PIPING HOT SKY MUSHROOMS

When cultivated in darkness, enoki mushrooms spill outward into long, pale tendrils in a sprawl not unlike that of fireworks. At this stand, sponsored by the University Beneath St. Paul, they were being sold-tempura fried, then drenched in all manner of colorful sauces: red-orange calabrianero-chili buffalo, verdant pitcher plant nectar and mint chimichurri, yellow neonaise of Finnish snow lemon and halogen butter, violet orchid pepper peri-peri, and so on and so forth. The whole "fireworks show" was dipped-to-order and thrown into a black paper bag. Together, these flavors were overwhelming, and ever moreso as the rainbow of coatings slurried together, but if it wasn't too much, it wouldn't be fair food.

We were at the Expo Beneath St. Paul, an invitation-only event underneath the Minnesota State Fair, for which my friend Margaret was kind enough to be my sponsor. Throughout the old sandstone-carved telephone tunnels, forgotten cave networks, and grain storage cavities, one might find all manner of troglodytic delights; pale punks born to generations without sunlight playing out-of-tune pianos abandoned during prohibition, crank academics showing off homunculi in mason jars they swear were alive just hours before, and of course, all manner of deep fried foods, a tradition that joins all who live above and below the manhole line. No matter what direction you moved through this near-endless bazaar of corridors and ladders, you felt the distant bass of doom jazz further down, and inhaled smoke from all the hipsters burning through packs of Hazard Lights.

"We set this stand up to celebrate the end of our preliminary fireworks research program. We've managed to prove that they are, indeed, a mycelial lifeform. Piping hot sky mushrooms." Margaret beamed, all eyes and teeth. "Our hypothesis was that their spores work their way into the human eye as phosphenes, tampering with the optic nerve. It's sort of like an ocular hay fever that makes us want to make more. We set up a panoptical sphere of artificial eyes in the old mines up by Soudan, and set a few big ones off in the middle. Sure enough, we were able to trap several strains of fireworks in retinal snares to assess their retrowilding viability."

"That's fascinating! What do you mean by 'retrowilding,' though?"

"Well, see, the idea is that fireworks are living creatures, even though they're manmade, right? Rather than something you can just find outside."

It was best to just take her at her word, here. "Sure."

"Well, that doesn't preclude the possibility we can make a wild variety, one that can exist in the absence of people, as if it had predated our own evolution on Earth. We owe this to them as their creators, surely. A free-flowing network of spores and light, erupting freely worldwide, propagating by the simple lens of their reflections on lakes and rivers. Can you imagine how beautiful it would be?"

"I think it would scare the shit out of deer, for one thing. Lots of other animals."

"For a time. The ecosystem would adjust."

"Stargazers would be pissed. Astronomers in general."

"They can work around it, though. Wouldn't be every night."

"And of course, there's the fire risks, likelihood of injury and damage in populated areas... I can't imagine I'm the first person to bring these things up?"

"Oh, we're aware of the risks, but it doesn't matter at this point." She leaned in to whisper. "We passed our internal audit, and my colleagues are setting off our first batch at the Fair tonight!"