Shrooming Fingers
The last time he held them up, Zebadiah Mullet’s hands felt like sprouting mushrooms. You would think that was pretty good, knowing the way things were going these sleepless dark days and nights, but really it wasn’t. Mushrooms simultaneously scream and twitch as they sprout, as their mycelial network expands rapidly and then contract, like a squeeze box, and not like the squeeze box in that old Who song that feels so lively and is maybe about sex.
*She goes in and out and in
And out and in and out and in and out
She’s playing all night
And the music’s all right
Mama’s got a squeeze box
Daddy never sleeps at night*
Zebadiah Mullet hadn’t slept more than an hour a night in three years. Nobody had. Ever since that thing happened that no one could remember specifically.
They just went on and on—in and out, in and out—all night long, not able to sleep. Not able to even gather their thoughts.
Zebadiah was a writer, but he couldn’t adequately place his mushrooming hands on a keyboard. When he tried, the keyboard slipped out from beneath his screaming and twitching fingers.
He was forced to peck away at a virtual keyboard on a digital device and his shrooming fingers made it so he’d hit double letters quite a lot and other buttons he didn’t really want to press, so the writing was piss poor, but he couldn’t really do much about it. No one was really reading anything anymore anyway. No one was really publishing, except for some minor online forums and groups. Zebadiah didn’t consider that real writing, but what was he gonna do?
He had tried using the microphone button on the virtual keyboard, but it was so close to the space bar that often times there were long, big spaces in his writing that he couldn’t delete, because the delete key was so hard to reach with his mushroom stems in the upper right corner.
So he left the big, long spaces in. The funny thing about it was that the few readers there were seemed to love those spaces like he put them in purposely, like they were the tip of the the tip of each thought that apparently seemed to relax their unsleeping brains to the extent that they laughed and found a little bit of peace.
Zebadiah wished that HE could find peace, but there was none to be found, especially since lately his toes has also begun to sprout, but not like mushrooms. Oh, no. That would’ve been way too easy and would not have pleased the elder gods quite as much.
No, his toes had begun to sprout like multicolored helium balloons, so that if he even moved a little bit, he began floating more and more up in the air slowly swaying in the breeze.
When that happened not only were there
long strings of
spaces in his writing,
but he found punctuation almost impossible to insert
Or else it would insert multiple times like comma after comma after comma or those damn semicolons. He had never liked semicolons. They seemed too damn complicated, but his toes continue to expand and his fingers kept sprouting so ;;;;;;;; there was nothing to be done but just accept=—- > all the mistakes.
And all the LIKES! Readers liked his strange, mushroom handled stories with bad spacing and punctuation more and more and more. In fact, he had never been so popular.
If only he could get some more sleep!!!!!!
;;;; ;;;;
!
/———-\
*Well the kids don’t eat
And the dog can’t sleep
There’s no escape from the music
In the whole damn street
’Cause she’s playing all night
And the music’s all right
Mama’s got a squeeze box
Daddy never sleeps at night…*