Limbo

a short story

Lara woke in the early morning by the ring of her telephone. She glared at the ceiling and let it go to voicemail, “Lara. Jake here. Calling everyone today and letten em know the store’s closed. Can’t drive in this rain and the power’s out in the whole town! Get back to me soon. Tomorrow we should be up and runnin!” She rolled over to check the time, noting: 6:18 AM, and went back to sleep.

The next time Lara opened her eyes was about three hours later. Reaching her left hand to the window sill above her mattress that sat on top of wooden slats, she grabbed a half smoked joint and lit it with an old match, then inhaled to rise on her feet.

The calendar said it was the first day of winter, but all they got was rain. She frowned, wishing it was snow. Lara walked to the front door and opened it; feeling the breeze from the rain that moved around the cool space. It had a steady pulse, but it seemed like nothing to knock out the power. She figured it must now be the least of it and closed her eyes, breathing deeply to capture the scent of strong rain. When she opened them, she noticed a strange shape on the ground by the door. . . “A rabbit pelt. . . ?” She said, peering into the fur. At least it’s clean now, she thought, grabbing the strange gift and closing the door, finding a random nail to tack into the plywood wall to dry. She finished her joint, letting the ashes fall where they may, staring at the fur that once lived on the body of a seemingly large wild rabbit.

The walls here dripped with dew; a sticky substance that seemed to make them sweat. There were few windows, but the light of day still had enough power to melt the energy that stuck to the corners and crevasses; though each one passed cooler than the last. A musty scent masked the whole space and stirred up nostalgic glimmers that bled through as daywalkers. There were probably pockets of dark mold in the dark places, but Lara never seemed to care. In truth, she didn’t care for much anymore; she barely cared for her own life. Just like the crumbling structure of the barn she now lived in; her dark and musty soul clawed at her for attention in a creaking silence that she could only ignore.

Lara found herself on the edge of her bed staring out the window that lived above the rusty sink, next to where she had tacked the strange rabbit pelt. She wished she was a bird, wanting to fly away from this place. South. Someplace warm where she could walk into the shoreline and never look back. Instead, she was more like the rabbit, stuck in circumstances out of her control. She got up and opened a crooked and cracking wooden drawer that lived under the dark counter where her savings and supply lived.

She counted the short stack of twenties, fifties, and fives and then pulled out the plastic bag of mushrooms, laying them out, one by one, counting the pieces aloud, “One. Two. Three. . . Six. Seven. Eight. . .” until she got to thirteen, deciding that was probably enough. Laura tossed them into an old mortar and pestle; something her mother left behind when they left here in their hurry; and ground them up. She tossed them into a glass canning jar and filled it up with tap water, staring into the grey pieces that were now floating around. She held the glass up to the rain that cleansed the morning, “Cheers.” She said, raising the glass and chugging the dirty water.

It always seemed as if no time had passed in these moments, as if this place melted things like time and consciousness. A solitude of unrest kept people like Lara alive, but it was barely an honest living. She turned around after a while of contemplation and moved her lanky body to the leftmost corner where she had her bed, dresser, and a dark pile of clothes. She sifted around until she found something warm enough to sustain her appetite for fresh air. She put on thick wool leggings, wool socks, a long sleeve black t-shirt, a black sweater that was ripped in a few places, then a large hooded jacket that was kind of waterproof. She grabbed a blanket that had an off-brand western pattern in the knitting, slipped on faded black leather boots, and slung on an old canvas backpack that contained her most important objects: a CD player with headphones, a short stack of alternative indie CDs, a journal, a few pencils, a copy of American Psycho, and a sketchbook. Then she went off into her favorite spot in the woods.

Lara typically spent her days off from the grocery store on some kind of drug; psychedelic or otherwise, and because she had been growing her own mushrooms, her stock was self-sustaining. She used to get them from a guy who lived in Canada; he’d often cross the border up north in the summer on his boat. Lara loved spending time up there, but she hasn’t gone back since her family left and was successfully growing on her own anyway, so she figured it would be okay to call off the deal. She vaguely thought about growing other plants which she called medicines, but it was enough for her to focus on one thing.

