We were somewhere around… wherever the fuck we were, on the edge of the Clinton Forest National Wildlife Preserve when the drugs began to take hold. There was Heather, Vanessa, Denise, and me, Justin, piled into my Nissan Shitbox, a car so old it still had a tape deck— (not that it actually worked). It was nearly the end of our first year at Clinton State University, and we were in that brief gap between the last of our classes and the beginning of exams. The excursion had been Vanessa’s idea. The shrooms had been Heather’s.

Of the four of us, Heather was the only one with any real experience doing drugs, or really anything cool. The rest of us had more or less lived sheltered lives. Heather, at least, could pass for a normie, and she functioned as our liaison to the regular world. However, we knew that deep down, she was just like us.  To put it bluntly, we were a bunch of socially awkward nerds who had previously existed in isolation until we discovered the existence of others of our kind in college. A weird person alone is just some kind of mutant, but several weird people together are like the evolution of a new breed. That's what we were to each other.

“How much further?” I asked Vanessa, who was DJ-ing from the passenger seat. As we crested a small rise in the road, I felt as if my car might take off into the sky unless I could keep it grounded. Recognizing that this was not a normal thing that people think, I was becoming eager to get off the road.

“Not far, man,” Vanessa replied. She’d been on this whole hippy-chick thing all year, going so far as starting a Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas book club. While no one else took it quite as far as she did, we were all swept up in the drug-addled adventures of Hunter Thompson and his Samoan attorney… except none of us, apart from Heather, had ever done drugs. Even Heather admitted that she’d only smoked pot a few times with one of her ex-boyfriends in high school.

“It’s just up ahead,” Denise offered.

Almost as soon as the words left her mouth, I spotted a sign letting me know that the park entrance was coming up in a mile. I let my car decelerate and pulled into the park entrance when it came. A minute later, we arrived at a small wooden booth with a barrier across the road.

“Everyone be cool,” Vanessa warned as the uniformed guard in the booth approached the car. No one had been doing anything particularly uncool.

I rolled down my window.

“Four of ya?” the guard asked. I nodded. “You stayin’ overnight?”

“Shit, we should go camping!” Denise exclaimed.

“Another time,” Heather said calmly.

"No, just the afternoon,” I responded to the guard.

“Uh huh,” the guard said. “Ten dollars.”

I slipped him a couple of fives. He took them and passed a thin park brochure through the window. I handed it over my shoulder to Denise. 

“It’s been a dry Spring, so no fires anywhere outside the designated areas,” the guard informed us.

“We’ll be totally careful, man,” Vanessa promised.

“Uh huh,” the guard said again without much interest. Without another word, he retreated to his shed and raised the barrier with the push of a button. He waved us on, and I pulled away traveling deeper into the woods. The paved road turned to gravel, and from there to a dirt track. The forest closed in on either side of us as if swallowing us. The leaves of the trees were so close that I could make out all of their veins glowing with green life force, stretching out to welcome us back to the nature our whole human race had originated from. Finally, we emerged into a clearing. I pulled the car over to the side of the road and we got out.

“Hey, guys, are you feeling anything yet?” Heather asked.

“I don’t know, maybe,” I answered. “Are you?”

“I think so,” Denise said. “I mean, I can feel the air, you know.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean, man,” Vanessa replied. “It’s like… all around us, you know.”

“And inside, too.” Denise agreed.

“Like are we breathing the air, or is it breathing us?” Vanessa asked. “Far out, man.”

“Well, we’re here,” I announced. “Um… wasn’t there supposed to be a lake here or something?”

“A pond, yeah,” Denise said, checking the map in the brochure. She pointed and drew a line from where we came into where we were now. At the same time, a gentle breeze picked up and blew through the trees.

“Whoa,” I said, distracted by the power of Denise’s finger. “Do that again.”

“Do what?” Denise asked, gazing at me with her big saucer-plate eyes.

“Never mind,” I said. It was safe to say that the shrooms were definitely taking effect. “But where’s the pond?”

We looked over the clearing, but there was no water to speak of, just a wet muddy depression in the ground.

“Must have evaporated,” Heather observed. “The guy at the gate said it had been a dry Spring.”

“That’s, like, really sad, man,” Vanessa said. 

“I wanted to swim,” Denise complained.

“Be my guest,” I said, gesturing at the mud pit.

“You first,” Denise retorted.

“Well, I’m going anyway,” Vanessa exclaimed. She was already lifting her shirt over her head. Beneath, she was wearing a blue bikini top as if she’d borrowed the color from the sky. Next went the pants, revealing a matching bottom piece.

“Wait, it’s just mud,” Heather called after Vanessa as she ran towards the pit.

“Who cares, man?” Vanessa shouted back over her shoulder. “It’s all nature.”

