OPHELIA OBLONGAGA | WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?

Carl and Annalisa were already at the cabin in Lake Arrowhead when Richard arrived.  Richard didn’t say any of the beautiful things he imagined he might when he saw her standing in the entry way behind Carl.

“You need to shower!  Get in the shower!  It probably won’t do any good but get in the shower and stay there a couple of hours…” Richard said with authority.

“You look like hell,” Annalisa repaid the insult.

“You haven’t seen each other for weeks and this is how you talk?”  Carl slammed the door in Richard’s face.

“He hasn’t really slept since the last time he saw you. We better go easy on him,” Carl whispered to Annalisa.

“Open the door!”  Richard’s voice was strained.

 “I’m sorry.  Auditions for Edward Albee’s new play are three houses down,” Carl shouted through the door.

“You call that going easy,” Annalisa remarked.

“He’s being rude.  I don’t smell anything,” Carl whispered. They heard a crash on the porch.

Richard was flat on his back surrounded by clay pots of geraniums.  A flower box had broken.

“Put me in the shower.  I’m telling you, Doc put peyote in the suntan oil.  Even if you didn’t use it, the stream was full of it.  Annalisa, we have to wash off as much as we can.  It’s time released.  We could be crazy for days,”

“How do you know if it’s affecting you?”  Annalisa asked.

“I wasn’t sure until now.  I was trying to get the geraniums to shut up.  When Carl said, ‘Edward Albee’, they started singing, ‘Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf….”

“Let’s go to the hot tub!” Carl suggested.

“You too, Carl?”  Richard cried out.

“We swam out to the raft today to cool off.  I let Carl use the oil.  Doc said it would keep evil spirits away,” Annalisa confessed.

“To the hot tub!” Carl cried out.

“And stew in the stuff?  No, Carl, that is a bad idea,” Richard argued.

They showered until there was no more hot water.  Carl made spaghetti.  Richard found the bottle of suntan oil and placed it in his satchel until he could figure a way to dispose of it.  They discussed how the photo and posters had changed.  Richard’s photo of Annalisa had turned into a photo of a squirrel and the HAMLET posters reverted back to the photo of Richard with the skull and Annalisa in the wings with the man standing behind her.  Carl pointed out that these things had happened before they were exposed to the peyote oil.

Annalisa tried to serve the spaghetti.  She dumped the entire contents of the pot onto Richard’s plate.  Carl and Annalisa scooted their chairs up against Richard’s and the three of them silently ate from his plate.

“We should go straight to bed after dinner,” Richard said with spaghetti sauce dribbling down his chin and onto his shirt.  “We’ll sleep through the worst of it and everything will be fine.”

“Before we turn in I suggest we retire to the library to crack the safe I found this afternoon,” Carl suggested.

Richard raised his eyebrows.

Carl squinted. “Not to steal anything.  I just want to see if you can open it with your ears.”

Richard could hear the tumblers clacking like typewriter keys.  He peered inside the safe and looked as if he’d seen the devil himself.

“Get your things.  We’re leaving NOW,” Richard slammed the safe shut and pulled back as if he was about to be launched from a slingshot.

“Richard, what’s in there?”  Carl begged.

“We have to leave now. No amount of magic suntan oil that can protect us from what is in that safe,” Richard pulled Annalisa to the door.  As they stepped onto the porch there was a rumble in the fireplace.  Acorns began to pour out of the fireplace.  They didn’t stay to watch.  The gravel under their feet didn’t sound like it had earlier.  Carl’s headlights revealed the gravel was gone and the driveway was now paved with acorns.

~ To Be Continued ~

OPHELIA OBLONGATA | ALL PATHS ARE PAVED WITH PEYOTE

“What am I listening to?”  Richard asked with his ear pressed on the rock.

“Do you hear thumping?  It gets louder as we approach a certain angle of the sun.  Bobby heard it.  It drove him mad,” The Fly Eater said.

“All I can hear is my own heartbeat. Where is Bobby?  Was there a girl with him?  What do you mean, ‘mad’”, Richard sat up.  He didn’t have the patience for tall tales at the moment.

“He’s running from the wind.  The girl left several hours ago.”

“There is no wind.  Did she say where she was going?

“Lake Arrowhead.  Your bother cast a spell on himself with my adder.  I warned him not to play with my medicine bag.  I can’t fix it until he returns my adder.”

It dawned on Richard that if he had stayed in bed at that morning, he probably would have arrived in Lake Arrowhead at the same time as Annalisa.  Luckily, Carl would be there to answer the phone and let her in.

“Get this wind off of me!”  Bobby’s muffled scream from downstream echoed through the rock formations.

“Is he alright?”

“The white noise wind follows him wherever he goes.  He was complaining that the thumping was tormenting him.  He cannot hear the thumping now but it seems he hates his wind even more.  Some people find it comforting.  I can turn it off when he returns my sacred snake.  He dropped it in the pool and it slipped downstream.”  The Fly Eater explained.

