by Ashley Naftule
The drugs didn’t kick in until the encore.
Resting against an amp stack propped near the plywood stage, Scott could feel a silvery warmth emanating from the blotter under his tongue. He didn’t know how he knew the sensation was silver-colored, but then he remembered Kelly telling him synesthesia was a common side-effect.
“I didn’t know yellow had a smell until I took glimmer,” she told him on the drive up to the party. “It smells like a mix of red and purple.”
By the time the guitars roared back to life onstage, the glimmer was blazing through Scott. He felt like he was made out of mercury. His right hand, pushed up against the stack, seemed to pour itself into the amps. He felt his body flowing through the gear, the screens, the wires, everything. Kelly had said this would happen: “It’ll make you feel oceanic. Like the air is rocks and you just keep crashing through them like waves.”
The band onstage had only been playing for the first minute of their encore and Scott already felt like he been completely unraveled and re-assembled by the drugs dancing in his system. His blood glowed in his veins like neon, and his eyes turned multifaceted and kaleidoscopic. He was so far beyond his old self—that craven young business major struggling to get out from under his father’s shadow. “All that old shit is falling away,” a scorpion creeping past the amps twittered to Scott. “Reach in your guts and you’ll find nothing but amethysts now.”
Scott reached into his navels, pulling aside skin and flesh and coils of intestine to feel the scorpion’s hard truth.
Kelly was the one who woke him up, hours later. She dunked Scott’s head in their cooler, letting the shock of cold water rattle him from his fugue state. “Suck on these: They’ll help,” she said while holding out a pair of sugarcubes in the palm of her hand.
Scott tried to remember what he saw in the darkness before Kelly woke him up. He was beautiful. He remembered that much. The glimmer had turned his body into gemstones and light. Now he was just a hairless monkey again, a sack of sentient meat with dry mouth and muscle aches, and a nose full of festival body odor.
“You’re in the self-loathing stage, aren’t you? It’ll pass quick.” Kelly smiled down at him. Her lips, chapped and cracked by the July sun, looked angelic to Scott at that moment. He imagined running his fingers through her red hair, each strand quivering with harmonic potential like harp strings. She probably tastes like blue and green right now, he thought. Blue and green, with a dash of pink.
“How much longer will I feel like this?” Scott moaned. He couldn’t remember his social security number, the PIN to his card, or where their car was now. The fact that none of those gaps in his memory worried him deeply disturbed him. He wanted to be himself again: Scott Cera, anal retentive. Scott Cera, good with numbers. Scott Cera, on track to be in his city’s alt-weekly “30 Under 30” list. Where was that Scott right now? He wouldn’t have forgotten his SSN.
“Forever,” Kelly whispered, running her hands through Scott’s dusty hair. Her hands felt like A sharps. “I lied to you when I said the drug wears off. It doesn’t. The glimmer is forever.”
Scott laughed and laughed and Kelly laughed with him. They laughed and laughed until he realized that she wasn’t joking, and that the experimental designer drug had no expiration date. No come-down, no refractory period, no way out.
That knowledge made Scott cry which made Kelly cry. They cried until they noticed the crystal tears rolling down each other’s faces. The crystals fell and splintered on the floor of their tent. “Do you want to see who’s playing next?” Scott couldn’t tell which of them asked that question, nor could he be sure if it was him who said “Sure, why not?” in response. Their bodies had melded together into a puddle. Together, they seeped through the tent’s zipper to evaporate beneath the desert sun.
Ashley Naftule is a writer & theater artist from Phoenix, AZ. He’s been published in Pitchfork, Vice, Bandcamp, Phoenix New Times, Ghost City Press, Occulum, Cleveland Review of Books, Occulum, Mojave Heart, Ellipsis, Hypnopomp, L’Ephemere Review, and Under The Radar. He’s a resident playwright and Associate Artistic Director at Space55 theatre.