Uncle Eddie’s Grave

“It’s too hot out here.”

That was the last thing we ever heard from my Uncle Eddie. Two years later, Pop was burying Uncle Eddie in the back of the farm. Every time I asked why he hadn’t checked on Uncle Eddie more, Pop would tell the same story. He swore he tried to bring groceries to my Ma’s brother, and in a fit of anger or confusion or something like both, Uncle Eddie appeared in a parka, pulled out a shotgun, and told Pop to “back up or get shot up.”

Before putting Uncle Eddie in the grave, but after he threatened Pop’s life, I was ordered to stay away from his house. It was hard to pretend like Uncle Eddie didn’t live on our family farm with us—the top of his chimney was just visible through the leaves of our persimmon trees. There were times when, as I watered the blueberries or picked weeds from between the squash vines, I would peek over to see if he was actually always inside. Maybe one day I could catch him as he came out for air. Every time my curiosity told me to get closer to look, Pop would call me back inside. I never got close. Never got to say my goodbye to him. One day when I was ten, Pop found Uncle Eddie dead outside next to the wilted tomatoes. I wasn’t allowed to see. I just watched Pop dig a hole in the sludgy North Carolina humidity. We’d said a few words at his grave, and neither of us shed a tear.

It wasn’t that I didn’t love Uncle Eddie. I just didn’t remember much of him. The times we did get to spend together, he’d tell me about how much Ma wanted me to grow as tall as the pines and take over the farm one day. He was the only one who would talk to me about Ma after she passed. We’d laugh and play games of hide and seek. On the clearest nights, we’d lay under the stars and he’d tell me stories of how he and my Ma built this farm for me. On the day the stories stopped, Pop told me that Uncle Eddie wasn’t well and to stay away from him. I never knew what that meant, only that I was to obey or get a lickin’.

It’s been five years since Uncle Eddie last stepped outside, three since he died, and it really has been too hot out here. The heat is borderline insufferable. Most spring and summer days, we’re lucky if the temperature is below 100 degrees. Since I’m not in school in the summertime, Pop works at dawn and I work at dusk. He does maintenance, like building deer fences and mowing the acres of land. I do the day-to-day work of weeding the crops and caring for the chickens. Even though it’s just the two of us, somehow we’ve managed. The crops have hit their brink each year, and yet each year they manage to pull through a harvest good enough for us to sell. We’ve relocated our chickens twice to places that have felt cooler on the farm in the hopes of saving them from heat strokes. We’ve switched up our crops to be more heat-resistant, but Pop says it costs us more on the backend. Sometimes I hear Pop wondering how much more of this our little farm can take. How much more he can take.

It’s another suffocatingly hot day in May. I place Pop’s plate of corn salad and fried pork chops on the counter for him to grab when he wakes up. I throw on my overalls with the cut pants, which Pop called “so innovative” when I revealed them. Each day, before I head out as the sun sets, I check the patio door for any news Pop might have on what he’s done in the morning. He considers it his way of being accountable so that he doesn’t stay inside all day—I just think he misses talking to me. We don’t see each other much since the farm requires such round-the-clock maintenance.

Outside, cicadas and toads croak near and far, filling the air with their vibrations. The sky is just turning that beautiful contrast of brassy clouds against rosy violet ribbons. There’s a slight breeze from the east that brings much needed cool relief and a bit of honeysuckle sweetness to the air. Dad mowed the lawn this morning, and the clean lines of two shades of green run parallel to the house beautifully. To my right, just over a small hill, is the catfish pond. It’s definitely drying up—at least three feet of cracked bed between the water and the edge of the bank. It’s not the first time I’ve seen it that low, but it’s the earliest in the year for sure.

I grab a wicker basket to carry on my back, then drag out my rusty, weather-worn harvesting wagon from the barn by the chicken coop. Our strawberries and watermelons sit between the edge of our lot and the forest, near Uncle Eddie’s grave, where the shade helps them survive the heat. In the past five years, Pop and I have had to rearrange the whole farm. So many of our crops died during one especially hot summer. But we’ve always managed to find some strangely cooler spots to relocate our crops. Pop says it must be part of global warming, the way the Earth is regulating itself.

