Fiction
Like Kohoutek
You spend so much time thinking that you don’t see what’s in front of you.
--
October, 1993
Knock knock.
“What was that?”
Silence.
Knock knock knock.
“What was that?”
“Someone’s at the door.”
“Oh fuck.”
“Don’t answer it.”
Knock knock knock knock.
It was midnight, Saturday night. Vin, Meadow, Angelo, and I were sitting in the dark, tripping our balls off.
Four hours earlier, Angelo and I had arrived at Vin and Meadow’s apartment, a renovated two-room, two-story loft on the old, narrow part of East Carson Street. On Vin’s kitchen counter, Angelo unwrapped a small folded square of aluminum foil and revealed four rectangles of white paper smaller than the nail on my little finger. Meadow’s dog — a short-haired mutt of mixed hunting and fighting persuasion — sniffed around the edges of the counter, curious about what we were eating. The heat kicked on and a gust from the overhead vent blew the foil, the paper tabs and all, off the counter and onto the floor. The dog lunged after them.
“Kermit! No!” Meadow caught the dog by the collar. Vin scooped the foil and the tabs off the floor.
“Hah!” said Vin. “That was almost four unhappy people and one fucked-up dog.”
“Shit. He could have inhaled them,” I said. All four tabs together were the size of half a postage stamp.
“Where’d you say your friend got this again?” Vin asked, holding up an unmarked white paper rectangle on the tip of his finger and squinting.
Vin had done more acid than all the rest of us combined. A lot more. I’d only tripped twice before, both times with him. Neither Angelo nor Meadow had ever tripped.
“He wouldn’t say,” I replied. “Whenever I try to ask him about it he just clams up.”
“We think he made it himself,” said Angelo.
“Huh,” said Vin, looking skeptical.
I suspected that this stuff was something special. Our source was a friend we trusted, a PhD…
