The Truffle Cobs

Cesar wielded the knife deftly. Thirty years in kitchens had made him fast and precise. The blade purred through each tomato, the keen edge brushing his calloused fingertips. There were still 20 pounds to dice and the wall clock showed 7 am. He’d been on his feet five hours already.

“I need more crane flowers!” Natalia called from front of house.

Cesar’s head dropped, his greying brows knitted. “I didn’t order any this week, mi reina.”

Natalia came in, scornful, her brown eyes blazing. “Cesar! How can I do the table settings without crane flowers?”

“Everything costs more. We have to cut back.”

She fumed, but relented. “Where is Sully anyway? He knows we need prep time.”

Cesar sighed. Sullivan’s deliveries had been getting later and later recently. “I know, I know... He hasn’t come yet.”

“Did you call him?”

“I’m sure he’s on his way.”

“But did you call him?” Not asking, commanding.

Cesar exhaled and grabbed the wall phone, dialling Sullivan’s number from memory. Brrr-brrrrrrrr. As he continued dicing, he looked at the framed photo of his parents, screwed onto the wall right next to the Virgin Mary. They had come to Las Cruces in the 70s, started a taco stand and pretty soon they had a storefront, La Malinche, which Cesar took over after his father died. That was already 30 years ago.

Today was Monday, a weekday, which meant all the workers heading out to the desert came by first thing for their burritos, triple-wrapped in foil and paper to survive a morning in a lunch pail. A late delivery was the last thing he needed.

Brrr-brrrrrrrr. Cesar heard a cellphone ringing out the back door, getting closer. Finally... He hung up the wall phone and seconds later a teenage boy ran in with a cardboard box of scallions. “Sully’s here!”

“Setalito! What did I say about running in the kitchen?”

Seta was fourteen, all arms and legs, but still not tall enough for the apron which he wore double-folded. “Sorry jefe. But I can help you now.”

“You know what to do?”

Seta plucked a bunch of scallions from the box. “Peel the outer layer and put them in ice water.”

“Bueno. And be careful.”

And at last: Eduardo Ortega Sullivan, wheeling a trolley stacked head-high.

“I was starting to worry,” said Cesar.

Sullivan lowered the crates, wiping the sweat off his pale Irish brow. “Cabron, we all have people to answer to. Hey Setalito, thought you were helping me out, uh?”

Seta jumped up. Natalia scowled, hip cocked, a model of annoyance. “So glad you could make it before we opened!” Sullivan made to respond, but Cesar shook his head smiling: Brother, it’s not worth it...

In a few minutes the four of them had unloaded and stored away the fresh goods which would get La Malinche through the next couple of days. Seta returned to his station and continued prepping scallions. A month earlier he’d turned up at the restaurant asking for work. He said his parents worked on the farms all day, but he was too young to join them. He wanted to work, he needed to work... Natalia had sent him away. So Seta came back the next day, and the next, until eventually she told him to wash his hands and grab an apron. Cesar liked the boy, he had good energy. No discipline or coordination – which made him a liability in their tiny kitchen – but he liked him around. Natalia wasn’t maternal, she didn’t want kids, so it said a lot about Seta’s charms that he had won her over.

Sullivan folded up his crate trolley ready to go, but before he did he leaned over to Cesar.

“Hey man, listen, I’ve got huitlacoche in. You want to see?”

“Sully that stuff doesn’t sell...” said Cesar.

“What’s... wheat... coochy?” asked Seta, his ears pricking up.

Sullivan laughed. “It’s pronounced wheat-la-ko-chay.”

He pulled out a paper bag and carefully laid it on the countertop. He opened the sides of the bag slowly, revealing its delicate contents. Seta leaned in closer to see what treasures lay within.

All he saw was a cluster of blobby unappealing grey mould.

“Oh that’s gross!” exclaimed Seta.

“That is a delicacy, amigo,” said Sullivan.

“May I?” asked Cesar. He picked up one of the ears of fungus. He held it to his nose, turning it slowly and gently testing the texture.

Natalia looked it over. “I remember this stuff. My abuelita swore by it. She toasted it in quesadillas like it was cheese.”

