'Go left.' She ushers me toward the alley way, her elbow hooked to mine, like our arms are two tangled paperclips. I appreciate the connection. Something is awry. My arms feel papery, as if they'd catch the breeze and flutter off disembodied, along the cobblestones and into the blue dome sky where giant cloudy butterflies puff and flutter.

'Left again'. I'm sure we've been this way before, except the alley is a lot bigger than I remember it. I lift my knees high where they hover for a moment before making their descent all the way down to earth.

**NOT a magic mushroom

'Here!' Releasing my arm, she leaves me hovering and longing for her touch whilst she reaches to pluck fat oranges from the branches that drape over a suburban fence. They are tangerine orbs, cannonball suns descending to the earth.

'Sit!' she says. This is tricky than it seems. I cross my legs, ungainly, like it's the first time I've ever moved my lower body into a cross legged lotus. The cobblestones are warm. Ants crawl over my knees. It tickles. "Hello ants", I say. I reach for them with my mind. They look at me with their antsy eyes and stay busy.

'Watch!' she says. She makes me tingle. I'm not sure why she is talking in imperatives, but it makes things a lot clearer. The last time she spoke in a full sentence it seemed to take a week to tremble across the space between us where we sat with a vase of spiky protea between us. By the time the sentence arrived, I already knew there was something wrong with the cold iced coffee she'd gifted me, jingling and clinking with iceblocks on such a hot morning. I'd swigged three greedy sips before I noticed. I'd never liked the taste of mushrooms. She had fake-panicked and apologized, but I was so into her she could have drip fed me arsenic and I would have opened my mouth like a baby bird.

I lay back so my legs are in the sunshine and my torso and head drape across the cold grass. Finger bones of tree branches skeleton across the sky and the butterfly clouds shift their wings and reform into giraffes and then a wormhole, which I would be scared of being sucked into if it wasn't for my beautiful mushroom queen brandishing an orange. Her eyes are covered with sunglasses and in them I see the sky mirrored. I reach to take them off her so I can see her brilliance better but she moves away from me.

**NOT a magic mushroom

'Watch!' she repeats, perhaps understanding the uselessness of words right now. My eyes fixate on the fruit. It's surface is pock marked like the crater of the moon. I can see a blood dark side and it's polar opposite paler semi-sphere awash with a nostalgic filter. I see it spin in the air and descend and disappear right before it hits my nose. Up it goes again, and down again, before being snatched away before impact. It's absolutely delightful and noises escape my lips which I eventually understand as laughter.

After some hours, we catch the tram to St Kilda and sit on the sea wall, giggling and playing with the warm treacle air. Our toes in the sand melt and burrow. As the sun goes down, and the world begins to make sense again, she pulls out a flask. At this stage and with all the eons before and ahead of us, I would bow down at her feet and wash them with orange juice. I smell citrussy coffee on her lips, and taste mushrooms in her mouth.

Her eyes are shot through with mycelial threads, golden veins in the dark soil of her eyes.

'More iced coffee?' she says.

**also not a magic mushroom

This story was in response to a prompt inspired by the Coffee Community on HIVE:

You’re three sips into a coffee with a friend at their home. They suddenly panic, going to check the coffee they brewed. They inform you that they accidentally served you coffee infused with hallucinogenic mushrooms. What do you do?