dreamszilla

Fatima finds herself in a glamorous but unsuited marriage, but her life takes a fateful turn when she makes an unlikely connection in her favourite restaurant. Image generated with OpenAI In the city of Grover there is a restaurant called Penceys . It is on Patmos Street and has been there for as long as anyone in the Tuppertown area can remember. It is a small affair, twelve tables covered in cloths of red and white check, and a menu that changes only rarely. The same family has owned the place for sixty or so years. Fatima Pawelski first went there with her husband and his artistically inclined pals. There were a few of them around, the would-be artists and writers and actors, bohemian types who cut a dash in the small working-class district. Whether they had any ability or not, she didn't know. It seemed to her that what they did was so strange that there was nothing to judge it against and therefore couldn't be judged. She was not born into that world. Her f...

Coss Bergman returns from military service to find his deadbeat mother has come into a huge amount of money somehow, and he determines to investigate. Image generated with OpenAI The taxicab rolled down the dirt road leading through the trailer park. The driver looked out through the windows, then into the backseat. "You see it, yet?" The passenger, a youngish soldier in a beret, looked out his own window and shook his head. "No." He kept staring and the trailers kept passing by. Singlewides and doublewides, some relatively new and retaining their color, others weatherbeaten. It was early spring and the sunshine kept things from getting too bleak. That, and the kids running around on foot or riding their bikes. "There!" The soldier pointed and the cab driver stopped. "Wait here." The soldier got out, stood before an empty space between two trailers, where an area of sunken red clay still held the form of his old childhood home...

A woman wakes from an induced dream and feels as if she has forgotten an entire lifetime. Image generated with OpenAI What they do is sit me in a folding chair in a white-walled room with a single fluorescent bulb on the ceiling. Two techs in white (one short and female, one skinny and male) sit there and tell me this is real, that I was never a world-famous concert pianist, never married and never mourned my husband, and never never never had a daughter. As such, the skinny one says, it is impossible for her to be in any danger. Is she in danger? I ask. Ma'am - But I don't let him finish. If she's all right, I say, I'd like to see her. Ma'am, the skinny one repeats. You can't see her. She isn't real. Are you the police? No, the short one says. We've been through this before. We are experimental psychologists with the University of —, the skinny one says, and you have spent the last eight minutes immersed in a holistic simula...