X & A & R & J, sprawled on the couches as though a bomb had gone off in the center of the room and they lay there, dizzily, stunned. the walls pulse with the reflected colors of the television, a noisy ghost shouting useless things. outside, the trees bend and quiver in obeisance to an invisible menace. it has rained for three days now and the city is beginning to feel it in their spines, right around the third vertebra, an aching that gets worse and worse as their shoulders sag, day after day, rising to see the sun and finding only that eldritch white-gray sky staring balefully back down at them. the clouds drop the rain as though unravelling themselves, like dispirited yarn-skeins.
eight hours earlier, X had curiously poked his index finger in the air, expecting it to tear through some sort of seam. everything sagged. they each ate a handful of psilocybe cubensis and chased them with miller lite. they'd gone through their ascent together, yet apart, each in a different quadrant of the room, gone through the period of hysterical laughter at anything anyone said, gone through the melting process, stared wildly into space, lost inside their heads as though in a vast cavern, staring, staring -
in the skinny hour before dawn, A falls asleep, his breath rasping against the back of his throat. the pre-cursor to some later-life apnea. R is bug-eyed, his long-fingered right hand clutching the armrest. the TV has taken on some form of life for him. J is in the process of calmly rolling a small joint, though he won't admit to having some difficulty. the small white pinner has developed an unfortunate twitch, a tail which flicks around and evades his fingers. he considers taking the lighter in his left hand and burning it as it lays on the table, but the thought is an ephemeral one, a fish in the muddy murk of his brain, a fish breaking the surface and then retreating again. his thoughts unravel like a burlesque reel, or a vaudeville. he is thinking of his various paraphilias. X finds his jaw clenching, feels the layers of his stomach writhing over the remnants of the mushrooms. he wonders: (is it still raining outside?) the curtains over the windows are thick and would not move easily. he has not smoked a cigarette in entirely too long, though sometimes when he trips he just doesn't. forgets to.
