Mario was a regular, self-employed plumber with Italian roots, an amusing, high voice, and a ludicrous mustache that somehow worked, lent just enough man to his little boy body and bright-eyed baby face. Reckless, perhaps bored with his work, the daily grind of cleaning pipes and unclogging drains, he ingested an unwise glut of psilocybin, and from that moment forward his life would never be the same.
In his altered state, he doubled in size, growing from a legal dwarf into an NBA center. His confidence swelled. He felt like himself –only super. He felt like Super Mario, invulnerable, or in any event, twice as willing to take a hard knock. When he suffered harm, a deflation of mood –the sort of hardship that comes from being attacked by a turtle, a slow-moving bullet, a shy, cowardly ghost, or a carnivorous potted plant– Mario would munch more psychedelic mushrooms to lift his spirits, literally lift himself up from Danny DeVito to Dwayne Johnson.
Mario’s brother and business partner, Luigi, soon got in on the action. Together, ill-advised and overindulgent, the pair would partake in fungal festivities, taking long, extravagant journeys to trip-out city. In the thick of their psychedelic haze, they went outside to the garden. “Let’s eat the flowers.” It was Luigi’s idea, but Mario already had nasturtium petals on his lips, California poppies sliding down his throat. Inexplicably –though perfectly explicable in a drug-induced delusion– Mario began to wield fire from his hammy hands, throwing balls of concentrated energy at turtles that basked in the sun. Was it the flowers? Luigi ate the roses, careful to remove every thorn. It would be the beginning of a prolonged bout of constipation, but in the meantime, it was goodness, gracious great balls of fire! In the garden, the tomatoes roasted on their vine.
Back inside, Mario’s girlfriend lounged on the couch. She sprawled, strung out, totally spent in the aftermath of hallucinogens and baking cookies, which she had shaped like stars with faces. “Hi, Peach,” Luigi greeted his brother’s gal when they came back in from the garden. Her given name was something less stone fruit, but everyone called her Princess Peach because she was a Georgian girl with an inflated sense of entitlement.
“I made cookies,” she told the brothers.
Mario flashed a wink, a white-gloved thumbs up, and sweated in the doorway, fanning himself with a bright red Gatsby cap embroidered with a bold M.
Weighing down the billowing folds of her pink, flowing dress, Peach balanced an unwieldy terrarium across her lap. Inside the box, an alligator snapping turtle pawed at the glass, opening its maw and snapping it shut. “Be careful with Bowser,” Mario warned. “And don’t feed him by hand. You could lose a finger.” Peach nodded that she understood, but she had already fed the reptile meaty strips of mushroom she found in a Ziploc bag. She looked at her painted fingers, grateful to count up to ten. In the kitchen, the oven hummed. The house smelled sweet with baking. Reality T.V. suffused the room.
Later, when the oven dinged, the trio were all in a state, a condition the kids may refer to as tripping balls. Luigi casually remarked that the world was weeping, but Mario looked out the window and determined that it was merely raining. Peach, meanwhile, got up from the couch, shifting the terrarium off her ample skirt, but as she walked to the kitchen, it dragged on her train and shattered when it hit the floor. Mario winced, but forgot about the alligator snapping turtle on the loose when Peach called out that the cookies were ready.
Two Italian plumbers and a Georgia peach ate star-shaped cookies standing up in the kitchen by the open oven. Mario shrunk to the size of Danny DeVito when he burned the roof of his mouth on molten sugar cookie, but ignored his predicament when the baked treat took effect. Was it the sugar? More mushrooms? Whatever it was within them, Peach’s cookies had Mario flying high. His stout limbs and round belly radiated light. He felt invincible, impervious to the oven burns at his calves and the turtle bites at his ankles. Throughout his reverie, 8-bit music flooded the airwaves in hyperactive melody.
And it wasn’t just Mario; soon, all three of them were eating cookie after cookie, laughing out loud in eruptions of golden crumbs. Below, at their feet, Bowser angled his head upward. With his cavernous maw, he snapped up the debris of baked sweets that rained down like mesosphere-scorched meteors. When the star fragments stopped falling from the sky, the monstrous turtle labored to maneuver its ungainly bulk, shifting its carapace the width of a hula hoop across the floorboards. With options, the amphibious leviathan lunged at Luigi first, but the waning effects of his star-power held even the strongest jaws at bay –or was it the plumber’s steel-toed work boots? In the end, Peach’s open-toed sandals provided an easier target, a far more tender meat. When she looked down at the canals of dark blood that filled the floorboards, surveyed her feet and counted a total of eight toes, not ten, first she screamed, but soon succumbed to laughter.
“Hey, do you guys want to go go-karting?” All the worst ideas came from Luigi. Mario knew they were all too fucked up. But that never stopped him before. “Let’s go!”
Outside, the sun was shining, a fixed yellow disc flanked in fluffy, white clouds. Eight-bit music filled the freakish landscape –jolly, repetitive melodies to go with the vertical green sewer pipes, the shark-toothed potted plants that routinely sprouted from them. Psilocybin in their system, the jaunt to town was filled with wonders, with coins to collect and question mark boxes floating in midair. There were dangers, too. Chasms to hop, pitfalls to avoid, and clogging the ditches, a profusion of red-capped mushrooms in bloom.