Uncle Drew's Lysergic Backbrain Apocalypse (Slight Return)

The flying cats were getting around. Uncle Drew was swinging doses all over town. I was up for it…I procured about twenty hits and I told him I would be up for more. That cost me about half a week’s paycheck.

Drew felt responsible enough to give me the rigmarole reserved for acid neophytes. Don’t take two trips too close together or it won’t work as well. Don’t look in a mirror while you’re tripping because you’ll never find your way out. Don’t go swimming. Don’t trip out in public. Check. Check. Check. What the hell was he thinking when he fed us flying cats on a busy work night? Uncle Drew’s concerns were misplaced and revealed some pretty skewed priorities in my opinion…but the flying cats were mine, so I’d listen to whatever line he felt like singing.

I went home and promptly dropped two hits at once. Glorious. I listened to something that wasn’t the Grateful Dead and I heard the ghosts of dead templars whispering to me in the headphones. I watched the Three Stooges and my brain became a rattling machine.

Eventually, I got the strychnine shits and probably spent two hours in the bathroom watching the mildew squirm along the walls. Unless you’ve been there yourself you have no idea how compelling that is. I thought about Candi and tried to whack off, but it was hard to concentrate…Charlie Brown, dead templars and the Three Stooges kept intruding on the fantasy…after a while it seemed to be an undertaking that was too dark to be worth it.

When I came back out to the living room, the TV was playing “The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms” and I got pretty mesmerized by that. A weird melancholy came over me and I started thinking about our basic unkindness as a species. Why could we not find a way to accommodate giant, radioactive reptiles in our world, with all our creature comforts and technological advances? Major cities seemed such ideal venues for them to run around and play in…an image from the TV the other night came to mind. It was H.G. Wells on the deck of an aircraft carrier or something, watching atomic testing. I wonder if H.G. Wells foresaw nuclear dinosaurs. Maybe you find that a funny notion in this day and age. What if H.G. Wells had a time machine? What if he traveled to our time….do you think he’d write about us?

I know…you probably have no idea who H.G. Wells was.

The sun came up and I was still wide awake. After a while I decided to head out. There was a joint down the block that served a mean breakfast.

I stepped out in the sun feeling wired all to hell. A cop car cruised by, very slowly. The two cops were rubbernecking, staring at me.

Did they know? Could they tell, just by looking at me?

They kept driving.

 

 

 

C.F. Roberts

C.F. Roberts is a writer, visual artist, videographer and antimusician living in Northwest Arkansas with his wife, writer Heather Drain and a small menagerie of animals. He published and edited SHOCKBOX: The Literary/Art Magazine with Teeth from 1991 to 1996. He sings lead for the rock band, the S.E. Apocalypse Krew while also commandeering his own industrial project, 90 Lb. Tumor. He most recent publication credits are in Fearless, Paraphilia, Pressure Press Presents, Crab Fat Literary Magazine, The Birds We Piled Loosely, Blue Collar Review, Corvus Review, Antique Children, and Guerilla Genesis Press. His book, The Meat Factory and Other Stories, is available from Alien Buddha Press.

 

Edited for Unlikely by Jonathan Penton, Editor-in-Chief
Last revised on Thursday, June 25, 2020 - 22:07