“We’re trying to speak clearly but our voices get drowned out
By the over-excessive braying and the always-open mouth.”

There are elated elephant-men running about my reddened and twisting carnival of a brainscape, all dressed-up in dimly depressing suits and perfectly ready for a summertime funeral. Floppy elephant ears, raging elephant trunks, like tapeworms they twist and grab and leech. I tilt my head in wonder as the beast-men begin to waltz with one another. They frolic on a predetermined frolic-path, marked off with lilac petals that stink like carved-out intestines. Smile for me, elephant men – oh, and they do! – such seductively nightmarish grins, all tusks and wrinkles and rotting black tongues, dancing indefinitely among the flower petals. It’s sad, though. It’s all so strikingly sad. Their suits are made of poorly-stitched darkness; their eyes are nothing more than dank pits of slop. Their happiness is hollow, yet—

“Sarah?”

“What? Oh… yeah?” Jesus Christ, I sound as dead as O-Ren.

“…How’ve you been lately, Sarah?”

“I can’t complain, I guess,” I mumble, running my scarred thumb along the arm of my ratty old recliner. “Things have been, um… pretty normal.”

Gnawhisfuckingfaceoff. Do it right now. The elephant men will congratulate and reward you, yes they will, oh yes they will. Rotting cotton candy from the carnival of the damned, so succulent and gory, saccharine webbing from the throats of blue-raspberry fetuses, cooking gently in the smiley-face sunlight – so gorgeously sweet! Do it sweetie, do it do it DO IT DO IT

“That’s good,” says Virgil, scribbling something down. Ah! I remembered his name! He still refuses to make eye contact with me though. Hack. “Have you been taking your medication?”

“No,” I say, stoic as the grave. “Absolutely not.”

“That’s good, that’s good. Nice to hear.”

I smile, flattered by his sexy voice. “Thanks Virgil, I really… wait, what?”

“You’ve finally realized that I’ve been giving you placebos, right? I’ve been wondering how long it might take you.”

Son of a bitch. “You’ve been giving me sugar pills since the moment I met you?”

“That’s right.”

“So… I’m paying you seventy-five bucks an hour to sit in my apartment, scribble useless notes and feed me sugar? What the fuck, Virgil?”

“You remembered my name, though. There’s some progress, right?”

“I do not have a memory problem,” I almost scream at him, suddenly livid. “I have a ‘waking-nightmare, hallucination-plagued, obsessive-fucking-compulsive disorder’ problem, and sugar pills aren’t going to do a thing for that! Give me real medication, you hack! What’s keeping you from doing that?”

DO IT SARAH GOGOGO

I find myself pressing my cheek against his, flesh against flesh. I’m straddling him ferociously, and a disturbingly feral noise escapes my throat. Our eyeballs are touching, I think. His stubbly face is nervous and sticky, and it smells like my pussy on a bad day. Dead things. Horrified rodent pheromones. Don’t puke, don’t puke. Wait… why the hell am I straddling—

“There are elephant people in suits offering me cotton candy to gnaw your fucking face off right now, Virgil,” I mutter. “I know you can’t see them, but they’re staring at both of us right now, wondering what I’m gonna do… and you know what? I’m thinking about obliging them, Virgil. I’m thinking that I’m reeeaaally in a cotton candy mood right now, Virgil… what do you think, sweetie pie?”

Virgil stares at me for a moment over his stylish glasses, grinning mysteriously. Calm and collected, he nudges my body off of his and loosens the knot of his tie, gently leading me back into my recliner as he does so. Savior. Augh, why must he be so good-looking? Dead, clammy flesh; breath of a flu-ridden serpent. Muscles, kinda. So sexy. And he absolutely rocks a sweater vest, quite possibly more than anyone I’ve ever known.

