The Lady In White

The ride back to Leslie’s place through the Gulf was a bit of a spiritual experience. He had quadrupled up on what was usually a micro dose of mushrooms and ended up macro dosing to a certain degree. Instead of driving his truck home, about a quarter of the way through the gulf his brain decided that a space ship would be far more appropriate. It had begun to snow, and with the sun long gone at this point, he seemingly took a shortcut through deep space somewhere along the way. Constellations of brilliant white hot stars pitter pattered against the windshield of his space truck. The mushrooms had fiddled around with the nerve connections in his brain and had made a bit of a synesthetic inference between his windshield and his face. While he enjoyed the cab of his interstellar craft being the warm center of his little universe, every celestial body that came to whisper past his windshield/face produced a downy tickle that jangled through his chemically altered sensorium.

This feeling was somewhat ecstatic, so he took his time picking through the gulf. Driving standard was normally a subconscious act for him, but in this state he was deliberate in the gears that he chose. Every depression of the clutch or light touch on the shifter was chosen to resonate in harmony with the epicycles that the planet traced in its journey around the galactic center.

This was the whole psychedelic redneck thing. He didn’t have to choose between practicality and spirituality. He could contain multitudes, and that was okay. As long as he didn’t run his yap about it at the bar. Were he to express his feelings on how the universe actually worked, he would quickly find himself being edged away from during social interactions. He would join the ranks of the tinfoil hat weirdos who let their personal mythos tumble out into polite conversation. Not that he was a religious guy, he wasn’t. Spiritual? Sure. To some degree he considered himself a spiritual guy, but spirituality was a subjective thing. Anything could be a spiritual experience given the right circumstances. LIke his shortcut through interstellar space for instance.

Every once in a while, and we are talking maybe a handful of times, when he had gotten recreational with his baseline dose of mushrooms, he saw something. Something a bit out of the ordinary. Not your standard hallucination, but a peek into a deeper reality. A reality where he was a mote in a much larger system. Something insignificant, but being a part of this vast system, inherently significant.
This something was the Allmother. She would pierce the veil of hallucination, and drop by for a bit of a check in. Like a CEO wandering down to the mail room to see how things are going.

He didn’t really have a name for her, but it was definitely a feminine energy that visited him. Allmother was probably the best way to put it, but it could certainly be Gaia, or Kali, or Lilith, or Ereshkegal. Kali or Ereshkegal was probably the closest descriptor, because she seemed to be in charge of both creation and destruction. She was deeper than that though, she was all of them. An unnamed feminine energy that quietly made sure the seasons changed and double checked that the worms made everything back into dirt or whatever.

Leslie knew that this was an absolutely batshit thing to think. Practically speaking, these were the mushrooms talking. When he had these visions, he was whacked out of his skull on psilocybin toxin, so of course they would be hallucinations. He had thought deeply about this. He had a number of unresolved mommy issues that, despite his diligent efforts, still colored the way he saw the world. Some cosmic mother figure taking time out of her busy existence to come and kiss him lovingly on the forehead and see if he is doing alright would be a pretty reasonable delusion for his brain to cook up. It just felt unbelievably real.

That was the kicker. The tangibility of the whole thing. He could smell her apricot fragrance, feel her gentle touch, hear her rustle the underbrush as she passed through the forest. Granted, he was a squishy blob of grey matter that inferred every experience he had from within the darkness of his skull. When you add a chemical that specifically acts on this nerve tissue to the mix, of course you would get some intriguing phenomena.

When he pulled into his driveway, the Allmother was in his back yard making herself at home. Leslie killed his headlights, not wanting to blind her. As his eyes adjusted to the thirsty blackness of the midwinter night, he could just barely see her glowing faintly. She glowed a very faint green, and the light seemed to describe a faint circle around her. Despite the weather, she was wearing what looked to be a long flowing sundress. Unaffected by the bitter evening cold, She was bent down examining something on the ground. Her sundress upon closer examination was made of tens of thousands of fine white hairs that disappeared into the snow below her.

As Leslie approached her he saw that she was examining the corpse of a Barred Owl. The story of the last moments of this great bird was written in the snow before the Allmother. A pair of wing prints were apparent a couple of feet away where the owl had alighted, there were blood stains on the snow. Two sets of quadrupedal prints from a single animal showed the comings and goings of a coyote. Two animals, both after the same mouse probably, had come upon each other in the night. The coyote had seen an opportunity for a larger meal and taken it. The Owl, taken from behind, had succumbed to its wounds. This had happened quite recently as the blood on the bird hadn’t frozen yet. The Allmother must have interrupted this little tableau and startled the coyote out of its meal.

