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The Slingshot

By Liana V. Andreasen and Florin Enescu
Softened from true stories

    “Is this my lucky night?” Dompy thought.
    It could have been the scotch, but it took less than an hour to get from finding the right pickup line to driving this buxom woman to his house. At least, he had done his laundry recently, so the bedroom floor had an easy to find path to the bed. Except they fell directly on the living room couch before he could finish asking if she wanted a cold beer to wake herself up.
    The night before, Dompy had had the worst dream ever. He had gone to bed after talking to an old friend on video chat, happy to bring some novelty in the string of curses and insults that usually accompanied this type of old pal conversations. Then he had fallen asleep thinking of sweeping a young girl off her feet with one stroke of his guitar. And then his neuron network started to short circuit sweeping him into an abyss of chaotic but still pattern-driven stampede of information he could not make sense of. There were screaming people, flashes of a corn field, flashes of light. He badly needed to pee and he could not find his penis in his dream. He woke up screaming and grabbed his crotch. Everything was in the right place. “Any other night I would thank myself for being alive,” Dompy thought. It should be mentioned that he would not thank God because Dompy was a declared atheist, even if deep down he was mostly a narcissist who bent reality to fit his immediate needs. If the idea of God were to serve him at some point, he would certainly be adamant that he’d been a believer all his life.
    Dompy was a man in his 50s, at a fine University in the United States. He was an accomplished scientist with a good career. He wasn’t married—not anymore. He had his own routines, he had his friends and his classes, his guitar and his love for the Beatles, and now and then he would get lucky with a girl.
    This particular night, to shake off the bad dream of the past night, he wanted to prove to himself that he had a very functional penis.
    “Is this my lucky night?” Dompy thought.
    Getting a girl to come home with him after one hour was not the most unusual thing that happened that night.
    That would have been just a lucky night, which weren’t very frequent, in truth. After all, there so many antiharassment laws that Dompy had to be 100 times more careful about the jokes he made when a pretty student came to his office. He wasn’t sure if it was just a generational thing, or these girls were getting increasingly stupid. Not to mention, his hair was receding, so he found it very annoying to focus on flirting when he saw them looking at the top of his head.
    They rolled around on the couch, groping for each other’s jeans’ buttons, when he realized he had to pee first, otherwise it would not be easy. So he just said, “Baby, let me run to the bathroom to pee,” and left her there, unsure if she’d be awake when he returned, seeing how she didn’t seem to register his words. In the bathroom, he tried to put pressure on his stream, to get it out quicker, convinced the girl would fall asleep if he didn’t. But he would have been better off getting all the pressure and the excitement out of his groin, rather than returning to the room.
    When he returned, the room was darker, strangely lacking in motion or excitement. The shape on the couch was stretched like a sleeping person. In fact, when he got closer, he realized the girl really must be asleep now because, face up, she was stretched out like a corpse. He pushed her shoulder to wake her up, letting his hand slide down toward her neck and her chest, when the cold, stiff skin made him pull his hand back as if he’d touched a nest of snakes. He was touching a dead body! He rushed to turn on the lamp by the couch and, in the spreading yellow light, he saw his dead mother right there, on the couch. His mother had been buried several years before! He felt he was going to throw up, or maybe fall to the floor, or maybe choke on his own disbelief, while his stomach filled with adrenaline and some kind of bile came up in his throat.
    He ran out of the house, not even bothering to close the front door. He sat down in the grass, with his back to a tree, and started shaking. He sat like that over an hour, and then he decided to go back. At least, the effect of the booze was gone now, so maybe whatever he hallucinated before was out of his living room.
    Sure enough, the girl was snoring on his couch, an arm hanging to the floor. He stumbled past her, to the bedroom, and got in bed without changing out of his clothes. He slept through the night.
    In the morning, the girl had left, so he sat on the couch where she had been and tried very hard to remember her face. To hell with her, it wasn’t the face he was interested in anyway. Those jugs! He only managed to get a few gropes in, and now he’d never know what they really looked like.

