Tireless Efforts

The LSD was just wearing off of us, almost completely gone, the music still in our heads, a ghost. We didn't turn the radio on for we wanted the ghost to remain and haunt us. The melodies still on repeat in our conscious, the beat of the drums, the stuttering guitar solos,  the fluent vocals that matched every note. The concert was healing to our souls, but the LSD left me distraught; everything became fake, everybody synthetically threaded in some way. As  we drove home, I didn't even remember finding Suzi unconscious on the ground earlier, or the disco ball that fell and killed that guy. I was so tired...

We came to a stop at a decrepit gas station, with only one gas pump. The lights over the pump were illuminated but inside of the store it was dark. Suzi got out of the car and walked around to the gas pump and pressed some buttons and eventually stuck the nozzle in the car's genitalia. I felt the gas being pumped into the car, flowing through the pipes under my feet like blood in a vein. A minute passed and she took the nozzle out and got in the car and resumed our drive. 

Looking in the side mirror I saw the sign of the gas station, only visibly lit from this side, and I turned and looked to read what the sign said, and a rush of silent panic surged in my head, I squinted to read the sign again, if I misread it, Only Diesel, No Gasoline. 

I turn to Suzi and start to tell her that she just put Diesel in her Prius and as soon as I open my mouth the sound of the dying engine interrupts me, it screams and the car jolts and Suzi shouts with panic laced in her voice, What the s**t?, and she pulls to the side of the road, in the dirt next to a chain linked fence. 

“What the f**k, Ben, what happened?”

“I was about to tell you but your car flipped out.”

“Tell me what?”

“You put diesel oil in you car.”

“What? What do you mean?”

“I mean you put diesel in your car, and you only put that in like semi trucks. You're not supposed to put diesel in a Prius.”

“Well why the f**k didn't you tell me that before?”

“I only realized it right now. After we left.”

“How did you realize?”

“I looked in the mirror and saw thar on the other side of the sign it said Only Diesel.”

“S**t,” she bangs her hands against the steering wheel and sighs. “We're only in the middle of nowhere, a hundred miles from Portland.”

“It could be worse.”

“How could it be worse, Ben?”

“We could be in Mexico.”

“Don't even bring that up.”

I was silent for a second. The waves of frustration radiated off of Suzi, and I felt the air tighten. I slapped my hands on my knees and opened the door. “Welp, I guess we walk now.”

I stood up out of the car and breathed in the night. I stretched and yawned at the moon. O the glorious moon. I walk with you tonight. 

The composition of the street in the moonlight, the lighting was eerie. My breath was a fog before my face, dissipating along with the moons misty exhale. The sounds still deafened my ears. The concert was still fresh on my mind, and I felt either fake or dead from the LSD.

Suzi says, “I see a light down there.”

She pointed to a house asleep on a hill behind the gas station. The moon made a silhouette against the shack and it appeared demonic.

We walk towards the house. Scattered around the lot before us are random miscellaneous items, anything you can think of just lying in the dirt. Suzi is mumbling to me something but I'm not listening, I am just so tired, and I feel paranoid after being stopped so abruptly without any warning. I feel like I am about to give up and just fold into a little ball next to this empty refrigerator. But I am not still lost in my head, am I? 

LSD Loss of Self  Direction

Where the f**k

are we? We 

walk and walk and walk and walk and

eventually we will stop at

one point

or

another.

  But still we approach the house. It is the same distance from where we first started walking. The house seems to grow farther away, and there seems to be more and more scattered miscellanea at our blind feet. 

Suzi says, “F*****g diesel.”

Suddenly I see a mass, or a mound, of something, I don't know, appears

before our vision.

I  hear a girl mumbling, crying, I think.

Then I see the silhouette of her head

against her cellphone. 

A cloud hides the moon, and the darkness grows thicker...

Suzi and I both stop walking. So I am not crazy. I look at Suzi's face and it is pale as a ghost, from what I can see in the girls cellphone light. Suzi is startled and she doesn't look away from the crying girl. She grabs my shoulder and tells me, 

“What the f**k?”

the cloud passes the moon and the girl stops crying and I can see what she is sitting on, a couple of tires stacked upon eachother, and then I realize what this the mound before us is, just a stack of tires, hundreds of tires. 

Suzi jolts closer to me, afraid. I look away from the mound of tires in the

moonlight

and look at Suzi and look back at the girl, but she is not there, she never was. But I swear I could have --

--I realize that there is no house in the distance, there is nothing even out here, both Suzi and I are tripping out on LSD and we are just going crazy in the middle of the night, lost, lost, O lost, beautiful hopelessness, and fear, and the terror of the things in the night that aren't even there.

We walk back to the car and find that all our wheels have been removed, and lay tireless in the mud, 

tires stolen probably. 

Author's Note

I don't patronize bunny rabbits!