WIP: Doctor Fantastik

He let himself be stung by wasps, each time burning like fire, melting like ice, evaporating into unconsciousness.

He chewed hallucinogenic onions and leaves so bitter he tasted them for days later.

He tried the flesh of an animate cactus and slept for three days in a dreamworld where he lived and died and rose into the form of a strange creature with ribbed horns on its head and hooves that struck fire from the rocks it ran over. It died to a wolf, and he rose that time as a vast flower, taking up a good third of the Abyss’s width, skirting the sunstrip and forcing travelers to bring him water and shit to pay passage. He lived for eons that way, then was vanquished by fungus and woke with his mouth tasting of licorice.

He listened to the dissonant orchestras whose intent was to derange the senses in tandem with a particular brew made from spit and a leafy green vegetable that had been shipped up from Ellsfall and followed it up with the discordant screeching of rodents.

He ate the eyeball-sized snails that thrifty city folk grow in barrels to sell at market, trying them raw, cooked in butter, and threaded on skewers to be marked with the grill’s deep black stripes.

He let parasites burrow into his skin and waited for the bliss of their hatching.
He huffed gritty crystals scraped from a cavern’s wall and scorpion venom.

He drank the blood of a mausel dog, although he let someone else wield the blade that killed it. He told himself it would have died with or without his intervention.

He smoked snakeskin and toadskin, and the dust of the yellow moths that come out only after a great wind.

“They was to marry, come next year, Ellie said”¦”

“She kept it from her mother ““ Efora wanted her to marry her third cousin Lark Nittlescent. Nice favored boy, and well pocketed, but bland as custard”¦”

That interested him.

Ellie wouldn’t have liked bland, indeed. Her menu featured quirks of taste and savor and spices that sometimes felt like blows, but ones that left you tingling with satisfaction. He knew that without her, what had come to the table was only a shadow of what it could have been, but she had designed the recipes, and they were as individual as signatures. As he ate, he had put together the strands, as though he were talking to her in his mind, drawing her out, finding out how she felt about fighting, or politics, or love.

Love. There was a dish on the menu called “The Cook’s Left Hand” and he thought, somehow, that it was meant as commentary on Liam. It was flavored with cinnamon, sometimes called “the forbidden spice” for reasons he was unsure of, which was an odd combination with the fish’s firm white flesh. Sour berries, no bigger than a sparrow’s eye and green as olives, had surrounded it. Somehow that combination of flavors, which should have seemed unsettling, mingled together in a way that enticed the tongue, as though flavored with desire itself.

She had loved Liam. Liam had seen the advantages of a partnership with her, at the least, and had perhaps even returned her love, just buried it so deep in sorrow that the Doctor could not see it. Although the boy seemed to have felt strongly enough about Kim.