oven beeped, preheated and ready. Tears fell to the checkered tile floor of the kitchen. And with a trembling breath, my father spoke his final words to me: “I’m sorry, son. I’m sorry we never made up…” He coughed laboriously, but continued. “Knowing that we’re on good terms now, you and I… I can die in peace. And… knowing that things turned out well in the end… that’s pretty good. I have one more thing to say…”

His breath was coming in ragged gasps now, his lungs filling with mushrooms and blood. I pulled him close and latched on, and suddenly I was five again, clinging to my father’s leg, never wanting to ever let him go. “What, dad?” I manage to ask through tears.

“E-” he choked on his own blood. “E…. E.” And with effort, he finished. “It equals… *m c squared…*”

As his head rolled limply back, I let out a tremendous wailing cry as the migrant workers began to clap and applaud the scene that had just unfolded. The Mushroom apelings put a comforting hand on my shoulder and helped me to my feet, where they gave me 100 dollars in their rudimentary currency. They were inventing society quicker than anticipated, and soon they would commit the same original sin as we had today and banish themselves from their own delicious garden of Eden. But until then, I couldn’t help but smile at the mushroomlife. They had it all ahead of them. All of the sadness, all of the bad, all of the chaos and murder and strife and falls…. but the rises, too. The high achievement, the shoulders of giants, the amazing moments of discovery, the ecstasies of intimacies and understandings… I envied them. And I put my hopes in them.

Like fungus, hope needs a death on which to grow. And my father was that base. I dedicate my hope to you, father. My hopes for the future, of what might be. Wherever you are, I hope you’re doing well. I miss you, dad.