    And that was the first, but certainly not the worst thing that happened to him. Once these shifts from reality got started, they just found a way to happen again and intensify every time. The second time, it was not his dead mother he saw. This time, it was his former wife, and she was certainly not dead.
    He had this uninspiring neighbor who, out of boredom, was open to adventure now and then. Not often, but when she did, she’d let him know by leaving a flower at his front door. She was older than him, and a widow, so she knew her way around a man’s body. This encouraged him to work very little on pleasing her in any way. He even fantasized about the eager neighbor pleasing her husband in the coffin, as he followed her clinical motions with his clinical eyes. She had a little more flesh than he did, or maybe a lot more, but she had precision, and her moaning filled her room so convincingly that for a millisecond he would think, maybe he should move in, to pamper himself in her warm flesh every night. But he knew better.
    So the second time something tricky happened to Dompy, he was in the house of this neighbor, right after he found the flower at the door. She wasn’t even trying too hard this time, as she had picked the flower from her yard—he could even see where a bunch of them grew. Be that as it may, he left his schoolbag at home, looked in the mirror briefly before brushing his teeth without much conviction, just so she wouldn’t complain, and he went out. He didn’t eat, because she usually had some kind of ethnic food ready for him at her house when she had him over.
    Instead of ringing, he knocked three times, and one extra knock after a couple of seconds. Clever and mysterious, or so they liked to call it. But it wasn’t the neighbor who opened the door. It was his ex-wife, all dressed up, all mad at him for losing her favorite necklace, and telling him he would be the one paying for the shopping today if he didn’t immediately find it. He glanced inside, and it was indeed their old house, and as she pushed him ahead of her to the car, he asked stupidly, “Who are you?”

    “I am your wife,” she said, “and because you’re being so impolite today and you lost my necklace, your punishment is to keep me company while I check the novelties at the jewelry shop. And don’t worry, I will pay because your teacher salary is laughable.
    “It’s Professor,” he protested, and she imitated him, “It’s Professor! Do you hear yourself? You sound like Dumbo the elephant when he plays his trumpet. Dumbo the Dompy elephant,” she said.
    Dumbo was, in fact, a reference to the way he acquired the nickname Dompy. When he was a kid, he had heard people name the little flying elephant but he hadn’t exactly understood the name. And what he called it then was what he ended up being called all his life.
    He and his wife used to laugh and make more names for him when they were cute with each other in the past. She would switch from elephant to froggy when he’d jump in bed with her, and he’d say no, I am the little worm that catches the fish, are you the little fish? Then they would make animal noises and have some kind of sex.
    He surrendered to his wife’s sparkling diamonds and gold glitter shopping spree. Lots of rings, brooches, pendants and bracelets, all those things he knew one is supposed to know the value of and brag about as one moved up the social ladder... All traps for the ones with big pockets, but he knew that her pockets could not have been that big, unless her hands were in several pockets at once.

    Then it got worse. His former wife, now again his current wife for some reason, had her friend with her, a friend who looked a lot like her, but was more like the virgin type, kind of shy, kind of going along with them just to see the mall but not having enough money to get herself anything but a chocolate. And while his wife had her back at him, he turned and kissed her friend, and the friend was shy, and maybe she gave in but in fact he was kissing his wife now, because they certainly did look like each other. He felt he was going to freak out but pulled himself together and drove the two women home, which was an apartment, because he was younger now, and he kept wondering which woman he wanted to kiss now, the one with the diamonds, or the shy one, and he kissed and fondled one for a while. The face was interchangeable and it seemed like both were there in front of him and laughing, whispering to each other. He resigned himself to play on the keyboard, looking at one, then two, then one again through the mirror in front of him.
    He didn’t know when he got home to his own house, and he was a man with a receding hairline again. Trying to remember which woman he was with for the last few hours, he could simply not remember the actual face. Maybe it was the neighbor the whole time.

