I wasn’t so much transported to the gleaming surface of the river as I was absorbed and assimilated into the very fabric of the planet’s most basic essence. One moment, I stood in that impossibly gleaming restroom, a thing alive with wonderfully wicked ideas that mostly failed to unsettle me---mostly. The next, through the mysterious power of the sink tap's liquid light, I was flung through the air—--I knew, deep down that the uncertainty of where I might end up as the result of such a hastily made escape should bother me, and yet fear of such things eluded me.
The moment I became one with the liquid energy flowing through the drainpipes, my entire state of being transformed. Elevated from simple man to something far more complex and unknowable than words could adequately state. I was suddenly something else entirely.
Solar flares reached out from the nearby star and pulled me from the planet. I was hurled through space and onto the surface of the sun, which promptly returned me, casting me thousands of miles away from it into the gleaming, violent reflections of daylight on the waters of a river. The current coursed relentlessly toward a distant, roaring waterfall. The very same waterfall glimpsed through the high windows of the Toilets-of-Many-Unwanted-Reflections.
I flowed through the rapids, my essence braided and intertwined with the torrent. I tasted every molecule, every atom of the river. We were inseparable: I became the tributary, and it became me—--a single entity composed of countless moving parts. Yet the river was alive, and I mean this not in the poetic way people describe rivers. No, it was truly sentient. And it had thoughts. Opinions, even.
They were mostly rude thoughts and opinions.
Ugh. We are exclusively a spring-fed current. Are you even distilled?
I bet he’s tap water. Eww.
You there! Yes, you! Outsider! Do you even know your pH? Disgusting, I bet.
Oh, for sure. Can’t you smell him? He reeks of pennies and nickels. Smells like my algae crusted cousin that lives inside a wishing well.
The Floodmind---this collective consciousness of the river---didn’t have to introduce itself. As part of it, I knew its name, its purpose, its disdain for me. Hive minds have no secrets.
Why are you so viscous? one of them demanded. We can feel this guy’s viscosity right? He can’t even assimilate correctly.
He’s separating everywhere, another added. Absolutely revolting.
What’s next? Are we supposed to welcome soup? Is that what you are? A can of soup?
They didn’t want me among them, and the feeling quickly became mutual. Their judgmental undercurrent grew unbearable as they dragged me along their surface, their sandy bottom, and their rocky flanks, eager to spit me out.
Soup? At least soup has depth, you flavorless backwash. I snapped back, my voice mingling with the roar of the current. It’s not like I asked to be here. Pathetic, really, how briny you all are about it.
Single-use plastic bottle energy, someone hissed in return.
By the time we reached the rapids before the waterfall, I was done. Done with their sanctimonious purity tests, done with the relentless badgering of a collective consciousness that smelled like pond scum but thought it was a fine mineral spring. I allowed their flow to carry me to the edge of the cliff, ready to leave them behind. But not before delivering a parting gift. With every ounce of effort, I projected the clearest mental image I could muster: the universal gesture of defiance: I projected a very clear mental image of giving them the finger. They couldn’t see it---I lacked a body---but they felt it.
The rippling transference of my disdain surged through their collective like a toxic spill, and their response was instant and unequivocal: an unambiguous middle finger hurled right back. Not in the traditional sense---no corporeal hands, after all---but woven into the currents, palpable and petty.
He’s disgustingly thick, one of them sneered.
Pick a consistency, outsider!
Ha. Bet he couldn’t if he wanted to, another chimed in. Probably full of contaminants. Do you guys think he’s leaching heavy metals? Imagine the silt. Decades of cleanup.
Runoff! shouted one particularly smug droplet.
Runoff? Really?I retorted. I call it freedom. Suck my dick, splashhole.
With that, I let gravity do its work and flung myself over the cliff.
As I cascaded down, my thoughts churned like the rapids above. How far would I have to follow this river before finding someplace less gatekept? A swamp, maybe. Somewhere dirty. Swamps wouldn’t care about pH or viscosity. They’d take me in, no questions asked. I could be somebody in a swamp. Maybe I’d even like being liquid. Sure, I’d prefer to be solid again---prefer to have hands and feet and a dick---but if this was my lot in life, I’d roll with it. I’ve always been good at rolling with the punches.
