Microfiction

In The Darkest Depths Where Light Never Reaches
Deep in unmapped space, engine malfunction had disabled their ship and they were left stranded in interstellar darkness, permanently adrift in some cosmic nowhere zone without hope of repair or rescue. Infinite space offered nothing now save bleak unlimited emptiness, and as they languished there in that awful abyss, the distant stars glimmering in malicious mockery, the doomed ship’s crew came to embrace a bitterly sarcastic philosophy: The mission hadn’t ended, its itinerary had merely shifted — in the nothingness between the stars, death was their one remaining destination.

Far Too Many Horrors Were Made Known To Me That Day
Fell into grinding gears of alien nightmare machinery. Flesh melted by infernal flames. Torn to pieces by maelstrom-like satanic laser phantoms. Soul shattered for the full duration of eternity by the sheer godawful horror of it all. Magic mushrooms, bad trip, full-blown inner apocalypse. Afterwards he resolved to avoid all psychedelics from now on.

In The Future
Universities phase out traditional learning models, supplanting lectures and reading assignments with packets of granulized data that are injected directly into the brain. As overachievers seeking an academic edge attempt to out-download their peers, hospitals develop treatment protocols for potentially fatal information overdoses. A black market for forbidden knowledge emerges, and illicit injection of dangerous truths becomes an all-too-popular pastime among thrill-seeking youngsters. Rehab programs for data addiction proliferate.

In The Ruins Of A Dead World
Attempts to repair his badly battered vessel were futile. Odds of rescue: none. Shipwide system failure, an emergency landing, permanent exile. Marooned on this barren miserable world of uninterrupted gloom, he whiled away another dreary gray cheerless day wandering the wreckage of a once-magnificent city, reduced to rubble eons ago, contemplating the strange capricious workings of fate, the depressingly grim destiny of all living things. A wind through the ruins cried out like a tortured ghost, and colossal ancient machinery of unknown purpose was everywhere strewn about, covered in rust, half-buried in the ground. Time is an illusion, he thought, a cosmic con job deployed by some insane and sadistic god who feeds on the isolation and suffering of every sentient being; without time, there would be no suffering, because the preconditions necessary for suffering to occur simply would not exist. Here alone on this dark desolate planet, in some remote and unmapped area of space, he felt the coldness of a billion light-years of emptiness penetrating into his bones, and came to apprehend with a mournful clarity that the universe is fundamentally a forsaken place, loneliness its central motif.

Exile In The Hell Vortex
Severely depressed, he’d been staying up late into the night filling notebooks with strange science-fiction stories involving amputee astronauts with unusual sexual appetites, evil phantom-like aliens telepathically torturing psych ward patients, hyper-violent and heavily armed robots programmed for maximum carnage by a drug-deranged mad scientist plotting world domination. Perhaps most disturbing was the series of 911 calls he’d made on a lark from various pay phones near his apartment, advising police that sinister demonic godlike beings were attempting to rip a hole in the cosmos, which would result in the end of everything — civilization, the universe, all gone. “We’re talking total fucking annihilation here, ma’am.” By now, the formula was fairly straightforward: Lonely, bored and depressed, he’d start doing drugs in alarming quantities. Pot, pills (mostly painkillers, sometimes Adderall), cocaine on the rare occasion he could score some. On drugs, he’d get a little crazy, and after doing one or more crazy things publicly (fraudulent Armageddon-related emergency calls, for example), he’d get dangerously paranoid, fearing — sometimes irrationally, sometimes not — cops and cuffs and imminent arrest and long-term imprisonment, so he’d start keeping to himself, like a hermit with a guilty conscience, staying secret and hidden from everyone and everything, remaining in his apartment as much as possible, door locked, blinds drawn, not answering the phone, not answering the door, total isolation, becoming increasingly lonely, bored and depressed. The horrible pattern repeated itself, in endless maddening repetition, over and over and over again.