“They call them corn smuts,” Cesar explained to Seta, “because they grow on ears of corn. They’re sort of rare, like truffles. Because the fungus needs the right conditions...” He turned to Sullivan: “So where are these from?”

“New startup,” said Sullivan. “Local farmer making a bet on the next big thing.”

“Next big thing?” asked Natalia.

“Y’know, a few years back it was pea shoots, then it was avocados. Now it’s alternative mushrooms.”

Cesar looked sceptical. Sullivan continued undiminished: “It’s organic. Local producer. Top quality stuff... But you have to taste them: these are something else!”

“OK man,” laughed Cesar. “I think you have a different idea about our customers!”

“Hold on. Is there only one kind of customer?” asked Natalia. “I didn’t realise we’re only taking money from one kind of people...”

“This isn’t what La Malinche is,” Cesar nodded toward his parents’ photo. “Not what it’s ever been. We’re about popular Mexican cuisine.” He emphasised each word. “Burritos, tacos... We feed workers and their families, not hipsters and magazine critics.”

“Have you looked outside?” Natalia snapped. “Half the places round here have gone organic and vegan...”

“And mushrooms are trending this year,” said Seta. Cesar stared at him. “I saw it on Instagram... But, actually,” he laughed, “that mould is never looking good on Instagram!”

Cesar shook his head, throwing his palms in the air. “I have tomatoes to dice. And you’ve all got stuff to do. Doors in five.” He put the huitlacoche back in its bag and handed it to Sullivan. “Thanks Sully, but, another time.”

Natalia snatched it back. “We can’t even afford table dressing because of your insistence we stick with our cheap-assed customers. We’re doing $5 boxes when there’s places charging $20 for the same thing on a plate. I think those kind of customers are exactly the kind of customers we need.” She turned to Sullivan. “These are free samples, right?” Sully shrugged, no argument here. “OK let’s see what we can do with them.”

*

Cesar and Seta finished stacking the dishes back on the shelves and hung up their aprons. The little restaurant was done for the day. While the men had been cleaning, sanitising and restocking, Natalia had been doing her own project. Now she had her elbows on the serving counter, holding her phone out over a plate, flashing photos of it from different angles. Seta came around the countertop to see what it was.

“Wooow,” said Seta. “Is that the coochy?”

On the plate was a dipping pot containing a puree of huitlacoche surrounded by tortilla chips. The puree was jet black, a profound darkness against the stark white plate, almost unreal in its inky perfection. It looked nothing like its tumour-like natural form. Its flawless blackness glimmered and glistened under the warm bulbs of the servery.

“It turns black when you cook it,” Natalia explained.

“I can’t believe that’s the same blobs of mould...” said Seta.

“Isn’t it cool?” Natalia continued. “It’s my abuelita’s recipe. She’d chop it and sauté it with a little oil and seasoning.”

Cesar remained sceptical. “Yeah, OK, but how does it taste?”

Natalia offered him the chips. He picked one up and dipped its corner into the black mixture. He raised it briefly to his nose, sniffed it, then put it in his mouth and hesitated for a moment before crunching it between his teeth. The dark paste oozed across his tongue. Immediately flavours exploded around his taste centres. First a rich nutty warmth that filled his gullet and spread up into the back of his nose. Then he felt a tingle of umami and sourness at the same time, at different ends of his tongue, in intense, extraordinary opposition. He was frozen, his hand still aloft in front of his lips, his eyes fixed on the middle distance, his mind suddenly unable to multi task. And he felt himself being drawn powerfully back into history, both immediate and ancient, personal and universal. A flash flood of sense memories washed through him: his first taste of chili, of acid, of kisses, rain, diesel, cedar tequila granitetomatonitroussteel... Emotions new and old welled up inside him, feelings he could neither explain or resist.

The fork clattered to the counter.

Cesar swallowed and emitted a small gasp.

“So it’s OK?” asked Natalia.

He couldn’t answer.