After an hour of picking strawberries and hauling watermelons, I instantly regret not splitting this into two trips. The watermelons this year are enormous and heavier than I anticipated. Between the cart and my basket of strawberries strapped to my back, I’m barely moving. The mosquitoes whisper their thirst, and no amount of bringing my shoulders up to cover my ears helps drown the buzzing out. As I’m dragging the cart behind me, I feel more resistance than normal. I look back, and the left rear wheel has stopped rotating and started pulling up grass and twigs as I move. Just as I start unclogging the spokes, the wheel jerks with the last pine needle I pull and the cart lurches forward. I jump, grab the handle, and do my best to stabilize the cart while also keeping my balance with the strawberries. Two watermelons roll down a small slope toward the treeline near Uncle Eddie’s house, near Uncle Eddie’s grave. Once I’ve regained control of the cart, I wheel it over to regather my harvest.

From the treeline, I can make out more of Uncle Eddie’s house than I can from the other side of the farm. His house is much more dilapidated than I expected it to be. It’s so covered in overgrown muscadine vines and iridescently green moss that the dark red brick underneath is barely visible anymore. There’s a window facing me with plywood covering it from the inside, as most of the glass is broken. It’s spooky to see his house up close again after so long. For a second, I wonder if I’ll see his ghost through the cracks of the plywood. I look down at his grave, marked simply “Eddie Thompson: April 11, 1968 - June 2019.” The back of my neck prickles. I hope his ghost isn’t mad at me for stepping all over his grave for a stupid watermelon. I look away quickly to collect my runaway watermelons.

Hobbling my watermelons one at a time back to my cart, taking care to avoid completely trampling over Uncle Eddie’s grave as his ghost spies on me. This time, I stack them a bit better so that another jolt won’t knock them off balance. It’s still precarious, and I can hear my cart squealing louder than normal, but it works. As I start pulling my cart back toward my home, my stomach drops. The cart handle feels even weaker than before, like it might break. And right now, that’s the last thing I can afford to have happen with this little sunlight left. I move to grab the edge of my cart and pull it forward that way, but just as I do, I feel the wheels give out.

“Shoot.”

I squat down to try and repair the wheels, but notice that they’re not broken—they’re stuck in the ground. Uncle Eddie’s grave, to be exact. I lean against the tombstone, trying desperately to save them. Each time I pull the cart, they sink lower. It’s then I realize that the ground beneath me is also sinking. And before I can jump away from my cart and out of the shape of his grave, the grass and dirt collapse under me. I reach to grab the edge of the hole. It crumbles as soon as I touch it. I can barely scream before I’m tumbling down.

After a few minutes of coughing, I try to move. My legs and back don’t feel broken, and my arms still seem to work. There’s so much dirt, grass, and debris on me. Once the wave of dirt settles, I try my best to gather my surroundings using the remaining sunset light. My overalls are ripped. One of my knees is bleeding, but it doesn’t feel nearly as bad as my wrists. I twirl them a couple of times, wincing as I look around. The first thing I take note of is just how far I fell. I’m at least fifteen feet down from the opening of what I now realize isn’t Uncle Eddie’s grave. I can feel my breath getting faster, panic setting in. How long will I be stuck in this hole? Except it’s not a hole, it’s a tunnel. The russet light that has managed to peek into this hole has given me just enough to see a stretch of void before me. From what I can tell, it leads straight toward Uncle Eddie’s house.

Since it’s impossible to climb up, it seems my only option is to follow the tunnel. His house has always felt untouchable: a decaying mass of memories that Pop’s too busy avoiding and I’m too busy trying to understand. Where did this tunnel come from? What’s on the other end of it? I instantly imagine my Uncle Eddie as a pile of bones underneath a pile of rocks from some cave-in that probably happened years ago. The longer I stare into the tunnel, the colder I feel. The light above is nearly gone, and the tunnel’s darkness and the shadows of the trees above have started to touch me from all sides. I feel my pulse racing. My chest heaves—I retch, but nothing comes out. It’s me, I’ll be the bag of bones down here. Pop will never think to look for me here. I’ll be eaten alive by worms and ants and beetles like Uncle Eddie probably was. Tears fill my eyes.

