Page 7 of The Dragon King’s Pet

“Girls!” Tom burst into the room with a cellophane packet in his hand. “Are you ready for something special tonight?”

“Okay, not him,” Traci said. “The next, next guy. What’s going on, Tommy?”

“Mushrooms,” he said, shaking the baggie. “We’re going to boil them and get really, really high.”

“Oh…” Mika screwed up her nose. “I mean, I don’t really like getting high.”

“Of course you don’t,” Traci mocked her. “You don’t like getting high. You don’t like getting laid. What do you like, Mikkie?”

“It’s not that kind of high,” Tom said. “It’s not bad for you, like heroin or something. They’re natural, they’re just mushrooms. They make you feel like you’re dreaming while you’re awake. They’re magic.”

His dopey grin and the fact that he believed in magical fungi was enough to make Mika figure nothing much was going to come of the mushroom experiment.

Over the next hour or so, everyone gathered in their hotel room and they slow-boiled the mushrooms over a little camp stove one of the guys had managed to get his hands on. The smell that rose from the pot wasn’t appetizing, but the anticipation of waiting for the brew to be ready seemed to make everyone more or less ignore the fact that what they were creating looked a lot like ditch water.

At some point, a bunch of other people joined—people who Tom and the rest of the guys had met. The room got crowded and uncomfortable and…

“Here, Mikkie,” Traci said, handing her a small cup. “Drink up. It’s not as bad as it looks.”

Mika hesitated. Every commonsense instinct told her to tip the stuff into the nearest potted plant and go to bed, but she didn’t want to miss out on whatever magical experience was supposedly at the bottom of the cup. She pinched her nose and sucked it down as quickly as possible, grimacing as she felt little bits of grit.

At first the mushrooms mostly made Mika feel ill. The tea had tasted absolutely disgusting, like boiled dirt and mold. This wasn’t fun. The lights were too bright, the music was too loud, and everything was swimming before her eyes.

“I don’t feel well,” she grunted more to herself than anyone else. Traci was staring into the eyes of some guy she’d just met and telling him that they were soul mates. That wasn’t an effect of the mushrooms; that was just how Traci acted pretty much all the time.

For the next half hour or so, they all sat around and chatted. Cigarettes and joints were passed around, but Mika avoided both of them. The tea had made her feel queasy, but also… not entirely terrible. Slowly, the world was starting to flex and change around her. Solid things didn’t feel so solid anymore. Little things became interesting. The space between her fingers. The way one of the guy’s hairs curled over on themselves in little loops and whorls. How did they do that without getting lost? She laid back on the couch where she was sitting and looked at the ceiling. Suddenly it occurred to her that the ceiling she was staring at was, in fact, somebody else’s floor. There was a whole world on the other side of that ceiling.

“There’s another place,” she murmured to herself.

“Huh?” the person next to her questioned her. She didn’t know if it was someone she knew, or someone she didn’t. Either way, their question seemed presumptuous.

“I was a dinosaur once,” she confided to the group. “When I was small. I was a little dinosaur.”

“Coooool,” Traci and Tom and a chorus of echoes behind them mooed.

“I stopped being one when I got taller,” she said. “I outgrew the dinosaur height restriction. It’s very tightly enforced. Nobody taller than three feet is allowed to be a dinosaur anymore.”

“I am sexy,” Traci mused to herself while caressing the chair she was sitting in. “I mean, very, very sexy. I think I might have been brought to this planet just to be sexy.”

Nobody was really listening to her. Nobody was really listening to anybody else either. They were all locked in their little worlds, communicating superficially, but the words didn’t mean what they used to mean so even the simplest of points were both lost and incredibly profound.

“Napkins don’t want to be napkins. They want to be trees!” Tom declared suddenly. “We need to go and plant the napkins so they can grow into big tall trees!”

Galvanized by his leadership, most of the room emptied, clutching handfuls of napkins and a few hand towels that got caught up in the mix.

Mika stayed behind, mentally trapped in her examination of the carpet, which had a rug over it. Did the carpet under the rug feel bad about itself? Why did some carpet get to see the light, while other bits of carpet were forever in the shade of the rug? And was it better to be preserved beneath the rug? Or to be exposed to the shoes and feet of passersby?

Thinking such revolutionary thoughts, Mika made her way back to her room. She was in a very strange state, not inebriated in the way she would have been if she were drunk, though her ability to walk and talk was somewhat compromised. Instead of simply having her mind wiped by alcohol, her perception of everything had changed. She was suddenly aware of everything, the way it sounded when her shoes touched the carpeting, the little scuffs on the wall here and there, carefully cleaned, but not quite entirely erased. She spent several minutes looking at the door of her room, noting how perfectly shiny the numbers on the door were.

When she forgot what she had been doing in the first place, Mika made her way through the door and into the darkened interior of her suite. It was a nice room, expansive and with a view of the beach. She could see the little lights of the clubs and cars moving back and forth in a dance that seemed suddenly to her like the pulse of a living thing. The island was alive. She could feel it.

“Mika…”

A deep, resonant voice murmured her name somewhere in the vast distance of the darkness behind her. She had half-forgotten where she was. With the lights off, she could have been anywhere. When she turned toward the voice, Mika saw a large glowing rectangle in the very center of her room. A light was emitting from it, a very strange bright light that reminded her of the sunniest day she had ever experienced. It was bathing the room in its glow, shedding a patch of elongated light across the carpet. Her bare feet padded across it and felt the warmth it was emitting—just like sunlight.

She looked over her shoulder and saw that the world outside her windows was still bathed in darkness, but this doorway before her was acting in direct opposition. How could it be day when it was still night?

“Hello?”