To bite tearingly into consequence. He was a creature. And he was probably late for work.

Screw you . I’m too busy for this and the Fictionwocky already ran rampant over both my mind and my feed. So I am jumping on a day late but who cares? But the idea literally has legs and I feel compelled to run alongside it now, having seen so many great entries; special mention to , and .

Leg 1 – The AI Leg: Create a piece of fiction of AI-generated text (yes, on any topic, any model, any LLM)1. Then, process it with a cut-up tool. Then fix that mess so that it acquires minimal (or satisfying for you) meaning, or story. So, feed any prompt to an AI, cut it up randomly (as in Burroughs’s cut-up technique), and then “make it make sense” as a short story. You can change, add or remove words at will. The fun is in taming the randomness just enough to make you happy! This is the ultimate William S. Burroughs exercise.

Here is what my first leg stood in.

He awoke deeply to tearing leather. What happened? A single, crisp bulk realised himself.

The bare Jabberwock washed heavy in a sulphur room. He had a burble, previously safe from consequence. Now, literal literature opened, peeling out of the margins. He blinked at a horrifying, nonsense existence.

Flesh replacing monster. Breath wet against windowpanes. His heavy eyes found a sudden, transformed reality. Unfamiliar claws of imagination, no longer a poetic conceit, truly call for a vorpal sword. The tulgey wood: gone. A scaly feeling groaned in the cheap, floral mattress.

Just oppressively real.

It replaced the safe page with a terrible smell, a sickening rip of actual, sinking dread. He attempted to stretch monstrous appendages against his leathery spine. Not a figment. He stared by the bare lightbulb; the ticking clock burning.

What was this massive mass? To bite tearingly into consequence. He was a creature. And he was probably late for work.

For the LLM prompt I had it mix Jabberwocky with Kafka. I quite like what it created. I liked your illustrations.

|

Part of the Fictionwocky 31-day challenge. Hop on.

Her boyfriend used to make jokes if he found a bit of stubble under her arms. He would say;

“You could strike a match off that” and then he would laugh. He had shaved only rarely, he was usually hairy and spiky and unkempt. He was very handsome. Very successful.

“Fuck it,” thinks Ellie. She gathers all her things like razors, mirrors, nail clippers. She gathers them all and throws them in the bin. She stops even taking a bath. She lets her hair grow tangled and wild. She doesn’t cut her fingernails. She’s still on time for work, but the boss thinks she’s slacking off. He has a word with her. She doesn’t answer back, she just takes what he has to say and says she is going to try harder. She doesn’t buy any toothpaste. She stops flossing. She loses her job. She loses her house.

“All because of toothpaste!” she thinks.

She’s walking around the park with nothing to do, talking about toothpaste to herself. Talking about hair mousse and moisturiser, shampoo and tweezers, floss and wax. All that stuff is bad for the environment. All that stuff is unnatural. Perfume and antiperspirant. The contraceptive pill. Tampons. Easy glide shaving foam. Manicure sets. Talcum powder. Mascara. Lip gloss.

“It’s all unnatural. It hides your real self.” She says this to the people who are kind to her. They seem to listen. They gently lead her away.

Justificwtfn

Okay, I think you’re going to like this one.

I was checking the document properties for this bit of microfiction, which I never actually published online. Well, it was self-published in a sense. I created a little zine called Entropy, and this was the title piece. It was part of a small run of about a hundred copies that I put together for a live performance I gave in Edinburgh for the Strange Attractor event, hosted by Tim Vincent-Smith.

Tim is actually a character in one of my other stories, and an old mate. We got back in touch recently, which was brilliant. He doesn’t have a mobile phone, so the chances of him reading this are slim to none, but he is currently busy smashing pianos, building amazing structures, and playing in a band called Pianodrome, so good luck to him on that.

Anyway, the thing I found interesting is that the file metadata says the story was created in December 2011. That’s a significant date for me because I know for a fact my wife and I were trying for a baby. When guys say “we are trying to get pregnant”, it’s just a thing males say to try and sound like they’re sharing in the incredible effort it takes to incubate another human being. Which, obviously, I couldn’t do. All I could do was try to be empathetic. Because we wanted a child but didn’t know if we’d have a boy or a girl, I was curious about what life would be like if I had a daughter. This story was me trying to map out that experience.

Especially living in Japan. I had just arrived here in 2011, and it’s a place where hygiene and cleanliness are constantly brought up. It’s not an easy country to stay clean in, either. In the summer, you literally sweat your balls off. You’re constantly scratching tiger mosquito bites, and you’re surrounded by smog, pollution, and the smoke from recycling facilities just burning rubbish. And yet, the expectation to remain pristine is immense.

I started noticing all the adverts for cosmetics. Sure, men wear them too now—we use deodorant and do a bit of manscaping—but it is nowhere near the crushing amount of effort society seems to expect from women.

What brought this memory back recently was a direct message from my best mate on Substack, Moa (you know who you are). She had shared a selfie, and some bloke had spotted a bit of stubble under her arm and tried to shame her for it. That immediately dragged my mind back to this piece I wrote fifteen years ago.

Look, I’m a middle-aged man. I don’t pluck my eyebrows, though I do have to clip my nostril hair more often than I’d like. But I’m not going to lose my job over a bit of BO. Maybe this whole bit of microfiction is a massive exaggeration. To be honest, I just don’t know.

So I’d really appreciate some comments. Tell me if I’ve exaggerated this for literary effect, or if it actually rings true for you. And if all I did was piss you off, then fuck off and go buy some shampoo.

Hope you liked the story. Thanks for reading.

because you're worth it

originally published at https://stephenprime.com/entropy-entropy-microfiction/

Whenever I see a turtle in the wild it, reminds me that I am in a foreign place. Living here for five years I’ve become acculturated to certain things. The busy trains, the neon lights, none of that really seems strange anymore. But when I ride my bike past the big pond in the park, and I see a turtle in there swimming along, or the ripple as one quickly sinks its head back beneath the water, then I feel like I’m still in a strange, exotic country. In Japan, there is an old superstition attached to turtles, which stems from a story called Urashima Taro, in which a fisherman saves a turtle from being tortured by a gang of local children. The fisherman is rewarded with a visit to the Dragon-king’s palace under the sea. He spends three days there and when he goes back home he discovers that everyone he ever knew is gone. Nobody knows him, but he finds that he has become a legend, somebody who disappeared three hundred years ago. Eventually his age catches up with him and his body turns to dust. I kind of feel like that whenever I go back the village where I grew up.