I stare up as the stars through the hole become vibrant with life. With each minute that passes, my senses come alive. Crickets chirp in the blades of grass encircling my pit. Fireflies lazily float over me and, as if to cheer me up, light up in zig zags around the hole before drifting away. A moth darts by, its wings like sheets of paper rubbing together in a comforting, rhythmic kind of way that gives me the space to breathe. My eyes are adjusting to the darkness, and looking up definitely helps me feel more at ease. Up there, I’m safe. Down here, perhaps I’m safe, too. My fantasies of skeletons and impending doom can’t control me. I stand and, with a deep breath, begin my trek into the tunnel.

When I was a little kid, Pop and I would play a game where he was a monster and I was trying to escape him. He’d usually catch me by enveloping me in bedsheets, folding them over me and creating a darkness too deep for my five-year-old mind to comprehend. I’d be pushing from all angles to get out of the sheets, and he’d hold them tight over me and growl about catching me. After a while, he’d release me from my fitted sheet prison and we’d laugh and have snacks together. That’s what walking into this tunnel feels like—it’s like I’m surrounded on all sides, and no matter where I stretch my arms, I can’t escape, but there’s no hope of release.

The tunnel curves a bit to the left after what feels like hours of walking. It’s definitely cooler down here than it is above, which I’m grateful for. I keep my left hand on the wall, which is weirdly smooth and definitely something carved rather than something naturally eroded. Which brings me some comfort, knowing that someone else was down here. Perhaps even my Uncle Eddie. Maybe he wasn’t really dead when Pop buried him, and he dug his way out the wrong way. I wouldn’t blame him for being gone so long if that were the case—there’s nothing fun about being buried alive.

As the tunnel drags a little more to the left, I can barely make out a faint white light ahead of me. The closer I get, the colder I feel. It gets to the point where I almost think I can see my breath in front of me, faint and clouding my vision as the tunnel narrows to just a couple feet of wiggle room on all sides. Suddenly, I’m met with a door. It’s made of plywood and jammed into the dirt walls of the tunnel. Some of the space around the edges of the door is packed tightly with clay, while other spaces leak a faint blue light in tiny beams that dissipate into the void of the tunnel. Part of me wants to turn away, to wait at the hole I fell into and call out to Pop when he comes out in a few hours. There’s another part of me that wants to know what in the world is going on underneath our family farm.

I raise a fist and gently knock on the door. It echoes out behind me, a light tap that devolves into boundless dull thudding the farther it travels. I wish I could travel with it, up and out, away from this mysterious blue light. I knock again, feeling idiotic for knocking against a door buried twenty feet underground. What will answer it? My mind drifts, picturing a giant gray rabbit on the other side with a fistful of our family’s greens in its mouth. I’ll apologize for intruding upon its home and promise to leave immediately, maybe even offer it some apples for extra good measure. The thought makes me chuckle, which comes out right as the door swings inward.

I recoil from the bright light on the other side just as I feel two massive hands jerk me forward through the doorway. The door slams shut. My eyes, barely open, make out a hulking, blurred figure standing over me. The figure is saying something, shouting at me in a tone that feels both terrified and terrifying. I lean my head against the door and let my eyes burn their way into sight again.

I’m in a dome-shaped room carved into the Earth with multiple tunnels branching off of it. The light, I notice, is emanating from one tunnel in particular, and amplified with lanterns emitting blue light from each of the tunnel entrances. The room isn’t big, maybe twice the width of the tunnel, but it’s taking my breath away with the sheer construction of it all. My focus shifts to the person in front of me who, now that I’m able to see, is snapping his fingers for my attention.

“Who sent ya? Answer ‘fore I get my gun!”

He’s bulky, hunched over and buried in a dusty parka with sewn patches of so many colors that I can’t tell what its original color was. His face is twisted underneath a thick peppered beard that looks the way chicken wire feels. Layers of dust cover his skin so that when each muscle in his face flexes, a bit of the caked-on dirt cracks and flakes away. He doesn’t seem to mind—his full attention is on me.

“Uncle Eddie?” I croak.

He looks confused for a moment before shifting into a slow smile that reveals exactly four brownish-gray teeth behind dry, splintered lips.

“Is that you, Aubrey girl? Gaw’damn you grown!” He sits back and belts out a chuckle that feels deep, but reverberates as though it were as hollow as the space around us.

