Page 16 of The Dinner Party

You unzip the duffel bag, your stomach growling painfully. The first thing you see is a bunch of clothing. That makes sense, you suppose. You fish around a little more, and you pull out items one by one. A mini sewing kit. A roll of duct tape. A color photograph.

You hold up the photo, and to your surprise, it’s a picture of a giraffe. Even stranger, he has crossed out the giraffe with a Sharpie marker. You’re not sure what to make of this, but it’s not food, so you put it back in the bag.

The next thing you find in the bag is a wooden box that is latched shut. When the hitchhiker sees you remove the box, he starts jerking against his restraints frantically. You ignore him and undo the latch to open it, wondering if the box contains something valuable like jewelry or cash.

It’s not jewelry or cash. It’s… a bunch of dust.

For a moment, you think the dust could be hot chocolate mix, or something along those lines. But you take a little taste and—no, definitely just dust. You pour it out onto the ground while the hitchhiker moans like you just punched him in the face. He needs to calm the hell down. He has much worse problems than a dirty box being cleaned out. You did him a favor.

Finally, you hit paydirt. You find a baggie of blueberries buried deep in the bag. There are only a handful of berries, but you don’t need many. Only enough to calm your empty stomach.

You eat the berries quickly and then return the plastic to the duffel bag. You zip it up, then get to your feet to try to sleep now that you’re not so desperately hungry anymore.

You feel better for a short time and almost drift off to sleep, but then, all of a sudden, you are wide awake again. Your mouth is almost painfully dry, and when you try to swallow, it’s difficult.

You sit up on the bed of leaves, and find that your heart is pounding and you’re covered in a layer of sweat. You try to stand up, but a sharp pain in your abdomen knocks the wind out of you. You feel like you’re about to throw up, and you want to get away from the bed to do it, but your legs don’t seem to work, so you just turn your head to the side and vomit next to the bed.

You are very dizzy. Could it be from a lack of food? But it hasn’t even been 24 hours since you’ve eaten a full meal. Plus, you ate those berries.

Wait.

The berries…

They looked like blueberries, but somehow, they didn’t taste like blueberries. They tasted sweet, but also kind of bitter, almost like a tomato, which was very strange. You were so hungry, though—you didn’t give it a second thought. After all, why would the hitchhiker have poison berries in his bag?

Another wave of nausea hits you, and you vomit once more. When you raise your eyes, you notice that the hitchhiker is watching you, a smile playing on his lips. He continues watching you as your heart beats wildly, your blood pressure plummets, and finally, you collapse and die from cardiac shock.

THE END

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28

You’re very hungry, but you’re not going to stoop to the level of going through a stranger’s duffel bag, searching for food. There’s got to be food around here somewhere.

You take a stick from the ground and ignite the end of it with the embers in the dying fire. That should provide enough light for you to search the cave.

You spend the next hour wandering around, searching for some sort of food, all the while growing hungrier and hungrier. Maybe you shouldn’t have expected much in a dark cave in the middle of winter, but you were hoping for something edible somewhere.

Just as you’re about to give up and go back to sleep, you come across something growing on the ground. It looks like…

A patch of mushrooms.

Granted, you’ve heard stories about mushrooms sometimes being toxic, but these don’t look like poison mushrooms. They look totally normal, like button mushrooms. Besides, at this point, you’re too hungry to care. If you hallucinate a little, so what? It might be fun.

You pluck a few of the mushrooms from the ground and eat them raw. They taste fine, like normal mushrooms. Satisfied, you return to your bed and try to get back to sleep, now that your stomach isn’t empty.

You feel better for a short time and almost drift back to sleep, but then, all of a sudden, you are wide awake again. Except somehow you’re not in a cave anymore. While you were sleeping, you were transported to some sort of wonderland filled with chocolate milk waterfalls and cotton candy trees. You sit up in your bed, which is made from marshmallows!

You dance around the wonderland, stripping off your clothes to enjoy the lovely tropical breeze. It is truly a magical paradise! You even come across Blair’s car, which is now made from fudge—you reach out and grab a chunk of it, then pop it in your mouth.

But clearly, the best part is the chocolate waterfall, and you can’t possibly go home without jumping off it. You stand at the precipice of the fountain, gazing down at the frothy, warm chocolate below. It looks so inviting. You can’t wait to jump in.

“Sloan! Sloan, what are you doing? You’re going to fall off the mountain!”

In the distance, you can hear the abominable snowman shouting something to you, but you can’t quite make it out. It doesn’t matter anyway—he’ll only spoil your fun. You hurl yourself off the edge of the waterfall, your legs swinging wildly in the air. And then you are falling…

Falling…