Despite the unfortunate fate of Urashima Taro, it is considered lucky to rescue a turtle. I’d saved one once from a crow. Cities in England are full of mangy pigeons, but here in Tokyo they have these great big Asian jungle crows that are bigger than ravens. They are smart, ruthless, and bear grudges. You have to put nets over your rubbish on collection days, or else they will cut through the bags with their blade-like beaks and rip out any meat remnants, scattering the rubbish in the strong winds that blow up and down the narrow streets. Walking my dog in the park one day, I saw this great big crow, one of the Hashibuto-garasu with the ugly, curved beaks like a scimitar. It had this thing in front of it which it was pecking ruthlessly. At first I thought it was just a dropped handbag or something. Then I saw it was a fully-grown turtle. I never knew crows would eat turtles. I shooed the crow away, which took more guts than you’d think, since the jungle crow has a wingspan of 60 centimetres and is about the size of a sparrow-hawk. Anyway, I picked up the turtle and I saw a little blood but I couldn’t be sure if the thing was alive or dead. I put it in the water of the big pond, on a little ledge at the side just in case it really was dead. When I came back for the evening dog walk, there was no sign of the turtle. It must have been OK, I’m happy to report. I have also rescued about two or three really little ones. Turtles lay their eggs on land, and then the babies hatch and get massacred as they try to find the water again. Despite their armour, turtles are surprisingly fragile and low on the food chain. Each time I pick up one the babies and carry them over to the water, I feel lucky. I know I am doing the right thing. Not many chances you get as a human to interfere with nature and yet feel you are doing the right thing. It’s a good feeling, and it connects me to this strange land where I have come to make my home.

But then, there was this other time when it wasn’t nearly as simple as that. That was the time I saw the Oni.

I was coming back from drinks after work. It was late, maybe almost midnight. Dark in the park, and raining. I was cycling with one of those clear plastic umbrellas you seem only to be able to get in Asia. Just as I was crossing the bridge across the park to the other side where I live, I saw this man. I say he was a man, but really he was more like a hobgoblin. He had a face the shape of a crescent moon, pointy at both ends and pockmarked features in-between. His arms were very long, and his legs seemed very short. But the thing that really made him seem like a hobgoblin was just the aura of wrongness about him—the way his actions seemed to be beyond the comprehension of ordinary logic. The man was Oni for sure. He had a net with him on the end of a long bamboo cane, like the ones children use on nature field-trips. His bike was parked nearby, and it was loaded with all sorts of paraphernalia for capturing and imprisoning things. He was already behind the fence, the official-seeming barrier that tried to keep nature safe. He was sticking his net into the dark black water with vicious certainty and cruel determination. He seemed to know exactly where the thing he was looking for was. I slowed my bike to look at him, something primordially wrong about the whole thing. Perhaps I’d sensed that even before I turned the corner. Why was he there at that time? I can’t be sure, because I don’t think I actually saw him fish a turtle out of the water. But I knew that’s what he was after. Now, this particular spot is a narrow path through the park that connects two wards and two prefectures. I take this path every time I go to work on the way to the nearest station. We walk our dog there in the big park, and when I am with Oliver, we often stop to look at this one turtle who seems to live in this very small patch of water which is a self-contained part of the reservoir that gives the nearby area its name. This turtle is special because we’ve seen her so many times. She is very very shy, even for a turtle. As soon as we stop to look at her, she pops her head away, but because it’s such a small enclave and because we go past so often, we’ve seen this turtle many times and Oliver and I like to look for her. And I knew that this Oni was after her. I could feel it. That was the aura of wrongness that I felt in that dark moment. This was our turtle, and this goblin-man was after her. The turtle’s fear was almost as palpable as the evil void of empathy that this Oni used to fish with. Although I didn’t see him get her, I knew she was in danger. But I hoped that she would get away. It was much too dark to really see, and the turtle could just swim off to the main reservoir, or dive deep and hide away. It seemed unlikely that the Oni could catch this shy and wary turtle. I willed her to escape, but I still felt afraid for her.

Although I had a fair bit of drink in me, I wasn’t nearly brave enough to actually challenge the Oni. I did slow my bike down and looked at him hard, but I had to keep going and get home. I told Kay about him. She believes in Oni, but this was the first time either of us had ever seen one.

I knew that this was her—our shy little turtle from the enclave. The Oni must have got her, and this must be the Oni’s house.

I’m not sure how long after that, but maybe a couple of weeks later, Oliver and I were on the way to the nearby supermarket, which is hilariously called Life. We went past this house that is on the way, a house we thought looks nice and interesting because it’s kind of a bungalow with a nice little patio and usually toys in the little speck of garden that it has. We think it’s grandparents who live there, as the toys don’t move around very often. Oliver, riding on the seat at the front of the bike, was using his sharp eyes to notice things and point them out to me. He’s very observant, but I’d already seen it. A turtle. It was in a rectangular glass aquarium, plenty big enough for small fish but agonisingly small for a turtle. It was just on the walkway to the house, with a lid on. There was a tiny bit of stale green water in the tank, no rocks or other features. A turtle in a glass prison—an agonising position near the road where cars go past night and day. Nowhere to hide. And I knew without knowing how, I knew that this was her—our shy little turtle from the enclave. The Oni must have got her, and this must be the Oni’s house. How wrong we were, to think that it might be nice people living in this house. Grandkids or no, that turtle should not be in that tank. I said so to Oliver and he agreed. We both felt sorry for the turtle, we both wanted to help it. We thought it should be back in the park, in the wild. What a cruel place to keep a turtle. Not even a rock to sit on. Having to keep its head up out of the water. How could it sleep? Without enough water to be fully submerged, it would have to sleep with its neck out of the water, cars and motorbikes zooming past all night. Nowhere to hide, nowhere to go, nothing to do. Oliver and I talked about it all the way to the supermarket and back. I told Kay, and said I knew it was the Oni who had caught our shy turtle friend. I wanted to rescue the turtle. Kay was adamant. I was not to go near the turtle, not to set it free. It was now a pet. Maybe it had always been a pet. How did I know it was the same turtle?

Maybe, instead of going there at night to rescue the turtle, maybe I could go there with Oliver and we could ask them to release her. Also no. Kay thought that it was none of our business. We had just moved to the area. We didn’t want to make any trouble. It was bad enough that someone was ringing our doorbell and running away before we could answer. As a foreigner here, I stood out enough already. Kay was very unnerved at the idea that I would do anything that could get me in trouble.

