Aberrations of Reality

by Aaron J. French

  “You just said that.”

  “Well it bears repeating. You are the organisms, the rocks, the light particles, the dust motes, the plants and animals, the buildings and cars—you are the sky itself, the clouds, the sun, the moon, the stars, the planets, the universe. You are infinite.”

  Scribbling furiously, I rushed to write down his words. I wrote without thinking. When I was finished, I looked up and nearly tumbled out of my chair.

  Clown Face was gone. The painting remained, large and dominant on the wall, its walnut frame gleaming in the mellow light. But in the frame was only soft, swirling white space that seemed to go on forever.

  I stood up slowly, and the moment I did, the chair vaporized behind my back. My trembling face aimed at the painting, I kept retreating, back and back, as the writing table flickered out. The walls began to resemble mirages. They too flickered out and finally the floor upon which I stood flickered out. Then I was surrounded by infinite whiteness.

  Everything was gone except the large walnut frame hanging in space and looming before me like some kind of bizarre entryway.

  When I came to it, my whole body was trembling. I could barely keep still. Colors appeared in the vast whiteness, more and more of them mixing together, swirling about.

  Soon they took shape inside the walnut picture frame. Everything else remained endless and white, and the frame itself appeared to shrink now. I glanced at my body and was appalled to find that it had vanished from the neck down. I tried to speak, to scream, but all that came out was a gasp.

  The picture frame contracted until it was only big enough to fit around my head. I became affixed to that place. The colors and shapes were soon definable only by textures, angles, and patterns. Out there I could see another room, one very similar to the room containing my writing desk.

  And the more I looked out there, the more I realized it was the same room, and the same writing desk, and even my old furniture. Everything that was once a part of my reality was now out there.

  Clown Face was sitting at the desk, dressed in a gaudy blue-and-white clown suit, with orange puffballs running down the chest and ruffles around the sleeves. Its face no longer appeared painted and cartoonish; it now appeared very real… and very unsettling.

  Looking up and staring through the walnut frame with big goofy eyes, Clown Face gave me a sneering, loathsome smile from its bloated red mouth.

  “What are you going to speak about today, Charles Face?” it said. “Are you going to lecture on the nature of reality, hm, perhaps you still believe there’s an objective world outside of your mind?”

  I tried to speak but I was paralyzed by fear.

  Clown Face shook his head almost ruefully. “No, I’m sorry to say, for you Charles there is only one mode of experience, and to that mode you will forever be a prisoner and that mode will forever be in your mind. The sad lesson of all this, Charles, is that you are forever doomed to your own subjective experience. You can never experience my reality, nor anyone else’s. There is only Charles Face… and you are forever stuck with him—”

  Clown Face got up from the desk and slowly made his way to the left, exiting the walnut frame and leaving me staring at the empty room. Once this happened I was finally able to transform my terror into something more audible. Something more like a scream.

  My Stalk

  Look how it rises godlike from the loamy soil. Here, in the primeval realms of the ancient forest: magnificent, enormous, sky-bound sprout; camouflaged among the towering elms and pines. One must seek it to locate it. But none are seekers here. No human being would set foot in this wild region.

  Only myself. And I only out of devotion.

  The deepest, lime-colored shades of green, rainbowed with reds and oranges. And a spiral of black weaving through it. Great, fibrous chords of chitinous flesh, interlocking like latticework with flat, purple leaves. Such a beauty. How it grows. This mighty fungus.

  Soon my Stalk will provide the bridge between worlds. Causeway, Sky God calls it. Then I will ascend, straight upward and not in a roundabout way. I will gain the heights of Heaven. My devotion will pour itself outward unto Sky God as He accepts me into His bosom, enveloping me so that He and I can become one, merge…

  All thanks to my Stalk.

  * * *

  If not for the disreputable myth which circulates these rural lands, I would’ve never gone looking for the witch’s rumored shop deep in the woods—much less found it—much less ventured inside to peruse the dusty shelves.

