Act 2, Scene 7: “Fungal Invasion”

TRL hates mushrooms. He had never thought about them before, except in the occasional context of psychedelia or the merits of using portabellas as a main course. But bouquets of mushrooms are sprouting up in his green, green lawn, invading the conformity of the grass like a cancer or an ugly growth emerging on the scalp and growing above an otherwise beautiful head of hair. Mushrooms are evil, TRL decides, and he must kill them all. So he kicks at the brown musky-smelling clusters when he walks his lawn to move the sprinkler or just take in the measure of his property. He once, in a fit of anger, grabbed a hoeing tool from the garage to scrape deep at the mushrooms’ roots, evicting the fungal bloom but also taking out a circle of grass.

TRL knows mushrooms are not to be feared, that they are part of the natural order of things, that outside is outside, but there is an aesthetic standard that the lawn must meet, for TRL’s burgeoning homeowner satisfaction and not to scare the neighbors. Plus he doesn’t want his boys touching these growths. Maybe they’re poisonous. So he kicks at them and knocks their caps off and with it some stem. It is a meager triumph, but a necessary one. The mushrooms can not stand.