*

Next day Natalia had printed new cards for all the tables advertising the new black sauce, an extra for two bucks on the side of their special boxes. But by lunchtime, they’d not sold one. She looked at the cards: the sauce just looked like a black circle. It was too weird, too different. She and Cesar shared their disappointment.

“I don’t get it. I mean, it’s just a puree. They’d have black bean puree, right?” she said.

Cesar felt depleted even though the day was barely half over. “But beans are beans, and this mushroom-that-isn’t-a-mushroom which is actually kind of a mouldy bit of corn...”

“Maybe you’re right,” Natalia relented. “Our customers don’t want this....”

“It just needs presenting different,” said Seta. He’d been lingering by the pot wash.

“What do you mean?” asked Natalia, suspiciously.

“Yeah, so...” began Seta, “the black is really unique, like Vantablack, so make a feature of that. Let me try something.”

In the kitchen, he took a fresh white tortilla, laid it flat and spread out a wide circle of huitlacoche, an enigmatic black disk that dominated the stark white plate. Cesar and Natalia watched as Seta grabbed utensils and ingredients like the kitchen was his home.

“It needs bold colour accompaniments,” he continued. “Some bright green, like avocado or pea sprouts.”

Cesar followed the kid with his eyes, as he pulled out a tub of guacamole and pea sprouts, put them in a small blender until the mix became a vivid mousse, and he piped out a small green circle onto the black circle.

“And now some purple. Like red cabbage.”

He took a jar of bright pickled cabbage from the refrigerator and plucked a few plumes from the liquid, and placed them next to the guac.

“And yellow. Where’s the huancaina?” He took a bottle from the side and squirted a perfect yellow circle of spicy cheese sauce next to the circles of green guac and purple cabbage. Seta slid the plate across the counter towards Cesar and Natalia, who were mesmerised.

“Those circles, they’re like geometry, in dialogue with the form of the plate.”

“It looks like modern art,” said Natalia, clearly awed.

“Where did you learn all that?” asked Cesar.

“Instagram,” said Seta.

Natalia was mesmerised. In fact as they stared at the deepening black and the projecting colours, the whole dish seemed to undulate. As if it wasn’t just a flat black spread, but like it was just a surface and beneath that surface descended pitch depths where currents surged and were buffeted by unseen forces...

*

The next morning, Cesar was prepping the $5 boxes while Natalia was pinned to her phone, apparently oblivious to her morning responsibilities. She caught his eye and explained: “2000 likes...”

“You posted it?”

“No, Seta did. And he has half a million followers.”

“Half a million?”

“He says it’s been shared in China, Iraq and Antarctica.”

“He knows we can’t deliver to Antarctica, right?”

She put down her phone. “Cesar, we are booked up for the week...”

“What?”

Natalia swivelled the bookings diary towards Cesar and showed him: every table number with names next to it, every sitting... “And most of next week.”

Cesar couldn’t help but smile, his shoulders dropping, and for the first time in a long time letting the tension flow out of him and joy fill his soul: No more worries about can we afford the monthly bills, or the business taxes, or the fucking crane flowers. They’d not been fully booked ever. And now they were. All because of that lousy fungus. Then his smile faltered, the tension flooding back... He turned to Natalia: “We’re gonna need a lot more truffles.”

“Mierda...”

Cesar picked up the phone and dialled Sullivan.

*

Sullivan started delivering every day. The huitlacoche didn’t store well, so the farmer only harvested it on demand, according to Sullivan. And demand was booming. At first it came in the small cardboard boxes like cilantro. Then it was the same boxes as scallions. After three weeks - and some mentions on YT channels and by some influencers in Santa Fe - Sullivan was bringing in the fungus in quantities rivalled only by red onions and tomatoes.

Seta jogged out to its side to help him unload. As he lingered in the loading bay, he noticed the Irishman’s keys were still in the truck’s fuel cover. He was about to tell him not to forget them, when one of the many sparkling, shiny, feathered charms on the keyring caught his eye. It was a small black crucifix, small enough to be an earring, and quite unique. Like the one his mother had always worn.

Sullivan appeared from around the tailgate and shoved a large sack of cornflour into Seta’s empty grasp. He noticed the direction of the boy’s gaze.

