Bristle stumbled into his lounge, blinked furiously until the blurry white smudges somewhat began to resemble his furniture and the sticky tiles under his worn boots firmed into shapes he once recognized. He still had no fucking clue where he was. “Am I dying?” was all he could think. “What’s going on here? How did this happen?” The couches swirled again into blobs of nothing, like an abstract painting Bristle may have once admired. It didn’t matter. His bladder felt old and rubbery and dark brown, he could have seen it through the outline of a protruding stomach under his faded and stained button-up shirt. He desperately needed to piss right there, but he couldn’t - he had forgotten how, or he was already pissing. Either one didn’t seem sensible.
He asked himself his name, and he answered. His straw hands felt like growths with a thousand crippled wasps stinging the surface - no pain, but intensely irritating. It didn’t make sense. Could he see through that wall? What was that? Was it some kind of a gateway-portal? The very gateway-portal that swallowed those school kids like he read about in the wretched Daily Oracle last year? “Then take me kiddie vortex” he barely slurred as he picked up speed and collided into the patio’s sliding door, bouncing to the floor in what seemed like an instant and an eternity at the same time, one big contradiction.
His face met the surprisingly soft carpet and some blood might have come out of him, he wasn’t sure. Bolting upright he fell back down and stared at the massive ceiling, once as white as everything once was, now dark and eroded, like everything now was. His ceiling. His flat. Massive. He remembered now. He’d bought it from that shady fuck who wouldn’t give a name and never asked Bristle to sign a damn thing. Good deal too, and never a breath of trouble in all the years of residency. The fear and paranoia crumbled to dust and the pink euphoria rushed in. He wasn’t dying, not at all, he had just smoked a hit of Satanic Beetle Wings. He felt sheepish as if someone was watching, and as if they knew this wasn’t the first time.
He hadn’t always been this pathetic addict mind you. Hell, he’d once been something much more important than you, and still was to a degree. The biggest Scarecrow-Hybrid ever in the records, in fact, and it wasn’t too long ago that Bristle had sworn to never touch the hard stuff. Sure, he’d meddled in a bit of Frenzy Herb, maybe a line of Mad Horse Cartilage at a party, but who in The Goats Nest fresh out of varsity hadn’t? No, it was safe to say that besides a box and a half of Marlboro Reds a day, he was far too timid to be considered an addict back then. And especially not the dreaded Satanic Beetle Wings. He knew better.
The ceiling cracked in front of his worn out eyes. He needed another operation on them, it was bound to happen sooner or later. His perverted doctor warned him they’d only get worse if he kept up the Wings. His memory seemed to squint, fold in half on itself again, and then slowly come into focus. What was he just thinking about? Something about varsity? He hardly remembered the place now, so distant and unimportant. Winning the 2004 3-Dimensional Sudoku Challenge might have been the highlight. Well, that and Ophelia-Leigh.
Red. Everything went red, the couch, the carpet, the ceiling, his brain. He puked water. It was his heart, he was sure of it. His heart was trying to escape out his throat. His screams turning into sobs. Ophelia-Leigh. Every time: Ophelia-Leigh. She was death, she was Satan, and she was everything that was wrong. He fought the thought down but his broken mind clawed onto it, scraping more bits of information from memory into his immediate thoughts, until he remembered.
THEN
And then he was there, and so was she. This was the memory that always teased him the most. What would the difference in his life be if she hadn’t had been there, or if he hadn’t been there? Without a doubt, the difference would have been astounding, the single most important event in his life, gone. He would not know the bitter taste of regret and sorrow like he did now, and yet, he wasn’t sure he could have lived without her. But that hardly seemed the issue, for as I say, he was there, and so was she, right on campus. More specifically, in the small, cheap, cold lunch-shop queue at the OIAC, their varsity. Not the typical place to fall in love, and for that reason, just as typical.
