by Andi Loveall
They got up and helped Panky gather up her things and move them over to the other cabin, and then they all had breakfast together, nursing their coffee as Panky smoked in the doorway. After that, Lucius packed some things and they took off.
He led them up the trail to the waterfall, continuing past it along another tiny trail that followed the ridge. Sunlight dripped down through the trees, feeding the ferns on the forest floor. Little birds twittered in the canopy. After about fifteen minutes of trudging along with weeds and vines scratching at their ankles, the trail opened up into a large meadow. They paused, looking out across the sea of green and taking a moment to breathe it all in.
They found a nice mossy spot in the shade at the east side of the meadow’s edge, and Lucius unrolled a blanket. He got down on his hands and knees, dumping out the mushrooms and dividing them into four equal piles.
“Now tell me,” Devin said as he was handed his share. “On a scale of one to ten, how scared should I be right now?”
“One,” Cora said. “Zero, really. It’s like jumping off the waterfall. It seems scary, but once you do it, you realize it’s fun.”
“I’d say you should be at a strong three,” Panky said, popping one in her mouth.
“No way,” Cora said, shaking her head. “Why three?”
“Mushrooms can sometimes be scary. You said it yourself—it’s like a cliff dive.”
“I don’t think cliff dives are scary.”
Panky shrugged. “As with any drug, some people react badly to mushrooms. It doesn’t mean I think it’s going to happen to Devin. But anyone taking a new substance should at least be moderately—”
“I say ten,” Lucius interjected. “Be as scared as you possibly can be. Accept your demise at the hands of the psychedelic overlords and go somewhere higher.”
Devin laughed. He liked that answer the best.
The mushrooms weren’t so bad—a little chewy with an odd aftertaste, but nothing he couldn’t get down. When they were finished, they lay back and relaxed on the blanket, listening to the hissing and chirping and rustling of the woods. Fifteen minutes passed, then twenty, and the only thing he felt was a weird sense of paranoia creeping in.
Once, at a party, someone had crept up and shoved him into the pool, and he swore the second before it happened, he felt it. This was like that feeling but weirder … and worse.
“I keep getting this urge to look over my shoulder.” He twisted around. “Does that mean it’s working?”
“There’s no way it’s not gonna work.” Lucius grinned. “We ate a hefty.”
“Shit.” He paused. “Really?”
The girls cracked up laughing and he did too, even though he wasn’t sure why.
“If you’re gonna do something, might as well do it right.” Lucius nodded, and then his head just kept going as if it were bobbing to an imaginary beat.
Oddly enough, Panky seemed to be doing the same. Up and down. Up and down.
“Why are you guys bobbing your heads?”
“What?” Panky stared at him. Lucius didn’t respond at all.
Devin laughed harder, feeling like someone else’s mouth was slapped on his face like a refrigerator magnet. His giggles died down, and for a second, he thought he felt normal again.
He looked over at Panky. Her t-shirt read Dinosaurs Against Creationism across the chest. It didn’t make sense, and that bothered him. He couldn’t imagine dinosaurs being against anything, other than asteroids and maybe bigger, meaner dinosaurs. Dinosaurs Against Asteroids would have made for a better shirt.
Asteroids. He looked at the sky.
Cora’s hands touched his shoulders, making him jump.
“Whoa. I forgot you were there.”
“Don’t forget!” She squished his cheeks together with the palms of her hands, making a mow-ow-ow noise with her mouth.
He blinked. What the hell was going on? Oh yeah, mushrooms. They had done mushrooms.
“We did mushrooms.”
“Thank you for the news of the hour, Mr. Newsman.” Panky was choking on her own voice, clutching herself as she laughed. “Oh God, it’s going to be ravaging.”
“I’m tripping!” Lucius stumbled to his feet. His voice was filled with incredible surprise as if he hadn’t been aware that the mushrooms could have this effect. The look on his face was just too much, and Devin fell over into a laughing lump.