    Dompy had a third event, and this one went deeper into his past and with even less of a warning. He was actually in the classroom. He was going by the rows of students as they took their exam, and he glanced at their knees, to see if they hid their phones there to plagiarize the results to the test. He even caught a student at it, and told him to leave the classroom, even though the young man claimed he had an emergency text. When he asked the student to show him the emergency text, the student, bending his head in humiliation, picked up his bag, went past the other students, who were very busy writing the test and would not look up at him, and left the room. When he banged the door behind him, suddenly there was no classroom anymore.
    Dompy was in a barrack, a familiar place but one he had not seen in decades. A long-forgotten voice screamed at him:
    “Get your ass here, private Dompy, you scum! The toilet is clogged up again on your watch. Go deal with it!”
    Dompy tried to find his words: “Wait a second... Sir. I left the country a long time ago. I’m a respected professor in America now.”
    “Say what? You’re a professor, you say? Sell this dumb story to someone else. If you don’t fix the problem right now, you’ll be on toilet duty for the rest of your time here. Move! This is an order, private Dompy!”
    The lieutenant turned around and went to find another private to shout at.
    In the restroom, Dompy found the unit’s toilet full of excrement, and the familiar plunger was awaiting him in its well-known place.
    “I guess it’s true that some things never change,” he said bitterly. He moved the plunger up and down in the murky brown water. Fetid feces splashed his pants.
    It took minutes before the dark soup finally got sucked down the hole, and Dompy stopped to catch his breath. Breathing deeply was not ideal.
    He felt pressure in his own bladder, and he started peeing on the wall. “That’s the highlight of my day, relief after a good piss.” New hope flickered in his mind. “This nightmare has to end,” he thought. He finished, closed the buttons, but soon horror invaded his chest: even after he had closed the buttons, he still had his penis in his right hand!
    “What the...! Mother! Mommyyyyy!” he screamed. “Why have you forsaken me?”
    The lieutenant came in and checked the toilet. He looked at Dompy, who had remained frozen, holding his penis.
    “Good God,” the lieutenant said. “You fall for the same prank again and again. Get rid of that corn cob, otherwise you’ll be doing pushups holding it in your mouth, in front of the company. I’m sick of hearing you screaming each morning with a corn cob in your hand. I’m this close to cutting your real penis off! And the penises of all the soldiers who keep putting them in your pockets. Now get outa here, private!”
    Dompy came out of the bathroom and was met by the whole company, staring at him and laughing as if he were an actor who’d fallen off the stage.
    He was destined to have corn cobs in his pants at all times from then on, as he internalized the gesture of stuffing cobs straight down his underwear, and also in his pockets, and he’d always be rubbing them and hoping to make them pop. It was a reassurance he had what he needed to perform at any given time.
    “That’s not the worst of it, private,” said the lieutenant. “Now you’re in for hard labor!”
    And suddenly, Dompy was in a cornfield.
    “So now I’m still doing agricultural duties, as if 30 years have never passed?” he said out loud. “Are you kidding me?”
    It occurred to him that this may not be a nightmare after all. The thought that the years of living free might in fact have been a dream, like a season of that old show Dallas, fell like a hammer in his bewildered mind. The angry lieutenant was yelling at him now, saying that he wasn’t moving fast enough:
    “How are you going to finish the row by the end of the day if you move like an old lady?”
    When he looked at the corn row he was in, he could see it stretch to the horizon. There was no end to the cornfield, at all, in any direction, and it became clear that he would be in that field forever and ever. The lieutenant was going to yell at him forever. The other soldiers were laughing, and suddenly he realized he had a swelling in his pants. The soldiers said the lieutenant was giving him an erection, and he must be a Poppa’s boy for sure, and they asked him to show them where his father touched him when he was a child. Now he realized he had two, no, three swellings in his pants! For sure, somehow someone had slipped corn cobs in his pants as another prank, but when he tried saying that, he choked and passed wind at the same time, so loud that everyone was laughing now, including the lieutenant. “Pop Crotch, Pop Crotch,” was all he could hear, and he knew this was his name now, because he could not remember his real name anymore. And the corn field became a blur.

    After this episode, he didn’t go back to the present. No, that would have been too easy. He was now in an intermediary timeline, and his friend Flo was talking on the phone to him from the other side of the Earth, telling him his father was dead, but just like that: “There is a time for everything: a time to live and a time to die. And so it is with your father. It was his time to die, so he died last night.”
    “Are you making a bad joke?” he asked.
    “No, but he died fast. He was diagnosed with encephalitis in the afternoon, and during the night he died.”
    Pop Crotch’s wife was in another room, on the phone, even though it was in the middle of the night. He had thought her asleep when his friend called and woke him up, but apparently his wife never slept. He did not go to tell her about his father, because her laughter on the phone was flirtatious, with giggles and whispers, and he thought he would rather be in the cornfield again. He spotted a cockroach on the floor, under the night light. It’s easier to be a cockroach, he thought, because you don’t get phone calls about your father being dead.

    It felt as if the whole world was coming down like a ceiling on top of him, and he hated everyone. He swore to himself he would no longer care, because it seemed that all his life he had let others tell him who he was and what he should be doing. “To hell with politeness,” Pop Crotch thought, and he wasn’t in bed anymore now. He was in a jewelry store. While his wife was going around the store, he was talking to the young woman at the counter, trying to think of a nice name to introduce himself, unable to remember any other name aside from Pop Crotch. Maybe Poppy, but that didn’t sound right either, so he asked her what her name was instead.
    “How may I help you?” she asked without saying her name, and her voice was sexy and inviting. This caused an increase in pressure in his pants, where he thought maybe the corn was destined to pop.
    That voice drew him closer, like a fly to honey, so he couldn’t think of anything else to say.
    Hoping he’d sound clever and funny, he said, “You can help me to rob this jewelry store.” Then he bent in a gesture that was meant to enhance his appeal, to show the bulge in his pants.
    The girl froze instantly.
    “What??” she said almost in a whisper, looking at his crotch.
    In his mind, that was a sign she was interested, so he grinned and said, “You ain’t seen nothing yet,” trying to sing it but his voice didn’t quite create the right notes and he managed to stutter on one of the most well-known lines in pop music. Hitting on a pretty girl can make one emotional and foolish.
    “You have a gun?” she said, ready to cry. Then her voice became angry: “Are you trying to rob the store, is that the idea?”
    “It’s super easy to have ideas when you’re me,” he said, even more smoothly and cleverly.
    By now, he could feel three bulges instead of one, and the girl seemed to get increasingly upset, so she pressed the panic button. Dompy’s wife was back, saying something to him in a nagging voice. In a panic, he passed wind again, and people around started laughing. He left the store, while his wife was complaining about something, and at this point they both decided they were hungry, mostly because they didn’t want to go home.

