SHORT STORIES

It started innocently enough. It had taken weeks to organise until it was finally set for the 1st of December. I panicked, of course, imagining it would mutate into yet another Advent Sunday ritual with optional spiritual toppings.

We sat with the young cacao family, the gentle, glowing sort of people who believe the Universe is a cooperative enterprise, provided you breathe correctly, when the doorbell rang.

Galina muttered, “We haven’t seen them in over three years.” K whispered, “Oh shit,” and I thought, here we go.

But it was only Nina. She stood there like an influenza strain that had escaped from an Instagram bio lab. Silver blond hair, perfect make up, unusually precise for someone who identifies as alternative woke. She looked slightly rattled, as if she’d been dropped off mid argument. Her pupils were so dilated I wondered how she could see anything at all, two huge black dots floating in her eyeballs like cosmic signposts. Yet she managed well enough, expertly passing the cream, helping serve round two, knocking nothing over, staring at us with those wide goat-like eyes and perfectly curated teeth.

I had intended to discuss something internal, something real, with our neighbours, but Nina interrupted the atmosphere with an almost anthropological remark: “You two have unusually good neighbour bonds?” Interesting. Irrelevant. And not the moment for my agenda.

So I tried diplomacy: “Perhaps you’d like to show Nina around before it gets dark?”

K, naturally, torpedoed my graceful exit by adding, “I still have letters to write. And a fax to send.”

And then, just as they were leaving, Galina turned, smiled, and said, “Adrian, I have something for you.” She placed a tiny bottle in my hand. Brown glass. A pipette. The unmistakable aura of alternative healing. Magic mushroom tincture.

I stood there in polite shock, because it’s not every day someone hands you hallucinogens at three in the afternoon with the delicacy of offering marmalade.

K, quicker on the uptake, as ever, asked the sensible questions. “How do we take it? And for what exactly?” The answer drifted around us like incense: “Well, for everything.”
Jonas, in his steady priest of the village tone, added, “But you need an intention.”
Right. An intention. Apparently the tincture reads your mind.

Later that evening I stared into a glass of water containing exactly five drops of the psychedelic cure all and mumbled the first intention that came to me: “To good health.” Glug. Down it went. Nothing happened. No visions. No revelations. No ancestral delegation appearing in the kitchen to advise me on untangling my intergenerational knots. Just nothing.

Hungry for scientific clarity, we googled and found only: “Hilft bei Verstrickungen.” Helps with entanglements. That was it. Vague, poetic, deeply German. Of course everything in Germany eventually becomes gut gegen Verstrickungen. Taxes. Verstrickung. Your mother? Verstrickung. The Bundesagentur für Arbeit? Die Verstrickung der Verstrickungen. In a country held together by paperwork and inherited dread, a tincture that claims to dissolve entanglements feels almost merciful.

A few hours later Ben came by. He’d been raking leaves since dawn, and we offered him coffee and crumble as a reward for existing. Ben arrived with his newest fascination, a device that makes “special water.” Naturally.

There is always special water somewhere, eager to rescue humanity, one microdose at a time. Holy water, special water, water with bubbles or water without. He explained, with the devotion of a monk, that there is also a crystal. It comes from Russia and you can program it with information. You can put grass in it, sugar, cocaine, morphine, whatever you like.
He tested it on his mother. She felt dizzy.

And that, apparently, says everything.

I told him, sincerely, helpfully, that he should enter the drug market. He could revolutionise it. Sell acid for the price of tap water. There’s no evidence at all. Perfect. It’s not even meth. It’s a crystal. Who could arrest him? For what? For liquids with opinions?

He didn’t laugh. He was already drifting into frequencies and cellular light memory while I sat there sipping coffee, absorbing a bleak but honest truth. People will believe almost anything, as long as it promises to untangle their knots.

The world is full of Verstrickungen. The inherited ones, the self made ones, the bureaucratic ones, the ones that come with your mother, and the ones you marry into with your eyes politely closed.
Mushroom tincture, quantum water, holy water, tap water, Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, a crystal, a mantra, or an Ayahuasca microdose for people who can’t face their own childhoods.

We all grab whatever instrument is at hand.