“Oh,” he said, flatly. “I’ll probably need those.” He took the keys from the fuel cover and returned them to his pocket.

Seta was promoted to sous chef, although it was still only Cesar and Seta in the kitchen so the title was honorary. But it did come with a 100% pay rise which coincidentally helped him get over his aversion to the gross mould. It came in clusters bigger than his fist. They’d been removed from the corn at the farm, so the base of the cluster was flat, geometrical, like a couple of slices with a long blade had liberated it from the cob. Sometimes there were a few flecks of corn flesh and the usual human hairs you had to be careful about with any hand-picked produce, but Seta washed it all off quickly and set to finely chopping the cleaned lobes and dropping them into a hot pan with oil and garlic. Natalia had shared her grandmother’s secrets with him: keep the garlic off the sizzle as long as you can, then the moment you see it browning, throw everything in and toss it well. Seta never tired of watching the fungus mould transform from its natural deathly blue-grey into the cosmic jet black paste. It was like when he looked at the sky on a cloudless day and tried to keep his eyes open as long as possible until the bright blue would burn a shimmering form into his retina, turning the light into an intangible, unreal black...

“Seta!” Natalia screeched.

He blinked awake, sensing the acridness of burnt garlic, realising the pan in front of him was already smoking. Seta panicked, and whipped the pan off the stove, knocking a bowl of chopped cilantro onto the floor with a crash that brought silence to the crowded front of house, a silence he could hear over the din of the kitchen extraction.

“Puta di madre, what are you doing? That shit is valuable! And we don’t have time to be fixing up your messes, we have customers waiting out there! I told you, Cesar, we need a real chef. Why are we still using this kid?”

“Hey, hey!” said Cesar, calming Natalia. “It’s OK, it was just a mistake. Everyone makes mistakes. Are you OK, Setalito?” Seta nodded and started picking up the mess. “OK, so we’re all OK. Seta is going to chop some more cilantro and I’ll get another batch of the coochy going. No importa, it’s fine.”

Natalia scowled and went back to the front of house, where the sound of dozens of diners had already resumed.

“Cabron, careful, eh?” said Cesar, punching Seta on the arm. “We can get more coochy, but we only have one of you. OK?” Seta smiled sheepishly.

*

The moon was just past full. It backlit the smoke from Cesar’s cigarette. After another non-stop day like today, the cigarette tasted all the sweeter. Natalia came out to join him, plucking the cigarette from his fingers and taking a drag.

“So?” asked Cesar.

“$7,800 and change.”

“That’s a new record.”

“After yesterday’s new record.”

“Corazon, we’re doing something special here.”

He kissed the moonlight on her cheek. It had been a long time since they had felt good about the business, and about his parents’ dream of success in the United States which was finally becoming reality. After thirty years of grind – and not forgetting the twenty under his parents before Cesar had taken over – La Malinche was finally a name people were talking about far beyond La Cruces. Natalia took his hand, and with her other hand turned his face towards her and planted a kiss on his lips, lingering, acknowledging, yes - this was special.

“So now can we get more staff?” she whispered. Cesar laughed, stamping out the cigarette under his heel. “A head waiter at least? I don’t want to be dealing with these idiotas anymore.”

“OK, OK...”

“And a sous chef, please. That kid is a liability.”

“Seta’s fine. I’m training him up.”

“He’s just a street kid. Kids like him are a dime a dollar.”

“A dime a dozen...”

“Right. So find one who isn’t a fucking liability.”

“OK, I’ll think about it.”

“Cesar...”

“I said I’ll think about it, Natalia,” he snapped. Then sighed. “I’m sorry. Long day. I’ll ask around, see if anyone’s looking for work.”

Natalia pointed at him. “That’s a promise.” Then she went back inside. Cesar looked at the moon. The music from the nearby bars bounced around the neighbourhood, and the sound of some kids in a truck gunning into the intersection...

Then he heard a rustle from the dumpsters. Something - someone - was standing there, not moving, hiding in the shadows. Cesar shielded his eyes from the moonlight, trying to see into the darkness. “Who’s there?”

