YELLOW MUSHROOMS

I shook his hand and said goodbye. I leaned over and pulled my finger in to my mate. He came closer. What did he say his name was, I asked? You never listen, he cried. He looked angry as he said it. No, I shouted, I never hear. I watched him try to understand. I was angry as I said, there’s a big difference between not listening and not hearing. My mate looked indifferent. I can normally hear the first thing someone says and then I’ll just ask questions and nod to their replies. I seldom hear the answers. If you keep asking questions few will know that you can’t hear. My mate studied me silently. It was hard to tell if he understood what I was saying. I couldn’t tell if he wasn’t listening or wasn’t hearing. It doesn’t matter anyway

At home I went to the toilet. I’d started pissing outside. He said that nothing should be wasted in this world. I piss dark yellow in the morning. I’d brought the wrong kind of Spirulina tablets by mistake so I’d placed them in the soil of my pot-plants. I crushed them into little pebbles in the mortar and pestle and then dug them into the pots. I got the big pots with the tray the soil sits on inside. I started liking pissing outside as people walked past. Some people looked up but I don’t think they knew what I was doing. I pissed in all the pots for three and a half days. It was the night of the third day that I noticed. There was a big round bright-yellow fungus growing next to the trunk of the plant in the middle. It looked like a sponge. It was at least five centimetres across and was not there the day before. I looked down and saw a different type of mushroom growing out of the hole on the side. It was pale yellow tall and skinny with a two and a half centimetre root. I don’t piss in my pots anymore

Women are always telling me that they love me. I’ve only just understood that it’s not love. If it is it’s a love that I have no use for. It only exists on paper. None of them have sucked me off. I put my stare on the concrete. A strange woman walked up to me. She was too tanned and looked like a raisin. She told me to close my eyes. They rolled involuntarily before they closed. Not another one, I thought to myself. I felt her hand on my temple so opened my eyes. She was standing with her eyes closed. Her face glazed with a serene smile. She had passed through the flames and thought it had given her some special powers. I let her think she was helping me. She really believed she was. There is nothing to believe. I have already burned. Passing through the flames does not give you insight. It just makes you burnt. If you are reading this and think you can help, you can. Fuck off please. Somebody once told me I should let people try and save me. They told me that it makes people feel good thinking that they’re helping. I said I know it helps them, but what about me? All it does is remind me how I’m different

She’d flirted with her smile for days on end. If you cannot read between the lines then there are no lines for you to read between. She looks like pure sex but it didn’t smell right. I knew it was a publicity stunt ‘cause I could see the paparazzi hiding behind rubbish bins. How come nobody else sees them? She flirted with me for a week before I even had the courage to introduce myself. They make her look vain but she is charming. I told a friend that I didn’t know why she would want to talk to me. My friend told me she was thinking the opposite. I had to ask what she meant? She said sharply, I don’t even know why would you want to talk with her. She’s a low type of person. I am also a low type of person. I talked to her because she looks like pure sex

A man walked up to me. He was in is his sixties and had a big square gold ring on almost every finger. He had dyed his hair black but his sideburns were silver. He kept walking up and down the street past me. I like watching people so I watched him. Every time he walked by me he would look me in the eye and lift his shirt over his head. There wasn’t an ounce of fat on him and every one of his abdominal muscles was visible. He didn’t have a trace of modesty. I felt like telling him to eat a Mars bar. His body was his everything. He kept on walking past me with his shirt up over his face. I liked it best when his face was hidden. I couldn’t tell if he was doing it to show off or because he was flirting. Neither one impressed me. He stopped walking on his fifth run and said, excuse me… Fuck off, I said. But… he said. Fuck off, I repeated, I’m not interested. A woman walked towards us wearing a black bikini. She had Double D breasts that jiggled as she walked. I said, my goodness, under my breath. I drooled and watched her like a hawk. I cleared my throat and said, excuse me, as she passed but she didn’t turn around. What, he screamed, I suppose if I had big breasts like her you would want to talk to me? I spat on the ground before I said, old man there is nothing that would make me want to talk to you.

I turned around and started going the other way. The sun was burning me and it made me mad. I’d bought a bad batch of sunscreen and hadn’t kept the receipt. He caught up with me from behind and stood in front of me and told me he was sorry. He told me that he’d had a bad day. He asked, shake on it? I said okay and shook his hand to get rid of him. His hand gripped mine firmly. Etiquette said the shake was over so I released but he wouldn’t let go. He smiled then his grip kept getting tighter. I had to match him to not get hurt. I was back in primary school. His smile kept widening. He wanted to see whose dick was the biggest. I matched his grip until I’d had enough and told him to go eat a Mars bar. He smiled a desperate smile before he loosened his grip and punched me in the side of the head. I woke up on the ground. I heard him huff before he started skipping away. I hadn’t seen it coming. My head thumped numb

I finally got home and went straight for the fridge. I have to take two handfuls of pills every day to stay alive. I popped them out of the blister pack into my open hand. I looked at them a second then looked at the beer. I wondered which one was keeping me alive? I went to the bin and threw the pills in before I laughed aloud. I opened the beer before I heard the doorbell ring. I went and pushed the button. The doorbell kept ringing so I shouted, alright! I went to the front door and opened it. There was nobody there. I shook my head out the door and there was nobody in the hall. The ringing was in my head. It only exists in my mind. As I brought my head back in the door I saw blood splatter on the door. I swung my head the other way and felt a sharp pain in my ear. I put my hand up to it and found it hanging on by the bottom bit of cartilage only. It was just hanging there. I pulled on it and it hurt. It hurt too much to pull it off. I brought my hand down in front of my eyes and saw red. I don’t know what to do. The red hurts the doorbell’s still ringing and it’s just hanging there

Andrew Stuart Buchanan