Unravelling at Dusk

Warren walked into the office on the ground floor, hands clasping his ears.
The traffic noise just seemed louder than usual, painful even.

“Morning,” the doorman had called out, without looking up from his paper.

He dropped his hands from his ears and was greeted with the click-click of various keyboards and the shrill sound of the phone ringing across the room.
He was having trouble getting to his desk. The furniture seemed to be swaying as if to the last song at an eighties disco. Miriam, his personal assistant was saying something to him but he could only see her lips move, the words drowned out by the other sounds. The hair clip in her hair looked frighteningly like a parrot perched on her head.

“Coffee please,” but it sounded like coffin police. He felt like he could not control his mouth, his tongue, his jaw.

Last night, he had decided to start meditating. He had put it off for so long. But, new year, new start. So he had rummaged in the kitchen drawers to find the packet of herbs from his local herbal shop. The young assistant who always seemed to be a little too merry and made him her own mixture.

“It has Salvia Divinorum and three other secret ingredients,” she had winked at him.
“Well, if it makes me as happy as you are, I’ll try it,” he had replied.

So, 9pm, when he should have been comfortably seated in his favourite armchair watching CSI, he was sitting cross-legged on the Moroccan rug in his living room. He had just gulped down the slightly sweet concoction and was ready to meditate.

“Fill your mind with silence,” the New Age book had said.
Instead of silence, he had images coming in and out like cowboys in and out of a saloon in a Western.

There was the awkward Christmas meal with his divorced parents eating together for the first time in years. They had all been so exhausted from trying to be cheerful. Everything in the house reminded them of happier times. His mother had not changed a thing when she stayed in the house.

His father had been diagnosed with Cancer of the mouth and they thought it might be nice to bring the family together maybe for the last time.

In an effort to get all this out of his mind and find silence, he had decided to go for a walk. There was a parade in the neighbourhood with families and children everywhere. It was then that the hallucinations started. A little boy on his father’s shoulders was making faces at him when he started seeing the child’s tongue elongate and wrap around his throat, threaning to choke the kid to death. He tried to call out to the family but they hastily moved away from him.

Down the street, a woman was fumbling in her bag for keys to get into her car. Her reflection in the window looked menacing. Although she looked normal on the outside, her face looked green with long purple hair in the glass.
He run home, half tripping over rubbish bins and curbs and decided to have a cup of tea. That should help, he thought.

Next, he saw orange steam coming out of the sprout as the kettle whistled and was so taken aback he turned off the hob and run into the bathroom. Looking at himself in the mirror, he had a sudden urge to shave his head and pulled out the scissors. He got bored after doing the right side and feeling exhausted, had fallen asleep.

In the morning he remembered nothing of it. The traffic and buildings and people looked strange and chaotic. Still, he had made it to work.

“Here’s the coffee Warren. New look, is it?” Miriam asked nodding in the direction of his head.