All the Way To His Cross Overlooking The Dark Sky Of The Cosmos
A lab explosion, an experiment gone wrong. Now he’s trapped in this strange purgatory, somewhere far beyond space and time, a bizarre shadow realm where one’s eyes can’t be trusted and the fundamental physical laws of the universe seem to hold no dominion whatsoever. A limitless, lifeless void. Mysteries dark and deep and utterly disorienting. Multicolored laser patterns, governed by unknowable occult geometries. Showers of golden sparks. Scattered rainbow-hued lightning bursts. Stuck in this dark awful dimension forever, in this endless unmapped emptiness all alone, his is a spiritual suffering, a dreadful lonesome isolation never-ending, a torment of the soul no other human has ever known.

Bedlam Did Reign That Night
In a dream, he was wandering in the woods and he came upon a crashed spaceship with hideous tentacled creatures crawling out of the wreckage, and he wanted to warn the world of a possible planetary invasion but the evil aliens telepathically hypnotized him and he was frozen in place, statue-like, as they lecherously groped him with their sickening slime-dripping tentacles and the sheer godawful terror he felt was immeasurable, it seemed to never end, but then a dazzlingly bright light flashed through the sky — A military missile strike? A-bomb blast? Secret satellite laser weapons?— and he awoke with a start, heart pounding, drenched in sweat, making a mental note to never watch science-fiction films from the 1950s right before bed.

I Was A Teenage Blood Tornado
More depressed now than ever, he almost never left his apartment, logging long hours day and night typing up his highly bizarre and completely fictitious “autobiography” — filled with accounts of berserk knife-wielding NASA astronauts, clunky metal robots programmed to do off-color standup comedy, sinister tentacled space aliens with dangerous drug habits and strange sexual tendencies. Mainly, he just wanted to forget about his failure-filled life and the bleak unwelcoming world outside. Day by day, his “memoirs” became ever stranger, and visions of a multimillion-dollar book deal with one of the major New York publishers occasionally flashed through his head. The weeks and months of almost total isolation had turned him intensely eccentric. In his journal he’d written, “A shitload of Percocet? My own personal llama? A custom-made bong fitted with foam-rubber Spock ears?”— he was still on the fence how he’d spend his advance.

On A Shattered Starship Stranded In Space
They’d been bold adventurers speeding through the vastness of space on a mission of exploration, searching the starry sky for wonderful new worlds. Now he’s all alone here on this wrecked and useless vessel, imprisoned in the endless void of lonely interstellar nothingness, sole survivor of the awful encounter, surrounded by the badly deformed corpses of his trusted crewmates, waiting for death to write the final chapter to this tragic dreadful story. Man looks up at the stars and dreams his wondrous dreams. Forever onward and upward stretches the search for truth. Yet man’s limitless search for knowledge often leads to dark and dangerous places, distorting his vision, blinding him to all the nightmares that may be lying in wait. Exploring the unknown depths of space stirs hopes of a bright shining future, but it may also bring us face to face with horrors we cannot yet imagine.

In The Future
A highly addictive virtual-reality drug — a biotech-modified microchip that can be smoked, swallowed or injected — proves deadly for many users, who starve to death while indulging the fantasy of their choice for days and even weeks on end, unwilling to leave their own private Edens.

Nightmares Forever Everywhere
Alien invasion is the primary symptom, he explained as best he could to the intake nurse, rushed by a friend to the hospital for emergency care. As the nurse took his pulse and blood pressure, he breathed a sigh of relief, sensing that someone here could help with this terrible predicament. If ever there was a situation warranting immediate attention from well-trained professionals, he thought, a night sky filled with satanic demons disguised as flying saucers that are vibrating with evil energy and emitting lethal rainbow-hued lasers is probably it. The last thing he recalls from the whole incident is a question the nurse asked his obviously distraught friend: “… and you’re certain it was psychedelic mushrooms?”

