“...I was on a ton of painkillers. If you've only had them for minor injuries and in smaller doses, you probably don't know about the hallucinations. By comparison, I was lucky: My roommate was tripping hard on his drug cocktail. I saw little animals coming in and out of the buildings outside my window, but that poor guy was hollering about the CIA coming for him and trying to formulate elaborate escape plans. It got so bad that I called over a nurse and told her that my roommate needed psychiatric help.
She told me I didn't have a roommate.
I was in the room alone.
When I didn't believe it, she pulled out the security video of the room, which showed me talking to an empty bed. So either I'd hallucinated so hard that I hallucinated a whole other person's hallucinations, or the CIA is really, really thorough.”
Gobsmacked. I scrunched in my limbs and gasped, "OH! Oh, oh my God!" I physically, vocally, viscerally reacted to this teeny tiny story & its big, fat surprise. When that happens, you cut that thing right out of your screen, pin it up and yank your muse out of the ether to take notes. This is every damned thing a great short story should be.
Wild, sustained applause, Anonymous and Evan V. Symon. Hat's off. The timing was cosmic. I'm taking myself out on a long-awaited, low & slow writing intensive tomorrow, my one day off this week. A date with an actual ink pen & a sheaf of erstwhile trees (and booze). And I am taking this tiny story as a reminder of what the fuck I am trying to do. Thank you. :)
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