Fragment 4

“Hey!” Jason is standing at the bottom of the stairs, grinding his teeth and looking generally manic. “Are you guys coming or what?” His current warped perception of everything means that he hears the words come out of his mouth very clearly. It’s like when someone hears their own voice on a cassette. He repeats himself not for anyone, just for his own amusement, so that he can listen to his voice again: “Are you guys coming or not?” He looks at his hands, they’ve got a faint gleam to them. “HEY!!!” still no answer from upstairs. “Fuck it – be boring! I’ll go on my own!”

Jason leaves the house, slamming the front door behind him. He mutters to himself about his friends, annoyed that they’ve obviously changed their minds about going exploring with him, even though they seemed to think it was a good idea before they took the acid.
Wow, who’d have thought this street could look so good? The street feels like a movie set or
something. Not a real street, but a street in a film.

Jason notices the trees. The green looks so green, with the moonlight reflecting off them in a way that makes them look glossy, like the front cover of a magazine. Jason imagines what the street would look like from a high diagonal camera angle. Cameras are his thing. He has his point-and-shoot round his neck as usual. It’s part fashion, part functional, he likes people knowing that he’s “a photographer” and the sort of casual social kudos that seems to attach itself to that, but also he just loves taking pictures of things. He imagines what he might look like from above with everything looking like it has been prepared for an expensive photo-shoot.

Man, the whole world has been Photoshopped. How can stuff look so perfect in the dark?

Jason walks out of the street. A warm, overwhelming rush of pills and acid races through his body, as he’s suddenly illuminated by the gorgeous orange light bursting out from an otherwise everyday lamppost. The beauty of everything makes the faint hairs on his arms jump up into goose bumps. This … fucking … rules.

Jason turns a corner. His senses suddenly feel acute. His ears zoom in on the sound of his trainers grinding on the gritty tarmac street, making a satisfying crunching noise.

Before long he finds himself walking past the fence that separates the house’s back garden from the street behind it. He cranes his neck and looks at the house standing there in the dark. It looks really still. No one would know that his friends are in there tripping their brains off. Weird, Jason thinks.

He pauses as he reaches the opening to the woodland that the whole town backs onto. He looks at the huge trees that form the entrance, he looks at the floor, at the point where the street ends and the dry brown soil takes over. The shadows cast by the thick growth of trees and bushes looks immense. Fuck, Jason thinks. Maybe I should go back for the others … don’t want them to … Jason starts doubting himself and his whole idea of walking round the neighbourhood and woods while tripping … don’t want them to miss out. He manages to get his brain back into fun-mode. Whatever, fuck it … their loss. He grips his camera and starts edging closer to the woods.