Page 94 of Shroom for Improvement

I forced my expression to mirror Claude’s. Pulled my lips into a smile. Something didn’t sit quite right, but I couldn’t pinpoint what. “We should still explore other avenues. Just in case.”

“Of course,” he said. “Yeah. For sure.” He nodded, his smile dropping only slightly. He sat down again and placed his hand on the tablet. “Still warm.”

I sat next to him to feel it, but at that moment, he moved, and his fingers brushed mine. He whipped them away, and a physical ache ripped through my chest.

“Should I try singing to it like you suggested earlier?” he said.

“That’s a great idea.”

He cleared his throat. “Okay...” he said, but didn’t begin singing. “Maybe if I get real close to it.” He leaned down, his face next to the tablet, and took a deep breath. And still didn’t start singing. “I just...”

“I don’t think it matters what you sing,” I added, because my guess was Claude felt shy. “Sing a nursery rhyme.”

Colour flushed his cheeks. “I don’t actually know any nursery rhymes. I only know the lyrics for one song. But it’s...”

“Cheesy?”

“It’s cheesy as fuck. Try not to listen, yeah?”

“I’ll try.” I made a show of putting my fingers in my ears.

“Okay.” Claude screwed up his face, paused again, and began humming the opening beats of a vaguely familiar tune. It conjured images of an acoustic guitar and a piano. Soft, melodic, somewhere between a lullaby and a country song. He opened his mouth.

“Because when you’re not here, you can still be with me. When you’re with her, that’s not what I will see.”

I knew this song, but I couldn’t think of the name. It was old. Twenty, thirty years. Claude looked to the heavens again, perhaps waiting for Jenny to say something, but continued singing quietly regardless.

“I let you drive to her house. Let you leave me again and again and again. Because when I’m alone, that’s when we’ll be together. In my dreams, that’s when we are one.”

He hid his eyes behind his palm.

“In my dreeaaams. In my dreeaaams. You and I are one in my dreams.”

Cosmos Roison, that was the singer. A human. He had died a few years ago from old age. The song was called “When You Are Mine”.

Claude finished his singing, but kept his hands over his face. “Did that work?”

I figured he must be talking to Jenny.

He removed his hand and rolled his eyes. “It’s laughing. It says, ‘don’t be so fucking ridiculous.’” He flipped onto his back and slid down on the blanket, his head next to the tablet. “Worth a try, I guess. I apologise you had to listen to my gods-awful singing.”

I lay next to him. “I think you have a beautiful singing voice.” Sure, the pitch was off and it was out of tune. Sure, there was bass where I didn’t remember there being bass. Didn’t stop his version from being beautiful, though.

Claude lifted his head to frown at me. I shrugged, and he lay down again.

“Okay, this feels kind of nice,” he said after a few minutes’ pause. He held his hands up above his face and turned them over, inspecting his palms and wiggling his fingers. The sun was on its ultimate moments of the day. Darkness spread over the grass like a rising tide. “Feels otherworldly. Like... soft, and wonderful, and harmonious.”

“It’s pretty cool, huh?”

Claude was quiet for a few more minutes, the buzz stealing our focus intermittently.

“I’m glad you’re here with me,” he said. He said it so quietly I wasn’t sure if I heard him correctly. “She’s wrong, though.”

“Yeah, she is. Wait, who’s wrong?”

“I love hanging out with the worm-stink boy.”

Oh.

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