  That old vile creature to whom I am indebted, to whom I owe my monitoring of my Stalk, watched me from behind her morose wood counter. Filigrees of herbs and vines covered the wall at her rear; glass globes; trinkets, likewise glass, clung to bent nails; animal skulls and taxidermy, gazing with intervals of hollow eyes.

  I found her loathsome, not only due to her appearance, but because she also smelled a tad fecal. It was like being around a slimy, rabid, rodent: the last thing you want is for the verminous being to come near you.

  The witch was clothed in a soiled mound of foul rags, more mold than cotton, shawls that enwrapped serpent-like about her. Hair like a wild bush. Grizzled face concealed in a veil. Ocular damnation peering out from wrinkled flesh.

  Her voice: the sound of dying angels. She suggested various items that she thought might interest me. Vials, herb formulas: things meant to poison people. I told her I wasn’t interested in such things.

  “Then why have you come?” she asked.

  “Curiosity,” I replied.

  She hmmed. “A seeker, eh? What do you seek?”

  I thought about this; shrugged. “I’m not sure, but since I was a child I’ve always asked the question Why? Why is your shop hidden in the woods? Why do you exist?”

  Cackling, she replied, “Those are topics for another time. What you seek presently lies on a shelf in the back, behind the hand mirrors.”

  She pointed and I followed her finger to the object lying on the shelf: a silent black pouch tied by a drawstring, with unusual gold symbols sewn into the fabric. I picked it up. Weighty.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Inside lies your answer. Go ahead. Open it.”

  I did. A handful of fossilized mushroom buttons lay at the bottom. They clinked together, a sound like knocking gems. Smell of stale mold wafted toward my face: a reek like rotting flesh. I pulled the drawstring, grimacing.

  “The odor of God,” she murmured.

  I was appalled by her comment, yet didn’t deign to respond. “What are they for?” I asked.

  “To lay in the earth in a secret place where no humans ever trod. If you know of no such place, then do not take them.”

  I thought of the ancient forests surrounding my countryside homestead. I nodded. “I know a place.”

  “Good. Bring them here and pay.”

  The price was everything in my wallet—more than I would have expected. I felt angry but I’d been entranced somehow: the allure of the mushroom buttons was like a drug.

  “Once you plant them, it will grow,” she said.

  “What will?”

  “The Stalk. You must nurture it, water it. Give it love. Then you can climb it.”

  I turned back from the door, brows knit. “Climb it where?”

  “To Sky God. To the Owner of the Mystery of Creation.”

  These words fell into me, permeating the world of my thoughts, almost like an infection. I saw disturbing imaginative forms: toadstool levitation; fungal mediumistic trance states; quivering vegetus limbs; and a giant amphibious monstrosity, with eyes like the bottom of a well.

  I shivered all over, my skin a flower of gooseflesh. My whole life I’d suffered from night terrors. Now I was having them in the middle of the day.

  The witch grinned. “You’re getting it,” she said. “He will come to you. Bury the buttons in the earth. Love them. Pray. And ascend.”

  The door opened of its own accord, revealing the dense woods outside and the unfurling
carpet of vines leading to the threshold. I stepped out, reborn, onto that blanket of fibrous green shoots. I felt free, transcended, like I was stepping into another dimension, one where my life was not so meaningless and dull; where I had a purpose.

  The sky opened overhead.

  * * *

  Later, I hiked into the ancient forest, found a spot, and dug the buttons into the earth. My father, who once owned and tended the farmland on which I live, who is now buried on that same land, grew perennials behind our house when I was a child. Mother died when I was young, and Father said perennials had been her favorite; he continued to plant them each season as a way of keeping her memory alive.

  He used the same rusty watering can right up until the end. I used it that day to water my fossilized buttons. The Stalk sprang up within several hours; when I came back it reached almost to my ankles.

  From that day on I began sitting with the Stalk, admiring its otherworldly beauty and alien colors. As it grew, I grew: infatuated. A feeling of love—of filial, almost parental love—fostered within me. It felt like budding roses. I imagined I could hear the Stalk’s voice inside my head and glimpse the invisible movement of the forest spirits who had flocked to see it: the fairies, sprites, and gnomes.

