Content warnings

Alcohol. Substance use. Relationship breakdown. Hallucination.

She stands motionless on the dance floor, surrounded by ravers who paid to get into this warehouse—her home—for a party that’ll help cover next month’s rent.

Techno thumps in her chest; the air is oppressively close, thick with sweaty bodies and dry ice and some unidentified burnt plastic smell. She stares down into her Solo cup, the black hole of nothing yawning at its bottom.

The musty dried mushrooms she’d choked down earlier are coming on, sneaking up on her, overpowering the gin she drank in order to tolerate all these strangers dancing mere feet from where she sleeps, the drunks flinging bloody tampons onto the bathroom floor and tweakers tagging the kitchen’s unfinished drywall.

Her housemates have vanished into the LED-lit sea of people. Guts squirming, she pushes through the crowd, each intruder now wearing the accusing face of someone she’s wronged.

After squeezing through the human thrombus clogging the entrance to their separate living space, she teeters in her platforms up the stairs, down the hallway, into her recently-constructed room. Unoccupied yet reeking of cigarettes, the floor littered with empty whippets and her secret stash of Tanqueray plundered. 

She locks herself in. Still the shrieking on the other side of the door chafes her raw nerves, the floor shaking with a walloping bass drop. Underneath all the clamor, she hears harsh yet familiar voices. Her ex’s friends, probably. Smug shitposters, none of whom can now be swiftly dismissed by the BLOCK button.

I’m running away from home, she decides, picturing the cartoon hobos of her childhood, hitting the rails with a bindle slung over her shoulder.

First: pants. Then she peels off her neon minidress, pulls on an oversized sweatshirt, yanks the hood up, grabs her backpack, races down the back stairs and out the door, mounting her bicycle and riding into the night, sweat evaporating deliciously in the cool air.  

As she pedals past the junkyard and metal recycling centers, the identical beige buildings with metal-barred windows and front-facing loading docks, the harsh voices follow. Condemning how she’d ghosted her ex while they were recovering from surgery—strategic timing for hookups, right? total dick move—and demanding penance.

She grips the bike handles till her knuckles ache, reciting her usual litany of justifications: she needed space. They were so clingy. Totally suffocating. Losing their keys every five minutes, expecting the world to stop and help them look. Plus, she’s highly allergic to drama—wasn’t it easier this way?

Cracked concrete glimmers in the moonlight, lighting her path down a dead-end street towards the water, a last effort to ditch these shadows, drown them in the Bay. 

She drops her bike at the tip of Heron's Head Park, a long isthmus jutting out into India Basin where cargo barge boats sit motionless. Wandering the sandy trail, through the low scrub brushes and salt marshes populated with cormorants picking treats out of the tide pools, she hears the lapping waves call, sing, howl her name. 

Out to the rocky point alone she goes, past mossy rocks and decayed wooden piers, to the water’s edge. No witnesses, far from the party-zombies mobbing her home.

The sun breaks fast and hot over the East Bay hills, illuminating the expanse of morning sky. She drops to her knees and prostrates herself before this omniscient eye beaming clarity into her cowardly heart. Her ex frowns down at her in every wispy cloud, because they still have no goddamn boundaries. Laying herself down in sacrifice and atonement, she piles on the promises: I can change. Make amends. Be different.

A line of ants marches past in the gritty dirt; she watches as they slowly assemble to spell out a series of words: 

NOPE

NICE TRY

TRY AGAIN

Author’s note

Psychedelics have a sneaky way of manifesting shadow material, which can be inconvenient when you live in a party venue. This love letter to the good ol’ days of Bay Area warehouse life captures a moment of unexpected insight amidst the chaos.

Joelle Killian

Joelle Killian is a queer Canadian living in San Francisco whose fiction has appeared in Fusion Fragment, Mythaxis, and Cosmic Horror Monthly. One of her doppelgängers is a psychologist writing about psychedelic therapy. Another was once in an undead dance troupe.