What’s more, she stank, but the Fish-Breeds always did. It wasn’t their fault, but that didn’t change the fact. It had been almost a year since Sir Corabaskian Jr. had freed his fellow Fish-Breeds, proving without a shadow of a doubt that the larger, more intelligent sea life could pass the Advanced Rights Test, and therefore were fit to learn and work among the upper-class forms of The Goat’s Nest. But nobody was used to it. Bristle even knew a guy, Allan Strauss, who had smashed a Fish-Breed’s water-tank in response to the law. Pure hate-crime; and he went to the underground high security for God knows how long. The papers reported it, front page, as a concrete indication of the rise of intolerance, but on the down-low there were high-fives from frustrated students against a school of fish, and even more fear from the outnumbered learners. In some ways, Allan was a hero, because all he did was what everyone else was thinking.
Bristle could see her now, clearer than anything he had seen for what could have been a million years or more. That smell permanently clogged in his nose, and he loved it, and he despised it.
She was in front of him, laughing in that gurgled way fish laugh, along with her friends. Another fish and a human girl, which is what some liked to call a Salty Crack, a humanoid who was more than likely rejected by her own kind in early life and then found solace in the placid nature of your average Fish-breed. He watched them sign away in Fin-Language, the only way such different species could communicate, all too comical, grunting and leaking every time something funny was said.
The smell was too much, but he needed his cigarettes. And besides, he had nothing against the creatures, hatred was far too complicated for Bristle, and some of his favourite novelists were fish anyway. So he held his breathe courageously, taking small whiffs of oxygen through his nose as seldom as possible.
And then it happened. It was stupid, he knew, and embarrassingly cliché, but in his fixed consciousness of breath, he inhaled the tiniest drop of saliva and choked. Just one small cough which changed everything. Ophelia-Leigh turned at hearing this, her left eye looking straight at his face, locked. The saliva seemed to dry up in his throat as if the disproportionate bulging eye had microwaved it right out of him. She was unlike any fish Bristle had ever seen, shimmering bright silver, and he couldn’t escape his pumpkin head reflecting from the deep of her wet pupil. It froze him to stone, like the legend of Medusa herself, and he became aware of a thousand things in that moment. He was more than just a Scarecrow, he was an artist. She was more than just a Fish-Breed, she was a muse. Right then, he was no longer a web programmer, he had a destiny. She was no longer just a bad smell, she was gunfire. The shop was transparent, only she existed. Ophelia-Leigh, a pink ring through her lower lip, a polka dot bow placed precariously on top of her head, a copy of Catcher in the Rye under her left fin. She was the concentrate of everything. He was in love immediately.
This wasn’t the first time Bristle had fallen in love at first sight, but it was the definitely the first time it had crossed the species line to this degree. And unlike those other times, he had spluttered up his guts enough to ask her out. She nodded clumsily and he thought he saw her smile. She had said yes.
NOW
The ceiling no longer seemed threatening; Bristle had fallen back into the euphoria, as was the unpredictable nature of Satanic Beetle Wings. This was his favourite part of the story, the story of his life. Although it was just the beginning of his adventure, it was the happiest moment of it all, as if his soul had finally been activated, as if he had found the answer every romantic writing had tried to convey to him and yet failed. He lay still, grinning the toothless mouth that was carved over his entire face at birth, a grin he could never get rid of as a Scarecrow. He was watching this story in his mind like a movie that he had never seen before, like he had no idea what was coming.
The next series of events played out in his head like little snippets. Date after date, meal after meal, the bond between Bristle and Ophelia-Leigh tightened, hardened, and solidified. They held motherly on to each other in the theatre. They chuckled knowingly at the judgemental whispers behind their backs. They made love as often and the best as they could, usually at Ophelia-Leigh’s holiday salt-water pond, and only when her parents weren’t there. Varsity became sub-important, and their grades shed numbers like a time bomb, but how could they care? They were in love; they needed nothing more; they could conquer the world - and did.
