By Aimee Parkison
The Mushroom Suit
When my young husband died unexpectedly, I wanted to find the perfect coffin for an open casket. He was so tall it would have to be custom-made. I couldn’t imagine it any other way. I wanted to see David again at his funeral. I knew his eyes would be closed. I would never see his eyes again, but I could see his peaceful face at rest, as if sleeping, his square dimpled chin smooth and freshly shaven. His lips slightly smiling as if he had kept a secret from us all, he would be meticulously dressed in an elegant suit with a dapper salmon silk tie. His golden curls always smelled of evergreens. I wanted to lean down, to kiss his forehead and smell his hair once more. To mourn him, to honor him, I wanted closure. I imagined how his mother and his father would feel, seeing David laid to rest in the best coffin money could build.
I assumed an old-fashioned funeral would be healing. One day, I expected, we would visit David’s exquisitely landscaped gravesite, marked with a large marble headstone and a magnificent imposing statue in the local cemetery with its painted iron gates opening off the highway.
These thoughts soothed me — the gravesite, the statue, the headstone, the coffin, David’s body pristinely displayed in the church for gathering mourners. Even so, I couldn’t settle with the knowledge of how we lost him. None of us had been ready. It was a terrible shock. So terrible it didn’t seem real.
That’s why I started laughing when I found his body.
Certain people, especially his parents, have a hard time forgiving me for that.
Faking his death was a game David played with me. Each time, he would gaze at me, strangely, studying my reaction. He would laugh and put on the weird cream-colored pajama with a full mask that buttoned over his face. The pajama had gloves and slippers, so none of him was uncovered, no skin exposed. No holes for eyes, it troubled me, worse than the bogus deaths he put me through. Something about the weird pajama broke me. It was impossible to have sex or cuddle when he wore it to bed. It was as if he were shutting me off, shutting me out. Inside that pajama, he was hidden, repeatedly.
“What have you done?” I asked when I found him in the living room. Slumped on the sofa, he was dressed for work in a gray suit. I thought he was playing games, but I was shocked to see the suit was ruined. “David? What’s this?”
Blood, lots of blood, dripped, splashed. On the ceiling. On the stereo. On the television. On the mantel. On the sofa. On the curtains. On the windows. On the walls. Hair hung in blood. The back of his head, wet and messy; splatter covered his face. A gun cradled in his right hand, a bullet lodged in drywall.
I was furious, thinking how difficult it would be to wipe the syrupy stuff off the ceiling and wash it out of the sofa and curtains.
I shook him. He was limp. Unresponsive. This was another of David’s tricks, I thought. He was a decent actor. He did things like this, using fake blood to scare me. All the time, pretending to be limp, dead.
He wasn’t acting. He was gone.
Just like that, I found the weird pajama laid out in another room, on our bed.
“I would have appreciated a trigger warning,” I said, though he couldn’t hear me.
That’s when his older sister Melanie arrived, before I had the chance to dial 911. A Realtor who worked with David, she was tall like him, statuesque and daunting. Dressed for a closing in a tailored charcoal pantsuit, she wore cinnamon lipstick matching her high heels.
“Don’t come in here,” I said.
“Why?” Melanie asked, opening the screen door and pushing past me with her designer shoes clacking on the tile. “Where’s David? Why wasn’t he at the closing?”
She strutted into the living room to stop short in front of David on the sofa. I realized I was witnessing the moment her life was changing.
She looked at me as if I were a murderer.
I laughed.
She fell on the rug. Weeping, her nose rested between David’s large, polished dress shoes.
I laughed for hours. I laughed when the police arrived. I laughed at the ambulance. I laughed at the coroner. No one was laughing with me. They looked at me with pity. When his parents found me laughing at the police station, they told me to go to hell, where I belonged. But in my mind, hell was where David was. It was where he had gone. I didn’t know how to tell them. According to my religion, I had lost him forever because of his suicide, which meant no heaven for him. His family refused to believe he killed himself. They blamed me. Literally. They told the police I should be investigated for murder. The police just gazed at me as if they couldn’t believe what I was doing. I laughed, until I wanted to cry but couldn’t.
