Mushroom Madness

I was moved into the freshman dorms with a randomly assigned roommate, a quiet blonde girl who had transferred to the school. For a few weeks, nothing of note happened, except she started smoking in the dorm room. I hated it, but other than mention to her once that it bothered me, I was too nice to do anything about it. I became accustomed to coming home every day to my room which reeked of smoke, although I was a non-smoker. Then the pictures started. First it was just a simple pencil drawing of a mushroom above her bed. A few days later, a watercolored painting of the mushroom appeared, in which it had partially melted into the grass. I complimented her on her artistic talent and went about my business. A few days thereafter, a new painting appeared. It was of the same mushroom, but now it had melted into a boiling mass. Then one of a mushroom with people standing around it. Okay. Then a mushroom melting with screaming people standing around it. In the next picture, the people had begun to melt along with the mushroom.

In the next picture, the people were screaming and melted tortured faces were hanging from the mushroom. They kept coming. At first, they were just next to her bed. Within a few weeks, they encompassed all the walls, then the ceiling. Then they were hanging from the dressers, mine as well as hers, the desks, my bed, the door. The entire room, from floor to ceiling was covered in hundreds of pictures of screaming tortured souls, with blood and intestines and brain matter dripping from them, each one somewhere featuring a mushroom. Eventually these pictures were covered with more pictures since there was no wall or ceiling space left. These new pictures featured male genitalia, usually mutilated or on fire. I was 17, a virgin, had never tried drugs of any kind and was a fairly conservative practicing Jew. Having never seen an actual penis, these pictures seriously bothered me. Nowhere in the dorms policy did it say anything about artwork, so I simply ignored it, not knowing how to ask her not to hang pictures of melting penises on my bed.

Near the end of the first semester in a two semester year, I was diligently studying for my finals. I had two finals on Friday morning and went to bed early Thursday night having studied all day and most of the previous week, during which I’d barely had time to sleep. I awoke at 4 a.m. with a naked man’s ass pressed to my faced. As in, my nose was actually inside of his crack and I couldn’t breathe. I kicked and screamed, and the man fell laughing to the floor. I looked over in the darkness to discover my roommate, naked on the floor, involved in a threesome with two other men I’d never seen, while the third I’d thrown off of myself was lying on the floor next to them, naked, laughing like a madman. Always being entirely too nice for my own good, I picked up my pillow and blanket, gingerly stepped around the orgy on the floor of my tiny bedroom and slept in the common hallway that night.

Interestingly enough, I never saw the roommate again. For the following two days, I saw she’d been there, like her stuff had moved, a drawer was opened or closed, but she was never around when I was in the room. On the third day I came home and the room was empty. Her bedding was gone, her dresser was empty, and the hundreds of pictures, as well as the tape that held them to the walls and ceiling were gone. The only thing I had left of her was a simple sketch of a melting mushroom, that had one day appeared on the back of my Calculus notebook when I’d left it sitting on my desk.