Just over a year into the relationship, Bristle’s uncle died. He knew nothing about him so it didn’t mean much, except that Bristle’s name was in the will, and a quarter of a million Credits fell into his wiry straw hands. Besides the money, his favourite part about this occurrence was telling his lecturers to “suck his dick” after the months they had spent warning him that if he didn’t shape up, he was going to “die on the street with no one to care”. He and Ophelia-Leigh (who by this time was proudly laying fertilized eggs and praying one of them would survive) promptly moved into a modest flat just a few minutes from Orbit Street, which was more upper-class than anywhere Bristle had lived before. Here they made love as often as they liked, and focused only on the things that made them happy. Ophelia-Leigh, for example, painted shells to sell at the Sea Shore Market, and Bristle spent hours dedicated to his laptop, turning everyday noises he’d recorded (the kinds you would never pay attention to like the traffic or the drone of a generator) into complex arrangements, arguably resembling music. They took soft drugs when they felt bored, and spoke to each other without even using Fin-Language. It was a connection so deep, it eventually got compared to the bond separated Siamese twins might have.
NOW
Even now alone in his apartment, he felt her, like a heartbeat driving him mad. But it was fading, everything was fading. The paranoia, the euphoria, the drug, all fading to a scratch. He would need a hit soon, or he would surely hollow out and fade away. The all too familiar panic of dark sobriety knocking on his psyche like children on Halloween. Digging through beer cans and junk-food wrappers like the rats he knew he shared his home with, he found his phone. He didn’t know Seth’s number off hand and he didn’t need to. It had been on speed dial for a long time now.
“Hello my friend”. Seth answered. Bristle almost found this amusing every time he heard it. He knew Seth didn’t have any friends.
“Seth! I… I’m a desperate man. Dying man, fuck” was all Bristle could whimper. He could hear his voice repeat in his head, acutely aware as always of its own pathetic delivery, as if his own mind mocked itself.
“Ah, you have no trust left, my friend. I cannot, it’s not worth my good time to come all that way, you see” Seth began, a little less sympathetic with each word.
“I… I …” Bristle’s attempt was cut off, with Seth’s:
“I can’t help you, Bristle, my friend. But I do know of a guy who might. A good guy, like you and me. It will be far from the A-grade, but he’ll sort you out, for just a tenner, I hear”.
Bristle sighed.
“He lives in A-Soft, several stations from you, my man. Here, let me give you his number. You got a pen?”
THEN
October 16th is a special day in The Goat’s Nest, for many reasons. They say it’s the day Venus swallows itself and is reborn, and because of this, a surge of idea’s raced through fresh minds, like a disease of good fortune. Because of this enigma it was celebrated as “Inspiration Day”, as it was, of course, essentially every creature in The Goat’s Nest’s birthday simultaneously. Five years ago was no different from twenty years ago, was no different from today. The streets pounded with music and the feet of creative activity. Ophelia-Leigh swam in their small indoor pond, gazing lovingly at her three strongest eggs, the oldest now 4 months. There was no set time how long a Scarecrow-Fish egg took to develop as no one has ever recorded it being done before, but this was the closest the couple had got so far. Bristle was lost in his imagination, smacking away at his laptop, feeding as much as he could from Mother Venus. Each key feeling just few keys away from his masterpiece, until he was afraid to risk touching it in case he forgot what he had just done.
“Ophie! Ophelia-Leigh!” he called until he heard her flop out of the pond and her hind fins patter wet up behind him. “Listen to this.”
It was the reaction Bristle had hoped for. Every time he heard it himself, something new seemed to add itself to the piece. It was an exact pin-point translation of what he had heard in the crevices of his brain all those years ago, finally accurately mastered into an outside source of sound. He jumped up and flung his arms like a kid around Ophelia-Leigh’s slippery mid-section, swinging her widely around as she squealed and spurted with joy and dizziness.
“This is the one baby!” he shouted in joy. And he was right.
Just over three weeks later, he had signed a deal with Religious/Anonymous Records and his Magnum Opus (fittingly dubbed “The Ophelia Reaction”) was released on Avant Garde A Clue VII, which was a very popular compilation at the time. And this song was the stand-out track, the first single, rising up in every chart and eventually hitting the top spot on the XMENTAL TOP 100, the first artist to do so on a debut single. The next thing Bristle and Ophelia-Leigh knew, they were household names. Their finances had doubled since the Uncle’s death, and Bristle had immediately signed a 2 album deal with R/A. And oh how the public loved them. Tabloids lapped up their personal life, they were the poster-couple for cross-species relationships and the romantic’s idea of forbidden love. The world crossed their fingers and held their breath, praying for the survival of the couple’s unborn offspring, glued to the news and gossiping on the phone about any rumour that surfaced.