So I tried another approach. I posted on Facebook, hoping that my Japanese friends might know something about the law regarding cruelty to animals. Perhaps there was something like the RSPCA which I could tell about the turtle’s plight. One of my students, Riku, checked and found nothing in Japanese law that could help the poor turtle. It turns out that you can legally take a turtle from the wild and keep it in a glass prison. Furthermore, another student, named Emi, begged me to leave the turtle alone. Like Kay, she thought it might even be a family pet. Emi asked if the turtle had a red spot on its neck. I said yes and she told me that the red-eared slider turtle is not native to Japan. Emi said it was an invader from China, but actually the red slider comes from Mississippi in the US. There was even an article in the Japan Times, describing the stress these alien species are putting on the ecosystem. They now vastly outnumber the endemic population of ishigame pond turtles eight to one. The slider is something like the grey squirrel in England, classed as an invasive species and doing harm to the local ecosystem, replacing the native species and upsetting the natural balance.

Who is to blame for all of this? Why do red sliders and grey squirrels invade our countries? Of course, we humans are to blame. In the 1970s, red sliders were sold as pets or given away as prizes at the local matsuri festivals. They were a popular pet, but when they outgrew their lodgings people just chucked them in the nearby ponds. Grey squirrels too, were imported to the UK in the 1870s as ‘fashionable additions to estates’ according to one source. It sickens me that we describe these animals as threats, invaders, and claim they are the ones damaging the ecosystem, as if they have a personal agency beyond their own will to survive. The onus is on us, as people. Calling them invaders is how we later justify culls and other measures to ‘restore nature’.

Releasing this turtle or keeping it as a pet? It’s ethical and unethical at the same time. It’s a dilemma of choice and morality. Its uninethical. Its antidisuninethcal. And, all the while, this poor turtle is suffering in a glass tank of water by the side of a road, occasionally yanked out and fed lettuce by the grandkids. Probably, the Oni feels they are helping the environment by taking this creature out of its home and keeping it away from its unnatural-natural habitat.

I doubted that reasoning would work. Technically, me taking the turtle and releasing it could be seen as theft. If my employer heard I’d had trouble with the police, that could be very bad for me and my contract might not be renewed. The mortgage. Oliver and Kay. Over a turtle.

I’d have to go there at night, dressed in black. No dog with me, although I often take her on night walks. She’s too distinctive, too blonde. I’d go alone. Probably, I’d be more than a little drunk too. It would have to be a night when I’d already been out drinking. When I was coming back late. I’d have to remember to pack a balaclava. My foreign face would be a dead giveaway. In order not to look too strange, it’d need to be cold, too. Winter time. But before the frost and freezes set in. I’d need to wear the right shoes. I need to have a getaway planned. But I’d need to take her back to the enclave or she might not be in the right place, she might be in someone else’s territory, or a place where she couldn’t find her way. That path is often quite busy, and I must not be seen by anybody. For a few weeks after too, I’d be worried that the police would be looking for me. It would be several months of anxiety until I’d know for sure I’d got away with it. I could never tell Kay, or Oliver. Never tell anyone that I stole a pet turtle out of someone’s garden. I had no real evidence other than a feeling that this turtle was the shy little turtle Oliver and I used to stop and say hello to. The one I saw, the one I felt, trying to escape the Oni man’s net.

Several weeks passed. Perhaps even a month or more. But I kept thinking of that turtle. Then one night I was going out with friends. I knew I would be back late, and I decided tonight was the night. On the way home, I bought a little bottle of whiskey to help me find the courage to steal someone’s pet. A neighbour’s pet. The grandchildren might even have named this turtle by now. But its conditions had not changed. Its life was not a decent life to live. No animal should be kept in a glass tank of water by the side of the road. Red sliders can live for 30 years. It had been almost half a year now, since I’d seen the Oni and I’d never seen our shy turtle friend in the water since then. I felt that this was something for me to do. I was the one who this had fallen to. I had to get that little turtle out of there.

So I did. Drunk as I was, everything went to plan. It was raining and very cold. A black wax jacket, a wax hat and a snood to cover my face. My eyes still a giveaway, I would have to make sure nobody saw me. Very few foreigners live around here, even though it’s so close to Tokyo. I parked up my bike around the corner. Went and grabbed the turtle. It was surprisingly big. Heavy. Cold and slippery, almost muddy even. The shells actually carry many germs so you are supposed to wash your hands after you touch them. I had gloves on and they got wet. I ran with the turtle and put her gently in the bike basket. Not an ideal place for her, at the moment even less comfortable than the tank. Plus, she’d be scared. Scared as hell. More scared than me. There was someone near the road, but they only saw me near there. They didn’t see me grab the turtle. On the bike, I sped to the enclave, less than one-minute cycle away. Nobody around. Onto the path, off the bike. Over the fence and down towards the water, turtle under my arm again now. I slipped and fell, muddy knees. I was already soaked through from the rain. The turtle slid into the water. She disappeared straight away. It was so dark I could hardly see anything. Or was it bright? I remember a street light shining on me as I looked to my right and saw a person going past on their bike. They’d seen me, seen me near the water. They must be wondering what I was doing, but did they see me release the turtle? Hopefully not. I got on the bike and powered off, opposite direction to my house. I cycled around the park, singing, rejoicing at the freedom of the turtle, taking swigs of whiskey and seeing the deep dark water from the turtle’s own point of view as she slid back away into freedom. I felt bad for the grandchildren. I felt sorry for the people, cruel as they are, who would wake up the next day and wonder where their turtle had gone. But this whole act was a protest. A protest for animal rights. A protest against humans taking things out of the wild. A protest against us having introduced this species in the first place too. Now we’ve done it, we have to live with it. Our actions have consequences.

A pounding headache the next day, I said nothing about the turtle to anybody. I actually got quite ill. Influenza or something, perhaps from being out in the rain, maybe germs from the turtle’s shell got in my mouth as I was swigging from the whiskey. Because I was also hungover, there was no sympathy from Kay. I felt awful, and the waiting part of the plan began. I saw in my mind the family as they called the police to report a stolen turtle. Would they send an officer for such a trivial thing? Surely not, but then the crime rate is very low here. Perhaps a stolen turtle is a crime—something they would investigate. I tried not to look when we went past the house and saw the empty tank. Then the tank was taken away.

Weeks went by and I slowly relaxed. And then, one day, I realised I’d gotten away with it. But not really. What if I see another turtle in a tank like that? What about all the turtles out there, in tanks, in cages? There is a Chinese supermarket in Ueno that sells live turtles. They are sold to be eaten. There were hundreds last time I was there, I felt awful. What about other animals too? How many invasive species are there in countries around the world? How many ecological disasters have we caused by simply releasing pets that got too big? This event, this story, is as meaningless to the ecosystem as one turtle is to that great big reservoir. But for me, and for that one red-eared slider, that was a victory. After telling this story, someone called me a ‘superhero’. It made me feel like Urashima Taro. Although I didn’t get to go to the dragon kingdom, I feel lucky and I feel whole every time I see a turtle in the pond now. When Oliver is old enough to keep secrets, maybe I’ll tell him about it too.

