The Strange, Time-Bending Tale of Eris and Alphine: 1996
Alphine stumbled into the room and was jolted back by the horrific sight in front of him.
Eris sat on the couch, leaning back, swinging an empty beer bottle in her hand. There was a disappointed look of betrayal on her face. On the floor were hundreds, maybe even thousands, more bottles scattered on the whole floor like a carpet of glass. Eris looked back at Alphine, still bright-eyed and lucid.
“So, what exactly was this drink meant to do to me?” She
asked. “I have imbibed as much of it as my human body can take, but it does
nothing. It does have a strange, pungent taste, though. Oddly, I liked it and
wanted more of it even though it left an aftertaste of something rotten in my
mouth.”
Alphine, jaw dropped, eyes still wide in horror, shut the
door behind her absent-mindedly.
“D…did you drink all these?” Alpine asked.
“What do you think I did with it?” Eris asked, sounding
offended.
Alphine shook his head. “Oh, right, I keep forgetting you are new to this human thing.” He tiptoed around the bottle on the floor to where Eris was seated. “So, you are supposed to get drunk after drinking that,” Alphine explained.
“What is ‘drunk’?” Eris asked, looking lost.
“Um, well, to be drunk is to…is to…um, it’s to...” He paused.
It now clicked to him just how absurd a concept getting drunk was. Eris leaned
forward, her large eyes, sparkling yellow, staring deep and intensely into his
soul. Co…could she see if he lied? She was, after all, an Angel. “Well, now
that I have to explain it to someone who doesn’t understand, it makes no
sense.”
“I understand complex computations of the universe, of
heaven and hell, and of alternate dimensions where your souls go to spend
eternity. Try me.”
Alphine nodded and cleared his throat. “Okay, okay. Um, so,
after drinking that –
“How many?”
“Well, certainly not as many as you have drunk tonight,
that’s for sure. This is a lethal dose. Just a few bottles. Four, five, maybe
six, seven, depending on one's tolerance.”
“Oh, you humans with your estimations and approximations.
How many exactly? What’s the exact number? I need an exact number. I can’t
stand any more estimates!” Eris snapped. Then she looked down at the bottles
scattered across the entire floor in the room. “Also, this certainly is more than
six or seven, yet I feel...nothing.”
“Clearly,” Alphine said, looking at the floor, wide-eyed, puffing
his cheeks. “Anyway, so about getting drunk.”
“Yes, please.”
“So, once we drink this beer, we then feel lightheaded. Our
brain becomes foggy. Our sight becomes blurry, our speech slurred, and we can’t
walk straight, and instead, wobble about like puppets on strings. It’s actually
quite something when you experience it.”
Eris looked confused. “So you induce a medical emergency?”
“What? No.”
“That sounds like those heart attack things you people have.”
“Well, um, no, it's not. I mean, yes, we feel lightheaded,
dizzy, lack coordination, and all that, but it’s all superficial.”
“And the purpose of that is…what exactly?”
Alphine shrugged. “Just to have a good time and forget our problems
for a while.”
Eris looked at the bottle of Tusker she was holding with a
disgusted look. “You drink this pungent brown piss to have a good time?”
“Yah!”
“Interesting,” Eris said, staring thoughtfully, almost
longingly, at the bottle in her hand. “Interesting.”
“Hey, what are you doing?” Alphine asked, a look of horror
on his face as he watched Eris wave her hands over the table, and more bottles
of Tusker appeared on it.
Eris did not reply and instead went on to gulp the twenty or
so bottles all in one go. When she was done, Alphine saw that her eyes had
become blood red and veins ran down her forehead. She stammered and slurred and
then slumped on the desk.
“Eris!” Alphine called, rushing over to where Eris had
slumped and raising her head. Her eyes were red, droopy, and watery, her face
flushed and sweating. “Are you okay?”
“Wh…wh…why wouldn’t…wouldn’t I be?” Eris slurred before clumsily
pushing Alphine away.
Alphine watched as Eris looked around the room with those
watery, unfocused eyes, clumsily waving her hands about in a drunken stupor, laughing quietly as if possessed by madness. Then
almost as quickly, it disappeared. She sat back up and adjusted her pearly white
coat with golden accents. “That actually felt good for a moment,” She admitted.
“It gets old pretty fast, though. Also, I didn’t like the heart attack bit.”
“Well, you aren’t supposed to induce a heart attack. Just,
you know, the other superficial symptoms.”
At this point, there was a knock on the door.
“Please excuse me again, Eris. My father can’t do anything
around this house without my help. I am coming, Dad!”
Alphine jumped out of the room and quietly shut the door
behind him.
Eris leaned back in her chair and looked at the bottle of
alcohol in her hand. She closed her eyes and pointed that bony finger at the
bottle, and it filled with beer, and she started drinking it again, this time more
slowly as she looked out of the bedroom window.
