I. Breakfast: button mushroom toast with lion’s mane coffee

The mushrooms swimming in my bloodstream detect the cancer cells attacking my body and—full of precision, finesse—swallow them whole.

You are safe, they tell me. The mushrooms used to live in my stomach, tucked between glistening pink walls. They used to travel down my digestive tract, tingling, tickling.

Now they are in every meal, my skin growing a layer of fuzzy-soft hair like their round caps, their velvety stalks. My system works on fungal fuel, my veins colored the white of mycelium. Esophagus lined with a soothing patina of spores.

Thank you for saving me, I tell the mushrooms, taking a break from morning toast and coffee to touch my breasts before the bathroom mirror. To knead the dimpled flesh this way and that, looking for discoloration, lumps.

II. Lunch: cream of wild mushroom soup, topped with pan-seared portobello

“You know not all mushrooms can prevent cancer, right? Even if we assume any food can, in fact, prevent a disease we still know nearly nothing about.”

“You’re mansplaining again,” I tell my brother from another mother during our monthly lunch meeting, avoiding his stare. I don’t think he is, but I need to divert, deflect attention from myself.

The mushrooms move within my belly, my bones. I can feel them whispering, mushy tendrils urging me to tread carefully, to not let him reveal to me information that might stress me.

Stress isn’t good for the body after all.

“If anything, I’m doctor-splaining,” my brother from another mother says, absently fixing the collar of his white coat. We don’t meet each other as much as we used to since the hospital hired him, my teaching job fired me.

I twirl my spoon in my soup bowl. The mushrooms inside are eager to join the horde of me, strengthen their fungal ranks, their phalanges fighting against cells autophagus, hereditary.

Mutant and degenerate, like people on the news call people like me.

I stare at an agaricus slice, floating slimy and unappetizing for once, almost like a fishtail in the lukewarm broth.

“So what kind of mushrooms?” I ask, unable to control my known compulsions.

My brother from another mother talks about the fungi used in traditional herbal medicine. No peer-reviewed studies, he cautions. No corroborated evidence. The mushrooms inside me revolt, roaring about how I need them, searing my veins with their moldy rage. My mouth fills with soil-filthy water.

He stops mid-lecture about the chemicals of store-bought varieties. Eyes softening, hand reaching out. The eyes we share, the hands we do not.

“Hey,” my brother from another mother says. “I’m sorry I couldn’t be there for you at her one-year memorial. I know my relationship with her wasn’t the best toward the end, but I could have—”

“Shut up,” I say. Hands clasped over my ears to block out the information that might stress me.

The mushrooms are silent as a death shroud, a grave.

III. Dinner: chestnut mushrooms in white sauce over baker’s yeast dough

Over a solitary dinner, I schedule three new oncologist appointments. They have to be in a different city. Every doctor and medical technician in the area has stopped being understanding after I showed up at their office several days in a row, demanding they test me for new growth, fruiting cells and bodies.

The mushrooms are a shield, but even the strongest defense formations have their blind spots.

I stare at my dinner plate and remember my mother teaching me how to make mushroom pie with cheese and phyllo while my brother—her stepson—visited his other mother.

Her fork punching holes in the pie ‘til it resembled a hand perforated by nurse-needles.

She insisted I wear a scarf around my hair when I was in her kitchen.

She didn’t have to. Her head was shiny as a white mushroom cap wiped gently with a wet towel, stripped of its fur.

I no longer cover my head when I cook, wanting the reminder when I find hair in the food that I still have mine. I choke the hair down, hoping to grow another layer of insulation inside my gut.

Why did you fail her? I ask the mushrooms. She put her faith in you. Don’t you know how precious that is? How dare you squander it?

The mushrooms don’t answer.

When my pulse pumps in my ears, it’s only my red blood, free of snake oil, mushroom serum.