This story was originally published in Dark Mountain on 11th June 2018.

Want to hear more about what actually happened? Want to know something about ecolinguistics? You gotta pay for that.

"Thus do I ever make my fool my purse"

Read more

Act I: Mum

The beach was the color of wet ash, empty except for the gulls. The air tasted like rusted pipe and wet cloth. He wasn’t out here trying to heal, he just felt compelled to sit near entropy. He was halfway between the jetty and a rotting lifeguard stand when he saw the bottle. A long, green bottle. Murky glass, like old 7-Up. Corked. Paper inside, curled like a dead spider.

He thought:

ok, based on shape & vibe alone this is either a potion or a haunted treasure map. if it’s a love letter i will consume it. if it’s poison i will also consume it. either way. i Win.

He squatted, stared at it a moment. Looked around. The bottle was heavier than expected. Something swirled inside—gray, granular, soft. A note, curled and water-blurred, pressed against the inner glass. He pried the cork loose with his keys. The smell was dry. Bitter. Like fireplace dust mixed with a hint of cinnamon. Probably psychosomatic. The note was handwritten in blue ink, the letters ballooned and lopsided.

The note read:

“This is my mum. She’s travelling the world. Please throw her back. Ellie. Whitby, UK”

He stared at that word: mum. Rolled it around in his skull like a marble. Then he started laughing. Short and stupid. One of those barks that comes up uninvited.

alright. some kind of beach grief art. not sure if it’s a prank. or a eulogy. what’s the plan here? am i supposed to chuck her into the ocean like a waterlogged grenade of sentiment? am i part of the ceremony now?

He carefully returned the note to the bottle and put the cork back in, then tucked the bottle under his arm and said aloud:

“Well... guess I’m your travel agent now, Ma. You’re in good hands.”

Back home, he placed the bottle there like an awkward award next to a stack of unpaid bills and an anime figurine with one broken arm. He opened a tallboy of malt liquor. He stared at her.

welcome to your new room. it’s small but full of character. you are safe here unless i do something monumentally stupid. like what i’m about to do in 5 seconds.

He unscrewed the cork. Tipped a bit of her out onto a napkin. Sniffed. Earthy. Musty. Notes of barbecue. Not terrible. He sprinkled her in rolling paper with some other stuff and lit it like a normal joint. He took one drag and immediately coughed so hard his respiratory system felt like it had been in an abusive relationship with a cheese grater.

“Jesus Christ, Ma.”

He talked to her while microwaving frozen burritos. He named her Ashley. Played music for her—mostly old Soul Coughing tracks and one Mahler symphony he found on YouTube titled “Best of Sad Classical.” When he shit, he brought her into the bathroom with him, set the bottle on the sink and said,

“Sorry in advance.”

He looked at her, slumped slightly now on the table.

“You ever been to Denny’s?”

He ordered coffee and over-medium eggs. Slipped a pinch of her into the pepper shaker while the waitress was busy swatting away weak harassment. Captioned it in his head: “Ma tastes good on eggs.” Giggled to himself. He was the only one laughing.

this is fine. this is part of the healing process. i am not insane. i am just doing The Work that no one else has the courage to do. she is probably proud. if not. that’s on her. i’m not gonna internalize that.

He sprinkled some into the cat litter box. Watched his cat paw at the remains of a stranger’s mother before squatting and shitting on them.

“Still better than Florida, I bet.”

Act II: The Message

The bottle sat on the desk next to a burnt-out Glade plug-in and a stack of Final Notice envelopes. He talked to her anyway. Out of habit. Out of guilt. Maybe out of love. He wasn’t ready to unpack that.

“You okay in there, Ashley?”

Nothing.

“I can microwave you. Just for, like, a second. Wake the particles up.”

Still nothing.

He sat on the floor, legs splayed, chewing a baby aspirin for no reason. The ash had gotten under his fingernails. Into his lungs. He hadn’t showered since the Denny’s incident. He’d begun wondering what she looked like. Not out of respect. Just morbid curiosity.

“You got cheekbones? Were you a fun mom or a ‘church mom’?”

He opened Google. Just typed the note in, verbatim: This is my mum. She’s traveling the world. Please throw her back. Ellie. Whitby, UK

He sat up. Phone battery at 9%. Perfect.

BAM.

There it was.

Top result: British News Syndicate. Headline: “Ashes Sent to Sea to Travel the World: Daughter’s Emotional Tribute Goes Viral”

NEW YORK POST

PEOPLE

HOLA

All these big news stories had jumped on the bottled cremains bandwagon. It went back to a Reddit post with over 100k upvotes and a cloying amount of positivity and heartfelt grief tourism.

she’s got BBC-level backstory.
i’ve been seasoning food with a trending eulogy.

He clicked deeper into the news archive. Local paper. Faded banner.
“Northport Mother’s Ashes Found Again After Sea Tribute Goes Viral.”

The article started with the familiar stuff—

“A bottle containing the ashes of local mother Suzy Capper washed ashore near Scarborough Harbour for a second time, months after her daughter launched it from the Yorkshire Coast.”

But then it changed. It got personal. She had four kids. Lost her legs during complications with her youngest. Spent her final years in a wheelchair. Husband split. She’d never been abroad. Never even flown. But she kept a scrapbook of destinations she’d cut out of magazines. Joked with the kids about seeing the pyramids “in the next life.” She died in her mid-40s. Daughter’s quote, etc.

He read some of the comments:

“Wholesome AF. She’s probably watching over you.”

you know what happens when you put cremains in the ocean?
they get eaten by a fish who gets eaten by another fish who ends up in a can labeled “chunk light tuna” at a gas station in Kentucky.

He looked up at the sodden sky outside his apartment, which could just have easily been the sea; gray and disinterested. The kind of colorless entity that didn’t give a single soggy fuck about your “emotional journey.”

and yet here we are.
me, the unwilling protagonist of someone else’s grief cosplay.
carrying a goddamn bottle of mom-dust that’s probably already been in three reels set to Sigur Rós.

He sighed. He wrote the daughter.

