Quoted By:
>[SOME TIME EARLIER]
You thought at first that your gambit had failed. This seething green hell belonged to nobody you knew, certainly nobody you cared for— it was nothing but random, scrambled sensation, garbage noise, and the aspects you could readily comprehend made you wish you couldn't. There was a moist feeling (humidity?), and an out-of-place flavor (grassy?), and a dizzying perspective skew, like your eyes were crawling out of your head, like you were seeing your own body from far below it.
You were preparing to leave when it occurred to you that you were God, actually— close enough to God, close enough for it to count— and you were doing this to yourself. You did not rest upon the strangeness of this thought and instead turned with your bad eye and looked, and saw clearly that the green hell was Gil's hell, and he was all around you, and you were inside him. His mind. The deepest and smallest part of it.
You rested upon the strangeness of that thought until you could not stand it any longer, and then you reached out and scooped some Gil up with your hands, and felt him push and wriggle between your fingers. Before you could put a stop to yourself, you took him and pressed him together into a single breathing mass.
He was no longer in your hands then, but was splayed on the ground, and the green hell was no longer noise, but just a muggy forest, and you wrap yourself up in the red mantle and step forward. Gil, in boxer shorts, in a plain white tee-shirt, hair down over his face, is just sitting up. He spits out a wad of leaves.
"Hello," you say uneasily.
"Lottie? Hi. How's it..." His voice is sleep-glazed.
"What are you doing right now?"
"Uh... I don't know." (You know he means this in the truest sense possible.) "Just... hanging out?"
You rub your thumb between your fingers. "What were you doing before this?"
"...I'm not, um... I'm not completely..." He pauses to hack another clot of leaves up, like a cat would. "Hnh."
"Were you eating leaves?"
"Uh... yeah... I must've..." His brow knits. "Yeah."
"Because you were beetles?"
"Yeah...? Yeah, I was. Beetles. Now I'm... now I'm not. I guess."
"I did that," you say.
"Oh. That's okay, Lottie." He turns his blind eyes on you. "I trust you."
You draw a deep breath, and another. "I... did you like being beetles? Were you enjoying it?"
Gil breaks into a wide, goofy smile. "Yes, I was."
Of course he was. Green hell to you must be a pleasant dream to him, a beetle dream, trees and mist and no predators. Somewhere in the world, Gil in his body is sleeping.
(1/SO MANY)