As anybody will tell you, success is directly proportionate to material goods, and as a well deserved reward, Bristle and Ophelia-Leigh bought a giant apartment on Orbit Street, a stone’s throw from Practice Beach. The price was beyond reasonable, even for an exchange done quietly under the table. It was every upper-class snob’s dream, a huge patio window overlooking the ocean and the biggest in-door salt water pond ever built in The Goat’s Nest. And as per Ophelia’s request, not a wall or a piece of furniture or even a piece of cutlery lacked the blinding of a cocaine-white shine. And this is where they would stay, for the rest of their lives.
NOW
Which, of course, didn’t take very long, as this was the same apartment Bristle felt trapped in right now. The walls seemingly getting smaller and clearer as each minute brought on a new wave of sobriety. Memories of Ophelia flooded from every corner and there was no good way to remove that smell.
Bristle stumbled around, looking for something without any surety of what it was. His pumpkin head was coated with sweat as he went from room to room, trying to understand himself, his mind now far too clear and yet far too difficult to grasp. He opened the door to the study, his laptop flickering in the darkness - God knows how long it had been on and untouched, the source of income now just draining electricity. Confused, he moved on and opened another door which lead into the nesting room, and he stopped. There sat the rotting carcasses of the three eggs, never hatched yet brown with wet straw coming out of their cracks. And the stench. God the stench, like a million little deaths on a farm shot up his nose, clearing his mind even further. He slammed the door in a panic, trying to shut out the thoughts that came with it, and frantically toppled into the next room trying to find a distraction without having any idea of where he was going. He found himself in the space they kept their in-door salt-water pond, the room Bristle had avoided the most in recent times. He stopped just in time, wobbling on his feet, nearly diving head first into the water. His brain flooded with regret as he collapsed onto his knees in an instant, puking into the water as he did. He hadn’t eaten for days, so what was coming out of his body was anyone’s guess, but the amount was substantial as he coughed and spasmed in pain for a few seconds. His body then granted him a moment to catch his breath and he wiped his mouth with his sleeve. His withered and dehydrated face reflected back at him from the dimly lit water, distorted amongst the swirling vomit he had just produced, and he began to cry. “How did this all happen?” he sobbed. “Where did I go so wrong?”
THEN
If I was chilling with Bristle in that moment, I’d tell him that there were two specific dates where things went wrong. The first particular night that stands out was a party they held, attended by people they loved, people they had seen in magazines, and more than enough people they had never met before. Drinks got pulled out of every room, drinks got swallowed and drinks fell to the floor. Pretentious and successful people shared war stories and yet there was no doubt that right now, Bristle and Ophelia-Leigh were the hottest around. A slightly beyond tipsy fish, a well drunk Scarecrow, making out the best they could in front of the rich and famous within the comfort of their own home. During the inebriated cheers for this pumpkin head being covered in fish saliva, Ophelia pulled away and signalled Bristle to follow her. She led him into their bedroom, where sat two people. One Bristle recognized immediately, it was Cestoda, the giant tapeworm who was as famous for being the guitarist in Potato Milk (the number 1 band in the history of The Goat’s Nest) as he was famous for his excessive drug use and mental instability. They introduced themselves, knowing exactly who each other were.
They shook hands and made small talk about 50’s music and sports cars until Ophelia shifted uncomfortably. The room fell awkwardly silent, so Cestoda slid off the bed towards the Jukebox, selected Led Zeppelin’s Black Dog, and turned up the volume until the horrific psytrance in the next room was drowned to a whisper. He slithered uncomfortably back into position and nodded at Seth, who smiled and proudly whipped out a bag of mustard coloured insects, buzzing in fear as if they knew what was coming.
Satanic Beetles. Bristle’s eyes widened and his jaw clenched. He spun to face Ophelia, who was staring right back at him with anticipation. This was obviously her idea. Seth plucked a Beetle out tightly with his fingers and it sang louder in perfect key with Robert Plant. He then tore off its wings and it fell silent and died. He flicked its useless body out the open window and pressed the wings deep into a pipe he held in his other hand. Bristle nervously looked back at Ophelia. She leaned into him reassuringly, and he relaxed a little more.
