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Drown in the Mirage

 Sharing with The Sunday Muse #249.


I. 

His guitar set things on fire. Not Eric--he could feel the heat but it never singed his skin. It never got as hot as this Texas afternoon that burned his neck and baked through his suit and made the road he'd been stalking seem like an asphalt river barely held in place by the gravel and weeds. He couldn't keep in the guitar in a case but the sun didn't seem to hurt it, even if Eric sometimes remembered it was goblin-made. 

That was an impossibility, though. He hadn't wanted to start a brushfire; walking in the sun in this suit was killing him. Sitting on the couch that had probably fallen from a truck seemed like a good idea. He'd discovered a folded sheet in his pocket, some rag full of tiny goblin advertisements, bluebonnet souls, cheap potions, gar-heart strings that prevented the dragon-gut fires...he closed his eyes. If he ignored the curious flames now reading over his shoulder, the growling couch, and the heat shimmer pooling over his shoes and pants' cuffs, he could survive a few more minutes. Maybe the sun would burn the sulfurous fairy dust out of his clothes and out of his brain. Maybe the he'd forget the spiders.

The tap on his neck earned a weak swat but the wasp was too big for thin paper, already dissolving into shredded leaves, to damage. Eric was a guitar player and he heard the noise and then the words--Wake uuupppp! Wwwwakkkee uppp! Gasoline ghosts were hovering around his midsection. The fire had crawled to the very top of the couch and the heat shimmer was already up to his waist. It was cool. Finally. He glanced at the wasp and, remembering blue pools and high school and the dangers of wasps, rolled into the shimmer.

His knees hit the tile. The wasp, now putting out a green light and humming erratically, skimmed along the concrete ceiling. A mirror gave onto a hallway of dressing rooms and Eric stood up. He remembered being fired and then tossed out of the bar but now his guitar was gone and his girlfriend was still in the webs and he was colder than magic underneath his jacket, which was still steaming with gasoline ghosts of the road. He'd asked for the string. He sighed and put his hands on the mirror frame. 


Comments

  1. Carrie BurttMarch 5, 2023 at 6:47 AM

    First of all you had me at drown in the mirage! What a magical and intense story this is Chrissa! Almost like a dream yet it is not! This could definitely be led into more. Love this my friend!

    ReplyDelete
  2. AngelaMarch 5, 2023 at 10:36 AM

    Fantastic imagery :)

    ReplyDelete
  3. JimMarch 5, 2023 at 6:17 PM

    I loved it and could identify with it well. Do you think it qualifies as being Gothic? I too picked up a couch left on the side of the road, took it home even though it had lost a back leg. An empty paint can fixed it up. I was just starting to be a bachelor after a fairly long marriage. Our daughter was babysitting a cat in Brooklyn, NYC for her stepdaughter this long weekend and when almost asleep she felt something crawling on the back of her neck. She scratched and left it alone. In the morning there was a squashed cockroach beneath her. So you poem is plausible to me, anything can happen.
    ..

    ReplyDelete
  4. HelenMarch 7, 2023 at 8:18 AM

    A huge exhale and a whew!! after reading your fast paced stream of consciousness story. Gotta love it when folks discard useful stuff along the byways.

    ReplyDelete

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