Instead of the noise of splashing, there was a sucking gloop gloop sound as Vanessa boldly strode into the pit. After half a dozen steps, the mud was up to her ankles. Vanessa was determined to keep moving into the center, but she lost her balance trying to pull her feet free of the muck and ended up falling face-first into it.

“Holy shit! Vanessa, are you okay?” Heather shouted, running to help our friend.

When she reached the fallen girl, she bent down to pull her out of the mud. That was when Vanessa’s arms shot up, her hands grabbed hold of Heather’s wrists, and she pulled her rescuer down on top of her.

“Fuck! You bitch!” Heather shouted, standing and wiping mud from her clothes.

Vanessa’s only reply was bright laughter, so Heather tackled her, pushing her back down into the mud.

“When in Rome,” Denise said with a shrug. She stood and began to strip down to her bathing suit, leaving her clothes in a pile on the ground. “You coming?” she asked me.

“You go ahead,” I said, feeling content to just sit with the universe buzzing all around me and soak up the sunshine. As the girls battled it out in the pit, throwing clumps of mud at each other, I lay back in the grass and watched the very interesting things that the shapeshifting clouds were doing to the sky. I reached my hands up, thinking I might pick them like lint from a shirt, but I couldn’t quite reach.

I’m not sure how much time passed like that. It felt like eternities, but probably wasn’t more than a few minutes. When I finally tuned back into the girls, I found that they’d gone abnormally quiet. I lifted my head to glance at the pit, and caught them crawling on their bellies towards me like soldiers crossing no-man’s land… No man’s land… No man… I was a man. They were women… in triplicate. No land for men, but perhaps allowed for the females of the species, which is how they were able to survive this long journey.

“I won’t shoot,” I promised, waving my empty hands at them, trying to reassure them I was their ally and meant no harm.

“No fun,” Denise replied, smirking.

Still, they crept closer and closer, until all of a sudden, they pounced. I felt their hands all over me, smearing their mud and dirt across my face, my clothes, one hand (but whose?) venturing to where no woman had ever gone before and giving it a playful squeeze. Unsure whether I was under attack, or only being assimilated into their way of life, I tried my best to get to my feet. The girls rose with me, pulling me towards the pit. I’m not the world’s strongest guy by any means. I might have been able to fend off one of them, but with all three dragging me, I quickly realized that resistance was futile, and allowed myself to be carried away with only token resistance.

As they pulled me, I had the sense that I was travelling backward through time, through the entire evolution of life on earth, to the source, the dark womb of mother nature. And me, the seed, the spark of all creation, dragged towards it, willingly, lovingly, desired, needed, returning to merge with the planetary potential, a reset of all the dreams we’d squandered all these millennia. Hope.

“Come on, Justin, you’re one of us now,” Denise said, as if reading my thoughts.

“Just one of the girls,” Heather added giggling.

“Come on and join our mud bath, man,” Vanessa concluded, pushing me from behind. I stumbled forward, tripped, and fell. The mud was cool and the damp quickly soaked through my clothes. Before I could recover, the girls were on top of me, rolling around, wrestling, and laughing.

“Um, Vanessa?” I said, noticing something missing. “What happened to your top?”

Even though the color of her breasts matched the rest of her mud-covered body, I could clearly see her erect nipples pointing at me. Vanessa seemed as surprised as anyone else looking down at herself.

“The mud took it, man,” Vanessa shouted, laughing hysterically. “The mud takes everything sooner or later.”

“We belong to the mud,” Denise observed solemnly.

“I’ve got to get out of here,” I said. Nature’s womb had become a grave for me, and I was starting to panic. “I’m not ready yet.”

“Ready or not, man, here I come,” Vanessa said, moving towards me menacingly.

“Just breathe,” Heather’s reassuring voice whispered in my ear from somewhere behind me. I felt her hands sliding beneath my shirt, caressing my body. “Breathe, don’t fight it, just let it happen. Everything will work out one way or another in the end.”

I focused on my breath: Inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale. Again, I felt the world around me breathing in complementary synchronization, all was breath. All we were, was a deep inhalation, mixing for a brief time with life, before being expelled again adrift in the universe to be a part of anything, everything.

More hands joined Heather’s fondling all parts of my body. I knew there were only three girls with me, but they each seemed to develop the appendages of Hindu goddesses. I surrendered myself to their feminine will and the will of the Earth. Tugging and pulling, I was stripped of my shirt, my pants, all the shameful barriers between me and Mother Nature. My cock became hard in hands that grasped and squeezed and stroked - A million hands, the hands of the Earth, coaxing me to climax, to deliver my seed deep inside of her. The universe vibrated with the force of my orgasm, a nuclear explosion of life in microcosm.

When it was over, we climbed out of the pit, like the first creatures in existence. All of us were naked, covered head to foot in dark mud, drying on our skin and in our hair. We lay back in the grass, with an occasional flutter of a bemused giggle, placidly watching the clouds smear across the sky like a smile on God’s painted face.