She took the owl into her hands and regarded it. As she did so, it dissolved into ash that she shook into the night. Her work finished, she turned to Leslie and regarded him with eyes of onyx on jet, like two portals to deep space set in a field of snow. She smiled at Leslie like he was the only person on earth. She stood up and approached him. Leslie, frozen on the spot from equal measures of fear, reverence, and confusion stood there like a post. The Allmother embraced him for a couple score of heartbeats. This was not a social hug. Those last just a few lub dubs of the old ticker. This was a hug that was an expression of love, deep and unconditional.
Accepting love like this was a difficult thing for Leslie to do. When it came to nonsexual affection, Leslie was a bit of a barncat. Physical affection tended to make his flesh crawl and he took great measures to avoid it. Under the current circumstances, it was unavoidable. When a force of nature like the Allmother has chosen you, there was very little one could do about it. He returned this expression after a couple of squirmy heartbeats and let the feeling of love and safety wash over him. He began to weep, silently.

The Allmother, having gotten her feelings across, broke the hug and held Leslie at arms length. She smiled at him, holding him by the shoulders, and seemed to examine him. Casually, she licked her thumb and rubbed some shmutz from his face. They both chuckled at this.

The Allmother had never spoken during the handful of times Leslie had seen her. She communicated through purely physical means. What she had to say for the most part was pretty simple. You are loved and I am watching out for you. Leslie had started seeing her in his early twenties. This had troubled him, because that was typically the age when schizophrenia tended to rear its ugly head. With none of the other symptoms forthcoming, he was stuck with this singular delusion. The mother of the universe had taken a shine to him and liked to drop by every once in a while and let him know that he was loved. Weird, but manageable.

The Allmother finally took him by the hand and led him toward his Yurt. Gently and silently she led him inside. She gestured for him to get into his bed. This was a break in the order of operation that Leslie would usually go about things, there were a number of things that needed to be done before he rested for the evening. The fire needed to be tended to, shoveling the path to his door would be a good idea, and he should have something for dinner besides hallucinogens. He had no real clue what time it actually was, but it certainly wasn’t bedtime.

He made a move toward the woodstove to kindle the fire back to life, but was stopped short by the Allmother. She again made it clear that he should be getting into bed and this time led him here by the hand. Resigning himself to his fate and an evening of seeing his breath fog the plastic windows of his yurt, he obeyed.
He unzipped and stepped out of the coverall that protected him from the frigid winter air. He removed his midlayer of wool and his polypropylene baselayer, leaving him clad in only long underwear and goosebumps. He slid between the sheets of his bed and shivered for a second while the heat of his body slowly worked its way into the block of ice that passed for his bedframe.

The Allmother busied herself with the task of tucking him in. She pulled the sheets all the way to his chin and spent about a minute making sure he had a tight little cocoon to keep himself warm. Her sundress had reached a rather prodigious length. It trailed out the door or the yurt and into the frosty night. Instead of being made of cloth, it was constructed of millions of tiny strands, each seemingly with a mind of its own. A number of these strands started tending to the fire. Grabbing tinder and kindling, striking a match and setting the whole thing ablaze in the belly of the woodstove. While her dress was busy with this, she was seated by the head of the bed, stroking Leslie’s hair and regarding him with her black on black eyes.
Although Leslie was still pretty spun on mushrooms, he felt content and eventually relaxed into this utterly bizarre state of affairs. Once the fire was going and the yurt started to get cozy, the Allmother set a kettle on the woodstove to heat up. The animated strands of her sundress rifled through the cabinets that passed for Leslie’s kitchen and eventually procured two mugs and some powdered hot cocoa.
Leslie had to untuck himself from his straightjacket of a bed and lever himself up to properly receive his cocoa. He and the Allmother quietly sipped their drinks and listened to the fire pop and crackle. Once the cocoa was all gone, she tucked him back in and resumed stroking his hair.

Eventually, Leslie started drifting off to sleep, but was gently shaken out of it by an utterance from the Allmother.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

“What?” Leslie asked, half awake. This was the first time he had heard her speak and it surprised him.

“Tonight, you are to sleep,” she continued, her voice like an unseasonably warm autumn breeze, “In the morning you are to see Mr. Drake.”

“I don…,” she put a finger to his lips and resumed stroking his hair. The conversation was over. This was a proclamation from the Allmother, and Leslie did as he was bade. He fell into a deep all encompassing sleep.