Footsteps then a figure emerged: Seta, carrying the empty scraps bin from the kitchen.

“Seta... Shit...”

“It’s OK. She’s right. I should move on.”

“Hey, hermano, I’m sorry you heard all that.”

“I fucked up today. I’m sorry.”

“It was busy, it happens. But you’re aren’t going anywhere.”

“You’re not hiring another chef?”

“Look,” Cesar squirmed, “the place is getting busy...”

“So you are hiring another chef?”

“That doesn’t mean I’m not keeping you on!”

“I love cooking, man. I love working at La Malinche. If it wasn’t for you guys, I’d be getting exploited for pennies like my parents were...”

“Seta--”

“This was the only future I had!” He put the scraps bin on the ground. “And it was everything I wanted.”

“Seta, listen to me. Who runs this place?”

“Well, Natalia.”

“No, man, I run this place. It was my parents’, now it’s mine. I decide who works here. And right now, the people who work in that kitchen are me and you.” Seta stared at the ground. “Do you understand?”

Seta looked up and Cesar saw that there were tears in his eyes.

In a quiet voice Seta said, “That’s everything I wanted.”

Cesar threw his arms round him in a bearhug, patting him on the back. “Well, you got what you wanted.” Seta held onto Cesar and Cesar felt the boy’s chest heaving. After a few seconds they pulled apart, Seta wiping the snot from his nose. “And what I want, is for you to be back here 5am sharp and you’re going to cook up all the coochy we need for the day. OK?”

Seta nodded. “Yes, sir.”

“Go home. I’ll finish up.”

Seta turned and walked toward the service lane running behind the restaurant. Cesar picked up the scraps bin and headed back inside, when Seta called out.

“Cesar.”

“Yeah.”

“Thanks.”

“No problem. See you five sharp.” Cesar went inside leaving Seta standing in the moonlight.

*

“It’s fucking 7am. Where is he?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did you call him?”

“These kids don’t pick up phone calls--”

“Cesar! I told you and I told you and--”

“And I heard you! Something must have happened...”

“So how are we going to get through today?”

Cesar stopped, breathed, considered. “The coochy’s off the menu.”

“What?”

“I don’t have time to make it and do everything else. And you have to run front of house. So that’s what we’re doing. Coochy’s off.”

“All the people coming here today are only coming here for one thing. There will be a riot. Our TripAdvisor rating will go through the floor.”

"No. You’re right. We should close the restaurant.”

Natalia’s eyes drilled into him. He threw her glare right back at her.

“Don’t worry, I’ll go and see what’s up with Seta. Or, who knows? Maybe I’ll just drag some other kid off the street, because they’re a dime a dollar, right?”

He tore off his apron and walked out.

*

A low winter sun rose without ambition. Cesar drove slowly through the long shadows of motor homes. He had an address for Seta on a trailer park in Mesquite, a few miles outside Las Cruces. He vaguely knew the neighbourhood, but he’d never been to Seta’s place. He crawled the dusty roads, seeing signs of life emerging behind blinds and battered doors, as the residents prepared for their day jobs. Eventually he found site 48, the address registered to Seta’s parents, and parked up. It was a small home, probably a single bedroom. And it was quiet. He knocked on the door.

“Seta?”

No answer. He tried the handle. The door was unlocked, so he went inside.

The place was neat and clean. Cesar silently begged forgiveness for his prejudices about a lone teenage boy’s housekeeping. But it still left him feeling disconcerted. He didn’t want to poke around, but he could see that the single fold-down in the living room was in fact a young man’s bedroom. He stepped carefully past the kitchen (spotless), down the hallway (immaculate), past the bathroom (sparkling) and peered into the bedroom. The bed was made and the furniture was arranged like his parents were still living here. But then again, as Cesar walked back through the living areas, and into the stark Mesquite morning, on reflection the whole place felt like no one was living here.

“Who the fuck are you?”

Waiting for him on the broken decking was a woman in her 50s, double denim, homemade bangs, staring at him. She had her cell out, pink nails ready to dial 911, like she’d caught a criminal and the next moments would confirm one way or the other.

