Microdosing Horror

FAVOR

Your first night working in the asylum, you figured what harm in allowing the young man release from his straitjacket for a little while. After all, he was so genial, so…normal. You did not know his delusion consisted in a belief that spiders were continually weaving webs inside his head. Nor that he believed those spiders were covering his eyes with their sticky gauze from the inside, blinding him slowly. Nor that he could move so quickly and snatch that pen from behind your ear and stab so efficiently through each of his eyes to kill the beasts. Nor that he would thank you so profusely and feel such gratitude for your magnanimous stupidity that he would weep grateful tears of blood. But your employer did not look so kindly upon your generous gesture. Your first check was docked in the amount of two glass eyes.

ON THE PLANET WHERE RATS ARE KINGS

The human interloper ran through the maze into which he had been introduced. It took days of panicked running to reach one dead end after another. This was playing out all over the planet, while the rats watched from above, invisible gods. Many humans expired slowly in deserts seared by double suns or died in endless nights of naked blue freeze. The few that found the prize were rewarded with a mate and a respite. But the mothers always died in the multiple-seeded births which produced large litters. And the children were raised as maze runners in preparation of feeding the blood sport which was, of course, beneficial science.

HAVING SWUM TO THE SANDBAR

Having swum to the sandbar at evening, she smiles and enjoys the color gradient of the orange sky over the ocean. She waves to her friends on the beach and laughs at their timidity. For they had asked her not to swim to the fleeting island that had emerged to exist so briefly. She was still laughing as the beast whose back she stood barefoot on turned and took her swiftly out to sea, interrupting even her glamor posing for social media. But the likes continued to climb on the video, even as the beast dove, and the followers stared, into the dark maelstrom on their screens.

THE LESSON

The teacher had mocked Aric for his paper on theoretical physics. She scorned his theory of super-symmetries as the foundation of the universe. She told him to erase his byzantine formulae from the blackboard as a way of shaming him. She heard the sound of the eraser on the anachronistic slate board she kept as a sort of joke in her classroom while she looked down at her lesson plan. But she also heard the gasp from her students. Aric was still sitting in his chair. Something was erasing the chalk numbers from the other side of the blackboard.