Quoted By:
Fog takes up space, and your body contains limited space, and when you've sucked up and soaked up every tiny drop you can— when you're probably more alcohol than person— there's more of it left. Why wouldn't there be more? Would you try to drink up a rainstorm? You probably would. There is excellent news, however: you will not explode! You'd never be so crass. Maybe a lesser body would explode, or begin to leak some sort of fluids, but you, Charlotte Fawkins, are pliable. You are easy to work. You have been warmed and kneaded and stretched, for years and years, and your blood is drained of troublesome byproducts, and above all you are accustomed. You take the forming and fettling in relative stride. If you did not key to it, it could never occur.
You are remarkably pliable, and something is the matter with you: you are lacking something you should have, or have too much of something you shouldn't. The red stuff, you'd say, the sun, but you were wrong before those. Take those as symptoms. Your memories, you'd say, and it might be those, but— who jumps off a cliff? Who jumps into the ocean? Not somebody all put together. And that was before, too.
These things do not occur to you in waking life. You do not want them to occur to you. They're all crammed down into the mud, the sucking earth, where implications lie dormant. When your conscious mind is very drunk, though, they burble up. And when your conscious mind is this exotic hallucination's sole definer, they burble out.
Thus you suck the fog in, or maybe the fog is sucked into you, now. If you feel anything, it's a happy vacuousness, like your brain's helium-filled and rising. All for the better. You do not panic when you distend; you do not react at all, even as you bulge and thicken and and lengthen and strengthen and create space to hold it all, the fog, the you. Something is very much the matter. Something is wrong. You are not recognizable: are weird, distorted, toothy, twisty, monstrous, broken, red as an open wound.
This is not the red stuff's doing. But if the red stuff had a mind to speak of, it could not be said that it was not pleased.
Also, you're not drunk. Maybe a little. Inebriated. You did inhale all that fog, after all. But there's that whole thing about body mass, or whatever it is, so you feel fine.
Maybe confused. You were drunk, and there was fog, and then... um... oh, God, did you black out? You blacked out! Total blank for a good while, then, er, no fog. So it worked? You got rid of it! You knew it'd work. Ha-ha. Well, further excellent news: Gil's over there. Weirdly tiny. Sort of floating. (You guess you didn't fix the lack of floor.) Oh, but— damnit! No interloper!
(3/5)
