A Ballroom for Ghost Dancing by John F Duffy

Author:John F Duffy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Inkwell Production Services

“It’s really beautiful.”

“Hmm.”

Adam and Mark were standing alone on a rim of parched land, the windswept layer of hard, gray mud beneath their feet cracked and segmented like crocodile skin. At their backs a vast prairie of golden grass bobbed, seed heads rustling as they mingled with one another by the millions. Before them an ancient drained seabed fell away in deep crevasses, the remnant high ground now a folding ripple of serrated gray pinnacles, a sandstone scab on the Earth against the crystal blue sky of morning. Adam quietly noted the nuances of color in the mountains, the faint candy striping of red and pink bands that became more poignant and obvious where they were hidden in slight shadow by sister peaks. Mark hung his sunglasses from the neck of his shirt and used his body as a tripod, slowly panning from the eastern to the western horizon, his phone recording a panorama that would fail entirely to capture the grandeur of reality.

“This place is really incredible,” Mark said as he slipped his phone back into the pocket of his jeans.

Again, Adam made a contemplative humming sound in response. “You feeling it?” he asked.

“No. You?”

“Not yet.”

The last time Adam had tripped on psilocybin was ten years ago when he was twenty-nine and touring with The Crestfallen. After playing at Fun Fun Fun Fest in Austin, Texas, Tommy bought a few grams of mushrooms from a young pink haired woman who called herself The Rainbow Warrior. Together, Adam and Tommy and Mark sat in the cool shallows of Barton Springs, hiding in the shade granted by the sprawling boughs of mighty pecan trees. In the pool, Adam had dragged his hands over the surface of the water and stood fascinated by the shimmer of criss crossing ripples. They laughed at everything human, then came down as the sun set, and it had felt as though the world was giving him a lesson in gratitude and being. He remembered feeling really good back then. Feeling unburdened. He didn’t want to be high when he met Bianca tonight, but he did want that feeling, that airy lightness in his mind where for too long he’d been carrying something angry, and dense. More than that, Adam recognized that he didn’t like who he had become since Tommy got sick, and so he decided there was value in acting against instinct.

After chasing the desiccated caps and stems with coffee, they spent an hour repeating a process of driving for a few minutes up the scenic byway that meandered among the hills, only to pull off at a designated viewing station where they would park, get out of the car, and wander about, taking in the view without speaking, the cold morning turning their breath into fog. They passed small herds of pronghorn antelope slowly making their way across the plain, and even a lone bison that never raised its head, standing on the road’s edge like a long ignored panhandler as Mark stopped the car and approached the animal on foot to take its photograph.

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