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Lore

May 30

Seattle, WA

The cursor, aptly named, for it cursed her. A blinking line in the empty white void, mocking Lore from the laptop screen sitting on the kitchen nook table. At the top of the document, a name: hitchhikers_guide_thru_hell_DESIGNDOCv1usethisone . A placeholder name, obviously, even though it was (or rather, would become) a game about literally hitchhiking your way through literal Hell. Lore didn’t know what it would end up being called. Glitchhikers was already a game. She liked Bitchhikers, but that didn’t really mean anything except sounding edgy for the sake of edgy, and besides, ByteDog wasn’t going to publish it with that name. They wanted to call it Hellhiker, which she hated. What if I make the player protagonist a witch, and we call it Witchhiker? she’d asked. They’d all made a face, the same face, a sour, just-tongue-kissed-a-dead-fish face. So, not that, then.

Cursor, cursing her. Blank document, a hole in the universe.

The document always started off blank, she knew. Day one, every document was blank. Problem was, this wasn’t day one.

The document had been blank for six months.

In her hand, a single capsule, the color of sawdust. Lore got water from the fridge dispenser, popped the capsule, drank it back. Something to open her up. Keep the ants in her brain moving, keep them lined up and productive.

She needed it. They’d paid her a lot of money for this game.

And so far, she had nothing to show for it.

It’s fine, she told herself. You’re just fucked up about Nick. And fucked up about having to travel today. And fucked up about having talked to Owen. And seeing Hamish soon. And then Matty…

You’re just fucked up is the answer, she knew.

Still. She’d never had this before. Never had real writer’s block or coder’s block or art block or any kind of block. Sure, maybe for an hour. Maybe, maybe a day. But more than that? Nah, never. There was always a way through. Shoulder to the door, fist through a window, hard head slamming forward into drywall, whatever it took. Lore knew she was fucked in a lot of ways, but this was never one of them. And these little microdose motherfuckers, they were one way to clear her mental pathways.

They hadn’t worked this time.

But they could. They would.

She’d do work on the plane. A change of perspective, in her head and out, would help. And maybe, in a weird way, seeing the others would fix some shit, too.

Still, that capsule she just took? It was her last.

Time to cook, she thought in her best Walter White voice.

—

I need a big kitchen, Lore had said when she was on a hunt for a house. A chef’s kitchen, she added, emphasis on chef’s, even though she was no such thing. This house, a Craftsman-style home in the Queen Anne neighborhood of Seattle, fit the bill with its broad-shouldered kitchen, which was good because Lore loved to cook, even if she didn’t love to eat. Cooking was sensual, tactile, beautiful; eating was crude, sticky, texturally upsetting. The feel of it in her mouth made her shudder as if she were sucking down spider eggs and broken glass. She liked meal replacement shakes and breakfast cereal. Everything else could go. But cooking—an act of arrangement and creation—brought her, well, not joy, exactly, but something resembling satisfaction. She didn’t eat her food. She didn’t play the games she made. Didn’t read her own writing or ever look through her sketchbook. What she made was for others.

True for most things, but not all things.

Like, for example, what sat out in front of her now:

A little bag of brown powder; a small digital kitchen scale; a small electric coffee grinder (cheap, not a burr grinder); a pill bottle of niacin, aka vitamin B 3 ; a screw-top jar of empty vegan gel capsules. What she would make of these things would be for her and her alone.

She had all of these spaced out in front of her on a lava stone countertop glazed the brightest robin’s-egg blue.

Missing one thing, though, wasn’t it?

Back to the bedroom she went. Up the bending staircase, an assault of colors along the way, because everything in this world was trending toward that gray-brown greige awfulness and she fucking hated it. Houses bled of life by the vampires of capitalism, a trend made into a trend by people who would make you pay top price for something that cost them less to make because they didn’t have to paint it or glaze it or stain it. Lore couldn’t stand that shit. So she put as much color into her house as possible. A fucking riot of color: kitchen the color of sun and sky, bathroom like a mermaid’s tail, bedroom painted in blood. Art everywhere, too. Book covers, game covers, weird-ass modernist abstract pop art, too. None of it her own because, JFC, she wasn’t a narcissist.

Now: the bedroom.

Again, red. Red as a Ruby Slipper apple, so red it was almost black.

