I glanced out the window of the car. The sky was blue and blue and the sun was black as pitch. I wasn't over it yet. I pulled out my phone with fingers without joints. It fell into my lap, making me smell a million colors that never existed. I looked across at Noser, who was apparently driving the car. "It seven, yet?" I muttered, barely making myself out. Noser's face was not a face, just grin. His bulbous shades reflected the moon we were passing, and all of it's neon lights. I felt my face melt off of the wire frame that it had been modeled upon, and felt my eyes dissolve in the water we were sinking into. My hands morphed to skin, then to concentrated, dusty particles, then to hard, sharp, rose-smelling needles, as a giant doe loomed in the sky…
ENOUGH!
I ripped off the face mask, and toppled two bottles of fluid and Noser jumped back, laughing. I sat there on the blanket in the basement, feeling washes upon waves of washes of real, unoquivically real sensation bathe me, almost giving me pins and needles it was so real, as Noser sat back on the floor, leaning on one gloved hand.
He chewed a piece of rubber with his snaggled front tooth.
"Bad trip, huh?"
My eyes felt like they could have been blinded by the dimness of the candlelit room and the silence of the dripping faucet in the sink could have forever deafened me.
*"Trip?"* I said frustratedly, feeling like I was screaming to be heard through the earth on the other side on the moon, "You call that a *trip;* girl, that could have *killed* me!"
"Yeah?" he said, unconcerned.
"Yeah!" I yanked out the USB8 cable that had been tugging at my neck as I sat up and rubbed my eyes.
We sat there, feeling out what we had just done, and I said, "your roommate making gnocchi again?"
She didn't move, just raised an eyebrow.
"You know, the- ohhh…" I waved a hand and looked away. "different time. My bad. Ignore."
"I never had a roommate."
I massaged the port on my neck. "Yeah…"
***
It was about an hour later when we'd cleared up. It takes a minute with this kind of equipment. It's got to be handled carefully to not disintegrate. I decided to make gnocchi myself, and made a bit of a mess of it, with half the pieces hard as a knuckle and others so soft you'd think they were uncooked meat. We ate in silence. The sauce made it, somehow. The radio played gentle erotic jazz.
I said something stupid, Noser laughed as she chewed through the pasta and I looked out the window. It could have been one in the morning. Did noser need to go home? No, only after 11 for her study group. I sighed.
Some time later I looked up from my empty plate. Noser was twiddling thumbs. "Noser," I said, pushing away the plate, "wanna go for a drive?"
***
Noser drove. I lived in the mountains. Less people to bother us. It wasn't dawn yet, my head felt woozy with lack of sleep, but that was a normal feeling now. Noser was going pretty fast, but she flew quads: down to two dimensions was nothing, really with some practice. It felt like flying to me, anyway.
Noser's eyes honed in on the horizon, and the winding road felt like a slide as we tore along. The moon was still behind a strobing mass of trees.
My hands were on my lap when I heard my phone buzz in the glove compartment. Noser didn't move with the distraction, just piloting the car along the road. My phone glowed scarlet, lighting my face with a deep red hue. I dropped my phone with a loud smack on the floor of the cockpit.
Noser looked over with a grin. Her eyes glowed from the amber glow hud of the car, and her hands shone with the moonlight. I suddenly felt nauseous. My head started spinning.
"Noser..." I mumbled, my lips numb and my eyes dry as sand... "Noser... help-"
I no longer felt the contact of the car on the asphalt. The moon outside was passing behind us; as the dawn broke; huge, unavoidable, mass upon mass upon teeming mass of white... It drew us towards it. The heat, light, *mass* of the massive ball of the sky...
The heat, the horror, the vision memory of the doe, looming in my mind... I didn't want to see it. I didn't want to hear it's cry, it's cutting, looming cry of the dawn... of the day... I shut my eyes tight as I quailed in fear.
Then, the day broke. The ball of light had overtaken the moon... the sky was electrified, scarlet red, deep red, red red and red redder; and the sphere! Its gigantic surface burned into my eyes and soul, and soon, upon the base of it's exploding, writhing, mass on mass on mass surface, smooth as a glass lake, I saw a massive iris. The embedded orb of the iris of the eye.
I grabbed for noser as I curled and wrinkled in fear; too red, too damn red, too damned bright and horrific and terrible for me... I felt no comfort of the body of Noser, for I was alone. Alone in space, an anchorless body in a excruciatingly wide, deep, empty void of red -- red alone, and far more than natural red. Red as to be redder than blood, or wine, or blindness... The eye was joined with another.
The sheer mass of the head was enough to convince one of death, it loomed so massive that I saw it encircle me, wrap about me many times, all to face me with the horror, and truth... the doe was the sun. The sun was the doe. I was in internis consumed by the sheer mass... I felt my body slowly lengthen in unchoosable supple submission: I was in entirety consumed.
And I felt my mind break.
And I screamed.
And then Noser yanked the cable that tethered me to my dream; and I was reborn.