It wasn’t long before the visions began to take over her mind, feeling the oneness with the brown leaves that sat upon the dirt and the rain that had begun to slow down. It was about half a mile walk from the barn, the ground was mostly flat except for one large hill she had to climb up. Each step grew heavier than the last and Lara found herself smiling at the molecules of dirt that played with her shoes and raising her head to stick out her tongue for the rain water. She changed her mind and decided to be grateful it wasn’t snowing yet; being almost sure that she would die this winter.

The spot in the woods that she came to was through the end of her property and met the corner of the next property over; both hers and the other were farmland and the corners met with tree lines. It was a beautiful place to watch the sky dance and the sun move. She had built a small structure at the edge of her property out of scrap metal and wood; something close to a deer blind. Lara laid out her yellow and grey blanket on top of the old wooden floor boards and sat down, creating a half circle around her legs with the things she brought.

The mushrooms were funneling into her neural network now and Lara was feeling the reboot of the psilocybin. She stared deeply into the network of the fibers that created the blanket, becoming one with the movement that she now felt pulsating from the ground, up into her body. It was a strange experience and usually when she hero-dosed herself, Lara felt like she could touch god through the dirt.

This trip may have turned out differently if she had eaten something beforehand, or at least with the thirteen caps and stems she consumed. She may have been able to walk back, but there was something inside of her that took over. Maybe it’s the demon everyone says I am . . . Lara began to think for herself, losing her vision until everything went dark.

The rain continued to patter along the metal roof of the poorly crafted deer blind as the soul of a young woman burst into itself. There were few other creatures out during the storm; one of which noted the influence of energy that emanated from the body laying inside of the deer blind. The front of the structure was completely open, mind the top that hung slightly out in front, almost covering the leather boots that splayed outside of the wooden boards. It came up to face the body, thinking she may be dead.

Lara opened her eyes, after having spent what felt like an entire lifetime trying to remember her body and all the memories that made her who she was, and saw a foreign figure standing above her body, peering into the deer blind structure. She tried to scream but was held under her own idiotic influence. Then, all at once, the figure turned to dust in the air, floating away. She hurried to grab her things and ran back through the rain as fast as she could back home. She opened the door and took off the layers of clothes that had been soaked through, running to the toilet to try and throw up the feeling inside of her; instead, she only dry heaved.

The next few hours she spent in dismay; looking through her mind to try and think of an explanation, making an effort to draw the shadow she saw; a thing with horns or deer antlers, as large as a moose’s, but the body, it seemed as though its arms were sticks, and it was covered in a thick layer of hair. She thought of the teeth she saw and the mouth that looked as if she could have been swallowed whole. The whole head of the thing was a skull, but it looked as if it had life. The figure was so huge, yet it seemed so swift and silent. Maybe it was just covered in a cloak, or maybe it was wearing a mask. She convinced herself it was a hallucination. It had to have been.

The day had gone by, being tossed around in charcoal and drawing pages. When the mushrooms finally began to leave her system, Lara ate a sandwich, having decided she could try to stomach it. Sleeping felt like a different dimension, it was barely real.

The next day Lara spent in a drag. Her eyes were dark and she spoke to no one. She had gotten up early for her morning shift and told her boss Jake that all she could do was stock.

“No problem Lara. You okay?” He asked her, seeing her shaken vision.

“Fine Jake. Thank you.” She said.

“You better eat something. I don’t want ya fadin out on my watch.” Jake smiled a crooked smile and placed a hand on her shoulder as a nod of encouragement.

Lara smiled too, but it quickly faded. She liked Jake. He was probably the only person in town that actually cared for her, or at least saw her for who she was.