He sits back down and crosses his legs, idly scribbling in his notebook. “Miss Fontaine – erm, Sarah… you’re a peculiar patient, to say the least—”

There is a hairline cut running along the inside of my lower lip. It meanders across my fragile mouth, chuckling to itself as it digs into vast untold crevasses, tickling my molars and the reddish-grey meat beyond my tongue. I can’t stop playing with it. Can’t stop tasting that vague essence of blood. It makes me melt. I wonder if the elephant people…

“Sometimes I find it impossible to even diagnose you, Sarah. You’re starting to slip. I just… I just feel as if there’s only one way to fix this situation,” he says, smiling almost profusely. In a movement so fluid and unnatural that it makes my eyes water, Virgil slides a pink glass rod out of his vest pocket and holds it between his thumb and forefinger. It’s about a foot long, and looks sorta like a fragile sex toy or a magic wand or something. “Do you know what this is?”

“Uh, no. But I’ll bet you a pair of trendy glasses that I can find a way to use it incorrectly.”

“My thoughts exactly,” he says, grasping the rod like a maestro’s baton. “Which is why I suppose it would be prudent of me to never let you play with it…”

Oh, that just won’t do. I have to play with it now.

“Uh… can I see it?” I stutter, my eyes glazing over with wonder.

“I don’t see why not,” he says, that stupid grin almost taking over his entire face. He twirls the glistening pink thing around for a moment, and then cautiously hands it to me. “Just be careful with it. We only have one shot at this, really.”

“Huh,” I grunt at him, mesmerized by the slender sex toy. How could anybody conceivably get this thing in their ass without breaking it? Oh! What if that’s the point – to fill someone with broken glass and stuff? You never know. People get off on the craziest things these days. Broken glass in the intestines is probably a huge aphrodisiac nowadays. I was never really turned on by anything beyond the traditional ‘you’re a cute douchebag, let’s fuck’ mindset of most teenage girls. Which is odd, because I never considered myself to be like most teenage girls.

“I’m special, aren’t I Mister Elephant?”

One of the elephant people stops frolicking and tousles my frizzy hair, trumpeting gently. Yes, sweetie pie. There is perhaps nothing more beautifully complex and vile than the Kingdom of Sarah Fontaine. Scream, scream, scream! Feel better? Wondrous. Now get on your feet AND EARN YOURSELF SOME COTTON CANDY

“How do you get the broken glass out, Dr. Virgil? Just curious. Cause, y’know… intestines are fragile. Also, why is it pink?”

“Intestines? Well, I’m not exactly a biologist but—”

“No! I meant this glass thingy,” I say, passively nibbling my raw thumb. “Why’s it pink? And as an entirely separate question: how do you pull the broken glass out of your intestines?”

“Sarah, I’m not sure where you got intestines from, but that device in your hands… is designed to solve all of your problems. It’s designed to make the nightmares go away. Over a long period of time, of course.”

“…yeah, but why is it pink?”

“It doesn’t matter, Sarah. I think you’ve misunderstood what we’re doing,” he says, his face nothing more than a grinning set of molars now.

“We’re not having sex?” I squeak, almost dropping the glass rod.

“No! Of course not… we, Miss Sarah Fontaine,” he says, standing up and pacing a bit, “…are doing something incredibly ah… abstract, to say the least.”

I despise abstract art. Mindless circles and squiggles and bits of scrap yard junk… my mind’s enough of an incomprehensible mess already, thank you very much. Oh hey, is that what is thingy is? Abstract art? Makes sense, I guess. Wait…

“What?”

Virgil seems to swallow me with his monster mouth. “Let me show you.”

“Goldfish! Oh my God, what happened to your eye?”

I tear a bit of flesh from my thumb and wash it down with a sip of black Starbucks. The little coffee house is packed with people shuffling around, calling out ridiculously complex and expensive orders. Breakfast rush. Food service be damned. We’re sitting at one of the window tables, and the curious eyes of strangers effectively surround me. I’m uncomfortable. “I knew you’d freak out,” I mutter, putting my dollar store sunglasses back on.

