Santana, the mistress of the earth and queen of the Necropolis, arrives in her sacred chariot and brings autumn with her.

The chariot a good sized van replete with painted flowers, a jackal skull on the bumper, and ribbons of jingle bells that jingle in the wind... They sound to drug addicts like the ice cream truck to children. I don't know what incantations he uses to stay off the radar of the authorities, but Santana is as unstoppable as the new year and is never late on tour. Maybe Santana also sells to the president's children.

Stramonium; Belladonna; Ayahuasca; Peyote; Burundanga; hallucinogenic mushrooms in a multitude of colors and flavors. Santana's garden is a festival to stimulate the senses. She opens the door of the van, welcomes with her black teeth, wearing a vintage dress with a wide skirt and a generous neckline. Her products are expensive. The quality is worth it, says Daniel. I, inexperienced in the arts of psychedelic travel and metaphysics, just nod and trust.

Santana invites us in and nods toward Daniel as if welcoming an old acquaintance. As she speaks she shows the onyx stones that adorn her mouth, a smile that brings out the gold of her eyes in her sun-tanned skin. She vibrates with the beauty of a coral snake, leaving me speechless. My soulless vision doesn't stop me from longing to feel the brunette's fangs. Kiss me and let the venom blacken my veins, noble lady.

Something itches. It's Daniel, his elbow. I blinked and came to. The interior of the sacred wagon possesses a suffocating air, incenses that spit trails of purple and blue smoke, with aromas that bury themselves in your skin and disorient your consciousness. The queen's claws manage to penetrate to our gray world and color it with diffuse brushstrokes. The fact shakes me.

"So my last baby wasn't enough for you, it tasted half-baked like any vending machine treat, or like the feces left over after cooking heroin?"

The lady's sensual, sweet tone keeps a trace of latent danger looming between the spaces, like a black widow climbing up to the back of your neck and caressing your skin with her front paws. In the dim light the lady's features darken, the gold of her eyes losing luster but not strength, becoming twin stars of sickly yellow that watch in the corner of an unknown galaxy.

Daniel stammers an apology and wipes the sweat from his brow, but beyond the nerves that surface, there was a tent in his pants that does not go unnoticed by me, and obviously not by Santana either.

A writer by the name of Lovecraft said long ago: The oldest and most intense emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and most intense fear is the fear of the unknown.

Unknown. Terror, delicious feeling that vitalizes the most stony heart of men. In that instant it meant a euphoric throbbing in our breasts and crotches.

Santana shushes Daniel by placing two fingers on his lips, a delicate gesture, almost as if inviting him to lick them. Daniel holds back, it is too soon to condemn us, there is much to prove.

"You are forgiven. I like the benevolence, it's very picturesque" she says as if talking about a child's drawings. She walks away to a metal shelf, pulls out a plastic bag with fifteen mushrooms with alvine cap and stem, bathed in a shiny coating that they themselves excrete. "Moon kisses, brought here from a higher plane. Not from the moon precisely, but very close"ç

Daniel receives the bag. He hands over a roll of money next to his late grandmother's necklace, and we say goodbye.

It took me a while to realize we were running. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed shadows of jackals looking to bite my silhouette. I pointed to the first alley I saw, we entered, stopped, and caught our breath. The jackals ceased to exist.

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I see what looks like the entrance to a porn movie store. The flickering purple light of the neon XXX sign above the door warns us that we are on the ground, a more vulgar, everyday, earthly place.

Welcome to the real world, please leave the divinities outside.

We smuggled in contraband.

We uncork a bottle of whiskey and with long gulps we cauterize our throats. The liquid blurred my vision. I felt stronger, more confident... But even the backing of the purest alcohol proves insufficient, like a pool that reaches your thighs. Finish the bottle.

We each devour a Moon Kiss. Eating it is like chewing cold, half-softened fat, leaving you with a slimy trail that travels down your esophagus. Done. Swallowed. All that's left to do is wait...

Drops of colors splash in the space, creating expansive waves that collide with others, which in turn generate more growing circles, and saturate until there is no reality left and only colors reign. I blinked and returned to the alley. I looked at my hands, they lengthen until they hit the ground and my fingers become blurred trails that furrow the air in erratic directions.

I wandered the sidewalks like a zombie. Daniel disappears, but his laughter doesn't go away. A groundhog follows me, maybe it's him. Chimneys spew raspberry bubbles, or blood. Open doors release profanities against the windows. The sun is so low it looks like another mundane streetlight. Pedestrians remove their human masks to reveal their red-eyed cow faces, mooing themselves blind and deaf from plastic, dyes and ever-larger televisions. Satisfied on their way to the slaughterhouse.

That's happiness... Why was something so vulgar denied to me? It's not fair.

The elevator in the building is out of order. I crept up the stairs and continued to the sixth floor. Tiara shouts something unintelligible, scolding for sure, and points the kitchen knife at me. She sensed my stench of alcohol before I walked through the door. As she jabbers her head falls from her neck, severed by an invisible thread, and rolls to my feet, still talking. I tapped the head with the toe of my shoe and something clicked in me. I let out a laugh, then another, and then I couldn't stop myself.

"Joshua" Mom says my name with her pallor fading and her head back in place. She looks at me as if she doesn't recognize me, or as if for the first time it dawns on me what I really am.

I wander to my bedroom, holding myself from wall to wall, laughing so hard that tears come to my eyes, and my stomach twists in pain. I collapsed on my back on the bed. Humanoid mushrooms, albino and alien, dance in an open portal in the ceiling, circling and cannibalizing each other in an act more barbaric and beautiful than any ritual invented by mankind.

My soul detaches itself from the fleshly vessel and floats away from the building and the country. It escapes from the speck of dust known as planet Earth.

The red Mars of blue people. The gaseous and bubbling Jupiter, just like its people. We fly beyond the solar system, to other galaxies, full of war, full of fantasy. And beyond? I see an infinite blackness, where the primordial and primordial collide since the Universe was born. And outside the book is white, nothingness. Without time or life or death. Turn around and face God. Cry to him, sing to him, beg him to testify your courage, pray to him to be happy or curse him for your misfortunes.

It is useless, it has no ears to hear you, no mouth to answer you, no intelligence to understand your signs. God's countless eyes remain fixed nowhere. They blink with you and everything around you contained in the well that are his pupils. You, me, the universe, the tragedies and the wonders, we are only the slow and incomplete unzipper in the eye of a retarded and primitive creature.

Where is our value, Daniel? Is it at the end of the search? Does it even exist? They always tell you there is, that you must get up and keep trying until the brimstone of hell turns to ice. But the truth is that no one knows the truth.

The effect of the Moon Kiss threatens to end. It puts me back to bed without dances or extraterrestrial mushrooms. I tossed the existential doubt around for a couple of minutes, but the only thing that came to mind was Santana's cleavage, two fleshy, brunette, perfect hills that made me salivate. I unbuttoned my pants and brought my hand down to my crotch, taking my time to satisfy myself.

Vulgar and earthly... It matters little how far our minds fly, that's what we are, even if we are denied the most mundane pleasures. Is there beauty hidden within all this filth?