I shot up like a malfunctioning vibrator had detonated in my rectum—pure, uncut panic sending me into orbit. Late again. Christ, my brain felt like a damp sponge in a urinal.
I yanked the blanket over the flamingo like a fevered mortician, tucking it in tight—too tight—like a man who’d made a terrible mistake and wanted to be sure the bird never spoke of it. With that problem smothered, I lunged for the stash.
Goddamn it.
Empty. Bone dry.
“Bird!” I howled, my throat raw with betrayal. “You let me take all the drugs again!”
No response. Just the slow, dumb stare of a bird.
I blasted down the street like a man on a mission, which, in all fairness, I was. Phil the Schizophrenic had a direct line to the cosmic pharmacy—whatever whispered horrors guided him, they always led straight to the good shit.
I found him hunched over a wastebasket on Pennsylvania Avenue, squatting like some degenerate gargoyle, his face twisted in raw, animal relief. The stench hit me like a baton to the skull. Jesus.
“Phil,” I muttered, eyeing him like a man forced to negotiate with a lunatic. “Tell me you’re not shitting out my pills.”
He grunted, shifting slightly, a wet and awful sound rising beneath him.
“Because if they’re in there,” I jabbed a finger at the steaming wreckage, “I’ll still take them. Don’t make me debase myself in front of all these good rioters.”
Phil blinked up at me, unbothered, then grinned like a man seeing a long-lost brother. “Rick!”
Rick? Who the hell is Rick? No matter. If he thought I was Rick, then I was Rick. No need to go correcting the man in mid-squat—whoever Rick was, Phil was goddamn thrilled to see him.
He yanked his pants up without wiping and lunged at me, arms wide, sweat-slick, pure unfiltered Phil. Before I could react, I was trapped in a rancid embrace, his breath hot and spiked with madness.
Somewhere down the street, a Lucid Manifesto—one of those smug, six-figure EVs progressives swear will save the planet—glided past, the driver lazily sipping an oat milk latte while an Antifa kid in the passenger seat, all sinew and malnourished conviction, leaned out the window and opened fire on a Tesla Cybertruck parked inside the dealership showroom.
Glass exploded. People cheered.
Phil didn’t flinch.
“You bring it?” he whispered, eyes darting.
I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about, but I’d been in this situation before. Confidence was key.
“Yeah,” I said, opening my palm. Nothing there.
Phil stared. Squinted. His brain crackled like an old radio trying to find a station. Then, slow and deliberate, he reached out, curled my fingers into a fist, and muttered, “Not here.”
Then he walked away, leaving me standing in the street with a fistful of absolute nothing and no goddamn pills.
Down the street, the Tesla dealership riot reached its natural conclusion—someone had set a Cybertruck on fire. Flames licked at the lithium battery, sending up a thick, toxic plume that would outlive both their cause and their collective attention span. These people were supposed to care about the environment, yet here they were, poisoning half the block just because Elon had the audacity to cut government waste.
The hypocrisy reeked almost as bad as Phil.
I tore after Phil like a rabid hound, but crackheads move too fast. A different kind of physics governs their world—knees don’t buckle, lungs don’t fail, time bends in their favor. He was gaining ground, slipping through the cracks of reality like some twitchy urban ghost.
Then, just as I was about to lose him to the filthy wind of the city, he veered hard and vanished into a diner. A real grease-stained, eggs-and-bad-decisions kind of place. He almost got away.
I crashed through the door, half-mad, expecting a full sprint but instead finding Phil hunched over a table, pouring salt into strange, manic patterns, mumbling some incantation to the great beyond.
I stomped over, eyes wild, voice sharp:
“You better be ordering my drugs from that voice in your head, Phil.”
Phil blinked hard, his pupils bouncing like marbles in a frying pan. “Where is it?” He was sweating now, reality peeling at the edges like cheap wallpaper.
I sighed, tired of the game but too deep to back out now. Slowly, I extended my empty palm, fingers curled like I was holding the Holy Grail of Narcotics. Phil’s hands trembled as he took the invisible prize with surgical precision, like he was handling nitroglycerin.
With religious reverence, he placed the phantom substance dead center in his salt pile—a perfect white crater, a shrine to the gods of derangement. Then, like some wild-eyed cult priest, he threw his arms up in victory.
“Okay, okay, man!” Phil beamed, eyes wide. “I’ll get your drugs! Right now!”
He yanked out a cell phone.
A homeless man with a smartphone. Progress, right?”
Phil tapped at the screen, his words slipping out, disjointed. “He’ll—he’ll be here in twenty minutes. Yeah, twenty minutes… maybe… I dunno…”
That’s when I realized. Phil wasn’t here anymore. His body was, but his mind had crossed over. His ritual had worked—he had reached the spirit realm. He was somewhere far away, talking to voices I couldn’t hear.
“Yeah, yeah, he’s comin’. Or maybe… no, no, it’s him, yeah… just, just wait.”
I stared at him. His eyes darted around, vacant. He wasn’t even aware of me anymore. Phil had lost himself to whatever twisted corner of reality he had entered.
“Gotta get it… it’s comin’…” he mumbled, his voice growing distant.
He wasn’t talking to me. He was lost, and I was just witnessing it.
Then he blinked, looking around, sniffing. “Food, man?”
I stared at him. Food? Jesus. I could barely breathe as it was—Phil smelled like a chemical spill at a slaughterhouse. Something primal and festering, like a mix of old sweat, piss, and whatever foul spirit haunted his jacket. But I liked him. Phil was a lunatic.