“What you want to do, my friend,” Seth handed Bristle the pipe “is suck as deep as you can. Try get it to all to burn as fast as possible, you see.” Bristle nodded and put the pipe into his carved mouth as a lighter sparked, hovering above the crusty mess overflowing from the cup. “And when it’s all in, exhale the smoke into your lovely ladies gills over there,” Seth smiled at Ophelia, who saw straight through his façade but winked back, willing to put up with it for this new experience.
Bristle nodded again and began to suck, the Wings whistled and crackled into black ash as he inhaled as hard as he could. It tickled his mouth, his throat, his lungs, but he dared not cough. He sucked until his vision blurred and the wings evaporated. The pipe was quickly removed from his mouth and he gently blew the yellow smoke into Ophelia’s gills, gaping open like a hungry vagina.
As he was exhaling, he saw the scales he loved grow bigger and the music turned into an unrecognizable drone. “Holy shit” he mumbled as spit dribbled out of his face. He fell back on his bed and saw Seth say something which made no sense. Moments later, Ophelia-Leigh was lying next to him and they laughed in almost the same way. In his eyes, she was turning into a scarecrow, in her eyes, he was a fish. “I love you” he blurted, his voice breaking like a teenager and she laughed again. The party became the background, their thoughts were the center of the universe. “I love you too” she whispered back in perfect English.
Bristle’s heart thumped so hard it knocked the wind out of him. Somehow he had heard Ophelia’s voice, for the first time, sweet and gentle, nestling into his ears, repeating itself. His head felt impossibly heavy, but he lifted it up to kiss her. Their lips met with all the love they had ever felt concentrated into this one moment, except this time their mouths felt small and there was no excessive phlegm and salt in the way. Bristle’s hand brushed her scales which no longer felt hard and slimy, but now like a coat of feathers, and it didn’t take long until his wooden penis harden in his pants.
Sudden lust consumed Bristle and he no longer felt drowsy. Completely forgetting where he was and who may have been in the room with them, he jumped onto his knees and unbuckled his jeans. Almost as if in instinct, he pulled Ophelia’s water-tank connection out of her breathing flaps and stuck his cock deep inside of her gills. The act was suffocating her as his wooden hard-on splintered within her body, but the motion and friction was unlike anything either of them had felt before. Bristle moved back and forward as viciously as he could, experiencing multiple orgasms as Ophelia flopped around half in pleasure half in pain. Black mess seemed to leak out of her every pore as she laid mounds of unfertilized eggs all over the bed in a frenzy, squealing in ecstasy and danger.
It was over fast, and Bristle quickly realised what he had just done. Without hesitation, he plugged Ophelia-Leigh's water-tank back into her gills, which had been rubbed pink from his penis and now overflowed with semen. Bubbles roared again as Ophelia caught her breathe, but her eye was one full of love and amazement. For such a sexual experience was light years away from what either of them understood, or would ever understand again.
NOW
As any addict will tell you, you will always be chasing that first high. And even though Bristle felt close to a breakdown, he needed to chase it just this one more time. He never found what he had been searching his house for, but he managed to scratch up some loose notes, and was now entering WitchFace station. As usual, he wore his giant sunglasses and a black beanie, which never properly hid his identity, but kept him a few steps ahead. Frank, he was going to meet some guy called Frank. Seth had set this up, and for all his ulterior motives and wickedness, God bless his soul.
Bristle’s feet hit the platform and he waited anxiously for the train. So far so good. He kept his head down, his charred lower lip now beginning to quiver from withdrawal, his vision doubling up until the roar of the train gushed passed his head and snapped him back into the mission.
The carriage was quite empty and Bristle calmed a little. Picking up a copy of the Daily Oracle to hide his face, he began to read the front page. Something about a gallery in the Art-Pulpitations Building commemorating some aristocrat couple’s unity. Such a public display of affection reminded him of Her once again. He chocked softly and quickly turned the page.
And there he was, page 2. He hadn’t seen a mirror for weeks, and this photo was taken just a few days earlier. Crying in the gutter with dry vomit on his checkered shirt, the same shirt he was still wearing now. So-CALLED SCARECROW GENIUS the headline burnt into his brain.
