The first mushroom didn’t take effect on Ryan Chack for a good hour or so. At least, he thought it took an hour. The world was slow and strange at that time, strange and slow and strange and slow and HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAt 7:15 AM, Jonathan made himself some breakfast, what he called Bacon and Eggs, but was in reality just Eggs. Not many people can afford meat, let alone on Tijuana. But it’s nice to dream every once in a while. There’ nothing wrong with having a dream per say. Dreams have their place in this world after all, Jonathan thought to himself when he first called them “Bacon and Eggs.” Not that they can ever be acted out, mind you. They exist in the place outside of the real world. Those who think their dreams can come true are just another kind of junkie.
It flew away way way way way way way way, like all birds do in the end. There was a sadness in its eyes as it flew away. I couldn’t place what it was though. Probably nothing to do with me, birds have a life of their own, you know. But the bird being there meant that I was caught by the police. They let me go a little while later, does goooooooooooooood not to lock up of the Red Dragons, especially me. I went back to Mars and heard what happened there. Shit was hitting the fan and it was my time to shine. We wouldn’t be led by some asshole who thinks a bloodbath and a statement are the same thing. Nor would we be led by a pencil pusher who’d rather talk things over than do business. No, what we need is a professional. Someone who can do the job and do it right.
The game was complex and strange. It started when a servant walked into a room she wasn’t allowed into. It wasn’t intentional, mind you. The room was typically open to the public, even to someone as lowly as her. But that was the day the church was baptizing the new king. There was to be complete privacy, lest their god be angered by the infidelity. So they claimed. In truth, the Queen wanted control of the kingdom for a very long time. She saw this as the perfect moment to strike, to escape from a loveless marriage and rule the kingdom the way it ought to be ruled. Any witnesses to what would transpire would need to be silenced. Which is why, quite unfortunately, the servant entered the room. She saw all that they were doing, all they had done. The king was dead. And there was but one loose end to tie. The Queen’s Knight tried to slay the servant, as many a knight has done. One could say part of the job of being a knight is silencing those who would speak poorly of those in power. Even those close to them. But tragedy befell the knight as, in his attempts to kill the servant, he loosened a stone from the castle’s walls. The stone held a pillar, which held a roof. With the pillar loosened, the roof shattered, if only slightly. It was enough to smother him. The bishop tried to escape from the room, destroying itself in the wake of a pointless and cruel power grab. So the story goes, he was able to escape. But then, stories have a tendency of lying about their truth. If only to keep the bishops in their place. The Queen, likewise, tried to escape. The stories tend to confirm her failure to escape. She was crushed, quite unceremoniously, under the weight of her kingdom’s stones. For in the end, the story is one with the moral: don’t let the ambitions of women have sway in the affairs of men, lest they destroy the kingdom. The queen may have power, but if not tempered by the cool head of the king, all will be lost. It is a cruel and awful story. One that exists to control the narrative of the world in favor of kings. Indeed, the story expands to further cruelty, as all defenses of the monarchy do. For how else did the kingdom fall but for one servant to not know her place. Were she to have known where she was meant to be, to be where her masters wished her to be rather than in the place her stupid mind thought she was meant to be, the kingdom would still be standing. Of course, as with all stories, there are always escape hatches, even unintentional ones. For the stories, the ones not told in the halls of church and state, offer a different moral, a different lesson. The focus is place, in their telling’s, on the servant, not the monarch. The servant escapes from the collapse of the world. The intentions were clear and understandable. She planned to be in the wrong place, baited the knight to strike at that spot, and slew the vicious monarch. She was mistreated by those in power, those who saw her as disposable. So she played the game her way, and down, down, down the monarchy fell.
Mobsters, as anyone who’s dealt with them can tell you, rarely let go of a grudge. I gave up on a job too quickly and they must’ve came all the way to Callisto to find me. That must’ve been what the two million was for. Security money in case they showed up. The briefcase was in my hands with all the money in it. I slid the money towards one of the hired goons. I put a note…. Where did I put it? Did I put it on the fridge? It’s in there somewhere, fingering some other mob boss for what my brother was framed for doing. Felt only right, I suppose. He looked inside, signaled his fellows, and they all disappeared.
