dreamszilla

A psychologist in a mental asylum laments the lack of progress in his most confounding patient, Corny Bird. Photo by Ron Lach, from Pexels The people in this place both confuse and disgust me. Do you know what they call me here? Never will there come a day where I do not baffle myself for not spontaneously quitting this establishment. The people here are all insane. For example - yesterday, Corny Bird (I absolutely refuse to believe that's his name, but the records indicate it so, and he has never admitted to anything else so long as he has been my patient) vomited on himself after becoming sick with guilt, and reportedly smeared bile on my office door. It looked more like urine, though. His room is very close to my office. On the late nights, I can hear him through the wall. Corny Bird gives me this tingly feeling of discomfort - déjà vu. I'm quite certain that him and I have met in many lives before. He doesn't help with this because sometimes, he tells me we are one and...

In a small town on the eastern coast of England, singer-magician Gareth Fisher discovers his biggest fan is a genuine legend, and then everything changes. Image generated with OpenAI During their third summer at the Cromer Pier Theatre, Cassandra Burns informed Gareth Fisher that she would no longer let him to cut her into pieces and put her back together again. "It's banal. The sawing a girl in half trick? Come on." She swept her long black hair up into a smooth bun. "Anyway, I'm a singer, not a magician's assistant." They had both been hired for their singing, straight out of secondary school. But it was all-hands on deck at the Cromer Pavilion, and Gareth wasn't above being helpful. Showing willing. So after the Great Lorenzo retired, he'd brushed up his old birthday-party act. Cassandra had been asked to stand in as his assistant, donning a sequinned body suit and crawling into his wooden box. She considered it undignified. "Fine,...

Sam has been working too much, and suffers an unsettling delusion. Image generated with OpenAI One night, as he worked late in the office, Sam was astonished to see the shadow of lettering embedded in the bony knob of his right elbow. As he bent his arm toward the men's room mirror, he could make out the word. Androm, it said, and as he brought his face closer, he could see the stylized, cursive "A." It looked like a corporate logo, as if designed by a creative agency. Like BB&D, the agency he worked for. He pulled on his arm but could not twist it enough to see. The lettering was in his blind spot; he could only see it in the mirror. But, in his thirty-five years of life, he had surely seen his elbow in the mirror many thousands of times and never noticed this feature. Nor had any friend, lover or family member ever pointed it out to him. He had come to the men's room to relieve the full bladder that had been tormenting him for the past hour, distracting him from...