dreamszilla

A young Nigerian man cultivates a relationship with a foreign sugar daddy in the hope of making money, but fate has different plans. Image generated with OpenAI You met him in 2012 from a 'good-for-nothing' Facebook group. His first message was 'a pic of your dick.' You rolled your eyes in disgust, but played your part, asking him for some dollars. He gave excuses, and you pushed him to a corner but didn't block him. His username reads German, but he claimed to be an American; like every sucrose guardian, he is the age of your grandfather with a white, sagging face. He told you his work is with the government but withholds the details. You chat with him only when bored and wonder if you entertain him because you lack love from home. He is always ready to tell you how much he loves you and how he may die tomorrow if you stop talking to him. He calls you his husband, his African king, his Wakanda lover with skin of honey and voice of an angel. Sometimes yo...

Anders is struggling to connect with his wife and daughters, and is about to face a reckoning. Image generated with OpenAI This is how it ended. In late March, Anders took his wife and daughters to Lake Erie, on the New York side. It was supposed to be a quiet week when he and Cynthia could visit a few wineries and take Lily and Harper to dinner. He'd imagined it as a sort of reset for everyone, especially him. He'd been feeling tense, worn out by work, on edge. They needed some time away. But the trip was a failure. On the second night, at a local restaurant (a stone cottage by a lighthouse), Anders was the only one not staring at his phone. They were like zombies, all three of them. He set a timer, just to see how long it would last: seven full minutes without a word from any of them, broken only by the waiter's voice saying, "Careful, hot plate." The phones went down momentarily as they prepared to eat, and, in that brief communal moment, Anders c...

A teenager is captivated by her daydreaming new friend, but will she open her mind or hold her back? Image generated with OpenAI I met her in secondary school - the shy girl who sat in the back, her notebook always open but rarely taking notes. For months, I ignored her existence until the day I glimpsed a poem she'd written and left on her desk. Her words unlocked chambers of my mind I didn't know existed. When I offered her friendship, she accepted with a quiet grace that belied her true nature. Soon I discovered she wasn't the wallflower I'd imagined, but a collage of personalities - outspoken, mercurial, lost in reveries, mysterious in every way. She lived half in our world and half in the realms of fantasy. On Monday, she was a Sailor Soldier, her head crowned with spherical buns, guardian of the precious Silver Crystal. By Wednesday, she'd transformed into the Queen of the Elves, speaking only in Quenya while our classmates stared. During Thurs...

Rory and Garrett decide to escape their deadbeat families by floating away down the Connecticut River. Image generated with OpenAI It starts and ends with the raft, more or less. That whole green summer before high school started, all me and Garrett talked about was building it. We daydreamed of floating down the Connecticut River, which started somewhere up in Canada and carried on past - somewhere farther than either of us could imagine. Instead of hanging around Bellows Falls we'd ride the river south to Brattleboro, meet up with Cindy and Hannah, whoever else happened to be around. Or maybe we'd cross to the banks of New Hampshire and see what they were about over there. Instead of Huck and Jim, these guys in a book Mister Calloway made us read, it'd be Rory and Garrett. I'm not much of a reader but parts of that book stuck. Those guys had set out down another river, named after the state of Mississippi, and didn't plan on coming back. Both of 'e...