Part of me is relieved that it’s him. Part of me has no idea how to engage with him, this underground gremlin of an estranged relative. And yet, his presence brings me a odd sense of comfort that eases my worries almost instantly.

“It’s good to see you,” I say, barely able to believe he’s standing in front of me again after so long. I feel a barrage of questions ready to unload onto him, but all I can manage is, “You’re not dead?”

He looks puzzled. “Dead? It ain’t been s’long the good Lord’s taken me. Not yet, a’least. Why? How long’s it been?”

“Like five years. I’m thirteen now.”

He slaps his knee and lets out that airy laugh again. “Well that ‘splains why you here lookin’ jus’ like ya mama when she was young, rest her soul. How y’all doin’ up there?”

Before I can answer, I let out a small cough and shiver, then bring my arms close to hold myself. It’s freezing down here, which makes me picture some massive air conditioning unit, running full blast at all times.

“Ah, damn, here.” He whips off his parka in one swift motion and throws it over my back. It’s heavy, musky, disgusting. It smells like anti-soap. Like the smell of plaque coating my tongue when I forget to brush in the morning. Like waterlogged wood and maggot-filled roadkill. I bury myself into it. He stands, still bundled in a thick, muddy-gray sweater, and offers me a hand. I take his hand and stand with him. We’re barely able to exist together in this room without breathing on each other.

“We’re okay. It’s been hard keeping everything together with just Pop and me. A lot of the old crops have dried up and we’ve had to shift everything. You probably wouldn’t even recognize the farm anymore. But we’re managing.”

“Ya mama’d be proud. She always knew you’d be a farm gal.”

I nod my head slowly, still trying to process everything around me. “So...you’re not dead. Pop didn’t bury you?”

He frowns. “Say what?”

“Pop said you died three years ago and we buried you. I fell down here through your grave—that’s how I got here.”

Uncle Eddie stares blankly for what feels like years. His eyes, dark and unreadable, squint as his brows furrow. More dirt cracks off of his forehead.

“So I’m guessin’ he ain’t tell ya ‘bout our fight.”

“You mean when you put a shotgun to him for checking on you?”

He snorts. “Oh I put a shotgun to ‘im, but not for that. Back when yer mama was alive, he was tryna convince her to sell the farm. Yer mama’s livelihood, couldn’t believe it. She and I, we’d been workin’ on ways to save the farm even back then. We was pissed. Damn near killed ‘im then for even suggestin’ it. When the cancer took yer mama, he blamed me for it, threatened me. Told me to leave. I told ‘im I wasn’t leavin’. What ya mama and I was workin’ on…stoo important. ‘Specially now.”

My heart is leaping from my chest at hearing about Ma. “What is it? What was Ma working on? And why would he blame you?”

Uncle Eddie walks to the door farthest from us, the one with the brightest light emanating from it. He opens the door, letting a burst of light pour in. It’s full of the richest blues and whites that dance along the carved dirt walls like the kaleidoscope Pop got me for Christmas once. He marches through the door without pause, leaving me trailing behind him in tense anticipation. As we walk through this tunnel, what looks like tiny dandelion puffs are floating around us, suspended without wind to blow them around. As we move through them, they push away from us with the lack of urgency of jellyfish, unbothered, just drifting wherever they can.

As we walk down the tunnel, seemingly as long as the one that brought me down here in the first place, Uncle Eddie is rambling about how he built these tunnels through trial and error. He built a network of at least thirty tunnels down here, all carved by him, all of varying lengths, and all with different purposes. The one that collapsed on me was one of his first, which he’d stopped digging because he’d gotten too close to the forest line at the back of the property. There were others, deeper into the earth and longer and twistier than this. Each one, he said, was built to assist in his research. Which, as we finally entered another dome-shaped cavernous room, became all the more clear.

Not a single part of the carved rock wall is visible in this room. Instead, it is covered, from top to bottom, in brilliantly baby blue mushrooms. Their stalks are long and curl like squash vines into each other. Their caps are the same color of a clear winter sky, when it’s too cold and too dry to go outside because no amount of Carmax can protect an unsuspecting pair of lips from splitting in the wind. There are hundreds of thousands of mushrooms in this room, each giving off a glow that, though faint, collectively creates a dazzling symphony.