    “We’re having junk food,” declared his wife, “and this time it’s your treat.” To which he answered,
    “This time is every time.”
    She stared at him.
    “And why are you looking at me like a bewildered bride?” he said and stood up.
    He went on and got them both some burgers.
    While they were waiting for the greasy food to settle a little bit in their stomachs, trying not to talk to each other, the cops showed up by their table. One of the cops looked remarkably like the lieutenant from the cornfield, and that was the one who said, “You have the right to remain silent.” Pop Crotch left the mall in handcuffs.
    He didn’t spend much time in jail—just enough for his picture to show up in the local paper. Without any intermediary months or even days, somehow he was back in the classroom after kicking out the cheating student, and he was talking, but he realized the students were all gone. The classroom was empty and he no longer had the three bulges in his pants. He was relieved his life of crime was over, but somehow he missed the bulges. But how could he know, after all that had happened, that he wasn’t, in fact, dreaming now but not before? Maybe the real him had three penises. Of course, it stood to reason that he had dreamed of the officer who looked like the lieutenant, but had he? Had he dreamed of the lieutenant who looked like a cop? In jail, the one thing they took from him and never gave back were the two corn cobs in his pants. The cop had turned him around, and he had felt something hard behind him—the corn cob? The cop told him to walk away and laughed at him for having legs like a man who’d just gotten off a horse.
    He returned home fuming, swearing that no one deserved the brilliance of his mind, as all of his intentions were misinterpreted, laughed at, and it didn’t matter if he was just hallucinating the past, or maybe just the three bulges. He could still feel exactly and distinctly three of them, unsure which was his own tool and which were the corn cobs. He realized it was all a phantom feeling, phantom caring, phantom naming of himself: Dompy, Froggy, Worm, Cockroach, Dompy the Crotch, Popcorn Scotch, all of it making him dizzy and sick to his stomach. All he wanted was to be home, away from everyone and their stupid, mouth-breather reactions to his genuine moments of pain and vulnerability. He’d go to bed without even eating, in a hurry to recreate as fast as possible the safety of a long-lost womb. Which he did. He crawled in bed, turned off his phone, put plugs in his ears and put a black mask over his eyes. This is how, every night, he would block out the whole world. Everyone, without a single exception, was his inferior, and at least he had his nights to himself. He thought for a little while longer about how worthless everyone was, and how he’d only put the mask of empathy around them, only to give them a merciless blow and send them away screaming. To hell with people! From then on, he would only think, act, and care about himself. “Nobody loves me more than I love myself,” he decided.
    He slipped into a pleasant fantasy, where he was a Star Trek Captain surrounded by green and blue aliens with sexy bodies. This time, he indulged in the thought that the alien women had three vaginas (each). He finally found his soulmates—of course, plural—and he tried to picture a three-fold orgasm. Would it be simultaneous, or staggered? Somewhere between these thoughts, he fell asleep.