Yeah, it was definitely working now. A mad banshee was overtaking his body. There it was in his mind’s eye, with its glass skull and swirling, smoky tail. It was shatterproof and eternal, its force field created from some sort of advanced nanotechnology that humans wouldn’t be able to understand for centuries. It spat microscopic ropes made from chunks of gold the size of red blood cells. Spirit String, they were called. Spirit String wouldn’t be patented until the year 2189, and that just so happened to be the year this governmentally funded banshee bio-weapon came from. It was sent back in time, just to attack him.
He rolled over on his side, watching as Panky tried to compose herself long enough to light a smoke. Chich—that was the noise the lighter made right before the tiny flame appeared.
“Chich,” he said loudly. No one responded.
Lucius started pacing back and forth. “I just thought of something …”“What?” Devin asked.
“What if you had a really small thing that was really heavy?” His eyes widened. “Like, really heavy.”
“Like an eighty-pound marble?”
“Yes!” Lucius flailed. “Exactly like that!”
“What would you do with it?” Cora said. “And could you even pick it up? Wouldn’t it tear right through your fingers?”
“Yeah,” Lucius said. “You’d have to have a machine to help you pick it up and put it in a big sack. Then you could carry it around.”
Cora made a face. “But why?”
“Am I speaking English?” Lucius looked at her. “Whoa … You know what would be even cooler? What if in the future they invent this computer chip that inserts right into your brain, making it so you can speak English in your head and have it come out your mouth in whatever language you want. Or vice-versa for other languages. You wouldn’t even have to learn.”
Devin was down with this idea.
“Dude,” he said. “What if we’re speaking Japanese right now and don’t know it because we all have ours set to English?”
“Oh my God.”
“Hey,” Panky said. “Look at the sky!”
There was a jetliner far above. It looked like a mosquito hawk making a great pilgrimage across a vast blue lake, only slower and without legs. A sad, floating, quadriplegic mosquito hawk. It made him want to laugh and cry at the same time.
Instead, he stretched his arms out above him. They felt heavy like tire rubber. His neck rolled so far back he could see upside down. The air was so clear, like everything had been wiped down with window cleaner. What was there normally that wasn’t there now? Smog? Mist? Human souls?
“Rubbish!” Panky let out a shrill whine, startling everyone back into reality. “I lit my cigarette and forgot to smoke it.”
The stick between her fingers was nothing but a delicate trunk of ash. It pathetically collapsed.
The laughter erupted with explosive intensity.
She looked horrified, like a sad rich kid with a missing horse. The story was easy to imagine: One morning, a spoiled little British girl happily skipped out to the stables to discover that her prized pony, probably named something like Buttercup or Georgie Sue, vanished during the night. No more seaside horseback rides for this rich kid.
“You …You … look so … ” Devin clutched his stomach. He couldn’t stop laughing. Sweat was beading on his skin, and he was starting to feel nauseated, but he still couldn’t stop. He was going to piss his pants. It was ridiculous, this horrid and pretty thing called life.
He curled up in a ball, totally freaking out. Suddenly, all he could think about was coins. What it would be like to eat coins. What coins could be us
ed for. Those little slots that coins went into, which had to be the exact right size for each individual coin. It was all too much.
He worked up the courage to open his eyes and saw Lucius packing the pipe. Weed existed. Thank God all mighty, weed existed.
They all smoked, sending clouds up into the sky, microscopic swirls breaking apart into puffs of even smaller microscopic swirls. Up and up, up and up. He gazed at Cora, who looked powerful and regal; the golden priestess of the temple South, the wind blowing through her hair.
The weed filled them with new life, and they went exploring, going across the meadow and into the other side of the woods. Cora skipped ahead and pointed things out to the rest of them. A hawk soaring across the sky. A cluster of vines winding their way up a tree. A ladybug sitting on a leaf, her back like a shiny piece of hard candy. Together they watched her crawl, mesmerized by her symmetry.
Devin stood at the base of an old oak, pressing his hands to its trunk and staring up into the branches. They were moving: twisting and gnarling into themselves. This was the king of the forest, the eldest of all elders. It had been here for hundreds of years, waiting patiently for this moment when they would arrive to feel its magic.
