promised he’d be done with County Road 9 by the weekend and then his boss is going to let him work closer to home. He promised Tyler they’d get out before summer’s over and do some fishing.”
“I still can’t believe he stole your cat.”
They stood, silently watching the tail lights of the man’s Ford pickup, that were now just tiny red eyes in the distance, continuing to fade away into the dark, as a changed man, renewed and grateful to be alive – left them and their madness behind.
- - -
An hour later I was home in Mountain Iron and collapsed into my bed to sleep off the splitting headache that continued to ravage me. The next morning I woke to the sound of a cat near my bed, staring at it, doing my best to remember why I had it. I got up, feeling weak, my stomach not sure it wanted to cooperate with me, my eyes bloodshot, grabbed the milk from the refrigerator that I noticed was only three days past date, took a swig, poured a bowl for the cat while I considered what to name him, the name Meril kept coming to mind, even though it seemed a strange name for a cat. I dressed for work, grabbed my hard hat and lunch pail, ran some water over my shaggy hair and scrubbed my meaty hands, that never seemed to come clean, permanently stained from coal, clipped my nametag, KARL CHEVSKY in big bold red, to my shirt, and went to work at Minntac – where I processed taconite - just like I did every Monday morning – swearing once again that my missions exploring the internal frontiers of the mind as a cerebral-naut had come to an end and that I would stay off the hallucinogens for good this time. With another five long days until the weekend, I’d see how well that promise held up then.
If you need an explanation of what happened, here it is.
The man in this story took hallucinogens to begin his weekend, as was his habit when he had time off from the mine where he worked in a neighboring city. He never was a home improvement salesman. The story is told from the man’s skewed perspective until he flees the home at the end and we are told what is going on from an omniscient narrator. At the beginning of the story, the man had driven until he could do no longer and then left his truck and laid down on the edge of the woman’s yard. She and her son brought him into her house to recover. They called a doctor that generously made a house call and then he told them that they could either call the authorities and let the man suffer the consequences or risk letting him sleep off the affects of the drug on their couch. They chose the latter. The man picked up the details from what was going on around him and then morphed them in his mind into an alternate reality, a very strange story. There are clues in the story as to what is taking place. For some people that are familiar with illegal drug vernacular the constant drug references make the story obvious. Not the case for everyone. Yellow Sunshine, Blue Sky, Rainbow Skittles, and Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds are all slang terms for LSD. In the dream the man has, he examines a picture of Hunter S Thompson – a writer famous for describing his drug infested exploits – and President Richard Nixon. The two hated each other. They would never have been photographed fishing together. That is why it looks in the photo that Thompson is trying to strangle the president. The television that the family set nearby to occupy the man influenced the man’s dreams with the movies: Apocalypse Now, The Wizard of Oz, and Alice in Wonderland. The child that he attempted to save, Meril, was actually the family cat. He had been so incapacitated that he spoke with the cat while he was drugged. I once argued with an empty chair for about forty five minutes, after waking up in the hospital following an operation, heavily medicated with morphine. I truly believed that my brother had been sitting there in the hospital room. I recovered from my accident for the following two years with narcotics. Drugs can have a strange and sometimes detrimental effect on people. I offered this explanation, not because I don’t respect the ability of the reader to figure out what happened - most of the people I know that regularly read had no problem putting all of the pieces in place- but because I want to make sure not to annoy or frustrate anyone who wasn’t familiar with Alice in Wonderland and its references to the drug culture, or the many slang terms that I hid in this story, or the quiet tribute to Hunter S Thompson. I hope that you enjoyed this story.
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