Four

Roots licked his fingers and awkwardly positioned himself behind the classic tube amplifier that was set up under his front desk. His hands groped in the dark for the copper wires of the speaker cable, finding the frayed wires he twisted them into a tight chord and inserted the chord into the appropriate hole in the back of the amplifier. Immediately a screaming guitar blasted out of the speakers set up on the desk, and Roots jerked up under the table, slamming his head, and scrambled out from under the table to turn the volume down on the amp. Annoyed roots stood up and rubbed his head, his frame swaying just slightly with the beat. As Roots rubbed his head the lateral motion of his hand slowly synced up with the music, his head began to bob, and his right foot almost imperceptibly tapped to the baseline. Roots noticed that something strange was going on, and looked down to see his free arm pumping of it's own accord. Roots immediately froze for a second, his head cocked towards the speakers, and then his entire frame lurched into dance. His head bobbed with great gusto, his arms swung wildly up and down, and his feet happily spattered all over the place like hot oil. It was in this mad jig that Mirela saw Roots when she entered the shop. Roots' eyes were squeezed shut as he careened musically about, and the noise was too loud for him to hear his customer walk in the door. Mirela stood just in the doorway shyly holding a flower and looking perplexed. The music kept playing and Roots' showed no signs of letting up, so she walked up to the desk and dinged the bell. This garnered no response from the groovin' clerk, so Mirela dinged the bell four times in quick succession. Roots dove under the table in mid jam without so much as looking at the source of the dinging, and Mirela heard the music dim down to a mere whisper. A distinguished Roots emerged from behind the table, and in a dignified voice asked,

“May I help you, Ma'am?”

“Um, yes. Well, maybe. I brought you a flower. I found it walking in a meadow and I thought you might know about these things...”

Mirela handed the flower over to Roots, who placed it on a stone tray and swung a large hinged magnifying glass over it. As Roots bent over the flower and examined it intently, Mirela stood politely, examining the jumbled shop. Roots ducked under the desk and emerged with a small wooden hammer.

“This is an excellent specimen of Blue Vervain, thank you very much.”

Before Mirela could answer Roots violently swung the hammer in a great arch and smashed the flower, hitting it again and again into nothing was left but a colorful pulpy mash on the stone tray.

Roots looked up innocently into Mirela's shocked face and said,

"Oops, will you look at that. Lunch break."

Three

A short walk later Roots stood at the front entrance of ROOTS' EDIBLE HERB EMPORIUM and proudly turned the key and entered the shop. The sight that greeted him was a large unlit room; to his left were rows of tall wooden shelves extending into the darkness, most filled about halfway with an array of unidentifiable objects. To his right were one long display case and one long desk forming an L shape jutting from the right wall. Roots switched on the lights and walked over to the old cash register sitting on the front desk. He counted out 37 dollars, in ones, opened the cash register and reverently filled the five slots with bills one at a time. Once he had filled his register with bills, he organized a messy collection of postal scales sitting on the counter and reached inside a lower drawer to withdraw a plastic “OPEN” sign. Roots held the sign in his hands and proudly marched towards the front door of the shop. He hummed a kind of epic, triumphant tune as he marched, and was reaching up to tape the sign to the inside of the door when the door opened abruptly and smacked Roots in the face. Roots dropped the sign and fell with a thud straight on his bum. He quickly scrambled to get up and regain composure; he was immensely embarrassed to look like such a fool in front of his very first customer. He looked to see the expression on the customer's face as he stood up, and was surprised to see that the customer, a rather intense looking man in a nice leather jacket, hadn't yet noticed him! The man was looking off towards the front desk with a serious, somewhat dramatic expression on his face. Roots ignored the fact that the man had just floored him with an overly vigorous door opening, despite the fact that the entrance door was clear plastic, and instead stepped into the view of the man and made a little bow.