“What—” I start, but catch my breath as I suck in one of the floating puffs, which I now realize is a spore. They’re all spores, all hovering in mid-air and searching for something to cling to. It’s freezing in here, and the air is super dry. I cough, sending even more spores buzzing around the room. Uncle Eddie rushes over and presses his ashy hand against my mouth.

“C’mon now—they’re sensitive.”

I nod, doing my best to clear my throat while keeping my mouth shut to abide by his rule. Once I have my bearings, I remove his hand with his approval. “Uncle Eddie, what’s going on down here?”

“I’m growin’ mushrooms.” It’s such a matter-of-fact statement that I find myself waiting for another sentence that never comes.

“They don’t look like any I’ve seen in the woods or cooked with before.”

Uncle Eddie delicately reaches out to a cluster of entangled mushrooms just above his head. Though dry and cracked and calloused to all hell, his fingers brush against each cap as though they were fine strands of a child’s hair. “They make it cold.”

I don’t quite know how to respond, so I resolve myself to watching him tend to the mushrooms in silence. He touches each one as if he knows them by name. With each cluster, he whispers something before moving to the next bunch. It feels like hours pass by the time he’s done, but he looks satisfied. Like he can finally untense and tell me why he’s been down here cultivating mushrooms.

He turns to look at me, once again showcasing those four unsightly teeth. “They special mushrooms, Aubrey girl. Ya mama and I, back in our undergrad days, we discovered these mushrooms that take in a hundred times the carbon dioxide that trees do. A hundred! But damn they’re fragile. I’m down here tryin’ to make ‘em more resistant to the heat, but they just so sensitive to it. Die the instant they get close to the surface. The spores is okay up there, but they can’t cultivate in the heat. Ya mama figured these babies could be the solution we been needin’ for this God-awful heat. I been workin’ hard to make that idea a reality. It’s gettin’ bad up there, right? I knew it would, that’s what I told ya daddy when he came to see me.”

I can barely keep up. “Wait—you told Pop about this?”

“We both did, me an’ ya mama. He called us both crazy. Then when ya mama died, he said it was the mushrooms that done it. Said they poisoned her body. Hell, I almost believed ‘im.” He paused. “But I’m fine. I been down here longer an’ I’m fine. I knew yer mama woulda wanted me to keep lookin’ into this. Her dream was to have massive mushroom fields in every city. She knew it could work. After she died, I ain’t know if I could do it maself. But I know she believed in it. That day, it was too hot. I couldn’t take it no more. I was fed up.”

“So you’ve just been down here trying to save the world?”

He nods with the biggest smile on his crackly face. “Ya noticed anything different ‘bout the farm?”

It takes me a second to connect the dots. “The cooler spots…”

“Exactly!” he exclaims. “That’s the mushrooms! They workin’!”

I feel like I’m being ricocheted between so many things at once. Ma and Uncle Eddie were working together on this before she died. They were trying to save the farm together from the worsening heat. And the best part—it’s been working.

“Why did Pop try to stop you? Why wouldn’t he want the farm to get better?” I ask.

Uncle Eddie throws his arms up. “I told ‘im it could help the farm! An’ what he do? He tell me he callin’ the cops on me, calls me crazy. So I pull my shotgun on ‘im and tell ‘im to leave me be. I ain’t gon’ hurt nobody down here. I’m just doin’ research is all. And he said fine, but I best stay away from you, an’ he best not see my crazy ass again. So my ‘crazy ass’ been down here since, tryna solve this heat issue. Tryna come up wit’ solutions.” He lets out a loud snort. “An’ I guess up there, he said I’m dead.”

I’m stunned at this version of the story. Pop never once told me this side—and I don’t blame him. If I’d heard this version of the story, I probably would’ve followed my crazy uncle underground. Even now, I feel the urge to help out of finally understanding both sides and wanting to connect with whatever Ma believed in. If I’d known the truth, I would’ve blamed Pop for keeping him away, and I probably would’ve learned to blame Pop for the incessant heat and the farm dying and our absurd sleep schedules as we’ve tried to adjust everything about our lives to not be in the sun.

