My head pounded as I tried to untangle my Jeans and after a fight, I slid back into them. I lay back down for a minute to quiet the drum solo in my brain, then staggered to my feet. Angel moaned but didn't waken. I decided he could fend for himself.
"All an illusion," I told myself. "The whole thing was just a peyote induced dream." My realism made me somehow sad. I lay on my back and looked up at the stars. The night was startlingly clear. The sky shimmered. I wondered to myself if the crystalize sky was an after effect of the hallucinogen. As I lay there, gazing at the heavens, slowly putting my reality back together, I felt a small movement inside my left pant leg. I reached down and pulled up the cuff.
As I stood there on that roughshod cliff, thanking the heavens that I had not been stung, I slowly poked at my pants with a stick, trying to run off the deadly insect so I could get dressed. Suddenly I saw it and struck with all the force of my adrenalin charged veins. When I was sure it was dead, I turned up my trousers and shook them out on the ground.
There it was, dead all right, not a scorpion, but an odd shaped piece of cedar bark. As I cursed that crazy night under my breath, I thought I caught sight of a yellow dog out of the corner of my eye, slinking through the shadows, but when I turned...nothing...only a vague sense that someone was laughing in the distance...laughing like running water.
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