Shroom WIP
This is a work in progress provided as a preview to my paid subscribers. Current quality may not be reflective of the final product!
1
At the time, I told myself that violence never solves anything. That if I retaliated against Lucy, it would gratify me for a moment, but I’d be trading that single moment for many decades in prison. Warm memories of her frightened, tearful face begging me to spare her life during those final few seconds might continue to nourish me for the first week or so, but would eventually fade. Months later, I would still be stuck behind bars with little to occupy my time, except regret and involuntary sodomy.
It took about ten years for me to realize and accept how wrong I was. There is a deep, gnawing hollowness afflicting those who tolerate unavenged wrongs. A living death, worse by far than prison. Some of that time was spent huddled beneath a tarp, at the bottom of a hole left by the city when they removed a tree. Not because there weren’t better shelters available to the unhoused, but because I didn’t know any better, having never needed to until then.
It was a humble but mostly comfortable hole, lined with cushions liberated from the dumpster of my former apartment complex. They stayed dry until the first rain, which mercifully wasn’t for two weeks. When I returned one evening from shopping for dinner with my recently acquired EBT card to find the cushions soaked through, I broke. It only took me so long because I’m so damned stubborn, but a phone call to my parents soon saw me riding Amtrak home. Warm and dry, but burning with shame.
One good thing I’ll say for the hole is that it was quiet, and I was alone. It gave me a good deal of time to think, before inclement weather forced me to abandon it. Weighing my options, whether I could bear to drag my family into a legal circus lasting many years over some random hippie dippie fruit loop in her twenties, whose bad side I had the misfortune to get on.
Lucy Patterson was perhaps four foot ten, and nineteen years old when I met her. Reasonably pretty face, sharply contrasted by an unceremoniously dumpy figure my younger self was willing to overlook. When she invited everyone in my English class to stay after to discuss “alternative spirituality”, my foolish lonely ass thought it might be an opportunity to get to know her better. I deeply lament that in fact, it was.
“Alternative spirituality” turned out to mean the Church of Novus Spiritus, a cult founded by the late television psychic Sylvia Browne. She was not yet infamous then, despite having repeatedly told grieving parents their missing children were dead, only for them to later turn up alive (or the reverse). This didn’t end her career somehow, not as a frequent guest on Montel Williams’ daytime talk show, nor her lesser known career as an author.
Her literary oeuvre included such bangers as “Mother God”, “Life on the Other Side”, and “End of Days”. Lucy brought one such book along with her, “Levels of Creation” which is how I was later able to identify the source of her madness. She spoke of a multi-layered heaven populated by various classes of angels and other spirit beings, including some from non-Abrahamic mythological traditions. When I asked her if this included leprechauns, she astonished me by saying it did, along with ghosts and satyrs.
I’ve never been able to read the room terribly well on account of weapons grade autism. It didn’t remotely occur to me that simply questioning this girl about the basis of her beliefs would set her off the way it did. Never once did I raise my voice, nor use any impolite language. Her boyfriend, or at least one of several other male admirers in attendance, offered to beat me up for her. That might’ve been a red flag that I was treading on thin ice, were I not so emotionally unintelligent.
Otherwise, I might’ve recognized I was dealing with a manipulative narcissist before she conspired to ruin me. I never saw her cry, but apparently she did produce crocodile tears for the professor after I left. So compelling was her performance, the professor came away with the impression that I must've savaged the poor girl.
I learned several things during the expulsion hearing which followed. First, that they didn’t want to hear that I’d done nothing wrong. I wasn't damn well going to bend the knee before a panel of inquisitors. Second, that the religious tolerance policy mentioned in the student handbook works only in one direction. It protects every opinion on religious matters, except that they’re all bogus.
As a consequence, in cases where two students argue over a religious matter, the religious student gets their way by default. This assumes they cry to professors first, seemingly a reward for fragility.