“So when will they be ready to go out into the world?” I ask him, feeling my own excitement building at the thought of a cooler planet. I’m tired of Pop checking the news every day to see how risky it is to go outside. I’m tired of wishing I could grow up and go off to college to study ways to help the farm. Ma and Uncle Eddie already did that—and this is the solution! This is what could help us!

“Got a long time comin’. These ones here, they still not ready. I been testin’ em in clusters in the tunnels. Some have more sun, more heat, more air. They usually die within a day from temp’ature shock. I can’t figure out when they’ll be ready, jus’ know it’ll come one day. An’ when it come, best believe I’ll be tellin’ the newspapers an’ the gov’na, then the president. I’m helpin’ save the world, Aubrey girl. Your ol’ Uncle Eddie, he ain’t no crazy fool.”

Perhaps it’s dehydration or desperation, but I believe him. Everything I’ve seen so far, from falling into an old tunnel to being surrounded by spores that look suspended on puppet strings to the absolute freezing temperatures down here—it all adds up. Perhaps Pop thought it was a stretch, a useless effort, to want to fix climate change with mushrooms. On paper, I’d laugh at it, too. But it seems so plausible now, here, in this icebox burrow surrounded by glowing blue mushrooms that emit a cold so powerful I can still feel it through my uncle’s crusty parka. Maybe not yet, especially since this room is just one tiny blip of the planet. But perhaps that means there is a little hope for the world, if small and confined now to one man’s delicate love of these little fungi.

Ma believed in this. I didn’t know much about her, I didn’t know her morals or what she really wanted for me growing up. I only ever knew what Pop told me, and now, it all feels like a lie. If I could talk to Ma, she’d say what Uncle Eddie’s saying. What Uncle Eddie was trying to tell Pa. And if I were listening to her, I’d believe her.

“I want to help you, Uncle Eddie. Pop probably won’t be too happy about that, but I’ve been grown long enough to make my own decisions at this point.”

He’s beaming. “Gaw’damn, really? That warms my heart, truly. I tell ya what—I’ll take ya back up so’s ya get some rest. Then when ya got time, come back through the house tomorrow an’ I’ll show ya how to help me grow these glowy guys.”

I smile back. “It’s a deal.”

Uncle Eddie moves to hug me, but decides to put his hand out for a shake instead. I take his hand firmly in our newfound partnership. After Uncle Eddie closes up the room, he directs me back into the initial room I entered from the old tunnel. He guides me to what looks like the most traversed tunnel. It’s lined with strings of chicken wire with jars that contain long-dead fireflies, probably from his first attempts at getting light down here. We follow this tunnel for a while, him exclaiming about all the ways he’s tried to build up the mushrooms’ heat tolerance, me taking off his parka and realizing that there are several spores stuck in my afro puff. It’ll probably take forever to get them out.

After some time, we come to a hardened clay staircase lined with stones. We climb the short set of stairs and come to a slab of concrete above us. Uncle Eddie hefts the slab up and slides it away from what becomes our exit. As we emerge from the opening, delicate rays of sunrise peak into the chaos that is Uncle Eddie’s kitchen. The black and white tile has been completely destroyed, shattered in multiple places and brushed aside to make room for the massive hole we’re coming from. His refrigerator is empty and open and reeks of something dead and something dying. The stove is stacked with rubble and stone, the giant ceramic sink is split in two on the ground, and the exposed pipes have long since rusted over. It’s terrifying to see how he destroyed his home—to see shattered glass and boarded up windows to keep as much light and excess heat out as possible. He’s placed his whole faith into these mushrooms, even if it means that he can’t live normally anymore. But perhaps this was a sign that “normal” couldn’t happen—that it eventually would be buried just as the rest of his life has been for the sake of trying to fix the world. One small fungus at a time.

Uncle Eddie traipses through the debris and rubble around the opening to his underground greenhouse as though it isn’t there. I stumble behind him. It’s hard to avoid getting shards of stone jammed into my knees or avoid the foggy, suffocating air from lack of circulation. The only modern thing I can see in this room is his shotgun propped against the unused dresser by the door.

