‘So when do you belive the hallucinations began Jack? Actually, when do you think that they stopped?’ the doctor asked, a pencil line of frowning lips adding yet another crease to his already crumpled face.
Interlocking his fingers and leaning forward, the elderly doctor tutted under his breath and gave a long considerative blink while searching for his next words carefully.
‘Probably after the mushrooms’ Jack replied, squeezing a tennis ball at 250bpm and darting his eyes across each item in the room to quell his increasing anxiety, ‘Twice boiled Amanita muscaria, debatably psychotropic, mildly poisonous. I ate twenty; repercussions to this point have been rather profound; regret has not yet been considered but give me a few minutes,’ watching a circle drip through the wall and begin to drag a cupboard out of the room Jack closed his eyes and tried to remember if green was still one of the safe colours.
‘Hmm…’
The resonance of this inflection went on for seemingly an eternity, bouncing off every corner and duplicating in tone. Jack watched the wrinkled doctor slowly notate a string of arcane hieroglyphs and cryllic onto a clipboard as he turned to 3 shades of purple and walked over to his bench.
‘You must know, young Jack’, the doctor spoke while rubbing an antiseptic patch over his stethoscope and shaking a mixolydian D major from the leg of his tweede breeches, ‘Psychoactive synesthesia is an interminable timespan. Um-and-a–they’re mushrooms Jack: they grow, they change, deer urinate on them, you take your life into your hands whenever you imbibe.’ Pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose several painters were knocked off his proboscial arch and then plummeted towards the vinyl floor below, ‘There is a saying within the academic closed loop of self gratification that we doctors frequent, “If rain shall fall upon it, cell based evolution no doubt lurks nearby,”’ monitoring to Jack’s erratic heartbeat the doctor took yet further notes and frowned with every line of his withered face, ‘I think we may need to run some tests, many, many more tests.’
Fingernails were weighed, radial bending tests were applied; all the while Jack imagined himself sitting behind a grand oak desk filled with important looking files and staplers. A tray marked “important” filled with a steady flip of pre-stapled A4 documents, while a nearby full-colour pneumatic printer expelled hundreds of sheets, immediately shredding them into the circular bin marked “non-essential dialogue and greeting cards”.
Taking a stamp and striking one of the loose scraps of A4 skittering across his desk with dynamic gusto, Jack was greeted by the buffeting wind of success; paperwork had been completed!
But yet, there was all the more paperwork to have completion similarly applied to them, and this was of course terribly exciting.
Armed with his father’s trusty ink-stamp in his right hand, Jack dove headfirst into the swelling pile administrative detritus, almost falling off the examination bench back in the Doctor’s office.
Returning to a more lucid level Jack stated ‘Whatever you need doctor’ and attempted to stop his thumbs from floating away from their fellow fingers.
‘How much water have you drunk recently?’
‘Yes.’
‘Hmm, that could be a problem’, said the doctor cryptically, turning to consult his shadow for advice, holding a Staedtler mechanical pencil in front of his patient’s eye-line, the doctor moved it slightly so as to keep Jack’s attention, ‘if I place this pencil in the amount of water that you’ve drunk, would you expect it to get wet Jack?’
‘I would expect it to refract, doctor’.
‘Yes, I suppose you would…’
Casually Jack plucked a daisy from his nose and set it down to go about its own business; every word that he had ever known was beginning to form a neat pile in the corner of the room. Regarding them, he became disappointed by the number of vowel heavy words that was forming his lexicon.
‘You do know that you’re still in the woods don’t you Jack?’ The doctor asked, leaning forward and returning to the shape of a tree stump.
‘Am I? That does explain all this moss.’ Jack pondered this blossoming conundrum with a considered stroke of his beard.
In light of this new information there was, of course, only one choice of reasonable action.
Removing his pants, Jack looked to the moon, enriching himself within the ancient spirit of a T-shirt three howling wolves painted on its front.
Screaming only the word berserker he then ran off boldly into the night.
Some may worry about Jack’s fate but fear not!
Quos fortuna non braccas–Fortune favours those without pants.
J.McCray
2020
Sunday Short Stories 