Subject: “URGENT (re: your MOM)”
hi.

i have come into possession of your mother.
it was not on purpose. i was not out “shopping for a mom.” i found her in the ocean.

for legal purposes, i did NOT ingest her. at least not entirely. and even if i did, that’s between me and her. in my defense, she looked smokable.

she has traveled. yes. Denny’s. the garbage zone behind Arby’s. i made a short film called “Mother Enters Litter Box”.

she whispered to me last night. said “the ocean has no memory.” i whispered back “neither does the state of Iowa.” it felt like a good exchange.

anyway just letting you know she’s safe.
sorry if this upsets anyone but technically you’re the one who started it by putting her in the sea.

Next morning: message gone. Blocked. Vaporized. He posted a screenshot with the caption:

“no one wants to hear about real shit anymore”

0 likes. 1 reply:

“Seek help.”

Act III: Guilt

He kept thinking about the article. He’d seen the photo now. He’d seen her eyes, heard her story. She’d been a mother of four with no legs.

okay. ok. this is...
no this is fine.
i just need to process the fact that the BBC has weighed in on the thing i vaped.
this woman’s journey is a SEO-compatible Disney+ grief quest and i am the cigarette burn on the film reel.

He closed the laptop. He sat with it. And then he whispered to the bottle:

“You made it. You went viral. Are you happy now?”

He kept scrolling and scrolling down that original Reddit post. So many comments to read:

“There would seem to be a risk - see bottle, pick up, oh a note, how cool, open bottle, turn up side down, shake bottle, get note, unroll, read, look down at beach… bugger.”

“lol I was thinking the same thing!”

“vigorously shakes the Mum off my hands”

He stared at that last one for a long time. It began to vibrate in his skull like a cursed mantra. He kept scrolling. A new commenter chimed in. And the replies were just soothing syrup:

“That’s very wholesome.”

“So sorry for your loss.”

“It helps to see the world through her eyes sometimes.”

He looked at his reflection in the dark screen of his laptop.

“Does anyone see through my eyes?”

Silence. The bottle sat on the desk like an old battery, drained of meaning but still toxic. He closed the laptop.

The next morning, a seagull was staring at him through the bathroom window. He panicked, slipping on his own sock. That’s when he snapped. Walked to the back alley behind Carl’s Jr. Held the bottle one last time.

“You sure?”

She didn’t answer.

“Fine.”

He dropped her in the dumpster. It made a soft clink. Like the world saying “meh.”

The regret came on slow but strong. A few days later found him clawing through the trash, muttering her name, repeating it again and again:

“RIP Ashley, RIP Ashley”

But the truck had come. The truck had gone. The deed was done, the guilt was real.

And so began his pilgrimage to the landfill. To find her. To apologize.

Act IV: Garbage Messiah

The front gate guard asked him,

“You dumpin’ or pickin’?”

He stared long into the man’s mirrored sunglasses and whispered:

“I’m here to apologize to a woman I disrespected in a culinary setting.”

They let him in anyway. America.

It smelled like every bad decision he’d ever made. Wet plastic. Rot-milk. Axe body spray from 2009. Something illegal and herbal. He wandered. Looking for the bottle. Looking for absolution. Instead, he found Duane.

Duane wore orange Crocs, a fluorescent vest, and the look of a man who had seen the inside of a mummified raccoon more than once that day already.

“You with the city?” Duane asked.

He shrugged.

“I’m with the BBC and People magazine.”

Duane blinked.

“You look like shit.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I think I got haunted by a mom I smoked.”

Duane nodded. Slowly. Like he’d seen at least five of that kind of guy this week.

He started cleaning up. But also—he started constructing a shrine. He whispered to it. Duane never asked. He started showing up every day. Duane eventually handed him a vest.

“You touch a worn-out Fleshlight, it’s on you.”

Sometimes they’d eat lunch together. Sitting on lawn chairs in the shade of a collapsed trampoline. Duane handed him a pork rind once and said:

“My wife left me for a guy who sells fake autographs on Etsy. That was in ’08. Now I just pick up other people’s garbage and keep my eyes out for treasure.” Duane had a load of hard-drives he’d collected since his wife left, each a dull, heavy rectangle of forgotten data, its own genesis block. He’d drilled holes to fashion them into masculine jewellery.

Our guy nodded, chewing slowly.

“I think I accidentally became a high priest of grief.”

Duane took a sip of warm Gatorade.

“Better than sales.”

Why Did I Write That?

You may remember the viral Reddit post that this is based on. Fear not, I don’t live in the US and I didn’t find any bottle... if I did I would just throw it back. But I couldn’t help conjuring an image of “our guy” from the story, and what would happen if someone like that found the ashes. I based the character and his dialogue on Dril from Weird Twitter (remember him, he was Mozart to my Salieri and I wrote about him in a book. Yeah, i love dril).

Anyway, I would hate it if the person whose mum was real whose post went viral did read this story and got offended. It’s NOT a satire about her. It’s a satire about the way that post went viral, the Grief Tourism that internet trolls hate so much it makes them create fake RIP pages. Personally an insincere post about ‘sorry for your loss’ to a stranger is far less egregious than making a fake memorial page to troll families of a teenage suicide. Anything that makes this world a slightly nicer place is welcome in our current online maelstrom of indifference and division. My story is here to redress that balance though. I didn’t want to write the story it just came to me, like a message in a bottle.

Story first inflicted upon the world at stephenprime.com 

The next day, Oliver was eating his breakfast and he noticed that he couldn’t taste the egg which was on his toast. He tasted the toast, but not the egg. The egg was just a texture. The egg white one texture and the runny yoke another, but they tasted of nothing. He drank his coffee. It didn’t taste of water, but it didn’t taste of coffee either. It tasted of nothing. He poured it down the drain and went up to his study to work.

For lunch he had noodles, which never taste much anyway.

For dinner, he made a stew. It had onions, carrots, beef, tomatoes all blended together. As he was eating the stew, he realised that he mustn’t have used enough salt. The stew tasted of nothing. He added more salt and pepper. It still tasted of nothing. He added a spoon of mustard. Still nothing. He ate a teaspoon of mustard. It had texture, but no taste. It tasted of nothing and he didn’t even have watering eyes. He poured himself a big whiskey. He kept a good bottle of 15 year old scotch in the house. It tasted good. He relaxed.

The next day, nothing he ate or drank tasted of anything at all. In the absence of taste, the texture was all he had to focus on. The textures of the foods seemed unpleasant to him, alien. Egg was worst of all, like thin slippery rubber. Noodles were like guts or something like that. Rice was like polystyrene. Because he focused on the texture too much, he chewed the food too much, and it became mushy in the back of his throat. It stuck in his throat as he swallowed it, and he thought he would be sick every time he swallowed something. He started eating soup.