“I’m looking for Seta Pérez,” said Cesar. “He works for me.”

“You run that restaurant?” she asked.

“La Malinche. My name’s Cesar.”

“Oh yeah.” She put her phone away. “I have a booking. Five weeks from now.”

“Yeah, sorry about that. It got busy... So, have you seen Seta lately?” She narrowed her eyes at him. Cesar explained: “He’s a good worker. He helps me in the kitchen. He didn’t come in this morning and we had to close the restaurant, so... he’s important. To me.”

“Well, I can tell you he’s a good tenant too. Since his parents went away, he’s paid rent every month. But I told him: it ain’t legal. A fourteen year old can’t rent a trailer.”

“His parents left him?”

She narrowed her eyes. “You come up round here?”

“La Cruces...”

“OK. You’re not from round here then.”

“What do you mean?”

“Folks in Mesquite work on the farms. And sometimes they don’t come back.”

“What do you mean? They go missing?”

“They’re just gone. That’s all that matters.”

“I don’t understand. If they’re missing, do the police know?”

“Mister, you need to stop asking questions.”

She made to leave but Cesar begged: “Please, just tell me one thing. Do you know which farm?”

She stared at him through heavy mascara. “The Irishman’s farm.”

*

Cesar pressed his foot to the pedal. The truck growled and lurched down the highway towards the new farm. With his right hand he dialled Sully’s number on his cell, but every time he made the call, Sully hung up. Sully knew he was coming. And Sully knew why. And there was something very wrong about that. Cesar had a gun in the trunk, but he couldn’t remember if he had rounds. Too bad. He had to get to the farm.

The truck passed fields of corn, rows reaching further than Cesar could see. A green labyrinth, at the centre of which Cesar found a modest single story farmhouse. He pulled up in front, next to a couple of trucks and a tractor with a backhoe attached. The house was dark and silent. All around was the susurrus of maize leaves in the air. To the left of the house, in a clearing amongst the maize stalks, was the first of a number of brand new greenhouses. Their long semicircular frames were hung with opaque white plastic sheeting, stretching back a couple of hundred yards each. A hum of air circulation came from them but little else.

To Cesar’s mind, a working farm being silent on a weekday morning didn’t sit right at all. He called Sully’s phone again. The desert air hung cool and still. Then he heard an answering ring coming from inside one of the growing frames. A vague silhouette moved behind the plastic, shutting off his cellphone.

“Hey amigo, what brings you out here?” Sullivan said, emerging from the entrance of the greenhouse. He was wearing a white labcoat. He lowered an N95 mask from his face. Slung over his shoulder was a rifle.

“I’m looking for Seta.”

“Seta...”

“I spoke to his landlady at the trailer park. She said his parents had gone missing. Maybe out here.”

“I’m sorry, I haven’t seen Seta,” Sullivan laughed, fake-casually. “Or his mom.”

Cesar looked around. “Is this where you’re growing the huitlacoche? All this maize looks pretty normal.”

“Yeah. It’s a delicate crop. So we grow it under the covers.”

“Can I see?”

Sullivan hesitated, clicked his teeth. “I’m sorry. Can’t risk the spores getting disturbed.”

Cesar didn’t like Sullivan’s evasiveness. It was out of character. Cesar walked towards him, towards the entrance of the greenhouse, partly to see if Sullivan would try to stop him.

“Cesar, you don’t want to go in there. This is not my farm. You don’t want to meet the people whose farm it is.”

Cesar walked right up to Sullivan. “If I’m mixed up in something, some kind of smuggling, cartel, narco business... I want to know about it.”

“What is known cannot be unknown,” Sullivan warned him.

“Well, I guess that’s life.”

Cesar pushed past Sullivan who did little to get in his way.

The plastic sheeting parted to reveal an entrance vestibule. Cesar felt a cool, damp microclimate. Not humid like a hothouse, but light and misty like a forest at night. Ideal for fungus. A chorus of low hums surrounded him and filled his ears. Some kind of ventilation or irrigation systems maybe. The opaque walls diffused the daylight, creating a flawless glow which his eyes struggled to find focus on. He saw masks and labcoats hanging on hooks, but he decided to forego the dress-up stage. A steel bench had drawers of scalpels and surgical wipes, and stacks of the crates which he’d seen Sullivan use on dozens of occasions to bring the huitlacoche into the restaurant.

