sketch

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.

interlude: cats

i am convinced that the cats operate under a science-fiction soap-opera dichotomy. gato, the dumb one, sidles up to curry, the smart, street-savvy calico, and sniffs at her face. recoiling in disgust, she paws at him in total disdain and he withdraws, shame-faced. he returns to staring at the things which move, or the things which make a lot of noise and could, thereby, be threatening. brings new meaning to the phrase "fraidy-cat."

it's just like the oafish thug who serves as the comic relief and the sharp captain who secretly loves his brutish ways btu who scorns him in the presence of others. sometimes gato & curry sleep on the same hemisphere of the bed, curled up near, but not too near, to one another, eyes closed, breathing in tandem. he's a bit of a hedonistic glutton, though, only living for the next jaw-scratch or the next tail-yank. curry is best described as aloof, and is yet tortured by gato every time the food happens in the early morning. we have to separate their dishes, else gato (who wolfs down his food with the vigor that only the starving have) will turn to her and stare at her while she nibbles and masticates delicately. it might have something to do with her significant lank of teeth that causes her to eat so cautiously, but gato never has been sympathetic to her disabilities, and will often chase her rambunctiously through the house, as though he were a dog in a cat's body. the more i think about it, gato is probably the world's first feline to exhibit symptoms of a species dysmorphia. perhaps he should get an operation. i wonder if he'll chase tennis balls. or frisbees. i've heard he's pretty crazy around those laser pointers.