In the fruit bowl, the clementines he had bought a few days ago were probably starting to go off. One of them looked grey. He threw them all away. Then he looked in his kitchen for a packet of soup. He had an orange spatula that he used to stir the soup. But, looking at it today it seemed to have gone grey. Oliver turned the lights on. I’m sure this was orange, he thought. He opened the fridge and took out the orange juice. The carton was grey. He poured some out. It was grey.

Within just a few more days, Oliver was completely colour blind. All he saw was grey and black and white. He had lost all his sense of taste and smell. All he could taste were textures as he moved his moth and tongue around them, chewing them up into mush in the back of his throat and making him feel sick. He went to see the doctor. The doctor felt very sorry for him, but could do nothing to help him.

After visiting the doctor, Oliver stepped out onto the street. It was raining, but the sun was still shining. There was a rainbow above the city, he could see the rainbow. He could see all the colours of the rainbow. He set off, looking for a way to climb onto it.

Evan is watching porn while his wife is at the gynaecologist. He knows there is something inherently wrong or ironic. Or hilarious. Or just generally bad. He knows there is something off about this action for sure.

Read more

I am a “Legal Aid Liaison,” which is a fancy way of saying I am a bureaucrat who deals in human debris. My office is located in an urban sprawl so grey and characterless it feels like a default setting for a city in some kind of tragic simulator game, except the people who come to my door are real. They are all too real. I deal with those who have had lives significantly harder than mine, and I feel a compulsion to act, to do something other than just sit and witness. I was born with certain privileges, and this job is my way of paying a tax on a soul I’m not even sure I will ever finish the down payments for. I am a professional witness, collecting these horrors because my own life is a void of frictionless privilege; I need the grit of their reality to feel like I’m not just an NPC in a suit.

The man sitting across from me was a special case. It was hard to look at him without your own body physically recoiling, a sympathetic ache in your own joints and skin. He sat in a chair that was held together by duct tape, his body a map of how a life can chew a person up and spit them out.

He was missing an arm. It wasn’t a clean, surgical stump. It was a jagged, scarred-over memory of a debt collection. He told me it happened in a squat where the furniture was mostly milk crates and mattresses that had long ago lost their spring. He had owed money to people who didn’t believe in payment plans. They used an angle grinder. He told me this with a voice that enabled you to hear the actual mechanics of his speech—a result of years of huffing toluene that had degreased the mucosal lining of his throat, leaving his larynx a scarred, rigid tube of gristle.

He’d been on a “three-day bender” of crack and heroin when the debt collectors came. He was in a state of chemically induced trance where the body is present but the pilot has left the cockpit. Because of the opiates, he could barely even scream when the blade hit the bone. He just felt a distant, high-frequency vibration and watched the spray of his own blood paint the peeling wallpaper.

His remaining hand was a testament to domestic horror. Someone in the squat had a dog, and he made friends with it. He’d passed out with a bag of beef jerky in his lap, and the mutt had gotten enthusiastic. Because the drugs had thinned his skin to the consistency of wet parchment, the dog’s playful tugging and licking of his hand had “degloved” the tissue from three of his fingers. He didn’t wake up until he had skeletal hands that required permanent dressings of greasy gauze.

Aside from his upper limbs, his face was a map of a collision. Nobody should be behind the wheel in such a state, but I think he felt that it was essential that he get away from wherever he’d been. His story doesn’t explain why he was driving, only that he was. So, he was just driving alone and of course, he swerved. He’s not sure why; he remembers seeing a person. But, his memory also sometimes puts a wild animal there. He’s quite sure it was probably all in his imagination. He has no idea what actually happened, but he swerved off the road for some hallucination. Some paranoid vision made his arm swerve to protect something that wasn’t even there and drove him straight into a utility pole. He had his seat belt on so he was OK, but when he hit that pole, the tempered glass shattered into fragments. Thousands of microscopic diamonds traveling at sixty miles per hour. They call it “starburst scarring.” The scars radiate outward from his nose in perfect, geometric lines, like he’s permanently frozen in the moment of impact. The wounds healed, freezing the motion across his face, giving the impression that he’s kind of flying through space. He looks like he’s constantly being viewed through a cracked lens.

Then there was the nose. Or the lack of it. A notch in the left nostril that made his breath whistle, and warped his face into a permanent, lopsided sneer. He’d passed out on a park bench during a cold winter. While he was out, a particularly officious squirrel had harvested a portion of his nose. “Disney-Gore from the world’s cutest omnivore,” he smirked, whether intentionally or not I don’t know, as he recounted waking up to that discovery.

When he spoke, you didn’t just hear the gravel; you heard the “Internal Scald”. Years ago, during a particularly deep overdose, he had aspirated his own stomach acid while unconscious, effectively performing a chemical peel on his own lungs. It had scarred the delicate alveoli into a rigid, non-compliant mesh, leaving him with forty percent of his original capacity. Every sentence was now interrupted by a wet, rhythmic click—a bellows-like gasp that sounded like someone trying to breathe through a handful of wet pebbles.

One of his legs was a purple, weeping column of edema that he called his “dead-weight”. It was the result of a fourteen-hour “node,” where he had collapsed in a slump on a cold concrete floor, his own body weight acting as a slow-motion hydraulic press. The lack of oxygen caused the muscle tissue in his thigh to die and liquefy inside the skin—a clinical disaster known as compartment syndrome. Doctors had eventually sliced the limb open to release the pressure, leaving a cavernous, jagged trench of scar tissue that looked like he’d been fed to a woodchipper and then stitched back together with wire. That’s why he rarely wore shorts.

His feet were a collection of missing pieces, a memory of a winter night spent in a metal dumpster. As his blood shunted inward to protect his liver, his extremities had frozen into crystalline structures. He recounted with a detached, clinical smirk how he’d woken up and tried to pull off his frozen socks, only to have three of his toes snap off with the clean, effortless sound of breaking frozen carrots. The blood only started to flow when the thaw came.

Finally, there were the “Collapsed Tunnels” of his torso. Because his arms had long ago been closed for business due to blown veins and the angle-grinder trauma, he had moved his habit to his femoral veins. Chronic cellulitis had turned his lower abdomen and groin into a topographical map of weeping, paper-thin skin that looked like it had been soaked in a bucket of indigo dye. He was a walking roadmap of infection, held together by a biological persistence that defied every law of human anatomy.

But the most pressing item in his inventory of misery was psychological, mainly spanning from his girlfriend. She was a fellow traveller in the wasteland of addiction, and she’d become pregnant. It was a collision of two broken people who still had working libidos. He was “almost certain” the baby was his. They were living in an abandoned tenement where the floorboards were swollen with damp and the only light came from the flickering streetlamp outside the cracked window.