“Eggs and hashbrowns. And milk.” I motioned to the waitress, a tired woman who had probably seen this kind of scene more than she cared to count. She scribbled it down without a word.
Phil grinned. Pure, dumb, homeless joy.
I needed a distraction. The world spun too fast, reality thinning like cheap soup. I pulled out my phone and scrolled—might as well get something for tonight’s article.
Phil started humming. Pouring more salt.
Twenty more minutes of this.
Then my eyes landed on it—just another article in the endless churn of news. Dry, predictable, the same talking points recycled again and again. Nothing new. Nothing exciting. But most writers don’t have Phil and his portal.
“Biden left us a mess. He left us tremendous inflation, tremendously high costs of products—he left us a mess.” – Trump
I looked up from my phone, eyes narrowing. “Phil, who’s benefiting from this inflation?”
Phil’s pupils snapped toward me like he’d been jolted with a cattle prod. He stopped mid-salt pour, hand trembling over the table. “The lizards, man. The ones in the suits. They drink the economy. They take little sips. Sip, sip, sip! And we—” He stabbed a finger into his own chest. “—we get the sludge.”
“Millions of people that poured into our country, that are criminals. Millions of those people happen to be criminals.” – Trump
I leaned forward, feeling the pulse of something—curiosity, paranoia, truth. “Phil, how many of them are in here? Right now?”
Phil’s head snapped side to side, scanning the diner with the precision of a malfunctioning security camera. “Six. No—seven. One’s in the kitchen. He’s making pancakes, but really, he’s tracking me. I saw him outside last week. His shoes never touch the ground. Hovering. A foot above the sidewalk. They got anti-gravity now, man. They all do.”
I exhaled, tapping my fingers against the table. Jesus.
“Canada should honestly become our 51st state.” – Trump
I was about to ask, What the hell does Phil think about Canada? It was a question I half-expected to hear some bizarre answer to, but I was feeling strangely gleeful at the thought of whatever madness he’d pull out of his deranged brain.
Before I could even get the words out, though, Phil’s entire body seized up like a broken marionette. His eyes flickered like a bad TV signal, darting around the room like a man trying to outrun his own insanity.
“Too clean. Too quiet. That’s a sign, you know,” he muttered, his voice a weird mix of hysteria and calm. “Ever see a room that’s too clean? Means somebody just wiped the blood off the walls.” He chewed on his cheek like a man working through some cosmic puzzle. “They don’t even have real money, man. Just Monopoly bills. The trees up there—they don’t grow like ours. Too straight. Too perfect. They’re watching.”
My brain froze. What the hell? How did he know? I snapped my phone shut, heart racing. Phil giggled to himself, completely lost in some far-off place where reality didn’t matter. He hummed that stupid tune, returning to his salt pile, detached from everything around him. I had no idea where he went, but damn if it wasn’t a hell of a ride.
Just then, a bird flitted up, cutting through the diner’s grime like it had somewhere important to be. It landed on the windowsill, staring at Phil, who locked eyes with it, his expression sharpening with recognition. They shared a long, silent moment—an unspoken understanding passing between them.
“Get me a cigarette, will ya?” he muttered to the bird, voice oddly affectionate.
Without hesitation, the bird flapped its wings and darted off into the gray sky.
I rubbed my temple, trying to make sense of the mess swirling in my head.
Phil’s grin spread wide, “We’re in a simulation. That’s why nothing makes sense. You ever see the same man in two places at once?” His eyes flickered, distant, then snapped back to me. “Happens to me all the time.”
I took a deep breath, trying to steady myself, but just then, a flutter of wings cut through the tension. The same bird swooped back in, landing gracefully on the windowsill with a cigarette dangling from its beak.
Phil’s eyes lit up as he reached for the cigarette, a grin spreading across his face like he’d just won the lottery. But as his trembling hand moved closer, his palm slammed into the glass of the closed window with a sickening thud. The bird jerked, startled, and with a sharp flap of its wings, it shot off into the sky, vanishing into the chaotic world outside.
Phil froze, his face twisting in disbelief. He stared at the empty windowsill, his mouth moving but no words coming out. Slowly, despair crept across his features, and he let out a low, guttural cry.
I watched, feeling the tension in the diner rise immediately. The other patrons stiffened, some looking up from their plates, others pretending not to notice.
I couldn’t fucking believe it—the goddamn bird came back with a cigarette, flapping up to Phil like it was part of some fevered, delusional conspiracy. If Phil could talk to birds, then maybe—just maybe—he could talk to my bird. The idea flickered in my brain, too insane to ignore.
“Phil, relax,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady despite the chaos inside my skull. “I’ll get you a whole pack of smokes. Hell, I’ll get you the good stuff.”
Phil’s head jerked up, eyes shining with a manic gleam, like I’d just handed him a one-way ticket to the fucking moon. He was hungry for anything that wasn’t this madness.
“All you gotta do,” I told him, locking eyes, “is come back to my apartment and meet my bird.”
Phil’s face morphed into something grotesque, disgust seeping from his pores like toxic fumes. “I don’t suck dick for fags,” he snarled, his voice a low growl of refusal.
I blinked, caught off guard by the words. Fags? Did he mean he didn’t suck dick for cigarettes? Or was he implying he didn’t suck dick for homosexuals? My brain started to seize up, racing to make sense of this, but all I could feel was the distorted buzz of confusion crawling up my spine.
I snapped out of it, shaking my head like I was coming out of a bad trip. “I didn’t mean that, Phil,” I muttered. “Jesus, no—what I meant was I have a flamingo.”