Lara spent her shift in disbelief, thinking over the events of yesterday. It seemed unfair that her own mushrooms would reveal something so terrifying, which made it all the more troubling.

Around 2 PM, when her shift ended, Lara walked into The North Bar across the street, ordered a glass of club soda with a lime and a whiskey shot on the side.

“She’s that dirty hippie.” One of the regulars said to Frank, another regular drunk, in a not so quiet tone.

Frank was washed as shit, “No. Yer a a derty lier. Nd sosshe. She’s a derty lier.” Pointing at the hippie.

“You’re a nutzo Frank. I guess I don’t know what a liar is. . . . To be frank, Frank, I don’t know anything anymore.” Lara nodded to him, then threw back the shot, paid the bill in cash, and chugged the soda; burping like the dirty hippie she was as she walked out of the wooden western doors.

Lara shook off the energy from the old bar and walked along the sidewalk, wishing she had ordered another shot before she left. . . It was too expensive anyway and that place reeked of cat piss, she thought, walking to the gas station on the other side of the street to go get a bottle of whiskey instead. She could have just bought one at the grocery store, but she didn’t want any of her coworkers to know she drank, it would only rally up further suspicion of her already precarious situation.

In line at the gas station Lara was standing impatiently behind someone she could not recognize. She started into the hairline that seemed suffocated by the yellowed ballcap that sat upon the man’s sweaty head. When he left it seemed strange, like the movement had broken her trance.

“Can I get a bottle of Old Charter? Thank you.” Lara said to the cashier.

The man pulled it down from the shelf behind him, “ID?”

She handed him her ID.

“I’ll get that.” A deep voice said behind Lara. She turned around to see who it was and couldn’t quite make out his face, but it seemed eerily familiar, like a face she had known before or all her life. She didn’t even notice that the whole transaction had been finalized.

“Who are you?” Lara asked, following him outside of the gas station.

“Hunter Thomas is my name if that’s what you are asking. What about yourself?” He came to a stop in his tracks as he asked her.

“Lara Hill.” She held out her hand for him to shake and he took it softly.

“I know this seems odd, but maybe you’d like to walk with me to the restaurant over there?” He pointed. “I noticed you are looking to drink something that requires food to balance.”

Lara looked at him strange for a moment and shook her head playfully, “That’s alright, I’ve got food at home. Uhm. . . I just got off a shift and you probably wouldn’t want to sit across from me right now.” She looked up at his face with a half smile and frowned. She felt stupid for trying to flirt.

“That’s alright Lara. I just hoped you might have been feeling what I’m feeling.”

“What’s that?” She asked.

“I’m really unsure. But I am curious.”

“If you’d like, there’s this place. . . I am free tomorrow. . .”

“Perfect. What’s the place?”

“It’s just this hiking trail near the beach I like to go to. I don’t think it should be too cold yet.” Lara said, beginning to question the words she spoke. What am I doing making plans with a complete stranger? She thought.

“The state park?”

“Yeah.”

“I can meet you there in the early morning?”

“Uhm. Sure. Why not.” Lara said.

Hunter handed her the bottle of whiskey with a pleased grin spread across his face and then walked away. She noted a strange rhythm to the way he moved and still could not place the feeling that she was experiencing. She thought of the mushroom trip and her current disposition. She debated showing up at all and began to wonder how he knew exactly what she was talking about. She started walking away and realized that he didn’t give her a time to meet. I guess I will just go when I get up and if he’s not there, then he’s not there. She thought to herself.

There is a place where time seems to stop. Birds float around in a perplexing way that mimic the song the plants breathe; the way the dirt hums in harmony; everything that seems to be buried underneath. A place where trees have fallen, where the grasses have grown wild and the rocks have been tossed around. There are spider webs and nets of cobwebs that float around with the cotton and the autumnal leaves.

