Simone had OCD

Simone couldn’t help reliving the tense days leading up to her radical relocation from the middle of Hollywood, CA, to the New Mexico desert. She had even purchased military grade gaiters to protect her lower legs from the imagined hordes of vipers that awaited her.

She had gotten rid of anything that wouldn’t fit in the back of a Honda CR-V. Not her own. Belonged to her oldest and dearest friend Mikki, who drove her from California to New Mexico, like it was nothing. Offered to do it.

Simone teared up remembering the day she arrived at the legendary Drifter Motel in Silver City. Her friend had given her an ill-advised but much welcome and needed, in-the-thick-of-the-pandemic hug, then, at the last second, took off the rose gold heart shaped locket she’d worn since her dad had given it to her for her Sweet 16, and handed it to Simone with a squeeze of hands.

Then she tore herself away and hurried back to the now unpacked car, whose seats were strewn with the standard effluvia of all respectable road trips that originate in California... snacks from Trader Joe’s and ice cold glass bottles of Mexican Coke.

The car windows were rolled all the way down, sheltering her teenage kiddo and puppy, who were sleeping in the unforgiving, early August, New Mexican desert heat.

As Mikki pulled off with a last wave, Simone feared in a very real way they may never see each other again, and sat on the filthy, lumpy bed and cried a tired, worn out cry.

She allowed herself to fall backwards, while using her most powerful imagination to place herself in the luxurious but understated room of the majestic Empress Hotel, where she’d stayed in Victoria, British Colombia on vacation years ago, when the world had just recovered from the Y2K scare. She slept a deep and dreamless sleep.

Later, crossing the large parking lot in cheap denim overalls and white linen shirt, using her aluminum cane for balance, Simone explored the immediate environs of her new planet. What the hell was she doing there?

Now, only a year and a half later, just as the world was recovering from the horrors of the pandemic and getting back to some semblance of normal, a wealthy man with a huge ego finally went too far, and pissed off the wrong person.

Simone, sitting in this dark abandoned warehouse, freezing in the harsh high desert nuclear winter in Grant County, New Mexico, barely able to avoid the shattered glass littering the floor like a deadly carpet with her now blue bare feet, lower legs isolated with the itchy warmth of her snake gaiters, clutched the locket, sobbing, teeth chattering uncontrollably, remembering her father’s long-ago, rare wise words to her when she was small, almost as if he knew something:

Sweetie, you know what a mushroom is, right?

Yes, daddy

Ok. One day you might live to see a very big mushroom in the sky... make sure you run as fast as you can without stopping toward the mushroom. You don’t want to be around after.

Shooting pains in her hand around the locket shocked her like bad wiring, but try as she might she couldn’t stop, and as she clutched and unclutched it, compulsively, for hours every day and night, missing Mikki and everyone and everything she knew and loved, all now probably dead or dying, it made her wince, until her face was a mask of pain, and as she regarded the skin as it slid off her palm in a nauseating mess, she cursed herself for always having been such a rebel.