I answered all their questions, several times, still laughing. Always laughing.
They started to smile at me.
In hindsight, I can see I married a suicidal male. David knew it all along, what he would do. He knew what he was going to do long before he met me. He tried to warn me. He told me I should marry someone else, someone who would stick around. I was worried he would leave me. I just didn’t know where he was going.
After the police told me I was free to leave the interview room, after hours and hours of talking at the station, they told me I had to be escorted home.
My in-laws showed up to drive me to their home, since they said that I shouldn’t be at my home, until we could hire professional cleaners. I was still laughing, and it was starting to hurt because I couldn’t stop.
“Alright, alright,” David’s father said. David’s gracefully uptight mother was so furious, she wouldn’t even look at me. Unlike David, his father was short and squat. David’s mother was the tall parent, but her personality remained humorless, not at all like David, the practical joker.
“Calm down. Settle down, Gillian,” said David’s father, staring at me with something like pity as he opened the car door. I climbed into the back of the Lexus. It still smelled new, as if David’s parents had been taking it for an extended test drive. “You okay, dear?” David’s father whispered as David’s mother got into the front seat, passenger side. David’s father closed the door and stared through the windows. I realized he was beginning to think I was so overwhelmed with grief that I was caught in the grip of hysteria. Was I? “You’re not right, are you, girl?” he asked, just before he started the Lexus, as if there were something truly wrong with me. As he drove down dark streets with me laughing quietly and David’s mother sitting stiffly in her straitjacket of silence, streetlights appeared haloed in rainbows, blurry out the Lexus windows.
Just when I was about to stop laughing inside their tastefully decorated house with its view of the country club’s ninth hole, David’s parents kept saying funny things to make me laugh. I wondered if they had sex in their hot tub, like David and I had done when they were away. I kept imagining David’s parents having sex as they said absurd, ridiculous things about David and their plans for his funeral. I wondered if they were just like David, after all, because the bizarre things they were saying were just the type of things he might have said, to get a rise out of me at the most inappropriate moment.
“We want him buried in a mushroom suit,” his father said.
“A what?” I asked, not believing my ears. “Because of the incident at Mellow Mushroom, with the mushroom pizza? My god, did David finally tell you about that? Unbelievable. I thought he’d never admit it. I thought he’d die first,” I said, recalling the notorious incident that got us kicked out of the restaurant, where we were waiting for our mushroom pizza.
“What incident?” his mother asked.
Bless their hearts, I thought, they’re trying to help me, to make me feel better. To humor them, because they were humoring me, I explained what happened at the Mellow Mushroom, when the manager threatened to call the cops on David.
David was drawing a mushroom on a napkin when a horde of elementary-school children arrived by the busload and began loitering beside our table, getting rowdy. To entertain them, David showed them the mushroom drawing. The next thing I knew, the kids’ teacher approached to say David was a disgusting man and should be ashamed of himself. She called him a pedophile. We thought she had confused him with another man. I tried to tell her she had the wrong person. The manager then approached our table and asked us to leave.
“Why?” David asked. “What did we do?”
“That,” said the manager. “That. Look at that! What is that? You can’t have that in here.”
“What?” I asked, staring down at David’s drawing. “This?”
“Oh, god,” whispered David, under this breath.
“It’s illegal to show that to children,” said the manager. “I could call the cops. Now, scram!”
David and I gazed down at the drawing on his napkin and realized his drawing resembled a mushroom-headed dick. The restaurant manager, the teacher, and the children all thought my husband was drawing a dick on a napkin to show to children. David and I tried to explain it was a misunderstanding. Examining the drawing in a new light, I realized the manager would never believe us. David’s friends entered the restaurant, just in time to follow us into the parking lot, asking what happened. They began teasing David mercilessly for his drawing. Not knowing what to do, I gave the drawing to David’s friends, who thanked me profusely and had it framed.