Things grew more intense from there. All at once, they became scared, longing for the comfort of the blanket. They made it back and curled up, Devin gripping onto Cora and losing the ability to control any other part of his body. Strange and disturbing things were appearing whenever he closed his eyes. Oxygen, rising from plants like invisible steam. Large, alien-looking buildings. Odd creatures that he couldn’t even begin to describe. There were colorful designs, flipping themselves inside out and dripping like melted wax, and whenever he opened his eyes, he saw the clouds sitting above like big snoozing babysitters, carelessly watching over a world painted in pastel and draped in strings of gold.
There was no gravity—the only thing stopping him from floating off into space was his grip on Cora. Her smell reminded him of vanilla cupcakes with pink frosting, and being near her felt like magnets clinking together through a fuzzy piece of cloth. It didn’t really make sense, but that was how she felt. Her pupils were bouncing black holes devouring a green biosphere.
“Can you see me?” he whispered. “What do I look like right now?”
“You look like a paper doll. What do I look like?”
“A universe.”
A second felt like weeks in this pulsating world. It went on and on, and soon he found himself coursing with emotion. Was his mother out there, hidden in the shapes beyond the horizon? Locked in a bell tower for all eternity with nothing to do but stare out upon the land? Could she see him now?
Or, had she gone down into the Earth instead? Down deep into a network of caves, where the air was thick with silver mist, and geysers steamed and hissed from the cracks? Hiss.
He looked over at Cora, who appeared to be resting peacefully. Maybe Maggie was locked in a bell tower too, along with every other beautiful woman who had died before her time. He read somewhere once that over two hundred people died every minute. Within the space of a few breaths, two hundred biodegradable suits of flesh fell to the surface of the earth, empty and abandoned.
“Where you going, babe?”
“There are caves under the ground,” he said, brushing himself off and looking down at Cora. “And I’m going to piss.”
Ingest liquid. Expel liquid through penis. He was a living water distiller. At least that much he could figure.
***
Watching the sunset was the best part of the trip. They sat together and smoked a bowl as the sky burned orange and red, and everything was right in the universe once again. The big, vast, beautiful universe, flying across an endless timeline and setting with the sun, only to rise again and again for a thousand other people in a thousand other lifetimes.
“We better get going, eh?” Lucius said, standing up and dusting himself off. “It’s getting dark, and I forgot to bring a flashlight.”
“You forgot a flashlight?” Devin made a face. “How could you forget a flashlight? What if we got lost in the woods? What would we do then?”
“We won’t get lost,” Lucius said. “The trail is right over there.”
“No one ever plans to get lost in the woods.”
“I don’t think you—”
Panky let out a shriek. “Oh my God! I just saw a panther!”
They all froze. Devin glanced at Lucius, who sighed and shut his eyes.
“Panky—”
“It’s not a prank,” she said. “I saw it.”
“You’re still tripping. Anyway, maybe it was a bobcat—”
“There!” Panky flung her fists in the direction of the trail. “There! I just saw it again!”
“Shit,” Cora said, eyes unblinking. “I saw it too.”
No way. Devin shook his head. He wasn’t tripping as hard as before, but far too much to fight an angry wildcat. He could see it now: Devin Ashford, the writer who wrote nothing, eaten by a panther a few short weeks after leaving his hometown. Such a pathetic story would surely make national news, and someone would write a really bad television movie about his life. Devin Ashford: Pilgrimage Lost.
“I don’t see anything,” he said.
“I don’t either.”
“She went under those vines there.” Cora pointed. “That way.”
“I thought mountain lions and panthers were extinct in this area,” Lucius said.
“They say that,” Cora said. “But people do see them occasionally.”
“Okay,” Lucius said, cupping his hands around his mouth and letting out a shriek. “Wahoooaaaahhh! C’mon, we can scare it away—Wahoooaaaahhh!”
“Stop!” Panky cried. “You’ll call it over!”
“He’s right,” Cora said. “It’ll be fine. Let’s just go.”
“Are you crazy?”