    For weeks, nothing out of the ordinary took place. He went on and finished the semester, eager to go away for a while, back to his home country, to see his friends and forget about what was happening. Except, of course, he wasn’t really sure what was happening to him.
    He had made plans to spend two weeks visiting monasteries in the mountains with his old friend, Flo, who was one of the few who was crazy enough to put up with him at his lowest and at his highest, but mostly at his lowest. This friend was a psychologist, so that was another reason why Dompy Pop Crotch was really looking forward to this trip. If anyone could split hairs with him over what had been happening, what with the past messing with his head and all of that, it would be his friend. For sure, something Freudian could be derived from all of this, and his friend would prescribe several doses of uncommitted sex, hopefully at least one with a virgin.
    His friend picked him up at the airport. For some reason, Flo was waiting for him with a slingshot in his hand. When Dompy Pop Crotch exited the baggage area, Flo pretended to point the slingshot at him, then he laughed and lowered his hand.
    “What’s the deal with that?” asked Pop Crotch.
    “It will blow your mind. But never mind that. I’m just nostalgic for my childhood, I had one just like this.”
    They spent some days singing, laughing, talking, seeing other friends, and packing.
    Scratchy Crotch went with Flo to rent a car, and the girl at the office was pretty enough that he felt the familiar three bumps in his nether regions. Already in the car with Flo, and all ready to leave, Crotchy Pop was trying desperately to find a subject to talk about with the girl. Apparently, certain people only make mistakes in order to repeat them, so he had never learned anything useful from his past.
    The best question he could ask was, of course, something about the car.
    “Can you tell me please,” he said sweetly to the girl, “suppose we lose the car key and we find ourselves locked inside the car, what choices do we have?”
    Flo was struck by this level of nonsense: did his friend really think one could lose one’s car key while being inside of the car?
    “Sex,” he said, which was the only thing absurd enough to erase the previous absurdity. “That’s what choice we have, sex.”
    Pop Crotch actually blushed, while the girl, unperturbed, said, “Well, that is entirely your business.”
    As the bulges were quickly receding, Flo started the car and off they went.

    The first monastery was one where they had been going every single year since they were in high school, staying at the same house every time. It was a small place—a white house behind the monastery, with small clean rooms and red flowers at the windows. There was a well behind the house, which always had cold, fresh water they’d use to fill their thermoses before going on very short hikes followed by very long breaks.
    They were driving the three-four hours to the monastery, and Dompy was telling Flo all about his strange daytime trips through time.
    “You read all those psychology books,” Dompy said after telling him the main episodes. “Now use that information on me,” he demanded.
    “You’re a complicated case,” said Flo, tilting his head as if he were putting two and two together in his mind.
    “Come on, show me what you got that degree for.”
    “Well, frankly, the first thing you need to do when you pursue a successful therapy is that you acknowledge you want to have sex with your mother, because all men want that. The sooner the better, and only after this issue has been closed and put aside can you really deal with other issues.”
    The image of his mother’s corpse on his couch came back in a flash.
    “I already did that!” he said, crossing his arms, as if offended by how obvious it was.
    “Okay then, there is a small minority of men for whom the issue stems, in fact, from wanting to have sex with their father,” Flo said, as he slowed down at the entrance to a village. Geese and cows were walking by the road. “I mean, you have to bring that thought to the surface and we have to talk about it.”
    Dompy started to say something about his father, but he stopped to burp.
    “That’s such a pathetic burp, it’s embarrassing,” he mumbled. He let his chin fall to his chest and began to snore.
    “Wake up!”
    “Yes Sir, copy that, Sir!”
    “What the heck is wrong with you, Scrotpop? Stop drooling on my seat, take your phone and start making a video. We’re close to the monastery.”
    As birds of a feather flock together, Flo really wasn’t quite right in his mind either. He was driving, and he rolled down both windows. “We’re soon going to drive on sacred ground,” he said, “so we must behave accordingly and show some piety when we see the monks. We begin in 1, 2, 3... Go!” And he started screaming the most terrible, darkest curses he could think of.
    Pop Crotch joined him, and as they drove into the main street, curses poured out of the car. They were happily losing their voices for a right cause, they believed. Nothing beats catharsis on holy ground.
    The yelling came to a stop instantly when they pulled into what used to be the driveway: the house wasn’t there anymore! Not the fence, not the well, the shed—everything had been bulldozed over, and now only yellow clay remained.
    They were in quiet shock for a good couple of minutes.
    “What can we do know, since this symbol of our youth is gone?” That was, in fact, a silent question they both thought, but did not speak it. They knew they were both thinking it as they looked into each other’s eyes and saw each other’s tears. It was as if they were suddenly homeless, emotionally at least.
    “There is a time for everything, and now this is the time for our house to be gone,” said Flo.
    They wandered on the yellow dirt.
    “I think this is where the attic was, where we’d look through the window to the monastery, here the hallway, and here the deck.”
    I wonder if they filled up the well with soil, or there’s still a hole in it. Let’s look for it where the back yard was.
    It was marked with round stones, uncovered, and a gaping yellow hole greeted them. It was mostly dry, but deep at the bottom there was dark, menacing water.
    “Speaking of liquid issues,” said Flo, “I need to take a leak.”
    “Me too.”
    There were apple trees around them, which used to make big, juicy apples and now they had gone wild, so the fruit were small and pimpled.
    Flo started taking a leak behind an apple tree, and his deranged friend Popscrot went to the other side of the same tree and started taking a leak too.
    “Look down at your own dick, Leaky Crotch,” said Flo. “What’s your business looking at mine?”
    “And why should I care where I look and where I leak?” said Pop Crotch. He began looking even more purposely at Flo’s stream, and as a consequence he started to pee on himself.
    Flo started laughing, zipping up his pants.
    “Best therapy in the world: instant Karma,” he said through peals of laughter.
    Pop Crotch jumped backward and almost fell, then he started laughing too.
    “That’s not therapy, that’s telepathy, because you wished it on me,” he said, zipping up.
    They laughed some more and went back to the well.
    Flo scratched his head.
    “Say, Poppy Pee,” he said, grinning from ear to ear under his safari hat. “I think it’s my fault.”
    “What’s your fault?”
    Flo pointed around.
    “The house. It’s my fault it’s not here anymore.”
    “Say what? What can you possibly mean?”
    “Well,” Flo said, taking out his slingshot. “It’s this,” he said, holding it up in the sun.
    “Give it to me.”
    “Nope. You can’t play with it.”
    “You’re so full of shit. It’s a slingshot, so what are you talking about?”
    “I thought about this house and I shot at it in my mind. That’s when it must have happened.”
    Pop Crotch started laughing, trying to wrestle it out of Flo’s hand.
    “Stay away!” Flo said, making his voice demon-like.
    “Or what? You’ll make me disappear?”
    “No, because you already would’ve disappeared by now. I already thought of you and shot at you too, several times in fact.”
    “And what happened?”
    “Well,” Flo said, “This!”
    He pointed the slingshot at Pop Crotch, pulled the rubber, and let go of it.