“I’m not freaking out! Just tell me what happened, okay? Curiosity slaughtered the cat,” Olivia says, typing away on her laptop and draining the rest of her ridiculously complex and expensive cup of coffee. “But I’ve got eight goddamn lives left sweetheart, so spill it.”

“Um. I fell. Yeah… I mean, yeah.”

“And gave yourself a black eye? Bull,” she says, stifling a grunt. “Tell me what really happened.”

“I’m serious! You know how clumsy I can be. And it was a hard fall, y’know? Like… I tripped on my bedpost and bam! Right in the eye,” I say, watching the passersby over my cheap sunglasses. It’s not snowing quite yet, but it’s definitely cold out. “I put some ice on it, but it still hurts pretty bad. Don’t worry about it, I’m good.”

FUCK VIRGIL FUCK VIRGIL FUCK VIRGIL

Olivia’s hand presses against mine, and it startles me more than it should have. “Listen, Sarah. You trust me, right?”

“Yeah, I trust you – I’ve just been having a rough week and I’ve had to stop taking my meds and—”

“Goldfish,” she says, her face uncomfortably close to mine. Somehow, her nasally voice is amplified by the strong coffee cocktail on her breath. “You need to relax. I wish you would relax more. Sometimes I think you’re going crazy.”

“Shut up.”

“I’m serious! I really you should come out with me this Sunday – there’s this college party up in Redwood Heights that’s supposed to be fucking ridiculous. It’ll be a blast!”

“You know I hate college… anything. It makes me uh… makes me feel like a failure for never getting in. Y’know? I don’t deserve to celebrate anything.”

“Preaching to the choir, Goldfish. Look, you don’t have to go,” she says, finally letting go of my hand. I settle down a bit. “But a little fun never hurt anybody, right? It’ll give you a chance to loosen up, meet some people.”

“I don’t think I need to meet anybody right now…”

“Bull! When’s the last time you made a new friend in this shithole of a town?”

Friends? Well, let’s see here… there’s Virgil, but I don’t think he’s my friend. My fingers slowly meander towards my eye, prodding the purple inflamed flesh. Yeah, he’s definitely not my friend. Uh… oh! Olivia! She’s probably my friend. She has a nickname for me that I didn’t ask for, she invites me to college parties, she covers for me on smoke breaks… yeah, that’s gotta be friendship material, right? Um, who else? C’mon, who else?

Oh God. Oh my God, I don’t have any friends! Pathetic, pathetic, pathetic, pathetic—

“Uh… I dunno, when I started talking to you at Slurp-A-Lot. You’re my friend, right?”

SHE’S NOT YOUR FRIEND SHE’S OUT TO GET YOU

Olivia’s face seems to sink, but she composes herself and pats my pathetic shoulder. “Yeah, Sarah. I’m your friend.”

We sit there in silence for a while. Olivia finishes typing whatever she was typing, and I stare out of the plate-glass window at the busy people walking by. One of them winks at me, I think. Perhaps he’s an elephant.

I can’t possibly imagine life without my medication – what am I gonna do if things get out of hand? What if my brain explodes all over the sidewalk, and I don’t have any pills to clean it all up? But… I never had any pills to begin with. I had fucking Tic Tacs, three times a day before meals. Ugh, I just don’t know what to believe anymore.

“Hey Goldie,” says Olivia as she slides her laptop into her bag and gets up from the table, “I’m gonna go ahead and pop out, alright? Think about the party. I’ll call you—”

“No phones, no phones!” I almost scream at her. A few people glance my way, and my cheeks burn crimson. Calm down, calm down.

“Oh yeah, I forgot… I’ll text you then,” she says, smiling grimly. Why must everyone smile at me when they’re concerned? It’s confusing and it’s oddly hurtful. I’m not sure why.

I’m suddenly alone. I’m surrounded on all sides by people, and I’ve never felt so utterly alone. The walk to the bus stop is cold and unbearably distracting. The notion of a bright orange medication bottle sets my mind ablaze. I wish I had my pills. I wish I had my pills. I wish I had my pills.

I wish I had my pills.

I wish

I had

my pills.