Psychic Explosion Imminent
All day, wherever he went, he was being followed — a mysterious skulking presence, not a person but some sort of hovering, sentient energy, which when close enough for its scratchy static-filled voice to be audible would whisper ominously of “sky squid” and “mind jelly.” Eating a pot brownie first thing in the morning was something he resolved to never do again.

Brain Wreck
He’d been a daily pot user basically his entire adult life, had gone on countless psychedelic trips and around age 30 had started taking cocaine in alarming quantities, but it wasn’t until he phoned me the night following his first ayahuasca trip that I became convinced the sad and disturbing rumor I’d been hearing about him was almost certainly true. He sounded frantic, crazed, brimming with bizarre arcane revelations involving cosmic portals and secret dimensions and invisible extraterrestrials with godlike psychic abilities. On his trip he’d conversed in coded language with strange occult energy beings, beheld the otherworldly architecture of vast alien cities, and was now fully convinced it had been no mere hallucination. “There are these other worlds, normally hidden from view, and it was all real,” he explained before mentioning he’d already planned another ayahuasca experience for the following night. His unhinged rapid-fire monologue by phone that evening, rattling off all the surreal details of his latest mind-blowing chemical escapade, served only to confirm the suspicion, long and deeply held by many who knew him, that he was probably fried forever, drugs had destroyed his brain.

Flaws In Your Paradise
He sat on the sofa all afternoon, keeping watch as his friend writhed on the floor in endless agony during a “bad trip” magic-mushroom experience, groaning sporadically, all of hell’s horrors raging full-throttle in his head. No celestial pleasures or cosmic insights to be found here, he observed as his friend let out several rapid-fire terror-filled screams, under attack at the moment by some menacing horde of rapaciously kill-crazy demons that he alone could see. Nothing but horrid illusions to be found here, under the soul-sickening spell of that godawful drug. Nothing but nightmares, dark and grim.

Recreational Psychosis
Suffice it to say, it was a wholly unpleasant experience — terrifying visions of the destruction of the universe mostly, along with sinister satanic demons with telepathic mind-control abilities beaming their malevolent death energies directly into his skull. “Maybe steer clear of shrooms from now on,” a friend advised him as he lay writhing facedown on the floor of the apartment in obvious psychic agony. “Clearly that shit is fucking with your head.” Under attack at that moment by hideous hologram-like mutant corpse creatures hell-bent on tearing his soul from his body, he was fully inclined to agree.

Secretly And In Darkness
He’d been getting drunk to the point of blacking out for several nights running and had no explanation whatsoever for the bloodstained boxcutter he’d found in his jacket pocket when he awoke this morning. “Probably just a minor mishap,” he muttered, in a futile attempt to quell his mounting paranoia and panic, as he wrapped the blade in paper towels and sealed it with duct tape before heading to the woods near his apartment to bury it.

All Surroundings Are Evolving
Stranded in Earth’s prehistoric past, the time traveler began carving coded messages on cavern walls for his 23rd-century colleagues to find. The messages, discovered long before he’d intended, became the basis for a strange primitive religion.

Memorials Preferred
Very, very high on Vicodin, he wandered around the neighborhood all afternoon looking dazed and muttering about angels. That night, back in his apartment, he took more pills — the rest of the bottle, in fact — and finally got to meet them.

In The Future
Daily psychedelic drug use becomes a hot new trend among pregnant women, convinced by a bestselling pop-psychology book that low doses of hallucinogens in utero will impart lifelong health and superior intelligence to their children. Government officials declare a public health emergency as maternity wards nationwide become overwhelmed by newborns whose eyes emit rainbow-colored laser beams, and whose terrifying otherworldly cries summon demons from another dimension.

In The Future
When robots finally seize control of civilization, humans are repurposed as furniture. The most one can hope for is to be assigned coffee-table duty for a kindly robot family.

In The Future
Untold millennia after all life on Earth has vanished, alien archaeologists uncover the ruins of what they believe is an ancient religious site, but is in fact a 20th-century pinball arcade. Vast scholarly treatises are written on the spiritual significance of the phrase “insert quarters.”