  Soon I was praying to it, falling on my knees in the soil, bowing my head. I told the Stalk I was grateful, devoted to it; that, above all things, I valued it most.

  Sometimes I’d cry. Still do on those mornings when I awake in my sleeping bag after spending the night beside the Stalk, while the sunrays are streaming in through the branches and the Stalk looks like a miniature angel, like a heavenly being descended to earth.

  As the months passed I ardently traveled into the forest each day, watering can in hand, to nurture, and to praise, my budding bridge between worlds; and I soon turned my attention toward the sky, where something like a permanent black cloud had formed, where weird designs became visible through the cumuli.

  I dreamed. Soaring disembodied through star-strewn spaces, past the rolling planets and farther out into the cosmos, where I was contacted by Sky God for the first time.

  I could recall snatches of our meetings, but nothing of what He said to me. Although His voice continued to resonate in my ears upon waking.

  For a while I tried recreating the dreams with pen and paper. I still have those crude illustrations, shut away in my bottom dresser drawer. Large, looming, green toadstool platform, the size of a circular spacecraft covered in warts, spores, and patches. I saw Sky God adorning this organic vehicle, riding it like a magic carpet.

  He was amphibious, yet somehow amorphous; sharply contoured, and yet blurry. I surely saw skittering tentacle-like legumes blossoming out to all sides, the petals of a horrid flower. The god Himself, though, un-vegetus; amphibious. The abstract outline of a giant frog, purple in color, bespeckled with glittering lights, and eyes of the blackest depths.

  Sky God wavered his arms and uttered bizarre sounds I couldn’t understand— shnee, shnee, shnaw, shnee… shneu…

  * * *

  I began wondering why my baby, my Stalk, was that alone—a stalk. I was unable to comprehend the absence of a fleshy round cap, likewise a furled tulipesque bulb. There was only this fat chitinous column.

  But I didn’t question it. I accepted that my knowledge of such things, of such worlds, was limited. I did not need to know everything in order to carry out my monitoring task. However, the answer to this fungal conundrum soon revealed itself to me.

  * * *

  I had gone into the forest to do my watering for the day. The Stalk, much to my satisfaction, had reached the height of a full grown human. I sprinkled water around the base, whispering devoted words of praise, cultivating my usual supplicatory feeling…

  … when the air around me seemed to thicken, to congeal; the sky darkened and opened up, parting the roiling black cloud formation. I glanced overhead. I dropped my watering can, falling to my knees in awe.

  Sky God had come.

  I watched in dire anticipation, my body a clamped, soppy sponge. Contorting, perspiring, wringing itself into new shapes. The air seemed so thick it nearly choked me.

  The circular shape descended through the canopy. I had seen all this before: in dreams. I knew what rode that levitating toadstool down to the physical plane. And I awaited its arrival eagerly.

  Flailing, tapering appendages became visible over the side of the toadstool, whose bottom alone made itself visible. The fibrous texture was like smooth wax, covered in multiplying spores and warts. Here and there strange embedded gems glistened like diamonds.

  I heard Him then. His terrible gibbering. Noises that a child would make. Yet these noises were coated with fluid, creating something guttural and liquidy.

  Shnee, shnee, shnaw. Shnee… Shneu…

  I humbled myself further, driving my knees into the soil. I am devoted to You, only You, I told the descending toadstool. Whose shoe’s latchet I am not worthy to unloose… You who comes after me is preferred before me!

  The toadstool hovered over the trees, angling itself forward slightly, giving me a full view of Sky God riding his moldering throne. Stringy clouds darted past his head—like spirits. He was indeed amphibious: here, as in my dreams; great mighty froggish face, with eyes that seemed able to swallow the world.

  Could he see me down here, prostrate on the forest floor?