It is a perfect place, in Lara’s eyes. She could envision the way the ecosystem grew up, being supported by the mother tree who lives now at a large distance; maybe there was another mother before, she thought. She thought of herself and how it would be so easy to give up, but something so simple that has awed her own existence; it had survived all this, why couldn’t she survive too?

Where the ends of veins and roots and branches were connected to the plants that existed both below and above; all of it connected by the mushrooms that existed in the dirt. Lara longed to be connected to the dirt. She walked off through the trails until the dirt turned into sand and she could hear the waves crashing and rolling into each other with the rhythm of the wind.

Hunter followed closely behind, but far enough to where she had space to feel her own nihilism. When she came to the shoreline she turned around and kissed him passionately. Hunter, taken by surprise and not really knowing how to work with this circumstance, tried to mimic Lara’s movements.

After a moment she paused, “What is it?”

“What is what?”

“Nevermind,” and she kissed him again.

Hunter moved to match Lara’s, learning how this process worked. It was exciting, a feeling he had never known, or something that he had forgotten from long ago. He got so caught up in the thoughts of what could be or once was and was beginning to move down the nape of her neck, finding her collarbones and shoulders and edging teeth into her skin. Lara let out a yelp and started to squirm when she realized she was unable to move.

The next time Hunter looked up and opened his eyes he saw the red of her neck seeping out into her clothes and hair, falling down to his hands where he had grasped her. Feeling something that he could not explain, but might have been called remorse or instant regret to a human, he picked up her body and began walking back through the path that Lara had shown him. He made his way through the forest, staying inside of shadows and swaying between trees with ease. He felt an agony which he had only felt once, when he lost his own human life. Hunter thought it best that she be buried in the place where he first saw her.

When the stars began to appear in the sky, Hunter left the shallow grave where Lara’s body was now laid. He never realized she was still breathing and bleeding. He didn’t understand what was happening to his own soul, and eventually, he left into the evening.

Lara woke from a strange and visceral unconscious state only hours later. She was alone in lifting pounds of dirt with the rest of her upper body; coughing up hard dirt and peeling the caked mud from her skin. It was painful to remember the place where she had lost so much blood. Recovering her memory sent her into a spiral which she was only beginning to understand. The vision from her mushrooms and Hunter must have been connected. She thought there would be no other way, realizing where she had been buried; so close to the deer blind.

In a rush, all at once, she got up from her daze and ran as fast as her feet could carry back to the barn. She gathered her money, the rest of her drugs, necessary clothes, a few knives, her music and a few books, all her sketchbooks and pencils, and threw it all into a suitcase and her backpack. It was nearing daylight and the start of her shift when she realized she would have to go in to let Jake know she was leaving. Lara started a shower for herself, acknowledging that it would seem insane that she would be covered in dirt walking around town.

When she found herself clean enough, she got out, feeling a bit more alive now that she had cleansed herself of another near-death experience. She bandaged the wound that had already started to scab over, to the best of her ability; with gauze and tape. It would leave a nasty scar, but at least it wasn’t bleeding anymore. Maybe I should just leave all this behind me. Lara thought to herself.

On her short walk into town, she noticed something strange from the grocery store window; it was as if she was looking into a mirror, but something wasn’t quite right.

She saw it; a true manifestation of her own self, in another form, another figure. Lara rubbed her eyes, trying to convince herself she must be tripping or sleeping, but it was still there. It was a copy, but it wasn't a twin. It's likeness was uncanny.

She practically ran to the bus station and bought a ticket for New York. Maybe it will be a start, maybe it won't be so bad anymore. Lara thought; there was nowhere else to go, realizing that maybe there is a kind of freedom to it; that it doesn't have to be so terrifying to leave this world behind. Lara thought of her family and how they acted when they left the farm.

"Fuck." Lara muttered to herself in a harsh breath. She could never come back here. She thought about warning someone, but who would believe her? Who wouldn't laugh at the dirty hippie; the demon that plagued their small and perfect little town.

She wondered if there were more of them; she wondered if she was the only one who got out.