Then I felt my essence changing, solidifying. Oh no. Not now. I glanced downward, watching my hands and feet reappear, slowly gaining opacity. My transformation was way ahead of schedule. I wasn’t even close to the bottom yet.
The turbulence below was too thick with mist to see where I’d land. Would the basin be deep enough to break my fall? Or would I smash against the rocks like some tragic Greek cautionary tale? The rapids kept raging downward, but my fall slowed unnaturally, as though I were being lowered by an unseen elevator operator who couldn’t stop monologuing about how much I didn’t belong in his precious river.
By the time I reached the bottom, I was fully corporeal. I stepped out of the cascading veil of water and immediately began patting myself down. Legs? Check. Torso? Check. Head? Check. I gave myself the once-over, making sure everything was where it should be.
Everything.
Even my dick.
Not gonna lie, I was worried about that pretty much from the moment I became water.
I worried about it every ten to seventeen seconds for the duration of this ordeal.
I wasn't sure I'd be getting it back, but with my hands on my crotch I felt it again where it was supposed to be...and I'll admit that was quite a relief.
Strangely, there wasn’t a lagoon or even a shallow pool at the base of the falls. The water didn’t gather---it slammed onto a mound of pink cobblestones, spraying upward into a humid mist that clung to the air like a vengeful ghost. The rest was absorbed directly into the stones, vanishing as though the earth were drinking it.
So there I stood, fully reconstituted, dripping wet, and watching a waterfall feed an endless thirst in a pile of rocks that looked suspiciously like chewed bubblegum. For a moment, I thought about going back up, just to tell The Floodmind what I thought of their so-called purity again.
But then I remembered: they’d probably still call me soup.
The ground began to writhe beneath me, and I struggled to maintain my balance. What I had taken for a mass of tiny pink cobblestones revealed itself with a single horrified glance---a wriggling, squirming carpet of miniature, cracked tongues. They were dry as sandpaper, parched to the point of splitting, and many flopped weakly to and fro as if caught in their final dehydrated death throes.
Most of these grotesque tastebuds were garden-variety in length, if there even is a standard for detached tongues carpeting the earth. But others, scattered randomly through the squirming expanse, were grotesquely elongated, several feet in length. These rogue tongues rasped against my ankles as I tried to flee, their papillae dragging across my skin with a cat’s-tongue coarseness that made me shudder to my core. They reached out in slow, desperate arcs, tasting me with a fervor that suggested I was their last hope for survival.
The more I moved, the more they strained toward me, the longer ones unfurling like grotesque party streamers in their starved attempts to turn me into their final, reluctant meal. Escaping them was far from simple; this revolting tongue-rug stretched endlessly in all directions, a never-ending buffet of cursed flesh carpeting the horizon.
And then there was the smell. It reeked of halitosis mingled with the damp, matted musk of wet dog, so thick in the air that I could feel it clinging to my skin like a grimy film. Breathing through my nose quickly became untenable---each inhale was like a personal affront to my will to live. Yet switching to mouth-breathing was its own torment: with every gasping breath, I could taste the air, its oily bitterness sliding down my throat and coating my lungs. I was forced to choose between two horrors---smell the breath of a thousand starving tongues or taste their air. I opted for the latter, as disgusting as it was. If you’d been there, you’d have done the same. That smell was an atrocity, an olfactory war crime.
Time warped as I moved forward, dragging on in surreal, elastic moments that stretched like the tongues themselves. Minutes felt like hours, hours like days. The tongues’ sluggish but insistent movements blurred into a maddening rhythm of rasping and grasping, a chorus of flesh dragging against flesh. Just as I began to lose hope of finding an end to this nightmare, the ground changed. Without warning, the carpet of tongues simply stopped.
I stumbled forward, almost disbelieving, into a new expanse---a desert of deep red sand stretching infinitely in every direction. It was a jarring contrast, an alien silence replacing the wet, gasping cacophony of the tongue-field behind me.
I wasn’t sure where I was headed, but I kept moving forward, never changing direction.
Sometimes it’s better not to look back...