Pseudanthium
The normal process is to think ‘I should do [something]’ but
when you’re on crystal, you skip the thinking-about part and just do it.
Whatever activity you’re occupied with becomes intensely meaningful and
beautiful and righteous. Cleaning your room can feel like going to church
and getting saved. Talking to someone can feel like jumping off a diving
board into the sky. You find yourself thinking about how happy fires must
be while they burn. Time warps and gains a profound urgency. The
world shines with an incandescent holiness. Sammy had been working on his
flower drawings for the last 9 hours.
Hunched over his sketchbook
with a pencil in his hand, he looked like a vulture patiently shredding a dead
body. His amphetamine heart hummed inside his chest like an
electric transformer. He’d been up long enough to start seeing dark
shadows in his peripheral vision darting around the room, but he ignored them.
On the floor next to Sammy’s
mattress were twenty ripped out sketchbook papers, each one marked with pencils
drawing of a single flower. The first drawing he did had started out as a
long stalk with a few leaves sticking out. He drew a loose ‘U’ shape on
top, sketching out some flower petals. But each time he took his pencil
away and looked at the drawing, he always felt like there should be more.
He thought about how roses seem to have a lot of petals, all folded into each
other. He google searched ‘how many petals’ and the autocomplete added
‘are on a rose.’ One website said 32 or 33 petals. One website said
between 5 and 50 petals. One website said 5 petals. But he wasn’t
sure that he was trying to draw a rose anyway, just a flower with a lot of
petals.
With each successive drawing he
added more and more petals until they were soon taking up 90% of the
page. Hundreds of flower petals grew out of each other like multiplying
cells. Then he worked on filling in the flower petals, making them look
textured. Sammy’s boss called, but he let it ring. He was tired of
washing dishes. He spent hours filling in the gigantic petals with
geometric shapes and designs that grew so dense you could hardly tell one petal
from another – the entire page bled together into one rectangular
derangement. Sammy lit a cigarette, laid the picture on his pillow, and
stared at his work with teary eyes.
‘That shit’s so beautiful,’ he
said. It was the first time he’d spoken out loud all day.
He felt like crying.
There was that one time he was in bed with Tracy, and she started talking about
how fractals are infinite. That was a good memory. Sammy laid down
on the floor with his other twenty drawings and rolled around in them for
awhile. He closed his eyes and fell asleep.
He had a dream that he found a
little bean on the ground and he took a long tree stick and pushed the bean up
his nose as far as it could go, into his brain. A flower started to grow
from his face. A thin green stem stretched out, and a head with many
petals opened. When Sammy closed his eyes, he could feel the world as the
flower felt it. The flower couldn’t see or hear in a human sense, but it
was very sensitive to light and temperature. The flower could speak to
other things, but it did so in a strange chemical voice of odors and
oils. When Sammy closed his eyes, he saw everything through the flower
and he didn’t want to move anymore. Everything was so peaceful. He
wanted to stay on the ground forever. He could worry about money
tomorrow.
Bob Schofield lives in Philadelphia, PA Chris Dankland lives in Houston, TX
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