Ellory Skye
This is Your Brain, This is Your Brain on God
Maybe you had to be there, or maybe Nyla’s roommates were all undergoing mushroom-induced psychosis. Either way, she wanted nothing to do with it, and when Rylie came into the living room, announcing earnestly her sudden and apparent transformation into bunnydom, Nyla was the only one who didn’t nod along eagerly. She’d imagined each of them in that moment—Rylie and her frizzy hair sticking out at the sides of her part, Elsie and her gleaming, whitening-stripped teeth, Cove and the freckles that so erratically hopped along her brown cheeks—as something more sinister than those small, helpless woodland creatures they’d met in the forest before they saw God in the moon. She’d imagined her roommates as a tight but ferocious pack of wolves, and when she went to bed that night she locked her door, knowing they might find a way through anyway.
Of course, Rylie identifying as a bunny wasn’t the first alarming thing to come from their collaborative trip a few weeks prior. There was Cove and her newfound obsession with Band-Aids. How they were crafted specifically to cover up all the parts of us exposed. How maybe that sort of thing wasn’t natural. She’d taken all the Band-Aids in the apartment, the off-brands too, and lit them on fire on the porch. Then there was Elsie and her sudden fear of the dark. Nothing good lingered there anymore, she’d said. The big light in her room stayed on from that point forward, no matter the hour.
But when it came to Nyla, she hadn’t changed at all. She never wanted to try the stupid drugs with them in the first place, but the others were convinced it’d loosen her up. Make her more fun and lively. More aware of everyone and everything around her. They didn’t understand that she was, always had been, painfully aware of everyone and everything around her.
Now in the living room, her roommates each staring at her for some kind of bunny-stamped approval that would never come, she remembered the way her hair looked in the reflection of the water when the stem kicked in. She couldn’t remember if she’d actually talked to it out loud or not. If the river really had heard all her convoluted, psychedelic confessions that night. That might’ve been in her head. The others were so preoccupied with the rabbits and the sway of the grass that neither would they have noticed if she had. She remembered, though, telling herself she was sorry for something. Her face in the water rippled down the middle, right between the bridge of her nose and her giant, muddy eyes. It sang something back in response to her apology, a hymn she couldn’t stop humming until the effects wore off and she’d returned to seeing her reflection as nothing else.
“Sometimes I feel like a bunny, too,” said Cove.
Nyla snapped out of her thoughts. Elsie stared ahead, stayed silent but nodded her head rhythmically as if in direct tune with all the hidden notes of the conversation.
“What?” Nyla shifted uncomfortably in her spot on the couch beside everyone. “Are you guys, like, on them again?” For some reason, she’d had trouble saying the word ‘shrooms now, like it was some sort of ancient curse.
“On what?” Cove asked, brows hysterically furrowed.
“On what?” Elsie repeated, then repeated again.
Nyla sighed. “You know what I’m talking about. Mushrooms. That stuff did something weird to you guys.”
Cove stood and began to pace around their tiny coffee table. She hit her calf once on the edge after a few complete circles, but reacted to none. Elsie kept on staring at the wall, except now she was chewing her nails furiously and squinting her eyes until they looked chubby and wrinkled underneath.
“Mushrooms.” Rylie shook her head quickly, the way she often did when Nyla spoke an ounce of truth around them. “You mean God. We’re not on drugs, Nyla. We all saw him and that sort of thing changes you.”
Maybe they were on something stronger now. Maybe they’d all agreed Nyla was acting like a freak that night, crying over her own face while they stroked the fur of mammals and prayed to a rock in the sky, and now they’d moved on to crack or meth or both without telling her and they were planning to kill her and sell all her underwear on eBay for more crack or meth or both.
Or maybe they really were bunnies now, and the moon didn’t love Nyla enough to give her the same grace. Maybe what she’d heard in her reflection that night wasn’t a hymn, but an omen that came from deep within the shallow river. Maybe her friends were bunnies now, and she was the wolf among them.
“You should try it again, Nyla,” Elsie said. “You might find something different this time.” She twitched her nose up and down, a habit she’d long possessed that Nyla was only now making real note of.
Something different, Nyla thought. She walked past them and into her room, trying hard not to look too much like a riddle. Everything was always a riddle to them now. She pushed in the lock on the knob as quietly as she could. When she fell back on her bed, untamed hair hanging over the sides of her pillow, she turned over to the mirror on her night stand. She didn’t know who she saw that night. It wasn’t a bunny, but it wasn’t exactly a girl either.
Outside of her window, the moon was full and uncovered by clouds. Nyla closed her eyes and drifted into a quiet, Godlit sleep. For once, she just wanted to be what everyone else was.
Ellory Skye is a young writer from Texas, where she recently earned her BFA in creative writing. She writes fiction about and for the peculiar, often with a speculative touch.