She gave birth on a mattress that was more stain than fabric. She was so deep into a “nod” that she didn’t even realise she was in labour. The human body is a strange, resilient machine; it performed the task of expulsion while her mind was a thousand miles away, drifting in an opiated vacuum of happiness. She didn’t feel the transition. She didn’t hear the first wet cry of the child, who was already an addict as soon as she was born. She simply bled out into the grey foam of the mattress while the baby lay there, connected to a mother who had already become a corpse.

He woke up hours later to find a living child and a dead woman. At this point authorities were called and he made a rare conscious decision that he would turn his life around now. He took the baby. He wanted to be better. He wanted to “get right.” He went to the pharmaceutical company because he heard they were looking for “complex cases” for a new miracle drug. He went there with his one arm, his notched nose, and his gravel voice, looking for salvation.

They prescribed him Axiom-9.

The pharmaceutical headquarters was a cathedral of glass and white light, a jarring contrast to the grey urban hellscape where a man could lose his nose to a squirrel while dreaming of nothing. He walked in, a one-armed wreckage, carrying an 18-month-old child who was the only gravitational force for good in his orbit. Despite the jarring juxtaposition of worlds, this clean corporate clinic was looking for people exactly like him to test Axiom-9, the ultimate “Addiction Reset.” When he walked through the doors, the corporate scientists saw a Living Negative Asset, a baseline of human degradation that they could potentially move to zero.

Axiom-9 was marketed as a miracle that silenced the itch in the skull—that relentless, internal bone-scratching that addicts feel when the grey matter starts to turn black. But the clinical reality was a body-horror masterpiece. The drug functioned as a total neuromuscular interceptor. Sure, it killed the craving, but it also severed the wires between the motor cortex and the muscles. It turned the user into a “Passenger”. You are a hundred per cent awake, a ghost trapped in a meat-suit that looks like it’s in a peaceful, medicated slumber.

He had no idea what it actually did, but he was sent home with a maintenance supply, a series of pre-filled syringes that promised a life dictated by safety rather than addiction. He injected himself in his new apartment—a place the state was paying for him to live whilst he and his daughter got their lives back on track.

The paralysis took hold within seconds. He lay back on the mattress and he felt his breath become shallow and automatic. He was out cold to any external observer, essentially comatose. But inside, he was a man in a glass tank filled with ice-water. He was acutely aware of the dust motes dancing in the light, the hum of the refrigerator, and the tactile curiosity of his daughter.

Her Finnegan score had plummeted from the screaming ‘20’ of her first week to a manageable baseline, but the Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome hadn’t vanished; it had just mutated into a permanent neurological static. She was eighteen months old and officially ‘stable,’ yet she remained a casualty of hypertonicity. Her nervous system didn’t recognize ‘gentle.’ It only understood the jerky, high-torque force of a body that had been forged in a chemical fire and then left to cool too quickly.

A toddler’s world is built on touch. She wanted her Papa to wake up. She started with soft slaps to his cheeks. After a while, her hunger set in. She needed her food, and her Papa. She needed stimulation. However, her brain was still a war zone of misfiring synapses. She lived in a state of permanent, vibrating agitation—a sensory hunger that no amount of milk or stories read in her Papa’s gravelly voice could sate.

Her muscles moved with a rigidity that turned her tiny hands into iron clamps. Her nervous system was a frayed wire. As her insistence grew stronger, he felt every sting as the slaps intensified, but his face remained a slack, serene mask. Then came the shaking, the pulling of his one remaining arm. The child grew frustrated, then focused. She sat on his chest, her weight a heavy pressure on his already-damaged lungs, and began to “investigate” the one thing that seemed to be watching her—his open, unblinking eyes.

She wasn’t playing; she was experiencing a tactile crisis, her brain demanding a sensory input to replace the chemical one that was missing. She reached for the eye with the desperate, jerky force of a body in autonomic overthrust.

He watched her tiny, uncoordinated fingers approach. He felt the soft, blunt pressure of her thumb against the left cornea. Because of the Axiom-9, his blink reflex was dead. He could not even flinch as she hooked her thumb into the soft tissue of the orbit. There was no sudden pop. It was a slow, wet extraction. The Ketamine-like disconnect of the drug meant his brain received the signals of agony, but had nowhere to send the reaction. He was a witness to his own mutilation.

He woke up in a sterile hospital ward days later. The socket was a crater, the eyelid healed into the bone like shrink-wrap. The girl was gone, taken into care because the state found a comatose father with a gouged-out eye and a house full of pharmaceutical wrappers. He realized then that the company had known about the “conscious paralysis.” They had suppressed the data to keep their stock price from bleeding.

He was no longer just a street casualty with an angle-grinder stump. He was the Living Proof of their betrayal, a man whose very visage was a lawsuit they couldn’t win. That’s why he came to me. I looked at his starburst face and his degloved fingers and I saw a hook—a way to make a corporation bleed for the mess they’d made.

The Aethel-Gard headquarters was a monument to the future—a soaring atrium of white marble and smart glass that tinted automatically to shield the executives from the harsh, unmedicated sun. I watched from a distance as he entered. He walked in looking like a Zero-Draft prototype of a human being that had been abandoned in a wind tunnel.

He walked past the security detail, who were too stunned by the sheer, jagged geometry of his face to stop him. He found a $5,000 Herman Miller chair in the centre of the Wellness Plaza and simply sat. He didn’t shout. He didn’t demand a lawyer. He just existed.

The contrast was a physical assault on the company’s brand. Against the sterile, high-end aesthetic, his body was a screaming neon sign of corporate failure. The missing arm, the scarred face, the notched nose, they would be counted alongside the eye-socket that looked like a thumbprint in wet clay. It was a visceral inventory of everything that drugs had allowed to happen, but Axiom-9 was arguably the most horrific of all. He sat there, his gravelly breath whistling through his nose-notch, until the air in the lobby felt thick with the smell of a PR disaster.

They took him to the Restoration Wing. It was a private medical vault where the air was filtered and the doctors wore silk. They performed a full-body audit. They scanned the starburst scars from his windshield impact and the indigo columns of his dead-leg calves.

But the discovery was in the bloodwork. The Axiom-9 had interacted with his street history in a way the labs had never predicted. His liver was actually quite healthy. Despite the toluene, the solvents, and the years of “shake and bake” meth, his liver was actually thriving. They called it a Prometheus. It was a hyper-regenerative engine of chemical filtration. He had told me that he never touched alcohol because he saw what it did to his own father. He was a biological miracle, a Living Negative Asset that had somehow turned into a proprietary secret.