    The ground swirled around Pop Crotch and suddenly he was no longer there with Flo. He was in kindergarten, and there were children around him, and a teacher, all looking at him.
    “But... but I didn’t...” he mumbled, “What...”
    He felt something wet, very wet, in his pants, and looking down he saw he had indeed peed on himself. The children laughed harder, and the teacher grabbed his elbow, trying to move him toward the door. He felt incredible shame, so he pulled his elbow, and a hot wave of vomit came from inside. He projectile threw up, spilling some on the teacher, some on two other children. They all fled, screaming.
    He had a huge bulge in his pants, much bigger than any child should have. And the teacher had become, of course, his wife, and she screamed so loud that someone immediately came through the door, which of course turned out to be the lieutenant, who threw a corn cob at him and started laughing really, really loud.
    He was on the yellow ground, crying, when Flo shook his shoulder. He opened his eyes and saw where he was, and he looked up at his friend.
    “So you did that?? Why did you do that to me? You sent me all the way to kindergarten now! It’s been you all along, messing with my head and sending me from nightmare to nightmare!”
    “Honestly, I didn’t know what it was doing,” said Flo, smiling sheepishly. “I had it for a year. I found it last year by this well, in fact, just before leaving. I stuffed it in my bag and forgot all about it until I took the bag out for a trip a couple of months ago. And I started pretending I was shooting people with it in my mind. I guess all the nonsense you were telling me was because of that.”
    “And why were you shooting it thinking of me?” Pop Crotch yelled.
    “Whoa! Why wouldn’t I? How on earth would I know the slingshot was messing with your head? Maybe I have mind powers because I studied psychology...”
    “No. I think it really is the slingshot, and it must be opening a time portal with the vibration of the sling, because every time you shot it you sent me further back in time. Probably next time you’ll make me a sperm!”
    “You’re already a sperm, and you come with pee attached,” Flo said, unable to resist taking a jab.
    “Ah, look who’s talking! At least I don’t look like a sperm!”
    “Let me concentrate. I just wonder if the others that I did this to, with the slingshot, had problems like you did.”
    “Who else did you do it to?”
    “Well... Everybody I know.”
    “Bahahah! But then,” Pop Crotch said wisely, “If it’s the slingshot...”
    “If it’s the slingshot, what?”
    “Well.” Pop Crotch became serious. “You know we can make money off of this!”
    Flo looked at him with his big blue eyes.
    “Why would you think of money right now?”
    “Why don’t you?”
    “Because it’s my slingshot. I can use it for my patients, I can cure them of their fears, and...”
    Without warning, Pop Crotch snatched the slingshot from Flo’s hand. Flo was still holding on to the rubber sling, so they extended the slingshot until it slipped from both their hands, flew high in the air, and fell right into the well.
    “What??” screamed Flo. “See what you did?”
    “See what you did?” Pop Crotch shouted back.
    “All right,” said Flo. “So let’s find someone to help get it back.”
    “Yeah... Like who?”
    They walked to the monastery. There were two monks in front of it, tending to some flowers.
    “Excuse us,” Flo said.
    “We lost our slingshot in the well,” said Pop Crotch. “Do you know who’s in charge of wells around here?”
    The monks looked from one to the other, then at each other. They both burst out laughing at the same time, slapping their knees and wiping tears from their eyes.
    “Your slingshot?”
    “Is your mommy gonna beat you for losing it?”
    “Come on, Dompy,” said Flo, and suddenly Dompy remembered that was his name.
    “No. Wait.”
    “For what?”
    “May I use a bathroom at the monastery?” Dompy asked.
    The monks pointed past the building to the Turkish-style bathrooms outside. Dompy went that way.