“He told you about that?” I asked David’s parents. I covered my mouth with my hands and burst out laughing, hard. I snorted. I imagined David dressed as a giant mushroom. David in a mushroom costume! David! David dressed as a mushroom for his own funeral. God, he would have loved that.
Then, because of the look on his parents’ faces, I wondered if someone had given me something other than a sedative.
Maybe I misheard? No, they assured me I had heard correctly. David’s family wanted him buried in a mushroom costume. That, I thought, was funny. Hysterical. A great joke. I congratulated his mother on her sense of humor. I couldn’t stop laughing. “Oh, god,” I said. “A mushroom costume. Oh, lord. That’s rich.” His mother just stared at me, and I realized she was dead serious as she explained the suit wasn’t a mushroom costume. Made of mushrooms and organic cotton and seeded with mushroom spores, it decomposed a human body while cleaning toxins before they reached the soil. She said, “We’re all full of toxins, you and me and David. Most people carry BPA, heavy metals, preservatives, even pesticides. We also carry nutrients.”
“I can’t deal with this,” I said.
“Mushrooms are nature’s cleaners. Even edible varieties are great at cleaning soil,” said David’s father. “David’s suit has spores from edible varieties but also from a customized hybrid mushroom bred to decompose David’s flesh.”
“How can that be?” I asked, feeling sick.
“It’s like pajamas covered in netting full of spores,” said his father.
“No,” I said, sinking at the mention of the word pajamas. I started to remember the weird pajamas David wore the year before he died. Were those weird pajamas a burial shroud?
“You just said you would be fine with him dressed in a mushroom costume at his funeral! Now, you’re saying you won’t allow him to be buried in a mushroom suit?” his mother asked.
As she poured our coffee, I realized she wanted to deny me a classic coffin for the classically handsome, statuesque man she had borne, and I had lost. I had never seen a man as healthy or as exquisite as David before and knew I never would again. He was taller than other men and had extremely refined symmetrical features with a friendly smile that opened doors usually closed to others. It was hard to explain that no one who met him or even saw him in passing would have thought he was the sort of man to kill himself.
His mother wanted to allow mushrooms to devour his gorgeous body. She wanted him to be food for mushrooms. I wanted him properly prepared, preserved, embalmed. His father wouldn’t hear of it. His mother accused me of wanting to poison the earth with her son’s corpse.
“His body, his body,” was all I could say between sobs. Choking on the piping hot French roast his mother had poured into an elegant teacup, I shivered, remembering being naked with David, the way he held me as I kissed his face, his neck. I kissed him everywhere he would allow me. Then, I kissed him more.
“Don’t you see?” asked his father. “We could all be a part of this, with David forever.”
“It’s what he wanted,” said his mother. “From his body, the mushroom suit will feed a fruit tree, and its fruit will feed our bodies. When we all die, we’ll be buried in mushroom suits, like David. The seeds from his tree can be planted in us. When his tree dies and our trees die, others will grow from the seeds in us. We will become seed savers and a family orchard, so none of David ever goes to waste or ever really leaves us. From his body, we will become part of an orchard to feed each other and the world.”
“I don’t know,” I said, feeling nauseated from the coffee on my empty stomach. “It seems untraditional.”
“So,” said his mother, “you’d rather David’s body be pumped full of gallons of toxic embalming fluid to leech out into a casket in a cemetery of pesticides?”
“Yes,” I said. “Yes! That’s what I want.”
His mother gasped. She said his body would be buttoned inside a burial suit seeded with fungus feeding on his flesh. “They’ll devour what’s left of him,” she said. “See, it’s beautiful? They’ll live on him, long enough to feed something else, which will feed something else, which will one day feed us.”
“Why?” I asked. I imagined mushrooms eating his toes, his eyes, every part of him I had kissed and licked and sucked: his tongue, his dick, his balls dangling like delectable plums. I loved him so much that when we were making love I felt as if I could eat him alive. That was why I couldn’t bear putting my husband inside a suit lined with flesh-eating mushrooms. What wife could?