  The toadstool angled itself more, gliding down, until it was over the tip of my towering Stalk. Sky God’s words echoed throughout the forest— Shnaw… Shnee… Shneu…

  As toadstool attached itself to Stalk, I released a redemptive cry. A profound sense of joy swept over my heart. I finally knew the answer: I’d been granted true wisdom.

  Two met and, with a mulching sound, merged together—stalk and cap— forming the most beautiful soaring mushroom I had even seen. Such grandeur! Such art! I could hardly contain the emotions wellspringing within me.

  Sky God rose from His fleshy throne, vines and legume-limbs unfurling around Him. His huge, bent, webbed feet clutched the mushroom cap in a deadly vice, allowing Him to gain the edge, where he stood almost diagonally.

  He raised his stumpy purple arms, with hands and rounded fingers. He gestured and spoke in his strange tongue. He looked absurdly like an orator—like some great political leader in the pulpit of His theocracy.

  Shnee, shnaw, shnee… Shneu…

  More diamond-shiny gems glistened all over His body. And His mouth was a wide empty cavern, toothless, housing a coiling/uncoiling tongue the size of a prehistoric serpent.

  Sky God orated for many hours, as I remained fixed in my devoted position. I came under a trance and lost all sense of time. When I finally regained control of myself, the forest was dark and moon and stars illuminated the sky.

  The Amphibious One who rode out of the Heavens on a toadstool chariot was nowhere to be found. Sky God had returned whence He came. My Stalk was no longer a large mushroom but simply that—a stalk.

  Saddened, but simultaneously relieved, I collected my watering can, sprinkled a few more blessed drops around the base, and headed back to the house.

  * * *

  But now the question must be asked—

  How much longer can I wait, crying alone in the wilderness?

  Nothing is certain. True, I have been granted a cosmic vision, but am I a mystic?

  Are we, Sky God and I, like this—(middle finger wrapped around index)?

  I cannot say. For I have not seen Him again since that day His fleshy chariot descended to the physical world. Now he only visits me in dreams…

  But that is something.

  At least I have not been forsaken.

  * * *

  And so I worship it. My baby. My reason for living.

  My Stalk.

  One day it will reach the Heavens. Then my precious Stalk will provide a bridge between worlds; a causeway. Then I will ascend, straight upward. Not in a roundabout way, for the shortest distance between two points is a straight
line.

  My devotion will pour outward unto Sky God. The two of us will unite.

  Until then I must continue my task undaunted, for I am the Monitor. The Guardian of the Gate. I will trod to the heart of this ancient forest everyday if I must, with watering can in hand, to nurture, to praise my blossoming beauty.

  And I hope to watch, like a proud parent, as my offspring grows taller, bigger, stronger, to the very threshold of the sky where I know Sky God dwells behind the veil, aseat upon his fungal throne, gesturing with those hands, uttering His magical invocations.

  Shnee, shnee, shnaw. Shnee… Shneu…

  I will wait until everything has ripened. And do so without malice or impatience. I’ll not be cursed to wait alone, for throughout all the cycles of time, I will always have…

  … my Stalk.

  THE FOUR TRANSITIONS OF THE SOUL UPON DEATH

  BY DAVID P. REICHMANN

  PHASE 1: RECOGNIZING YOUR DEATH

  Over our morning cup of coffee at the Steinman Café, Jeff said to me, “You know something, David? The only reason you’re happy being single is because you’ve never experienced real love.”

  “Excuse me,” I said. I set down my black porcelain mug. “My marriage to Beth lasted a whole six years, thank you very much. You and Cathy—what, a year and a half?”

  He was shaking his head. “It’s not the same. Me and Cathy, we’re different. Cathy is different. She’s just… man, she’s everything. Being with her was something else. She had these emotions that were so intense they brought out feelings in me I never knew I had. We were on fire for each other!”

  “So on fire you put yourselves out.”

  More head shaking. “You don’t get it. Beth wasn’t emotional the way Cathy was. She was all thinking and rationalizing. And you… what—I’ve never seen you have an emotion as long as I’ve known you. Christ, you’re like a robot sometimes!”