Tuesday January 30, 2007

Microtext by
Alan C. Baird
© copyright Alan C. Baird 2004

Tuesday 30-Jan-2007 17:18

RETORT MAGAZINE ISSN 1445-7164

À la Recherche des Têtes Perdues

The Gauloises were a stupid idea.

Très stupide.

Not only did they incinerate our throats, but they also masked some of the more interesting effects of our not-so-bad hashish.

Patrick, Doctor Jeff and I were up to the usual tricks: killing time after our Restau-U meal at the Université de Nice. But Patrick had just added a curiously small envelope to the mix, and the quality of the stash provided by his connection far exceeded our expectations.

The Doctor's eyes burned with the light of a thousand suns, and Patrick giggled incessantly. I tried to act nonchalant, right up until the gibberish tumbled out of my mouth: "Stuff that was good f*ckin' pretty."

Damn. My cannabis-induced verbal dyslexia had struck again. The Doctor pretended not to notice: "I think we can safely up the dosage."

Patrick blew me a kiss, and painstakingly extracted another tiny brown pellet from his envelope, dropping it onto the Gauloise's glowing tip. In a flash, we all poked our straws into the resulting puff of smoke, and sucked it down our already-raw windpipes. If any gendarmes had noticed this singular tableau, we'd still be rotting in a French jail.

But God has been kind to those boneheaded dope fiends, and some of 'em have even survived to the ripe old age of fifty.

Alan C. Baird
© copyright Alan C. Baird 2004

Alan C. Baird is the Harvard Book Prize winner who recently coauthored "9TimeZones.com" - a print\web\wap project featured at the Whitney Biennial. His online stories and scripts appear in Locus Novus, minima, the-phone-book.com, Quick Fiction, flashquake, Literary Potpourri, fifty word fiction, 3am Magazine and In Posse Review. He lives just a stone's throw from Hollywood... which is fine and dandy, until the stones are thrown back.