“It’s simple and practical,” his father said. “Don’t be a baby, Gillian.”
“How? How is it simple?” I asked, thinking a coffin and funeral with an open casket was traditional, dignified, certain.
“Would you really rather him be embalmed, put in a coffin with a concrete liner, and buried in a cemetery?” his father asked.
“Yes,” I said. “I would.”
“Why do all that harm to the environment? That’s not what he wanted,” said his father.
But what about what I wanted? Did that matter? Apparently not. I guess I was the selfish one. “But what about his body? He said it was mine,” I said.
“What do you mean?” his mother asked.
I told her sex was the one good thing about our marriage. The sex was fabulous, the best either of us ever had and we did it all the time, in every room of our house and theirs. We did it in cars and in bathrooms at parties. We did it outdoors and in public places, often in theaters, amusement parks, churches, buses, pools, and diners, and in the houses and buildings he listed as a Realtor. It healed us and brought us closer. It confirmed and restored our love. I remember touching him, lying beside him, licking him, sucking him, riding him, kissing him all over, the way he kissed me as he buried his exquisite dick deep inside me like a secret between us. I thought we would keep doing it for decades. I thought we would never stop. We gave our bodies to each other, repeatedly. That was why I wanted to be buried beside him, for our bodies to be put to rest the same way, near each other, though now I understood my coffin wouldn’t be needed for decades, though he needed his coffin now. His body needed his coffin to hold it for me because I couldn’t hold his body anymore.
* * *
I was, after all, very acquainted with his body, even if I hadn’t known what was in his mind. None of us knew all the things he had been thinking or what he was planning. What happened was a complete shock, at least for me. I’ve always assumed that’s what started all the disagreements about his burial.
“There were so many things you never knew about him,” his mother said. “So much he never told you. Things he told his father and me that he could never tell his wife.”
“You bitch!” I shouted.
“At least you’re not laughing anymore,” said his mother, smiling.
“What did he tell you? What did you know about him that I don’t know? I slept with him. He put his dick inside me. Doesn’t that count for something?” I asked.
“Not in the way you think,” his mother said.
I started to cry, finally, and she put her hand on my shoulder and explained he was part of something called the Urban Death Project.
“David and I took a do-your-own-death workshop for home burial,” his mother said. “We did it together. His father is also in on it. We were planning for all our deaths — yours included.”
“It soothed David in ways you’ll never know, and it’s a comfort to us now,” said his father.
“It was his passion, his hobby. He could never share it with you, but he shared it with me and his father,” said his mother.
“No!” I needed to vomit. My head was spinning.
I longed for a coffin. I needed a coffin. Only a coffin would satisfy my needs to lay David to rest in a style that would allow me to feel I could let go and show my love for him. The thing no one wanted to speak about was how very young he was. And how unexpectedly he died. And how beautiful the corpse. It hurt me. It was a pain like no other. David and I weren’t even of legal drinking age yet. I thought we had decades ahead of us.
* * *
I felt a familiar taste in my mouth, blooming behind my tongue and through my teeth. It was mushrooms — the earthy flavors of the mushroom dinners David used to prepare for me. I couldn’t tell his mother that. I couldn’t tell anyone. I could hardly even admit it to myself since I was raised in a conservative religion where despair was the greatest sin. I was raised to believe my young husband had gone to hell for what he had done, and that I would be going to heaven, so his body was all that was left of him, at least for me. I didn’t want to give it up to mushrooms.
Mushrooms! For God’s sakes! The thought wasn’t so much gross as it was indignant. David and I ate mushrooms all the time — on pasta and on pizza and in quiche. It was one of our favorite foods. He was supposed to eat mushrooms, not the other way around. I had lost him, really lost him, and my loss was mushrooms’ gain. Now my gorgeous man, who used to eat mushrooms, would be fed to mushrooms. Now that his soul had gone to hell, I couldn’t stand to lose his body to something as passive as mushrooms fashioned into a suit to devour the flesh from his bones.