She paused for a moment to look to her bed, with its black silk sheets, under which slept two of her recent lovers: the first, Cedar, lying face down, tall, thin, and lissome like a sylph, the light catching in the long trench of their spine; the second, Shar, face up, tits out, splayed out like a starfish, long black hair swallowing the pillows beneath and behind her. Cedar was timid and gentle, while Shar was eager and hungry, though both deferred to Lore’s chaotic neutral energy. All around them were the tools and devices of another night spent well: two kinds of lube, ten feet of rainbow jute shibari rope, a vibrating cock ring, a cold metal butt plug, a glittery green dildo made to look like a dragon’s cock.

A good night. Though one whose memory was already fading, like the taste of dessert lost to a sip of water. That’s how it goes. Nothing lasts, Lore thought.

Into the walk-in she went, confronted with a tall mirror she used to get ready when she had to do events, be they in-person or virtual. In that mirror she could also see the bed at the far end of the bedroom behind her. Gently, Cedar stirred. They didn’t sleep deeply, though Shar you had to wake up by practically waterboarding her with a wet washcloth. Lore took a moment to watch Cedar gently uncoiling, still not all the way awake yet. Mumbling. Murmuring.

Lore reached up to the top shelf, finding the little ornately carved wooden box—an old box, one that she’d had since she was a teenager. The carvings on it were vaguely Celtic-ish, with all its whorls knotted together. Once she kept tarot cards in here, alongside a little thin sachet of purifying herbs—supposed to magically keep the cards free and clear of negative energy, which was probably nonsense. Eventually she ditched the cards and kept weed in there. These days, no more weed—weed made her weird, made her paranoid, made her slow, and Lore needed to keep sharp, sharp as a thumbtack in your eye. As such, in the box was where she kept a baggie of dried mushrooms that looked not entirely unlike shiitake but were, in fact, a fifty-fifty split of Psilocybe cubensis and Psilocybe cyanescens .

She held the box in her hand. The wood felt warm. The whiff of the ghost of that herb sachet tickled her nose: patchouli and cloves and lavender.

It was in that moment the sense memory brought another memory along for the ride, one she’d forgotten:

Owen had bought her this box, hadn’t he? That day down in New Hope, at the little hippie occult head shop. She didn’t have money and he had a little, so he bought it for her. Gods, she’d forgotten. So much from that time was foggy now. Hard to access. For good reason, probably. Owen, she thought. Her middle was suddenly a bundle of snakes, twisting around one another. Gods, she missed him sometimes. But she wasn’t good for him. That’s what she told herself, that’s what she always defaulted to. He’s better off on his own, better off not needing me, not using me like a crutch, because he ended up resenting her, and then she ended up resenting him, and it was just a sucking and slurping resentment sixty-nine.

Two thoughts at the same time:

Fuck you, Owen.

I miss you, Owen .

She stepped back from the shelf, the box in her hand, and then she caught a glimpse of the mirror reflecting the bedroom behind her—she saw the bed and its occupants, Cedar, Shar, but also—

A third person.

A young man. Shirtless. Chestnut hair mussed up, and he did that thing where he tossed his head back to flip the lock of hair from his forehead. His arms were spread out, one across Cedar’s back, the other toying with Shar’s hair.

Matty, she thought, strangling a cry.

Matty winked.

She spun around in the closet and stormed out of the room and, freeing her voice from the strangle, yelled at him:

“ Hey! ” And she wanted to yell at him to get out but then also no, no, don’t go, but any other words she wanted to say lay trapped in the meat of her throat.

Cedar cried out in alarm, rolling over and sitting upright fast, nearly falling off the bed. Shar stayed asleep, breathing loudly. Cedar blinked past their own golden locks, looking left, looking right.

“What’s wrong?” they asked, mouth tacky with sleep.

“I—”

Matty was gone.

Of course he was.

Because Matty was gone .

It was the shrooms, she knew. It was them. It was seeing the box Owen had given her. It was reading Nick’s email. All that mud that had long settled to the bottom of her had been stirred up now, and thoughts about Matty were surely swimming around those turbid waters.

“Nothing. Sorry. I—” Lore looked at the box in her hands. “I’ll order dinner. Wake Shar up. Then I have to leave. Flight to catch. Red-eye.”

“Oh. Yeah. Sure.” Cedar rubbed their eyes with the back of a hand. “What time is it?”

But Lore didn’t answer them. She was already walking back downstairs to the kitchen where she’d grind up the mushrooms and make her weekly microdose capsules. Capsules that, when it came time to catch her flight, she left there on the counter, because if she was already hallucinating, what was the fucking point?