Just A Little Something

Lights flash. Noise fills my ears. The whole room seems to roll and move. One minute I’m upright, the next it feels like I’m hanging upside down and dangling from the ceiling by my feet. Something bubbles up inside of me.

Send me a prayer. Please. I think I need it.

A demon, or at least I think it’s a demon, presides in the corner, slouched in a chair as if it owns the place. Thick, dark hair spills from its head. Small black eyes, each with a red pupil, are fixed on me. They blink slowly. To be honest, I’m staring back at it. It’s probably just as freaked out as I am that I won’t break eye contact. That’s the only reason I can think of for it choosing not to approach me.

I look around, but no one else seems to be paying it any attention. I blink rapidly, trying to will it away. It stays, not moving, perched. Staring. Watching. Judging. I wave at it, but before it gets a chance to respond, a five-foot blue alien bumps into me, drink in hand. It scolds me for spilling its pink goop of a drink all over the floor.

“I didn’t bump into you,” I say.

It swears, or at least I think it does in whatever dialect it’s speaking. It cracks and pops like popcorn in a pan. I’m not versed in intergalactic languages to know which one of a potential million it could be. I offer my sincerest apologies, hoping they can understand me because I don’t want to be on the receiving end of the multitude of razor-sharp teeth that reside inside its mouth.

I turn to escape but find myself standing in front of two other aliens. Bright pink skin. Big sky blue eyes. If I were an alien, I think I’d find them attractive, but I’m not, so I don’t even know how I feel. One of them, the one on the right, tugs on my shirt.

“Hey, I think you’re kind of cute,” the one on the left says.

My head wobbles. I try to reply, but as soon as I open my mouth, my stomach makes a horrible, deep rumbling sound, the kind a rocket makes right before launch. It shakes my feet and makes my insides feel like snakes are pressing against my skin, trying to escape.

I make a hand motion I hope signals that I’m making a swift exit without offending their alien cultural sensitivities.

“Hey, where are you going?” the one on the right says.

“Such a shame. He is cute,” the one on the left says.

They part ways like automatic sliding doors. I stumble through them, and their back-and-forth jabbering sounds like elevator music. “Oh, I hope he comes back… comes back… comes back.”

I push past an elephant sipping wine, its trunk in a glass that is somehow big enough to house it. Its snout twitches as it slurps. I then pass a chimpanzee dancing with a pulsing, neon jellyfish with humanoid features. Glowing tentacles swirl around its mass with translucent hands at the end.

There’s a queue at the bathroom. A dozen black birds turn their heads and look at me. I point to my mouth and puff out my cheeks to signal why I’m desperate to cut.

They squawk and flap their wings, pushing me to the front. I try the handle. Locked. I slam my fist against the door.

No answer.

The birds squawk louder, making my brain swell.

I pound the door again.

I look back across the room. The demon is still there. Watching, only now it is smiling.

The toilet door finally opens.

A man steps out, confident and impossibly tall with tree trunks for legs and leaves that sit on top of his head. Everything I want to be. He smiles at me, and for a second, I understand what the two pink aliens were thinking when they were eyeing me. Cute. No. That’s not the word. Hot. Absurdly so. He sends a wink my way and follows that with the best smile a tree has ever given in the history of the universe. I want to talk to him, but you know, vomit might explode out of me at any moment. I don’t want to be remembered as the one who blew the contents of their stomach onto his blazer.

The toilet opens its mouth, and I vomit up what feels like my entire stomach, lining included.

“What the fuck did I take?” I say to the bowl.

The toilet gags, its tongue spinning almost as fast as my mind.

“How am I supposed to know?” it responds.

I shrug. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay. I’m good at cleaning myself.”

I pat it on the head, and it passes me some toilet roll.

I stagger back out, patting my mouth dry. People squawk at me, but they’re not birds anymore.

The impossibly handsome tree is gone, but Brad is now seemingly wearing his blazer. I’d never noticed before how sturdy and handsome he looked.

A guy dances with a girl with pink hair.

Another guy, I think his name is Klein, chugs beer through a hose.

Two girls approach.

“You feeling better?” the one on the right says. The one on the left dips their head and smiles.

I look past them to where the demon was sitting. But he’s not there. It’s just Nell now, thick dark hair falling into her face, sitting exactly where the demon had been. She stands up. Approaches. She growls, long and deep, and the two girls scarper into the dancing crowd.

“I didn’t think it’d hit you that hard,” Nell says, her hand on my shoulder, her nails digging into my skin.

“What the hell was it?”

“Just a little something.”

A little something that melted my mind into another dimension. Sure.

“It was more than a little something. Tell me what it was.”

She doesn’t answer. She knows I can’t say no to her, that whenever she says so, I relinquish control of my own body and surrender. She puts another tab in my hand and smiles as I pop it on my tongue.

“Am I going to be alright?” I ask, my tongue protruding from my mouth, the tab perched like a bird ready to give flight to my mind.

“Yes,” she says. I know she is lying.

I curl my tongue back and let the tab fall down my gullet. I can feel it sliding, making its way down. I can feel something bubbling. Pink and yellow lights flash on the inside of my eyes.

Pray for me. This time I really need it. Please.