“Think of all the money you’ll save on the coffin and on embalming,” said David’s father. “He’s already paid for the suit. He raised the mushrooms with the help of a lab. They were bred just for his body and taught to hunger for him. David trained them and grew them. He cared for his mushrooms.”
“We were married. His body is mine!” I said, again, but in saying this I told his mother the wrong thing. She slapped me. Both of us were surprised, not so much by the slap but for the simple fact that it had the ability to surprise us both. We had both lost ourselves in losing David and had been walking in a fog of pain, a stupor of grief, both of us hating each other but vaguely because so much of our energy was focused on fighting over his body while living without him. It had only been one day since he died, and his mother and I had been arguing for hours, sleeping little.
Losing him was like losing myself but that was such a cliché I couldn’t even say it to anyone. All I knew was the love of my life, my husband, needed to be buried. Soon.
I told his mother again, because I thought it might comfort his mother to know how much I loved him.
“Suicides, the experts say, increase in May,” she said. “Something about the spring, the blossoms and the warm weather. The longer days and the sunlight, the beauty of the robins and the roses. Something about the hope of the new season. No one knows why, dear. David was part of that trend, the May suicides.”
I would always hate the month of May after that.
Apparently, David and his mother had plans for his body that didn’t include me, among them, a customized burial on his family’s acreage.
“David was part of an online group of healthy people who discuss plans for their death,” his mother said. “He was extremely active in the group.”
“You could have stopped him,” I said. “You could have told me.” I hated her, more than ever, because I started to wonder why she didn’t tell me, why she didn’t try to stop him. It was almost as if she had enough information to know what he would do. But did I?
“Don’t deny his mushrooms,” she said, “the ones he raised and trained to eat him. Don’t kill what he worked so hard to keep alive.”
I covered my mouth with my hands, retching as I remembered his little project in the basement: the mushroom garden he had been growing. He was very particular, watching them grow, misting them in the shadows and feeding them secretly. Once, I caught him putting hair from his hairbrush and his fingernail clippings into the soil where the mushrooms grew. When he cut his nails, he took to standing over the mushroom garden, letting the toenail clippings fall into the soil near the mushrooms. Whenever he got a haircut, he saved the hair and buried it in the soil of that garden. Feeding the hybrid mushrooms his own hair and nails, he taught them, just like his mother and father had said. David was training the hybrid mushrooms to hunger for him. What made me sick was how often he cooked with the edible varieties — making the two of us intimate, gourmet meals with mushrooms before we made love in the kitchen, on the table and on the tile. He would sometimes gather the mushrooms and seal them into plastic bags in padded envelopes to mail.
To calm myself, I closed my eyes while imagining gorgeous, jewellike caskets, starting with a midnight blue deluxe casket, a deep blue reflecting the midnight sky. My sister had told me to order a black casket with white velour interior from Overnight Caskets, though a funeral director informed me majestic mahogany is for “special loved ones.” What about for loved ones who aren’t special? I wondered. Then, I glimpsed the orchid steel casket — strong durable steel in antique orchid with a starburst design, so soft. What about the simple pine casket? My mother had asked, informing me I could order it from Amazon. I knew she wanted me to get a cheap coffin because she worried about my finances, and for some reason that hurt like hell. What about the traditional oak? she asked. David wasn’t that traditional, I had to remind her.
While a stainless-steel casket is only $2,700 dollars, a copper casket is $2,900. But the bronze casket with a white velvet body is $6,900. My favorite was the Xiao En Center Casket with its fine mahogany wood, burgundy velvet interior, and hand-painted artistic accents, but it cost $36,400. My mother said that was obscene.