On the other side of the vestibule was a zipped-up inner door. Cesar reached up for the toggle and began to pull it down. The humming got louder. The gap exsufflated a fetid breeze onto his face, a bloom of musty air so intense it felt corporeal. As he stepped through he wondered if he should have worn a mask, but that thought was interrupted by what he saw inside, which froze his feet and filled his abdomen with a heavy, black dread.

A human garden. People planted vertically. Naked and staked inside steel frames. Half a dozen rows receding into mist. Irrigated and drip-fed by a matrix of tubes. Mouths sutured. And all their eyes turned towards Cesar, bulging, staring, begging. Cesar felt dizzy and paralysed. His thoughts stacked and tripped over one another, and what he saw next made him feel like his body was plummeting through air: their heads were incomplete. Their skulls were wide open above the brow line. The exposed cerebella were being misted by spray nozzles. But the visible tissue was not brain tissue. It was fungus. Those familiar blue-grey nodules, plump, succulent and delicious.

“It’s a modified strain of ustilago maydis.”

Cesar jumped. Sullivan was standing right behind him.

“You just make a little nick in the growth medium and paste in some spores, and the mycelium takes root nicely.”

Cesar’s mind spun as he looked along the rows, from body to body: dark skin, pale skin, thin, tall, fat, old, young...

“The brain loves glucose, devours it. So does fungus.”

Cesar now saw there were other people in white labcoats scattered through the greenhouse, tending to the crop. On a row against the left hand wall, a new person was being planted. The body was young, a boy...

Cesar cried out, but no sound came.

Dear God, Seta.

The boy was being fitted into a frame, thick steel wire wrapping around his limbs and neck. He seemed unconscious. Lying on a steel trolley in the aisle next to him was a terrifying instrument, like an inverted chainsaw with the teeth in a circle facing inward. Cesar knew with abject horror that this tool was for removing the top of a skull.

Cesar leapt in Seta’s direction, but Sullivan saw the move coming and tripped him. Cesar toppled to the floor, slipping and rolling on the mist-slicked walkway, ending up on his back, looking up at the row of living corpse plants.

Sullivan stood over him, his rifle extended. “That damn key chain.” He clicked his teeth. “His parents were here. The first crop. The skullsaw caught her earring and threw it on the ground. And I just picked it up. I don’t know why. Anyway, Seta saw it at the restaurant and came looking.”

“Not him.”

“What?”

“Take me.”

“Cesar, I can’t let either of you go. This is the end of the line.”

“No!”

Sullivan raised the gun barrel inches from Cesar’s face. “What a waste of brain.”

Cesar closed his eyes. “Natalia. Please tell her---”

Boom.

*

The sign fitters adjusted the banner left and right on the front of the restaurant. Natalia shielded her eyes against the sun. It said: Natalia’s Truffleria. Grand Reopening.

A fresh coat of blue-grey paint gave the front of the restaurant a modern, trendy feel. The old tie-back curtains had been replaced by tasteful venetian blinds. A team of waiting staff were ferrying tables and chairs out on to the sidewalk.

“Señora, the delivery is out back.”

“Gracias, Ettore.”

Natalia walked through her glistening new front of house and into the kitchen where the kitchen crew were preparing vats of jet black truffle paste and turning it into empanadas, dips, soups, pastries...

On the wall, next to the photo of Cesar’s parents was another, old colour photo from the 1990s showing Cesar and Natalia in front of La Malinche. A wave of sadness fell through her, but she had decided months ago: there’s no point grieving forever.

Sullivan walked in, trolley stacked high, The top box overflowing with exotic flowers.

“Crane flowers!” exclaimed Natalia. She threw her arms around him. “The one thing I needed for the opening!”

“Not the only thing.” He revealed another box, filled with an abundance of blue-grey fungus. “The latest crop. I think you’ll love these.”