“You’re telling me that my brother has his own private wind circling him?”

“See those trees swaying down there?  That’s Bobby.  Your brother could hear the thumping even better than I can.  I could train him to be a Shaman if he wasn’t so full of mischief.  What a waste.  The world needs his gifts.  You young people sing about the Age of Aquarius as if were a big deal.  There are other things happening. There is something up there changing the way light falls.  The angle of the sun is trying to release demons that have been locked in the earth for eons.”

“Demons?” Richard was hearing that word a lot lately.

“They weren’t always demons.  They were the stolen children of a sky king from a planet with a double sun and hidden in the earth for so long that they went mad”, The Fly Eater explained.

Richard sighed. 

“No one notices the angle of the sun has changed, that it burns the skin worse at sunset than at high noon. The ship of the sky king is up there. You can’t see it but you can feel it burning you skin.” The Fly Eater tossed a bottle of suntan oil to Richard.

“What’s this?”

  “It wards off demons while promoting an even tan. I made it myself.”  The Fly Eater offered Richard a clear brown bottle of suntan oil.

“This is the most famous suntan oil on earth!  You didn’t make this!” Richard protested the obvious lie and tossed the bottle back.

“You can’t get this off the shelf,” The medicine man produced a vial from his bag and poured the contents into the suntan oil and shook it. “Now it’s double strength.”

“What did you put in it?”

“Concentrate of mescal and other natural ingredients.  It’s a secret recipe that is ingested through the skin and makes you one with nature.”

“No thank you.  Tell my brother I’ve gone to Arrowhead to be with my woman,” Richard began the long hike up hill.  Bobby and The Fly Eater were out of their gourds on peyote.  As he turned to wave goodbye, it slowly dawned on him that the rainbows shimmering on the pool he had just gotten out of were caused by a layer of suntan oil.  He slapped his shoulder.  It was oily.  He’d never taken peyote.  He didn’t know what to expect.  Before he let out the big sigh, the medicine man made him gasp again.

“Your woman knows about Squirrel-Man.  He’s following her.  I told her to stay away from the tree of lost souls on the rim of the world, but she’s on autonomic pilot, all medulla oblongata, you can’t argue with that,” the medicine man shouted over the wind which had come up out of nowhere. 

“Squirrel-Man? What the fuck? I don’t have time for this,” Richard kept climbing.

 “Richard!”  Bobby cried out to his brother, waving one arm and holding the Fly Eater’s adder snake in the other.

“I’ll catch you later!  Tell mom I’ll drop in next time.  I have a show!  Bye!” Richard climbed the mountain to the top of the waterfalls as fast as he could.  Every now and then he’d shout out, “Shit!” 

No matter what choices he made, all paths were paved with peyote.

~ To Be Continued ~

OPHELIA OBLONGATA | THE FLY EATER

Richard checked out of the motor lodge and took the freeway north.  He bypassed his mom’s place and stopped at an isolated liquor store on Bodfish Road on a hunch that Annalisa might have stopped there.  He pulled the photo out his wallet and handed it to the clerk.

            “Have you seen her?” Richard had desperation in his voice.

           

“I believe I have. Yes, a few minutes ago.  She ran up that pine tree out yonder,” the clerk could not help laughing. 

Bewildered, Richard snatched the photo from the clerk and saw that it was a photo of a squirrel. Incoherent attempts at speech came out of him. Carl didn’t do this.  He decided not to think about it and raced up the mountain as fast as he could take the curves.  At a certain road marker, he hid his motorcycle and continued on foot.  Gradually the sound of the Tule River grew louder.  The heat was unbearable. There wasn’t even a hint of a breeze. 

He reached a cliff and studied the deep green pool below before he took the leap.  If there were evaporation rings on the rocks, then it wasn’t safe to jump.  There were no rings.  The water was ice cold year round.  Under the circumstances it felt good.  He quickly swam to the edge where the water in the pool was spilling over and trickling down a steep slab of rock.  He scooted down slab until gravity carried him on a wild ride down to the next pool which was only up to his waist.  A bikini top floated in the pool.  He hoped it did not belong to Annalisa.

Again he climbed out of the pool and scooted in the direction the thin film of water was traveling down another steep slab of rock.  This time he slammed into a much deeper pool at a high speed. He surfaced to a horrible sight.  On an altar-like rock formation beside the pool was a naked old Paiute medicine man from Mono Lake called The Fly Eater, sleeping in the sun like a grotesque lizard. 

“Eww,” Richard looked away.

“Looking for your brother?” The Fly Eater stood up in all his glory and stepped into his shorts.

“Yeah. What are you doing down here?”  Richard and Bobby knew The Fly Eater.  The Shaman was famous for showing up at campsites precisely when dinner was about to be served. He would exchange tales of mystery for a tasty meal.  This pool was off the beaten path where there were no campers to mooch.

“Guarding the gates of hell,” The Fly Eater motioned for Richard to come up and see for himself.

 ~ To Be Continued ~