As Uncle Eddie pries and opens the front door, a burst of reds, blues, and oranges flood my senses. Except they’re not the sunrise, which now is coming into full effect along the treeline towards the front of the property. Rather, as I lower my hand from the blinding light, I realize that there are two police cars sitting just outside our house down the hill. Pop is talking so loudly I can almost make out what he’s saying. The two officers are diligently taking notes.

“Pop!” I shout, walking towards him.

His head jerks up to look at me. He comes running in an instant, pulling me into the tightest hug I’ve ever gotten from him.

“Aubrey, where ya been, baby? Where ya been?” He’s wailing, sinking to his knees and holding my hands in his. “I thought I lost ya. I thought somethin’ happened when you wasn’t home when I got up. I thought some bear got ya. I had the cops takin’ your description…”

I wrap my arms around Pop’s neck. “I’m okay. I’m right here. I was with Uncle Eddie.”

At this, he stiffens. He pulls away to look at me in the face, his tears suddenly gone. He stands and raises his eyes towards Uncle Eddie’s house, where Uncle Eddie is now standing in his front doorway.

“What?” Pop whispers. I can sense something brewing in him that I don’t like.

“It’s okay, Pop! Uncle Eddie showed me the mushrooms, and I want to—”

“I told you to stay away from her!” Pop shouts.

I look to Uncle Eddie, who doesn’t answer him. Instead, he turns to go back inside. In an instant, Pop tears away from me and charges up the hill for Uncle Eddie, scrambling and tossing grass and dirt as he claws his way over. The two officers run up the hill after him, but it’s too late.

In an instant, Uncle Eddie whips out his shotgun and points it at Pop. The two cops and Pop freeze. The cops whip out their guns and shout at my uncle. Uncle Eddie doesn’t lower his shotgun, but I can see his eyes glance between Pop, the cops, and me. They linger on me the longest, pleading. Begging. For what, I can’t be sure. Before I can say anything, he tosses the shotgun to the ground and bolts inside. The two officers chase after him immediately. I race after them, ignoring Pop’s calls to come back.

“Wait!” I call to the officers. “Please, don’t hurt him!”

By the time I get to the tunnel entrance, my throat can’t form cries or pleas for mercy on my uncle. I can only watch in horror as Uncle Eddie is dragged out of the tunnel and back outside in cuffs. He’s limp and looks beaten, though not physically.

“Please, it’s the mushrooms,” I choke out. “They’re good—they can help us solve climate change! He’s not crazy, please listen to me!”

The cops barely give me a second glance. I find myself reaching for him, reaching for the cops, reaching for anyone to listen and understand that they can’t take him away. He didn’t mean it. He was protecting the mushrooms, he was protecting himself, he was protecting us all.

One of the officers goes to my father, asks if he’s okay, then comes and asks me the same. I can’t respond. My eyes are fixed on my uncle, a trail of bright white spores floating behind him, as the other officer stuffs him into the back of their police car. I can’t hear the officer asking if I’m injured. I can’t hear Pop asking me if I’m okay, cursing and worrying about my safety. I can’t hear one of the cops calling to the other to get a unit out to investigate what could be a massive drug operation being kept underground in some strange tunnels. I can’t hear them telling Pop and I to stay back so we don’t breathe in the toxic spores.

All I can do is maintain eye contact with Uncle Eddie as he stares at me from the backseat of the police car. His crusty face, his peppered, wiry beard, his pitch black eyes. I’ve memorized it all. He puts his forehead to the window glass, shadowing the rest of his face as he starts to shake. I find myself reaching out to him with one hand, wanting to tell him I’m proud of how hard he tried. Wanting to touch my fingers delicately to the cap of his head and whisper reassuringly, “We’ll figure this out.” I feel my throat choke up, but I force the tears back. This won’t be the end—I’ll do what I can to figure it out.

My hand falls to my overall pocket and grazes against something soft as kitten fur. I feel my heart leap into my throat, knowing instantly that it’s a spore, maybe more than one, clinging to my pocket fibers. I take my hand out of my pocket and press my hand against it to keep any light away.

My swollen eyes unleash a steady stream of tears as I accept my mission.

“I’ll figure this out,” I say aloud as I watch Uncle Eddie get driven away.

***

Released: February 15, 2024

Jendayi Brooks-Flemister is a queer, Black Afro-speculative fiction writer and a graduate from North Carolina State University's MFA program. Full Bio