    Back in the car, Flo settled himself in the driver’s seat, and noticed Dompy was giving him the most satisfied grin.
    “What? What are you happy about?”
    “This!” Dompy said and took two rolls of toilet paper out of the pockets of his jacket.
    “You robbed some poor monks of toilet paper?” said Flo. “Can you imagine them using leaves to wipe their asses now?”
    “Ha-ha! I love you motherfrakker!” Dompy said.
    “Why should I care? Get love from your mother, motherfrakker!” Flo responded.

    This came from some years before, when just after the death of Dompy’s mother, he had tried to teach Flo to lie. And he asked, for example, if he had come to Flo to whine about his sadness, and out of desperation he had said, “I love you motherfrakker,” then what lie would Flo had told him? And Flo said, “I would’ve looked at you with my cold blue eyes and I would’ve said, why should I care? Go make sweet love to your mother.” To which Dompy Pop Crotch said, “But that’s not a lie, it’s the truth.” Flo said. “I know, I’m a lost cause.”

    And just like that, Flo and Dompy Pop Crotch forgot about the slingshot. Of course, when they got in the car, it was already clear they would not return to try to get the slingshot out, so they looked at their old-fashioned map and calculated how long it would take to the next monastery, to figure out if they should stop at a restaurant to eat. They decided to stop at a field close to the first monastery, to fly the drone they had brought, and then they’d eat, or drive, whichever. This field was the place where they used to bring their blankets and their guitars, but now they only had a drone.
    “You take the bag with the batteries,” Flo told Dompy. “I’ll carry the drone.”
    “It’s heavy,” Dompy protested.
    “You should know how heavy Lithium batteries are. Stop complaining.”
    And they walked up and down a path for a while, until they reached the field. There, Dompy opened the battery bag, and instead of a battery, he took out a heavy rock. And another rock. And another, and Flo was filming the whole thing. The bag was filled with rocks. He looked up with a pained grin, and asked, “So you got all this on camera, I take it?”
    “That’s what friends are for,” said Flo.
    “I love you, motherfrakker.”
    “Why should I care? Get love from your mother, motherfrakker.”
    That’s when Dompy knew that the timeline had returned to normal.

    Intermission One:
    “I am right here, right now. And the slingshot is in my hand.”
    This intermission provides an insight into Flo’s thoughts, and also it is the key to this story, in case readers are not familiar with associative dissociation. To clarify, associative dissociation is a way by which people can exist in the mind of another, and even make changes to another’s mind. But only under certain circumstances.
    Naturally, even after being lost in the well, the slingshot remained in Flo’s hand like a phantom limb for the rest of his life. It was the surest way to connect, at unexpected times, with his friend, with no regard for what other people called time and space. It was just the way it was meant to be, as the slingshot was never real to begin with. It was just a necessary presence to create an illusion of cause and effect, but the cause was deeper, and the effect was even deeper than that.
    Without interference from Flo’s thoughts, readers would be doomed not to understand the intricacies of Dompy Popscrot’s associative dissociations, or in other words, embodied introjections. In fact, their mutual interference was the first known case that led to a brand-new field of study: psychotransitology.
    Flo was thinking at mindfulness therapy and was trying to internalize what the heck it meant. But this was only taking place in a corner of his mind. In the other corner, he had already dissociated and taken his body along. He was now with his friend Pop Crotch on a forest road. They were trying to grab some small spruce trees, to plant them in their gardens. Actually, Flo was trying to take one abies alba and one picea abies for his garden, and then his friend Crotch wanted to do the same for his. So they went on a steep slope with a shovel.
    “Ok, here’s one baby spruce, let’s take it out,” said Flo, and he started to dig around the baby tree, as he knew it must be taken out with the soil around it. But while he was working, he saw a car driving down the road, and he feared he might be taken for a lumber thief.
    “Quickly, let’s pretend we just pulled over to take a leak,” he said to Scrot, and he took the pee position. To his surprise, Scrot came behind his back, taking the same position.
    “What the heck are you doing? We are supposed to pretend we are peeing, not banging. Why are you staying behind my back?”
    But he knew, and was quite resigned to the fact that his friend was not quite right in his mind, so he shrugged and allowed himself to be part of this awkward behavior from Pop Scrot. “That’s what the friends are for... Mostly for embarrassing you,” he mumbled.
    Later on, when these spruce trees became 6 or 7 meters tall, Flo would look at them and instead of seeing their beauty, he was reminded of his friend, standing behind him while he was pretending to pee, to cover up the fact that he was digging out a baby spruce tree...
    “I love you, motherfrakker,” he would say.

