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By Frank Severino
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Laughing Gas
A Story by Frank Severino
PICFISH PRESS eBOOKS
December 2011 ~ V1.08 ~ Smashwords Edition
Copyright © 2011 by Frank Severino
All rights reserved.
Laughing Gas
Thurman Munsanto held a beaker aloft and let white florescent light shine through amber liquid. He swirled and considered it as it glowed, effervescently, like thin American beer. His fingers loomed like giant thumbs, magnified behind glass. The swirls of his fingerprints announced his individuality like moist lithographs of fossilized primordial shellfish.
The best Pyrex money can buy…don’t drop it. He resisted an animalistic urge to sniff the flask, repetitively reciting lab protocols; similar to his wife enumerating his flaws, sublimating her instinct by spending his money every day and feigning headaches in the bedroom each night.
Echoes of high school chemistry leapt from dark desperate corners, his teacher’s alarmed admonishment surfacing without bidding, “Don’t sniff that beaker—that’s hydrochloric acid, you dumbass! You want brain damage, or do you already have it?”