Cycles

She melts into plasma and slides into the various cracks and crevices in the opposite wall of the kitchen. There is a squelching noise, now a wet pop signifying her total immersion in the woodwork. Johnny Cochrane stands by the refrigerator, his mouth gaping slightly, his hand raised as if to somehow pull Shelly out of the wall. A pause, and now Shelly's parrot, who had until this moment been resting quietly in his cage on the round kitchen table, bursts into flames with an abrupt and final squawk. The fire immediately spreads to the shredded newspaper at the bottom of the cage, and now spills out onto the table, immolating a gas bill, three credit card offers, and the paperback copy of Atlas Shrugged that Shelly had been making fun of earlier that morning.

Johnny watches the over-sized text smolder, and sighs. Shelly had been so happy that morning, and now she's haunting the apartment complex. The blaze consumes the entire table, and the wood lets out a jagged scream that echoes inside Johnny's startled cranium. A tortured visage emerges from the flames, with enormous teeth and dark, reflective eyes slatted like venetian blinds. The creature lifts a glowing hand, a hand whose very existence seems to twist and warp the passage of light through its immediate vicinity. These visual fluctuations multiply and spread, and the whole scene quickly changes. The tile floor arcs up violenty, the refridgerator rolls backwards, all four walls burst outward launching the ceiling high into the blue sky. The rest of the apartment complex is completely gone; beyond the linoleum cliff of the warped kitchen floor is an interminable ether of cloud vapor.

Johnny crawls to the edge and looks over. Down in the clouds is a dark spot, rapidly growing larger. Closer and bigger, closer and bigger. At the last possible moment, Johnny hops backwards as the mysterious object finishes its approach. It is the trunk of a leafless tree, reaching from an impossible depth to examine Johnny and his tiny satellite of a dimension. The knots, branches, and bark arrange themselves into a face featuring one massive, scrutizing eye. A fleshy vertical gash next to the eye opens, revealing jagged little teeth and a web of curious, roving tentacles.

Johnny opens his mouth and a wall of vibrating tones emerges from his throat. The tree reaches into his mind and plays him like an instrument. Johnny's senses explode with shifting colors and flanging melodies. His nerves tingle, and a foreign presence in his mind communicates the secret to eternal happiness: a series of emotions cycling in a particular order at a rapid pace, each emotion a new-born star, each cycle an orbiting sphere.

The lesson is over, and a new presence courses through his mind. It grabs the gears of time and slows them to a crawl. Every thought swims by slowly, as if stuck in runny tree sap, and every breath is monumental, every lungful a mountain climbed. Johnny realizes there are moments between himself, or rather, moments between himselves. His whole being strobes, light, dark, light, dark. The floor beneath him transforms smoothly into an enormous hand. Bumpy ripples cascade through the skin of the palm, and the fingers prod curiously at Johnny. He looks up into a gigantic grinning pair of lips and two burning white eyes. The substance of this behemoth perpetually appears and disappears in shimmering bands spreading outward from the center of its forehead. Over the apparation's shoulder, Shelly's familiar gaze looms. She's at least fifteen times larger than she had been the last time Johnny had seen her, shortly before she had melted into the wall.

He shouts her name, flails his arms, tries desperately to elicit a nod of familiarity from his love, but her face stays expressionless. Her hair writhes like worms, her hair is worms, her face slowly peels off her head like a latex mask, and beneath the mask are worms, worms, worms, brightly colored worms, changing from orange to green and back again. Another woman, even larger than Shelly-of-worms looms over them all. Her head is so high in the sky that Johnny can not see it, it disappears into the clouds. Johnny stares at her enormous breasts bulging beneath the green, golden-trimmed towel that this goddess has wrapped around her torso. She grabs the folds of the fabric and tears it from her body.

Her torso is a dragon, her breasts are the beast's humongous eyes and her navel gapes wide, revealing a dark, moist throat. The dragon devours the colorful glowing worms in three bites. Green tendrils emerge from between the dragon's eyes, the beast's skull cracks open, and a flower emerges from the crevice. A breeze ushers radiant pollen from the flower. The pollen becomes a lion within a lion, a sun within a sun with a sun. Incredible light pours forth, and at the exact moment that Johnny's visual field goes completely white, black tentacles claw at the light. The sun is being devoured by an octopus of the inkiest, darkest, deepest purple imaginable.

The octopus is Johnny's own hair. Shelly gently lifts his head from between her breasts, and looks at him fondly.
“Did you like it?” she asks, softly.
“Yes. I want to do it again.”
“Give yourself some time to recover.”
“Okay, but let's be clear. We're going to do this again. And again. And again. And again.”