Through it, she saw the bustling street road, narrowed into a thin one-way road by roadside vibandas (kiosks) and a burst sewer that spilt dark, black, stinky water into the sides of the road. From this busy street rose a cacophony of noises – cars and boda bodas growling and hooting as they roared past, indistinct chatter from the people in the market and the most annoying of all, which only Eris could hear, the muddled beating of all their combined heartbeats, sounding like drums playing out of synch without rhythm or order; just a muddy mess of thumps and thuds that drove her mad. Some of these heartbeats beat arrhythmically, some stopped beating suddenly, others beat rapidly, while others beat so weakly she could hardly hear them. Maddening, those sounds of beating hearts, they made her want to rip out her skin and ascend to the clouds just to escape it.
If only she could turn it off, as
she had her angelic vision. Her angelic vision could see the aura
around each human being, that glowing mass of opulent cloud that each living being on earth had, but she could only see the human beings' auras, as those were her responsibilities here. Usually, that aura was pearly white, iridescent in the sun, sparkling like scattered diamonds when a human was born. Unfortunately, that aura never stayed that pure forever. It often got darker as the human being grew older. And what she had seen, the widespread rotting, almost black mass of dark aural energy here on
earth, had almost driven her mad, and she could not bear it and had turned it
off. How she wished she could also turn off that heightened hearing, but alas, God considered that essential, so that she could tell when someone was about to die and send that message to heaven with a blink. So as she sat there, each time she blinked, she was, in fact, sending a message to God of a person passing.
Then, her skin began to ripple, as though waves of the ocean were rushing beneath the skin. She touched it tenderly, and her eyes watered with emotion. Sadness. Fear. Concern. Time was running out. In a few Earth days, mere hours back in her own realm, Earth would be destroyed, and her planet was next. She needed to act quickly. She needed to get Alphine, the key to peace, back home, to come with her ASAP.
She then sat up with a start, as if remembering something.
She snapped her finger, and in front of her materialized a being with a goat’s
head, fiercely burning red, demonic, angular eyes, pulled-back horns, and hoofs for feet. Immediately
this being appeared, he adopted a contrite posture – shoulders lowered, and head
bowed in reverence.
“Eris The Grand! Shalom.”
“Baphomet,” Eris called. “Please, tell me something good
about that stubborn human you have in your oubliette.”
Baphomet’s eyes lit up. He licked his fingers and ran them
back through the pulled-back, twisted horns on his black, scaly head that
looked like a snake’s skin.
“I think we are making a breakthrough,” He shrieked
excitedly, jumping around like an overexcited toddler. “Today we stripped him
of his loins, down to his bare skin, and have been thrashing him on the back
and on his buttocks.”
“Marvelous! What have you fetched from his wretched heart?”
“Oh, just before you summoned me, we had been thrashing his
buttocks, and then this pendulum thing between his legs got hard and squirted some
white, sticky substance. And he was grunting like an injured buck and spasming like
he was possessed by madness. I think our torture is working.” Then, in a much
more sinister voice, with a diabolical grin, he added, “Just a matter of time
before he speaks up.”
Eris gave Baphomet an incredulous look. "You hell duster! Don't you know?"
"Know what, Eris, the Grand?"
"He was enjoying it!" Eris cried out at Baphomet, who seemed genuinely shocked by the revelation. "Have you not learned anything about humans in all those millions of years? That pendulum between his legs is their reproductive organ. For women, it's a hole guarded by skin folds that look like flower petals. Those parts send spasms of pleasure in their body. That wretched being was enjoying it. You have to devise a different kind of torture. Have you tried pulling him apart from the inside, piece by piece?
"Oh, Eris the Grand, isn't that the last resort?"
"Well, what about your current torture methods have gotten anything out of him?"
"None, Eris the Grand,"
"Well, then, go on and do it. We don't have much time."
At this moment, she heard the sound of approaching footsteps. She sat up and urgently waved Baphomet away.
“Quick! Begone, you filthy basement dweller! The boy is at
the door! And he mustn’t know that we are working together. Their human minds can’t
comprehend eternal good and evil having a direct throughline.”
The door unlatched and swung open just as Baphomet
disappeared into thin air. As Alphine walked in, Eris got up to her feet to
meet him, urgency in each step she took.
“Quick, Alphine. We must leave now! Take me back to when
you were born. Time is of the essence.”
Before the confused Alphine could respond, Eris took him by
the hand, and shortly, they were flung forward in incredible speed that to Alphine felt as though he had been forcefully evicted from his body by gravity-defying speeds. They plunged into these tunnels with fractal shapes that extended before them into forever. The crystal walls passed by quickly, and Alphine saw that they were traveling back in time, for he saw, through the crystal walls, though distorted, buildings and roads appear to be dismantled, cut trees standing back up, grown-ups slowly returning into their younger and younger years the further back they travelled. He felt an invisible
weight crash on his chest the more they travelled, until he got to a point where he couldn't breathe and started suffocating. but they they came to a halt. It was 1996, to be precise, the year Alphine was born.
"Quickly, Alphine, show me the hospital where you were born," Eris said, pulling Alphine urgently forward. "Time is of the essence!"
...To be continued
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Kiraka D. Mugatsia 'Son of No Man' (@kirakadm.bsky.social) — Bluesky
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