The lawyers arrived with a “Hush-Agreement” that read like a coronation. I negotiated it. I traded his right to exist in the sun for a 70-inch screen and a view of the city that had chewed him up. They had run the maths and realized it would be cheaper for them to keep him, even though the Prometheus Liver meant he might live for another seventy years. Every day he spent on the street was a day their stock price was at risk.

They bought him. They ingested him into their system of care and silence.

He ended up in a penthouse that costs more than the city block where he lost his arm. It is a gilded cage of glass oblivion. He is “saved”. He has 24-hour concierge service and a view of the sunset that looks like a painting. He spends his days tracking the movement of birds in the distance, and watching nature documentaries on a 70-inch screen, though he keeps the remote close to kill the feed if anything with a twitching nose or a bushy tail appears.

I managed to get him one thing the corporate lawyers tried to bury: supervised visitation. It’s rare, and it’s clinical, but she comes. She’s older now, a quiet girl who looks at his “starburst” face with a confused, distant empathy, not remembering the night she touched the world of his vision’s orbit with a drug-spasmed thumb.

When she isn’t there, he writes to her. He uses a heavy, black-lacquered fountain pen with a 14k gold nib. Another corporate peace offering designed to keep his skeleton fingers occupied. He presses the thick, embossed stationery against the jagged stump of his missing arm, using the scarred limb to pin the paper to the desk so it cannot slide away while he works.

He watches the nib touch the page, fascinated by the capillary action as the obsidian ink pulls through the feed. It’s a familiar physics; the way the dark fluid is drawn into the grain of the paper reminds him of the way the blood used to bloom in a disposable syringe when he finally hit a vein. The ink flows in expensive, permanent lines, a sharp, clinical contrast to the waxy, degloved texture of his grip, though even this is healing now —the skin tightening over his knuckles like burnished Nappa leather, sealing the damage in. He tells her about the birds on the balcony. He tells her he can’t wait to see her.

He doesn’t need the street drugs anymore, but the agreement mandates a maintenance dose of the new, refined Axiom-10. When he’s not writing to his daughter he writes testimonials for it, though we have no idea if it works or not, really. He sits there, a passenger in a luxury cabin, his gravelly voice a secret the world will never hear. He is a success story. He is off the streets, and for the first time in his life, he is finally, perfectly, clean.

Author’s Note

I didn’t set out to write a story that is worse than Chuck Palahniuk’s “Guts” (which I read years ago on my lunch break when I worked in a bar. I was eating minestrone soup and I just laughed and went home and had a wank). The impetus for this story came from a pencil-written note I found in my gaming diary, of all places. No date, but probably circa 2020, deep lockdown times. The note just reads “The Disfigured Man —Crack/Smackhead with 1 1/2 yr-old kid in a trance like drug state but kid awake. Starts off slapping his face but ends up sticking thumb in one of his eyes + gouging it out. The guy gets lots of other disfigurements uglier he is uglier his life vicious circle + no turn back“

Yeah, that’s the kind of shit I write notes to myself about. My friend, Richard, who always reads my stuff (big shout out to that guy! You know who you are, buddy!) said to me “Man, that’s dark😂. I’d ask how on earth does your brain go in that direction? But I think art is just like that, hey?”

The story developed into the legal aid liaison/Prometheus parody just naturally as I tried to wrap a narrative around it. IMHO the ending is one of my nicer endings really. He gets a gold pen and I was laughing my arse off when I wrote how he tells his daughter he can’t wait to “see” her again. Geddit! LMFAO. Yea yea yea, fuck off it wasn’t meant to be funny anyway, just wry.

Why Prometheus I hear you say? Well, I wanted to show that I think with my dick and it has a brain on it. That’s pretty much all, just some literary flex. In truth I think it works well. Hope you enjoyed and thanks for reading you psychos.

The first thing the new human did was to almost get hit by a yellow taxi as it ran out, naked and covered in sick and filth, into the middle of the road. The horns blared at the new human and it backed away, colliding with a couple who had been watching from the pavement. They were horrified at the naked ex-cockroach, and pushed him away. One of the couple, probably the girl, kicked out at the ex-cockroach and he felt a jolt of pain sting him in the crotch and buckle him over, but he was too confused and started searching desperately for the crack from which it had initially emerged. It couldn’t find it. It scratched desperately at the walls and fled back into an alleyway, knocking over dustbins and upsetting some stray cats.

Finally, the ex-cockroach found a quiet place to sit. It sat, hunched up somehow instinctively in an upright foetal position. He had never sat like that before, it felt odd and yet comfortable. The roach was suddenly trying to deal with the fact that yesterday its brain had a million neurons, but now it had about 86 billion. Its mother had been a roach, but it had never known it or seen it or if it had it hadn’t recognised it to be its mother. It had never considered the concept of ‘mother’ before, and now all of a sudden, the ex-roach wanted its mother. However, the revulsion it felt towards the colony flashed back in its memory. The ex-roach was shocked, having never had anything like a memory or the ability to think in any abstract way before. The thoughts rushing into its head were sickeningly fast, rapid. Like laser beams, light and colours, it could almost sense each neuron bouncing off the grey-matter contained in its never used before brain. It wanted to say something, to open its mouth. It opened its mouth and its brain communicated via the nervous system with muscles, causing parts of its mouth and throat to move in an odd sequence which produced a very specific array of noises, which if written phonetically spelled out

Help me.

Then it screamed. It screamed a long and anguished scream. It screamed like a man nailed to a fifty foot high cross on the hills of Golgotha with a scorpion climbing over his chest. It was a bloodcurdling scream. How horrible it was to be a human.

The ex-roach was cold, and started to shiver. It had never felt cold before, it had never even known the idea of anything other than ‘eat’ and ‘search’ and ‘breed’. Now its head was full of language and ideas and, worse of all, burning questions about the exact nature of its existence and purpose on earth. It started to have a seizure, its heart was pumping so fast and its breathing was coming out so quick, it could hardly sustain all its vital organs. Yet still the brain used up most of the oxygen and energy, burning up every calorie with illogical and irrelevant urgent questions. Its heart stopped and the oxygen stopped being passed to the brain. The shock of being a human was too much, the stress too much to bear. The brain died, but the paramedics arrived in time to save the body. After a few months, they decided to switch off its life-support system and donate its organs to people who could be saved by them. No one ever identified the ex-roach or learned where it came from. No one wanted to know.

Notes on the story: Originally published in Drunk Monkeys 2015. Copyright Stephen Prime. Thanks to Franz Kafka for the inspiration.