“We’re no better off just sitting here in the dark,” Cora said. “There’s four of us and one of her. Come on.”
“How do you know there’s just one?”
They were all quiet.
“Panky,” Devin said, shaking it off. “Stop it.”
“But I—”
“We stay close,” Cora said. “We stay calm. We make a lot of noise. If you run, she’ll think you’re prey—you got it?”
Panky didn’t get it, but luckily, Lucius was willing to drag her.
“That’s it, girl,” he said, struggling. “Scream your head off. Scare that biznatch away.”
They made their way down the trail, armed with sticks and letting out random whoops and hollers every few seconds. The last of the light vanished, and they were left stumbling along the rockiest part of the trail near the waterfall, gripping onto each other in desperation. Devin was hit with the giggles again, and they quickly spread to everyone else. Even Panky.
“We’re going to die,” she wailed.
“We’re not going to die,” Devin said, looking over his shoulder. “We’re stupid idiots, tripping on drugs. There’s nothing—”
Something darted across the trail behind them. Something big. He faced forward slowly, the blood draining from his face.
“I don’t mean to alarm anyone, but I think it might be following us.”
“What?” Cora spun around.
“I’m not joking—I might just be seeing things. I don’t know—”
“I see it!” Panky shrieked. “Run!”
Before anyone could respond, she took off.
They ran after her in a blind panic, making their way out to the main trail. He kept the others in front of him, ready to sacrifice himself if need be. When the light of the cabins appeared, he praised the sky.
“We survived!”
Everything was a blur of celebratory hugs and delirious laughter, and after a few minutes, he found himself in the kitchen, shocked from the transition from dark and dangerous to safe, warm and comfortable. Had he been here all along, dreaming everything else? It was almost like a scene from his future book,
except his story had the cruel spirit of a murderous countryman as the antagonist, not a possibly hallucinatory black panther.
Lucius and Panky wandered down the hill to go describe their near-death experience to everyone they knew on the Internet, vanishing from Devin’s world. Cora disappeared and reappeared, grabbing things and doing things he didn’t have a clue about. It looked like she was moving really fast, but she was actually moving at normal speed and he was stuck on pause, staring at a pot of boiling water on the stove.
It was a living entity in constant metamorphosis, tiny bubbles forming on bottom, breaking free and shooting to the surface. It was a fast and passionate journey, just like life.
Tears formed in his eyes. He was distracted by the chair scraping against the floor as Cora sat down at the table. Skrrrmp. It was such a weird sound.
It was such a weird concept; scraping. He closed his eyes and began picturing things that could scrape together: Sandpaper against a piece of wood. Nails on a chalkboard. The teeth of kissing lovers. The sides of two buildings, falling into each other during an earthquake.
“You know,” he said. “I think I’m still tripping.”
She giggled. “At least we’re out of the woods.”
“I think,” he said, pouring out two cups of tea. “I’m ready to begin our sleepover.”
He gathered a container of leftover egg salad, a box of cookies and, of course, a jar of pickles, and carried them over to her cabin. She walked along beside him, carrying the tea, and looking beautiful in the dim light of the porch. Her face was flushed with sun and puffy from the effects of the mushrooms.
They lit a bunch of candles, turned on some classic rock, and spent the next ten minutes putting fresh sheets on the beds, which inspired an even greater idea: pushing the two beds together to create one giant bed fort.
He was an expert in fort construction. Leon never approved of forts, so Devin and Michael had to find covert ways of getting away with building them as kids. They couldn’t simply wait until Leon wasn’t around because their mother didn’t approve either, always pulling the “too big of a mess” card. Their only real option was to wait until she was asleep and Leon was away on the graveyard shift, which meant pattering out to the living room in the middle of the night and deconstructing the couch. They usually brought one of their sheets out from the bedroom and used it as the room, and then they would get inside, pretending to be superheroes guarding an underground portal that led to another universe. Once, they accidentally fell asleep, waking up just in time to put everything back and leap into bed before the sound of the key in the front door signaled that Leon was home, bitter from work.