Wally held up a glass test tube, gazing with pride at its phosphorescent green contents. He turned off the lights in his basement laboratory to better view the effect. A gentle swirl between his thumb and forefinger stirred the fluid to greater brightness. Suspended sparkling motes pulsed with life, combined in twos and threes, grew and thrived.
“Dinner is ready!” urged Alice from the top of the basement stairs.
“I’ll be up shortly dear,” he replied for the second time without looking away, mesmerized by the glow of his creation.
If the results of his experiment were as hoped, eating food would never be quite the same. He took a deep breath, looked briefly to the top of the stairs, then back at the test tube. He threw back the contents like a shot of fine whiskey, expecting the swallowed rush and burn of a high proof liquor, but feeling none. The mild essence of chlorophyl, of a summer day rose up the back of his throat and into his nostrils. And then it hit.
Wally could not suppress the operatic scream he released as he doubled over from a sensation that was not entirely pain. It was metamorphic, gripping his diaphragm and radiating outward past his ribs and internal organs, down the nerves in his arms and legs, and upward to his skull in an optic light show that caused the room to color and spin, his stomach to clench and sweat to pour down his face. He sensed an upswelling loss of consciousness like a profound sleepiness and allowed his body to rather gracefully collapse upon the cement floor.
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