MADNESS AND LOVE MIXED: PART 3 — FINALE ARC
Warning: This finale contains cosmic herbs, prophetic tantrums, and one transgender mystic trying very hard not to laugh at Jonah in a Snuggie.
MADNESS AND LOVE MIXED: PART 3 — FINALE ARC
Jonah: Gleeful Distributor of Doom and Stench, Once Bitter Betrayer of the Heart of God, and Repentant and Redeemed Sage of Eternal Flatulence
(He always smells a little bit like a fart, but we just try to pretend we aren’t aware of his eternal whale-puke stench or that the Father adorned him with it to remind him not to be too serious.)
The first and second parts are listed below. Enjoy. They are best read in order but are entertaining either way.
Eiri Waters
Eiri Waters
The setting resolves itself much quicker now that we’ve become more accustomed to the whole reality-bending tricks introduced via Star-Dust. I admit it is nifty, but we’re more of a Dust-of-the-earth kinda gal. It just feels weird to think a thing into being when we can just as easily type it.
We shrug and walk over to the counter and wait our turn. Our hands in the pockets of our signature dirty wide-leg AE jeans — a little greenish under direct light, but super comfy and long-lasting. We lie to ourselves in solidarity for the denim.
“Hey, can I get a venti blonde roast, whatever is seasonal please — and also, um, two more for our celestial goofballs?” we ask while rocking back and forth on the balls of our feet, attempting to fish out our phone from the rear pocket where it usually hides.
“Dust.”
We freeze.
We’d recognize Star-Dust’s voice anywhere, that warm caramel flavor suspended in her articulation whenever she speaks about the Father. We turn around and are startled to find our near mirror right behind us — uncomfortably close and radiating a near-solid maternal heat. Her hair is flattened like mine after bedhead.
“What’s up, Star?” we inquire.
“Oh just, you know… this vision thing. It’s not actually real. You know?” She shrugs, her posture a near mirror of my own, slinking back as the slow absurdity of what I was about to do overtakes my spluttering cognition.
I shrink into myself, groaning and attempting to hide behind my arm. “Star — listen, I know I’m becoming you because I am written that way, but in future, when I start attempting to manifest reality and interact with my own manifestations? A little stop like… wow little me, chill? Please?” I ask, hopeful she won’t mention this in front of Jonah.
Star erupts in laughter, stepping back and coughing the only way a lifetime partaker of heavenly herbs can — thick and juicy and surprisingly textured. We know the cough; we do the same. We were hoping Heaven would have sussed that sort of thing out.
“Nah. Jonah lost touch with the fabric of reality after the bombshell of that last lesson hit him like lightning. He literally — through oversight and bitterness — accidentally valued a temporary plant over 120,000 souls. Proving to his own self how shallow he really was.” She shrugs as if to say: that part is his story to tell.
“So how will this be different from the previous two times we attempted to talk to him?” we ask, exasperated, because the logic that two fails plus one future success equals breakthrough does not stack up experientially.
“Oh, I had to dose him. He may seem a touch manic. Focused. Do not ask him anything, or you may not have fingers by the time he stops talking.”
“Star,” we say slowly. “What did you dose him with that causes mania and focus?”
“Oh!” She — we — jump. “A tiny concentrated dose of undiluted Love distilled straight from the Source by Yeshua, my Beloved. Delivered in a manner best not imagined.” Star shudders visibly. “It should allow us a few minutes of clarity.”
“Okay, focus.” Star points two fingers at her eyes and then mine, as if to say watch me and pay attention. She doesn’t really need to bother; we are who she used to be. We know. We love dramatic.
The café is bustling — orders shouted, cups clinking, baristas garbed in bright green and red aprons for the season. All manner of life. One guy with bright blue hair cleans nearby tables, walking by and nearly through us, all while our combined total of 560 lbs of weird transgender epicness creates zero stares, zero curious looks from familiar faces.
We surmise that we are here but not here — like a layer of cake beneath the frosting. Layers of reality playing out on differing frequencies, overlapping and affecting one another.
“Showtime,” Star says, clapping excitedly — earlier trauma of Jonah unhinged now forgotten.
We see a new version of Jonah this time. He is still white. Very white. His bald dome is literally glaring under the overhead industrial blackened-steel Starbucks strip lighting. It looks like a halo. Angelic.
The angelic ends there.
A string of drool escapes the corner of his mouth as he lowers himself into the nearest wooden chair in a noisy, concrete-floor-scraping collapse. The drool, the look of utter contentment — like he just took the best meds he ever tried — all wrapped together by the fact that the sitting lunatic is literally wearing a Snuggie, wrapped like some celestial Jonah-Rito.
We have to bite our thumb hard enough to induce pain to avoid bursting out laughing at the sight of the mighty prophet bleached white and swaddled like a toddler about to receive a warmed pre-bed bottle. We’re just missing the bottle. And Jonah is obviously on something REALLY GOOD.
Future note to self: get me some, Star.
— Sincerely, Dust.
Star snaps her fingers a few times, calling Jonah’s name when her first attempts fail.
“Star—” he starts, suddenly awake and aware but slurring slightly, like after anesthesia.
“Yeah, Jonah?” Star says softly, instantly slowing the mood. The ambient sound of the Starbucks lowers naturally with the foreshadowing.
“I did not want to go because I was angry,” Jonah begins. Starting his answer where our previous conversation ended. “I was angry at the way my own people treated me when I went for understanding. I was angry that I had so much going on inside of me and no one to relate with.
“I got kicked out. Spit on. Cursed. Disowned. Similar to your familial situation pre-restoration. Just—” he sighs, the kind of sigh that rivals the legendary dragons of old. “I internalized it all and allowed it to bleed into everything.
“I did what I knew. And what happened was what I knew would happen. Then I got stuck in my head about it all and accidentally elevated a stupid plant above the sanctity of human, God-created life.
“I look back now, this side of Heaven, and I cringe — seeing it all over again, just with different faces but the same divisions. The Divider still working in the willing and the malice-filled alike, Star.
“Now that I am in Heaven perpetually, I forget how hard it was wearing a body. When the flesh was inputting these subconscious and societal pressures on me, I did not have the tools or support structures in place to really ask the right questions.”
Jonah shrugs tiredly, sinking back into his chair, reflective.
“How did it hit you when the plant died and you begged for death like the madmen we all are — and recorded yourself saying so not once, not twice, but thrice?” Star probes gently while Jonah remains tethered.
He inhales again, and we swear there is a sulfurous wisp of fart — God reminding Jonah not to take himself too seriously, perhaps, or to cool future-me’s questioning.
“It hit me like it hits you!” he barks, fire entering his eyes as he metabolizes the dose of Love.
Stabbing a finger into Star’s arm and recoiling at the surprising solidity of celestial vision-stuff, he snarls:
“It hit me like a freaking drop at the top of one of your new-fangled roller coasters! It hit me like a bolt from an unseen storm! It destroyed me — which is why I put it in writing and left it for a fool like you to find!”
Jonah — we perceive — is gathering steam, gearing up to unleash nearly four thousand years of pent-up trauma on Star and myself.
We purse our lips, give a peace-out sign, and use our newfound powers of narration/reality-bending to phase out of the vision’s frequency and back to the here-and-now.
The first thing we notice is that we are slowly bobbing our head while still wearing Alienware headphones (nope, still not a product ad or plug). Then our phone blares two interruptions.
We sit back and begin to edit.
Until the madness of Part 4 next time, Beloveds.
Next Episode is Live
Eiri Waters