• Mushrooms, as many as will fit in your pot, surgical sample basin, or other receptacle

• 1 mouse

• Water

Pick the mushrooms. You will find them growing in warm spots in the basement. Look on the steam pipes or in the laundry room or under that autoclave that somehow developed a leak. Make sure they aren’t deathcaps. Or make sure that they are.

Catch a mouse. They’re most plentiful in the old labs or the animal room, but really you can find them anywhere.

Ask the mouse, “Mouse, what do you have to say for yourself?”

If the mouse answers, invite it to share your stew. While it’s true that you’re probably hallucinating from loneliness, malnutrition, and suppressed terror, it might be a transgenic mouse that mutated further and developed intelligence. Better safe than sorry.

If the mouse doesn’t answer or answers only with a squeak, kill it with whatever you have on hand and skin it. Cut the head off. You never know. Better safe than sorry.

Collect the water. There will probably be a pool of water somewhere near where you found the mushrooms. Try to make sure you aren’t under the infectious disease ward when you collect the water, but don’t worry about it unnecessarily. Boiling covers a multitude of sins.

Start a fire. Don’t ask me how. That’s your problem.

Take half the water and use it to wash the mushrooms. Put the rest on to boil.

Drop the washed mushrooms in the pot. If any of them scream, take the pot off the heat right away. It’s probably a hallucination, but better safe than sorry. Sort out which one screamed and invite it to dinner. Hope mushrooms don’t consider eating non-sentient mushrooms to be cannibalism or that their ethical tradition does not forbid cannibalism.

Put the rest of the mushrooms back on the heat. Toss the mouse in. The body, not the head or the skin.

Boil until it’s mushy enough to eat even with the state of your teeth.

Wonder why you’ve written this recipe in the second person given that you’re almost certainly the only surviving human in the world.

Forget that last step.

Pause for a moment to be grateful for the food.

Suppress the urge to scream at whoever said you should be grateful. Seriously, fuck that.

Hope it was a deathcap.