From the Twisted Tails V short story, DIALING THE FUTURE, by Marilyn Peake:

Landing on his knees, Walter found himself tossed upon a scorched, blistering desert road.  An endless, distant, halo-shaped horizon shimmered, promised moisture.  Walter rubbed his eyes, shoved a hand into his jeans pocket and procured his medicine bottle.  The label brusquely announced "AntiHal".  The latest in clever psychotropic drug names, it was short for "Anti-Hallucinations".  Walter read the dosing instructions: "200 mg bid".  What did that mean–bid?...bid?  Oh, right, code for "twice a day".  Well, he had already taken one 200 mg. dose; he could have another.  He cracked open the lid, rattled the pills around until one robin-egg-colored tablet tumbled into his sweaty palm.  Then he placed the oval on his tongue, wrestling it down his throat with sparse spit.

He waited.  Still, the dusty road sprawled in front of him, disappearing into hazy infinity at the world’s tremulous edge.

Perhaps this was reality.

Walter put one foot in front of the other, following an impulsive decision to trek until he reached a populated area.  Whether his mind was actually clear or impaired, he could not hear or see people.  Whether he was truly in the desert or simply walking down a hospital corridor, hallucinating wildly, he was completely alone.  He would walk until he came upon people.

Walter pulled his Tangerine from his pocket, inserted miniature headphones into his ears and listened to his favorite music.  He walked until the sun melted into the horizon, the air chilled from torrid to iced, his burnt skin erupted in prickly goose bumps.  Throwing his backpack on the ground, Walter fished around for his fleece jacket, bundled up in it and guzzled down a few ounces of liquid from a plastic water bottle.  Then he continued wandering all through the night until the cold glimmering moon sucked all remaining heat from the air and pulled his joints taut.

Up ahead, water glistened suddenly under a few scraggly trees, dark black against the moonlit night.  Walter tried to run, couldn’t, then settled on a loping pace.  When he reached what he had feared would be a mirage, it turned out to be real.  He prostrated himself on sand at water’s edge.  Strip of beach out in no-man’s-land, water black in the pitch of night, shaking, rippling ever so softly.  Submerging his chattering teeth into the kind, giving fluid, Walter satisfied his desires.  Then he sat up, trembling; tucked his knees up tightly against his chest.

"Stranger."

Walter squinted, checked to make sure his vision was clear.  There, on the other side of the pond, sat a two-headed black bird with twin yellow beaks and two pairs of intense, beady, ebony eyes.

"Stranger."

"Who, me?"

"You.  All of it."

"All of it?  What do you mean?"

"Don’t you find this all so strange?  Stranger than you would expect?"

As Walter parted his lips in a feeble attempt to answer, the bird spread out two pairs of long, thick, black-feathered wings and took off for parts unknown.  Exhausted, Walter fell fast asleep.  Unlike the fantastic images flickering across his retinas throughout that day, his dreamscape was sterile, empty except for sparks of color floating lazily across his vision like bits of shattered rainbows.

Copyright (c) 2010 Marilyn Peake