“Good day good day sir! Very nice of you to come, thank you for visit my shop. Today is first day of opening, you are first customer! I make you special price, whatever you like, yes? Perhaps some thing for relaxation? Maybe you like Bai Shao Xiong? Very nice, very very soothing. Make you feel like you on nice soft cloud. Or maybe root of Tangkuei? Extra potent, super fresh. Make you super warm, real nice with wine. Or perhaps-”

The man seemed to have been half listening, with a bored disinterested look on his face, but here he interrupted Roots and very seriously said, “I've come for Salvia Divinorum.” Roots had gotten quite excited as he talked to the new customer, unconsciously swaying and moving his arms in animated emotion, doing a little dance in front of the rigid man. But at hearing the man's request Roots froze in the middle of this dance, his arms in an awkward kind of Egyptian stance, one raised and one lowered. Salvia divinorum. Játiva. The Diviner's Sage. Roots knew much about the “Sage of the Seers,” briefly he had lived in Oaxaca among the Mazatec shamans who still practiced the old ways. He had seen men enter the ceremonial huts, had heard the sounds that pierced through the clay walls, sometimes chanting, sometimes screaming, sometimes shouts of joy. He had seen the transformations that took place in those who underwent the vision quest. Often they would emerge with a look of dazed awe, many who chewed the leaves of the Sage found profound peace, but some did not. Roots had seen men enter the sacred hut with fear in them, he had heard stories of those who had tried to fight the Sage. For those who took the journey and resisted, the herb destroyed them. It killed their ego, murdered their self, decimated the mind. Roots knew the hallucinogen in Salvia was the most powerful natural psychoactive known to mankind. But he reasoned to himself, the Mazatec shamans consumed much higher doses than this man would, and Játiva was known to bring about a powerful change in consciousness, the nature of the herb was highly spiritual. Roots looked the man in the eyes,

“Are you sure that’s what you want?”

“Yes.” The man responded.

Roots shivered uncontrollably as a strange cold wind cut through his body. He hoped so.

Two

Roots took one last look around the apartment as he put on his stiff canvas jacket. His eyes passed from the small kitchen, empty except for a cooling tea pot on the counter, to the somewhat larger living room, a whitewashed space filled with moving boxes and packing crates ranging from the size of a small rectangular cigar box to a large 3' x 3' crate sitting in the right corner of the room, almost hidden from sight by the other smaller boxes stacked on and around it. Roots' eyes passed over this without interest, stopping only when they reached a stack of boxes near the door. On top of this stack lay a neat pile of papers, with one placed gingerly on top that simply read: “Total due payments: $48,000.” Here Roots' eyes lingered for a moment, verging on a look of fear before dissolving into their usual happy, mildly loopy gleam as Roots looked back down to fumble with the doorknob. Behind him the stack of papers silently blew off the box and danced a somber dance in the air before scattering themselves on the floor without a sound.

One

The dusty man's stooped figure was hunched over a can of white paint, he held a small wooden paintbrush in his right hand while shielding his view from the sun with his left. On his face was a look of intense concentration, his tongue was stuck out of his mouth and writhed around with each brush stroke, following the direction of the paintbrush as though it were attached to it by string. Indeed, his whole body seemed to mimic the events transpiring on the shiny pane of glass in front of the weathered man, his back arched as he painted the majestic curves of the letter “O.” His eyebrows leaped and fell as his brush followed the roller coaster ride of the flowing “M.” When he moved from letter to letter he did a little dance, hopping to the right in order to continue the flow of calligraphy without breaking his tempo. Finally, when he had reached the final letter, his face was inches away from the glass, his tongue was writhing manically with effort and his brow poured sweat into his gleaming, squinting eyes. And then it was done. Roots carefully propped the paintbrush across the rim of the paint can, sat back and looked up at the giant glass window that had so thoroughly occupied his being for the past five hours. He read aloud to himself, “ROOTS' EDIBLE HERB EMPORIUM” and fell back into a fit of giggles with a grin on his face like that of a child who had just built the biggest sand castle on the beach and didn't notice the tide slowly eating away at it's foundation beneath.