“Think of what David would have wanted,” David’s mother said, still arguing. His mother was probably right. But what did it matter? He wasn’t here anymore. She was. He probably would have wanted to just disappear into mushrooms, to degrade beneath a tree, coffinless, to just disappear into a suit of mushrooms so that he would become something else, gently but quickly, all evidence of him absorbed into a sack of fugus tailored to devour his remains. His handsome remains. His mother started crying, asking, “Why, why won’t you give him what he wanted? This one last thing.”
That’s when I realized one of us would have to be the one to steal his body from the other. One of us would take his body away from the other. Since I was his wife, there would be no contest. Legally, his body was mine because there had been no formal will. Despite everything, he had left all details up to me. But why, why, his mother kept asking, wouldn’t I give David what he would have wanted?
Maybe, I began to think, just maybe, he assumed I would give him what he wanted, even if it wasn’t what I wanted. Maybe, just maybe, he didn’t really want what he claimed he wanted. Just like maybe, just maybe, he didn’t really want to die. There were days he wanted to live, and there were days he knew he would kill himself and wanted someone to stop him.
Was it possible that all of this — the mushroom suit, the mushroom garden, the gourmet mushroom meals, the mushroom-headed dick on a napkin — might have been some sort of an elaborate cry for help I was unable to answer?
I didn’t know.
His mother kept asking me why I wouldn’t just give David what he wanted.
I didn’t answer his mother’s question, though the answer was clear and simple. It was something his mother could never understand. Why wouldn’t I give him what he wanted? Because what he wanted was to destroy himself. That’s what he wanted all along. By loving him so intensely and by giving him all I had to give, I tried to keep him from doing it for as long as I possibly could. Because I loved him, I didn’t want him to have what he wanted, even in death. And now, once again, I was going to have to let him have what he wanted because he was never really mine.
* * *
Over the years, everything changed among us because of what I allowed David’s parents to do with David’s body. I caved. I let David be buried in the mushroom suit, and everything was nothing like I thought it would be. There was no open casket, no casket, no viewing, no headstone, no statue.
Instead, there was a peach tree.
David’s parents allowed me to select a young peach tree from a tree farm in Georgia. The tree was supposed to produce large, sweet fruit. His father carefully placed the peach tree in the soil over David’s body after installing an incubator with a sensor embedded in the soil. The sensor sent custom updates, going right to our smart phones through an app that monitored the health of the growing peach tree. It grew from David’s body, wrapped in the mushroom suit, which became a biodegradable urn.
Our modest family goal was to be able to eat David’s peaches in three years’ time.
“I hope the mushrooms start to eat him faster,” said his mother, checking the tree on the app. She had so many plans for the peaches — fresh peach pie, peach fritters, peach ice cream, peaches and cream, peach cobbler, peach bread, canned peaches, and peach preserves.
Me? I just wanted to pick a single perfect peach and eat it straight from the tree. That was all.
For David’s family and for me, eating the peaches that grew from his tree would connect us to him, nourishing us. Eating the fruit that grew from the nutrients of his decomposed body would be the closest we ever came to sharing life after death. Planning the moment of eating the peaches felt both strange and sacred.
When the peaches were finally ready for us to harvest, they had grown round and bright with yellow and pink skin, like the warm colors braided into the sky at sundown.
The peaches tasted like the sweetness of our love mingling with a strong tartness making my tongue ache, reminding me of how David loved me and how he hurt me. How it hurt to love him and to lose him. Biting into the first peach, I tasted his sadness and his love.
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Related Feature: One Question: Aimee Parkison
Aimee Parkison is widely published and the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including: the FC2 Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize; the Kurt Vonnegut Prize from North American Review; the Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction; a Christopher Isherwood Fellowship, a North Carolina Arts Council Fellowship, a Writers at Work Fellowship, a Puffin Foundation Fellowship, and a William Randolph Hearst Creative Artists Fellowship. She teaches creative writing in the MFA/PhD program at Oklahoma State University. Her newest book is Suburban Death Project (Unbound Edition 2022.) More information can be found at www.aimeeparkison.com. Parkison is on Twitter @AimeeParkison
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