Anger spiked through his hands which trembled so furiously they ripped at the paper, tearing it into 2 pieces. He gave off a small scream in fright of his own actions, and then froze as he remembered where he was. He looked up at all the eyes in the carriage. The kid with a Hero Duck t-shirt. The business man with a brown moustache and a matching briefcase. The bald grandmother sitting across from him. They all stared. They all knew who he was. They were all reading the Oracle.
Readers of the paper would blame many things for Bristle’s downfall. The Wings was a common and reasonable assumption. Ophelia-Leigh another. But Bristle blamed The Daily Oracle itself. It was too fast, too up to date, and unlike most papers, 100% accurate and reliable. And as a celebrity, living in a city with so many reporters that the famous were outnumbered, this can be a very destructive thing indeed.
The second date I would pinpoint as to where it all went wrong was a few months ago, where a set of photos were printed in the very publication in question, even though Bristle would remember very little of it. At this point of his flashback, we see him in a taxi flying down the road towards his house, trying to piece together what exactly happened the night before. He recalled being invited into The Deep Thoughts Building for the first and last time. He recalled smoking Wings in the back of a limo with Cestoda and Seth (who were now much more than just acquaintances) on their way to some seedy strip joint deep in The Bergie Town. No memory from this point was left undeleted.
But what he didn’t remember from the night before was already well documented and in the hands of the entire city. He found himself alone, walking the streets with the hangover from Satan with the sun in full force burning his head, when he heard his name being shouted. There was a Black ‘n White Kid just a few feet in front of him, handing out The Daily Oracle. Not in any position to deal with a fan, Bristle briskly walked past until he heard his name shouted once again, yet not directed to him at all. He turned his head slightly and focused his attention on this boy, whose words quickly came into focus. “BRISTLE’S ORGY OF SIN! READ ALL ABOUT IT! WE HAVE HIM LIKE YOU NEVER SEEN HIM BEFORE LADIES AND GENTLEMAN! READ IT RIGHT HERE, FOLKS! SEE JUST WH-” Bristle reached back and snatched a copy, continuing on his way, ignoring the child's shock in what had just happened.
Moments later he was in this taxi, begging the driver to go faster, looking over and over at the front page. The full colour photos were far beyond incriminating, laid over a four page spread, hundreds of them in neat rows displaying an array of illegal activities. Drinking Jaegermeister from a vagina; pissing onto the bar; smoking a bottle-neck of some unknown substance on a table; even one of him performing fellatio on a Chickenman while a semi-nude lady laughed in the background. But the worst was one of him having sex with a girl who looked almost 12 years old, as Bristle shoved her face deep into a much older, perhaps mid-50’s Indian woman’s lap. They were all covered in semen and tin-foil for some reason, white shit stained Bristle’s cut-out nostrils as he drank from a bottle of Jack Daniels. They were all laughing and he looked like a demon even to himself.
His heart pounded in beat with his hangover, pumping guilt around his veins, his gut kicked inside of him like a complicated pregnancy. Panic had blinded his vision, fully aware he was in big trouble, begging the gods to have mercy, to stop Ophelia from seeing the photos before he could somehow explain. But he knew in his soul it was too late. He just didn’t know how far too late he was.
In what seemed like his entire lifetime, Bristle eventually got to his front door and frantically stuck his keys in, bursting through whilst trembling in adrenaline. She was there, he could smell her.
“Ophelia! Ophelia-Leiiiigh!” he called up the stairs. No answer. He started to run, step by step, calling her name so loud that his ears rang, her stench growing thicker and weirder as he ascended. “Ophelia!!!” Opening door after door, stomach turning over and over, refusing to believe what his mind was telling him, shouting her name until he eventually stumbled into the salt pond room. And there she was.
She had really done a number on herself. Her throat was slit right up to her gills as she lay motionless on the floor, her eye wide open, white with dead, the emotion of fear frozen deep within. Black shit still oozed out of her wound, covering everything, staining the carpet. Her water-tank smashed and splintered on the floor, shards scattered wall to wall. There was no note, but the front page of The Daily Oracle with the incriminating images lying wet next to her body was enough evidence.
