Untitled by Adam Fisher (fiction)

After I finished The Stranger, I woke up my girlfriend and we had sex. She fell asleep and I made a pot of coffee. I poured two cups of the steaming liquid into a blue mug and two cups into a Styrofoam cup secured with a plastic lid. I set her mug on the nightstand by her steaming body and mine on the desk. I rifled through the desk to find eight-hundred dollars, a map written on the back of a cereal box, a bag of marijuana, and a tube of purple powder. I sprinkled a pinch of the powder in her sleeping mug then pocketed the tube in my jacket with the cash, weed, book, and other sundries. I took the Styrofoam cup and left.
On the front porch I lit a spliff and stared into the burgeoning day. I imagined inhaling the sun until it burned my lips. A fat man walked by, the leash of a miniature hippopotamus engulfed in his hand. He scowled at me, “That’s illegal, you know.” The fat man turned up his snout and probably wiggled his ears. I reached into my pocket and fed the hippopotamus from my hand. He walked away ignorant: “Come along, Daisy,” he snuffed, tugging at the leash.
I scrutinized the cardboard map then started the engine of my pick-up. I took a sip of coffee, placed the cup in the cup holder, and decided I needed help. I drove West until every tree fell to dust. The wind whipped the plains into a fury of sand and clay. There were no roads anymore, only landmarks: a dilapidated spaceship submerged like an iceberg in the dunes, the carapace of a giant insect, a metallic cog and spring. I parked next to Greta’s jeep.
She greeted me in the garden with a crying child on her hip. She had her hair tied back with a plaid bandana and wore jeans and a T-shirt and no shoes. I tried to light a spliff, but the matches wouldn’t strike. I put my hands in my coat pockets.
“I have the money,” I tried to say, but through the wind and sobbing of the child, I couldn’t even hear myself. I stepped closer to Greta and realized that she was smiling at me. The child cried louder and louder.
“Can you hear me?” I shouted, but she just smiled. “I have your money,” I winced through the swirling dust, “Why don’t you calm the baby down?” Greta’s eyes turned toward the child. Mine followed. I watched a tear well up in the child’s eye and fall to the cracked earth. Where the tear landed sprouted a plump red mushroom. Greta was smiling. I saw them now. Patches of scarlet mushrooms permeated the swirling dust. They grew in rings like wounds in the earth.
“His name is Noah,” she said, tossing me a canvas bag, “and they are yours.”
I bent down and ran a finger over the smooth curve of a mushroom cap. I could smell the dank breath of the fungi in each nostril. I plucked a mushroom by the stem and turned it over in my hands. The pale gills resembled an accordion. Greta watched my slow harvest until I had picked a full circle of crouching mushrooms, dropped gently in the canvas bag. I stood up and Noah stopped crying, instead burying his head between his mother’s breasts. Silently, she led the way into her wooden house on the edge of the wasteland.
The house smelled of lavender. I sat down on a wooden stool and placed the canvas bag on the kitchen table. I stared at my dusty jeans through the slits between the wooden planks of the table. Greta disappeared with Noah. When she returned, she took a dented black kettle off the stove and poured two cups of tea. Greta handed me a cup and sat down on the other side of the table.
She sipped her tea and I opened my mouth to speak, but she interrupted me from behind her pearly mug, “But I thought you loved me.”
“Women,” I thought, but said, “You don’t understand,” and noticed the scar below her right eye. “What happened?”
“Do you have the money?” she asked.
I tossed the clump of bills onto the table. I reached into my pocket for the spliff and matches and could feel her stare on my cheeks. Without looking at her, I lit the spliff and shook out the match. When my eyes met hers, I became frightened for the first time. She took the money from the table and the spliff from my mouth.
“Enough,” she said through a wisp of smoke, “let me see the map.” I pulled out the square of cardboard. “This is the back of a Rice Crispies box,” she said.
“I know,” I said, “look at the other side.”
She turned the map over without breaking eye contact, puffing away on the spliff. She pushed my mug closer to me. “Drink,” she said and went to work scrutinizing the map.
She looked up periodically as if searching for answers in my face, though I must have provided none. Several times her face contorted and she began to speak, but her voice would fade to a hum. After I had finished my tea, she sat up and said, “This is genius work. I’m glad you brought it to me. It is twelve miles North of here in the middle of a palm grove.” Greta stamped out the spliff on the table. “You do know you will die, right?” I nodded solemnly. She walked to the door. I grabbed the canvas bag and kissed Greta. She opened the door and we winced as dust and wind blew into the small house. I stepped outside and walked to my pick-up.
In ten miles the air grew still. In eleven the cracked earth belched sprigs of green grass and after exactly twelve miles I glimpsed the palm grove. I parked the pick-up on the edge of the palms. The air smelled like fresh fruit and running water. I waded through the vegetation. Soon I came upon a clearing with a spring in the center. I took out the bag of marijuana and dumped out the buds. I sealed The Stranger and the tube of powder inside the bag and tossed it into the spring. I sat on the edge of the spring and breathed heavily.
The trees rustled overhead and I thought about my sacrifice. It didn’t make sense to me. None of this made sense to me. I grew angry and punched the rock. Why had I come this far? Couldn’t I slip back into the apartment and find my girlfriend asleep? Couldn’t I slip back into my life? It was my life after all, wasn’t it? Tears rolled off my chin and into the canvas bag under my arm. I took a handful of the red mushrooms and ate them all at once. I grew drowsy and fell into a deep sleep.
I awoke to a wet, bristly sensation across my face. Opening my eyes, I saw Daisy’s plump purple mug inches from mine. It had worked. It had worked! I sat up and rubbed my bleary eyes with two fists. I was surrounded by people, my people, in the same palm grove. My girlfriend hugged me. She rambled on about magic and heaven and God. I told her not to be absurd.