This here’s my take on what happened. Uncle Dave seems to remember it differently, but that’s because he ended up on a different timeline, I’m pretty sure. He’s alive, and that’s sayin’ a helluva lot. Maybe this is some Portrait of the Artist As a Young Dog short story kinda deal, or maybe we broke the very fabric of space-time once we hit them bowls. I could say somethin’ kinda lame like, “You decide”. But the whole gawdamn point is just the opposite. You don’t decide; It decides you.
We lay back in them lawn chairs and did a three-two-one countdown together before we hit that shit. Tasted like plastic at first. Harsh. More chemical than I was expectin’ given that some frog squeezed it out through its fear-pores. It took two long hauls to get that whole pile burnt, and after I’d started on the second pull I already knew shit was shakin’. And I do not mean that in the figurative sense. This tone right around 100 Hertz came on, like someone had a signal generator plugged in to God’s hundred trillion watt PA. It was real warm and cozy-like to begin, but then it started increasin’ in frequency at about 50 Hertz per second, and then the whole gawdammned world was shakin’ right along with it. Up it went through the lower kilohertz range, and I didn’t know if things were gonna hold together because it was all blur and freeze at the same time. I could hear Uncle Dave still trying to get his lighter workin’; clllllllick, cllllllllllick. At about ten thousand Hertz everything just tore itself apart in a reverse supernova, and somethin’ put a hook into the back of my head and whoop–it extracted me like an impacted wisdom tooth right out from the rotten gums of my body.
I was dropped off in some kinda city built outta microchips built outta crystals built outta dead souls built outta crystalline microchips that were attached to the fractal cells of tegu lizards crawlin’ in and out of each other’s crystalline soul compartments that were each another city that for some reason reminded me of Albuquerque. I was there, and then I was gone.
Then I weren’t nowhere. But there were critters out there with coyote souls dribblin’ basketballs made outta geometrical proofs that were kinda like robot panda bears wearing clown suits, dancin’ on giant Buckminsterfullerenes and tellin’ me, “Lookit that. Lookit THAT!”, just pointin’ this way and that while time would stop, start and reverse depending on how I moved what used to be my left hand.
I came back with coyotes on all four sides of us. They had them coyote smiles and they were pacin’ around on tippy toes like ballerinas tryin’ to sneak home after a one night stand. I knew I’d primed the cannon for damn good reason. Sonsabitches. My fingers just oozed right into the metal when I grabbed it, like the thing was made outta clay. I pointed it up at about forty five degrees and opened the valve. That potato I’d packed in there was just a bit too wide I guess, since the barrel banana peeled, sendin’ a ball of hot blue plasma in all four directions.
Them coyotes ran every which way, and once the shock wore off and I’d brushed the charred hair from my blistering cranium, I looked over at Uncle Dave. He was just comin’ back from wherever he’d been, and he had his left hand pressed hard against his right inner thigh. Piece of shrapnel found its way in there and boy was bleedin’ out fast.