Naturally, Gary did the sensible thing and ran like heck. The streets of Mars are full of dark alleys, odd turns, and canals. And Gary used them all to try to escape from his pursuer. There were moments of luck and moments of failure in his escape. The crowd of children celebrating a birthday party gave him a brief reprise. But getting hit by the gondola didn’t help matters. But eventually, the chase ended with Gary pinned down in a garden planted atop a smile. No one knows the exact reason why the smile was on Mars. Some say it was the creation of a higher being with a sense of humor. Others believe it to be an optical illusion like Magic Eye pictures or the third dimension. It talks sometimes, about the future, the past, the worlds that never were and always were forever and always and never and whenever and however it can find the flesh of the man who sold the world. Gary was too busy having a gun aimed at his head to think of an answer to that riddle.
While the bartender went to grab some people who knew his brother and Jacob nursed his vodka (“On the house,” they said. Then, after a short pause, “For Michael.”), Jacob caught a glimpse of Vanessa. She was a rare breed of woman, the kind with an infectious smile, a verbose giggle, and eyes that could make the sun melt into a ball of golden lava. He didn’t recognize her from their first encounter (he was too busy focusing on getting away from the cops). He didn’t say anything at first, as Vanessa was watching the news. It appeared that a New York City vigilante dressed up like Spider-Man was brutalizing people who were unlawfully poor and brown. The police had rather unsubtly, if nonverbally, given their support to the masked criminal, much to Vanessa’s chagrin.
We drove to the spaceport in the most opulent of cars and towards one of the most mundane of spaceships. I suppose that’s fair. Callisto has a long history of hiding criminals on the run. It stands to reason that they can’t all be murderers. Seeing the moon made me think otherwise. I’d never been to Callisto. No one goes to Callisto unless the ISSP is after you for a sum greater than seventy-five billion woolongs. It was a shithole. Not like Earth where you could at least have a conversation. I mean a proper shithole. It was a barren, desolate planet where the only life was a driving city without any cars in it. And, to top it all off, it was cold as balls.
The song ends as all songs do. The King of Nightmares is pleased with the song and gives the waking world a reward. She knows of all the worlds that are, were, and might be. She dances in all of them like a ballerina on a chain of memories. She has seen cruelty and pain and joy and Hope. She knows where all things lie. And so, she sends that world a gift. The only one she can: a nightmare. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!
He imagines a memory of being infinite lightning. He was never lightning, only his original version was. He has to remind himself of being a copy. He has to remind himself why he is in the cell. And who was free to be out of it. And why that makes him happy. And sad. And angry. And content. Hell is a place without being. On the outside, there are those who see hell as a library, a collection of broken ideas that could be seen again, but never will. On the inside, hell is nothingness. Life without living. Without even the faintest glimpse of other worlds. He imagines being lightning. He strikes down planets with the eye of an artist and leaves behind scars of ancient art.
Ural Terpsichore was dead. (I Don’t Feel So Good. I Feel Like I’m About To Hurl)
But that’s just one story being told. There are others out there in the world, ones suppressed by the official one. (BLUUUUUUUUUUUUAAAAGH!)
The frozen sarcophagus floats in the eternal night like a child drowning in the middle of the ocean where not even the most carnivorous of sharks or the most vengeful of dolphins could find him. The remains within splurge out of the metallic casket like blood from a stuck pig. It glistens in the night sky with an air of magic and wonder that could only come from a fishing lure. It will be free one day. It will consume. It will survive. It always does. Its children will die, consumed by those who are stronger than them. But it will consume them in turn. All things return to the refrigerator.
But it was the woman that confounded Bobbie. She didn’t have the face of a cop, not even the eyes of one. She was too hardened to be a civilian. But it was what she said at the podium, in that stunningly miserable blue dress that really peaked Bobbie’s interest.
Jane looked at the pocket watch and thought to herself, ‘Scout would really like this.’ Then she began to cry.
Ryan Chack awoke four days later, completely naked and inside someone else’s home. He was thankful that they weren’t there at the time. Less thankful was the fact that the he was covered in glass from the door he broke into in order to get into the house. His pants were five blocks away on a flagpole waving about like leaves in an autumn sky. He tried to piece together what happened the night before, still thinking it was three days ago. The last thing he remembered was eating from a plate of mushrooms someone had politely left lying around. He wasn’t one to say no to free food. Then everything started to blur. It was as if the universe had reshaped itself around him and become something completely alien.
But before he could figure out the shape of the world he now found himself in, a kindly police officer knocked on someone else’s door.
See You Space Cowboy…
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