memories & a prediction

Claudia realized at lunch that she had been living life on some kind of mental auto-pilot for the past semester. When she tried to remember what she did a few days ago, she could only recollect seemingly pointless things. She remembered walking with Ashley and they saw a dead squirrel laying in a garden. Ashley screamed, and Claudia felt a pointed annoyance peak in her mind and push out all other thoughts. She stared down at her lunch, a Greek salad she had been pushing around with her fork in its plastic container. The feta cheese pissed her off slightly, sitting there in limpid clumps. She had been trying to break them apart, split them continually until, she guessed, they were tiny and unseeable. Ashley sat across from her, texting someone on her phone, probably Matt. In front of her, a plastic basket of chips and a little cup of guacamole untouched save for a small triangular crater in the middle, where Ashley had hesitantly marked with the corner of a chip. There were chunks of avocado marbled in the dip, which was rippled like a dune. The apartment smelled like stale white bread.

"Do you remember what we were talking about when we saw that dead squirrel?" Claudia smooshed a big cluster of cheese, and stabbed the bottom of her salad, bits of feta flying off from the gaps of the fork's prongs.

"You know, if we don't sleep tonight, we'll have nineteen hours to film this thing, edit it, burn it, and turn it in." Ashley sighed, her eyes and fingers still occupied with her phone. "You really are a bad roommate sometimes."

"It wasn't my idea to go to Chinatown yesterday, or to that stupid bar the day before."

"We only did those things because you wanted to shroom on

Thursday. And you wanted to relax the other two days. I really shouldn't have done that, my whole schedule is awry."

"You're fucking awry." Claudia had forgotten they had taken shrooms. Understandably, this worried her somewhat. She stopped her cheese pogrom and put down her fork.

"I've been thinking about going back to my therapist. I can't remember things, like things I should be remembering."

"What? Like what?" Ashley set down her phone and stared

at Claudia.

Claudia averted her eyes towards her salad. When they'd met freshman year, she had always been slightly intimidated by Ashley, mostly because of her stare. She had a high forehead which she hid with straight bangs (she'd told her once that in high school people had called her fivehead behind her back) and large eyes that Claudia had always thought of as brimming. Hers didn't seek like most peoples, they were eyes of a person content. Claudia had at first, as did most people, mostly guys, mistaken this happiness for naiveté. It was hard for her to keep eye contact with Ashley.

"Just regular things, like stuff we've talk about, when assignments are due. I mean, like...I don't know."

"I mean, do you think it's serious? Maybe you're not getting enough sleep, or maybe, oh god. Oh god, what if it was the mushrooms? Maybe you should go to a doctor, like a real doctor."

"Dr. Harrington is a real doctor."

"Oh come on, Claudia. If this is something wrong with your brain, like your physical brain, you can't talk yourself into being cured. Promise me you'll go to a doctor, or at least a nurse or something."

She tried to imagine herself in the examination room, trying to tell him what exactly was wrong with her. She would tell him about the mental fog that crept through her mind whenever she sat down and tried to concentrate on something, how for the past few months she had to silently mouth the words of whatever she was reading, which she always hated seeing other people do. Each morning she woke up it seemed like her room was messier than the day before, bras and hoodies undergoing nocturnal mitosis. She found bottles of wine and beer she didn't remember drinking. Once she found a receipt for six cans of smoked oysters, which she definitely did not recall ever purchasing, let alone eating. She imagined telling the doctor all that. He would stroke his beard (she always pictured authoritative men with beards for some reason), and ask her the requisite questions, diet, sleep patterns, exercise, stress and of course, drug use. Oh just some psychedelic mushrooms once in a while. He would hmmm and check off a box next to DRUG ADDICT, advise her in a non-judgmental tone of voice, neutral as his white doctor coat, that perhaps it would be in her best interests to cease further use of any hallucinogenics and to limit her alcohol consumption to one to two drinks an hour, two nights a week, in the meantime he will prescribe her a fungicidal cream, which she must apply three times a day to her forehead, it will fight the degenerative spores of the mushrooms she had eaten, they were sprouting through her mind, fibrous and deceptive.

"Hey, are you okay? Your salad's getting cold."

Claudia looked up at Ashley. She seemed genuinely concerned, and Claudia felt an intense devotion to her.

"Ha ha. I'll go to the doctor, I promise. But I'll only do it if you do one thing for me."

"What?"

"Tell me what we were talking about when we saw that dead squirrel, do you remember?"

Ashley spread out her hands palm down on the table. Her nails were painted a yellowish green that in certain lighting reminded Claudia of spring, but right now matched the color of the guacamole.

"We were talking about Jessica Martinson and her summer internship at S.P.C., and how we hate her for it."

"That's right, I remember. We do hate her for it. I'll make an appointment right after lunch."

Ashley smiled and took a chip and wiggled it in the guacamole and brought it to her mouth and bit into it, her other hand under her chin. Suddenly, her cellphone shook and vibrated, and Claudia picked up her fork, unable to stand it's rattling on the table.