Jason Tait stares at his naked torso in the fogged mirror. He’d run himself a bath, had taken off all his clothes, but hadn’t yet lowered himself into the scalding water.
It’s Dec. 31, 2024. There’d be people coming over later. Or he’d be going out. He’s forgotten which. But that doesn’t matter now, because there’s something wrong with his stomach.
He wipes away the mirror’s fog, and looks back and forth from his reflection to his bulging gut. And it is bulging. Well, quivering, rather. The bath’s tap drips, and it send a ripple across the water. The same is happening to Jason. From somewhere within him, a droplet drops onto the inner surface of his skin, and spreads outward.
He feels around near his belly button, and just to the right of it he feels a hardness. And it moves.
He looks closer in the mirror and sees a little red spot, like a zit or an ingrown hair.
• • •
Patrick Michalishyn rubs his eyes. The faint phosphene of his unconscious mind swirls in them, in purples and blues and flashes of white.
He’d had the dream again. He was a worm. Some long and slithering thing. A human-sized garden hose maybe. Or the coiled phallus of a duck.
He tried to blink away the dream – the nightmare – but it remained, as it always did; it was as if it had wedged itself into his retina like a nematode, like loa loa.
A dark thought came to him: was this a parasite? was he being controlled by a foreign entity? was the dream his or the parasite’s?
There was an unshakable feeling that wherever he went he was being followed – but should he truly trust that feeling? What if he was mistaken, and that this feeling of being shadowed was reversed? That he, and not it, whatever it was, was the shadow. Wherever it went, there he was.
He lay back in bed, and breathed deeply. Of course, all of that was silly. He wasn’t parasitized. He wasn’t a duck dick. It was a simple, repeating dream, and even simple, repeating dreams will pass. Eventually. He will get up. He will eat. He will go to work. Like he’s always done.
But when he went to get up, he found he could hardly move. A momentary alarm bell rang: he was paralyzed.
But, no, that was not quite right. Rather, his hands were heavy. His fingers felt as if they’d turned into lead weights.
He pushed himself up onto his elbows, and pulled. But his fingers remained fastened to the bedsheets.
• • •
The G-384 tuning fork.
Activates the hairworm in the cricket.
The cricket’s brain is suffused with chemicals.
With Eszopiclone.
With Quetiapine Fumarate.
Aldous Huxley strikes the fork.
The cricket searches for water.
Searches for a flood.
Searches for understanding.
Searches for relief.
Huxley watches the cricket near the water.
The cricket’s brain is flooded.
With LSD.
With morphine.
• • •
To read the rest of this review — and more by Steve Schmolaris — visit his website Bad Gardening Advice.
• • •
Steve Schmolaris is the founder of the Schmolaris Prize, “the most prestigious prize in all of Manitoba,” which he first awarded in 1977. Each year, he awards the prize to the best album of the year. He does not have a profession but, having come from money (his father, “the Millionaire of East Schmelkirk,” left him his fortune when he died in 1977), Steve is a patron of the arts. Inspired by the exquisite detail of a holotype, the collective intelligence of slime mold, the natural world and the suffering inherent within it — and also music (fuck, he loves music!) — Steve has long been writing reviews of Winnipeg artists’ songs and albums at his website Bad Gardening Advice, leading to the publication of a book of the same name.
