Cackle(49)

“You’re not a burden to anyone but yourself,” she says. “Drink your tea. Get some sleep. Good night.”

As she leaves, I notice the spider from earlier is in her hair, its legs clutching the strands.

When the door closes, the silence rises up against me. It takes shape. I don’t know what time it is. It feels like I’m neck-deep in a nightmare. I wish it were a nightmare.

I want to look at the picture again.

I want to analyze the look on his face. I want to compare it to the pictures of us.

The stink of the mushroom tea distracts me.

I slip off of the couch onto the floor, stretch my legs out underneath the coffee table. My arms are slack. I can’t stiffen my wrists. I rock myself forward and sip from the mug.

Sophie was right. This tea is truly repulsive. It’s thick. It drags its nails across my tongue, squirms down my throat. But once it’s inside me, once it’s settled, it begins to warm me. Soothe me.

I take another sip. And another.

A brightness erupts inside my head. It splits into twin stars, one in each eyeball, twirling in my vision. Spinning, spinning.

Another sip and I’m up. I’m testing out my new body. It’s made of lightning.

I reach down and pick up the mug. There are little bits floating in it. Dark leaves. Tiny black seeds. Dried mushrooms. Flowers.

I finish drinking the tea. I swallow some of the flowers. The mushrooms. I don’t know if I’m supposed to.

I trust that I’ll be okay.

I dance around my apartment to music I can’t hear. But it’s there. I know it’s there. The spiders are dancing, too. They wave their limbs. I wave mine. I have just as many. Just as many as them.

Too many.

I raise my arms up. I try to count them. They multiply quickly, split at the ends into several hands. My collection of fingers, I notice, is not all fingers. Some of them are different. Ribs. Rib bones. I’ve got rib bones functioning as extra fingers.

Because I am a creature, an amalgam of bones. I’m a femur, a kneecap, a fragment of jaw. One of my arms isn’t an arm, or not just an arm. It’s extended by vertebrae.

I’m rearranging.

My torso is a sack of transparent skin. I can see my organs pulsating inside, wet lungs, a pulpy red heart, liver dark and smooth, stomach like a naked bird. I reach up for my head to see if it’s still there, and it is, only the texture is wrong. My distorted skull feels something like cardboard. Like an empty box. There are voids where my eyes should be.

But then how am I seeing?

My tongue. My tongue is like a huge sponge, wagging out of my mouth, spit bubbling, popping, murmuring.

I try to speak, but my tongue has expanded. It extends to the far reaches of my mouth. It presses up against my cheeks. It’s like a marshmallow in the microwave. It’s going to explode. My tongue is going to explode.

I stuff my fingers in my mouth to try to make space. So many fingers. So many rib bones.

That’s when I realize I don’t have any teeth.

I begin wailing, but the sound is trapped behind the wall of my tongue.

My teeth. Where are they? Where did they go?

I pull my hands out of my mouth. They’re covered in something. A slimy membrane. Glossy saliva. I try to shake it off, but that only forges my fingers together, so my hands are now like oven mitts.

Fleshy, webbed mitts.

There’s a dense noise ahead of me. A hearty plop.

I feel around in the bog of colors and find it.

My tongue.

Wearing a crown of my teeth.

“There you are,” I say, only I can’t make words without my tongue or my teeth. And even if I could, it wouldn’t matter, because the laughter is too loud.

Who’s laughing at me? Why?

Or am I laughing? Is it me?

It is.

I pull at the dog-eared pages of the universe and fold myself up inside of it.





BAD REACTION


I am violently ill. I’m hunched over the toilet in my bathroom, throwing up some kind of gluey water-bile mixture. It’s the kind of vomiting that involves the entire body. It’s brutal.

I’ve been puking for some time when I realize I’ve been puking for some time. When the fog disperses and the events of last night return to me, when my thoughts become clear.

I called Sam. He told me he has a girlfriend. Sophie came over. Comforted me. Gave me weird mushroom tea. I felt okay for a while, I think, but now I’m hard-core praying to the porcelain God.

When the last bits have trickled out and all that’s left is spit, I deposit a dollop of toothpaste on my tongue, lift a handful of faucet water to my mouth and swish. I don’t have any mouthwash.

When I come out of the bathroom, my eyes shrivel inside my head. It’s bright out. It’s daytime. Not morning. Day.

I scan my apartment. It’s a mess.

What the hell happened last night?

I stumble into my bedroom, where I find my phone on the floor. The screen is shattered. I attempt to turn it on. Nothing happens.

“Damn it!” I croak. If the sound of my voice is any indication, I’ve aged five thousand years overnight.

I fall back on my bed. What was in that tea?

I take a series of deep breaths and must pass out again, because when I open my eyes, it’s cloudy and raining outside, and my phone is gone.

I hear movement in the other room. Sophie humming to herself.