    Intermission Two:
    Here, there is a fleeting interference from Layla, the friend of Pop Crotch (known to her as Dompy), the woman he was trying to cheat on his wife with that one Christmas, and he hadn’t quite managed to replace his wife’s body completely with the friend’s body while kissing her.
    It should be known that this was the first time when a sort of dissociative association had happened in her life. When they were at the mall, the three of them, and he kissed her, she was not aware of the fact that her body kept changing to her friend’s body and back to hers. It was only what Dompy was seeing. But a few days later, on New Year’s Eve night, Dompy’s wife decided to party somewhere else, with someone else, leaving the two of them in the apartment. Layla had tried to forget that she had let him kiss her. Her explanation was that she hadn’t made a fuss because it would have been more embarrassing if she had struggled and drawn the wife’s attention. Kissing was quieter than saying no.
    Now there was no wife on New Year’s Eve. There was champagne, and midnight was coming, a time known for people kissing under mistletoe. She knew what was up. When twelve o’clock was announced loudly everywhere, on TV and through fireworks outside the window, she stepped out of her own mind, just like that. She was surprised there wasn’t even a transition. Suddenly, she was swimming in the waves of a very blue sea from her childhood, more specifically the Mediterranean Sea. She had a jar in her hand and goggles on her eyes. She dove, and in that moment she was in fact kissing Dompy. She saw the starfish at the bottom, and she dug in the sand with the jar, hoping she got the starfish in it even though the water became murky with sand.
    She continued to dissociate as Dompy went down on her, and as he touched her breast under her dress, she put her hand in the jar to look for the starfish in the sandy water. Instead of the starfish, there was a big clam in the jar. It opened when she touched it with her finger. The inside was smooth to the touch, and almost instantaneously, hot light coalesced into a ball inside her loins, then it burst between her legs, so she dropped the jar in surprise. The clam scurried away. She came out for air and she saw Dompy grinning. Something must have happened, something she didn’t consider herself entirely (or even partially) responsible for. But nonetheless, the dissociation ended and she could not keep the guilt away for the rest of her life.
    This intermission serves to show how, through her dissociative association while she was with Dompy, Layla had somehow warped the space-time continuum and set the stage for his associative dissociation before a slingshot was even used (real or imaginary). The switching of bodies and faces in the mall was, in fact, not a false memory but a real one all along.
    Later, when she became friends with Flo, Layla borrowed the slingshot a few times, but it isn’t clear what she did with it.

    Years and years passed by. Now the life of Popscrot was made only of disparate flashes. The embodied introjections had taken a toll on both him and Flo, because having been freed from the space-time continuum had created gaps in their aging process. They both grew old outrageously fast.
    Popscrot lost the ability to live one full day in chronological order, or in any coherent fashion. His friend Flo passed away years before him, during an episode of dissociation, and only because it had occurred to him that he should try trissociating, but it didn’t work. Associative dissociation worked instead, and when he died, he remained locked in his friend’s mind. Now and then, he would come back, sometimes just as a vivid dream, sometimes standing in front of Popscrot, like a real person but younger than he was when he died.
    Popscrot wasn’t going to make it much longer, and Flo’s visits became more frequent. When Flo stood next to Popscrot’s hospital bed one time, and when Popscrot saw him holding the slingshot, he knew something was different, and most likely it wasn’t good.
    “Look at you, laying here on a hospital bed, completely confused, imprisoned in your own real and fake memories. Is this life? Let me help you, because that’s what the friends are for.” As he raised his slingshot, he said: “There is a time for everything, and now it is your time to die. I love you, motherfrakker”.
    Popscrot felt as if he had been sent speedily through a tunnel, and he thought, “What a disappointing cliche!” But he felt a swollen bump rise again in his pajama pants, and then there were three bumps...
    “Now that’s a pleasant surprise,” he thought and he gave up his last breath with enormous relief.

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