All emotions were gone as Bristle knelt down to the body silently. The smell burnt his eyes as he tried to pick her up and small bits of her came off in his hands like badly made sushi. And as it has been said so poetically many times before, two people died that day.
He sobbed into his arm as he left the A-Soft Train Station and turned up the street that Frank had told him to meet him. A few more steps, Bristle stopped, wiped his eyes, took a deep breathe and pulled himself together. Down a dark alley, then another one, and there he was. Frank was a big man, with dirty hands and an unshaven face, and a shopping bag for a hat indicating he had been in that alleyway for a long time.
He immediately looked up to greet Bristle with an “Oh my God! Seth wasn’t lying! I’ve served some big names in my time, but never someone as big as you Mr. Bristle, sir!” taking the scarecrow by the hand a little too enthusiastically, an obvious long time fan. Bristle smiled the best he could, trying to seem grateful for the support but feeling sick to his stomach. A hyperactive fan and his own fake appreciation was the last thing he felt like dealing with right now.
Noticing the discomfort of a fellow addict, Frank apologized and pulled out a small paper bag from his pocket, the humming of Satanic Beetles coming deep within, the previous thoughts of Bristle’s heartache wiped clean. This was all he needed right now.
Bristle fumbled with the crumpled notes and stuck them out to Frank.
“Here” he said. “Please… here.”
“Oh no, I couldn’t!” Frank refused. “This is an honour, my friend! This one is on me! Please, let’s hit one right now, I can see you need it!” and with that he pulled a small pipe from his tattered sleeve and picked an already prepared Beetle Wing out of this toothless and rotting mouth, admiring it for just a second before pushing it into the cup with the back of his thumbnail. Bristle recognized that he normally would be put off by such an unhygienic method of smoking, such a stale Wing kept in the cheeks of a contaminated man, but right now this pipe was a symbol of hope, his thoughts drooling for the release.
Without another word, Frank handed the pipe over, and Bristle took it thirstily, placing the metallic handle directly into his cracked mouth. He allowed the lighter to dance above the Wings for a second before plunging the flame into the pipe’s head, and he inhaled the cracking sound the Wings made, as deep into his lungs as he could make space for.
The first thing that Bristle knew was wrong was the taste. It was too sweet, like a syrupy powder coated his throat as he exhaled the off-white smoke. “What the fuck was that?” he spluttered as his vision vibrated and the usual feeling he had come to expect was replaced by an unfamiliar skin crawling pain running down his back.
His straw fingers fell limp and the pipe rolled off his palm and hit the ground as he swayed, his balance pulling from all directions. “Woah, you alright homie?” Frank asked in worry as Bristle’s pumpkin head began to turn pale and wrinkle in front of his eyes. Seeds and thoughts popped out of Bristle’s mouth as he coughed silently. The whole world slowed and warped like an overused cassette, as if time itself was on Valium. Which only means one thing.
Bristle’s feet swirled and he began to fall backwards. All sounds were deep and sick, his body lost all ability to move to his orders and his knees crumbled beneath him. No more addiction. No more heartbreak. As all the air rushed out of him and pieces of his head decorated the scene which had swirled to white, Bristle knew that before he hit the street, he would die with no one to care.
LATER
No one ever found out if it was this specific B-Grade strain of Wings that killed Bristle, or if he was so close to the edge anyway that any hit of Wings would have done the job. His body was so dry and hard no autopsy performed could reveal any useful evidence. But the city, while quick to boast they had predicted the outcome for months, mourned the loss by playing his songs until they re-entered the charts, as more and more people placed flowers at his final resting place.
But what people didn’t know is that this wasn’t the last we would see of Bristle. As with any passing, his energy (now clear and free) rose into a new height of awareness. But unlike others, he felt a presence next to him as he did. It was a female presence, not dominating or adding to volume, but just coexisting with him as one.
“Ophelia?” his thoughts whispered, even though he knew it was not her.
“Hello? My name is Japan,” the energy responded. “Are we dead?”
“I don’t know,” his thoughts responded, even though they both knew they were. And in silence, they rose higher into the air to meet something much greater than the both of them.
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