A little boy looks up at a man with graying hair, “Why do you play with desperation?” The man, he puts down his worn clarinet and replies, “Because they live in every town I have a gig.”
Two-thirds of the populace were living alone when it happened. Hallucinations, at first faint, flickerings in the reflected blue light from television screens, almost transparent in the cheap halogens found over bathroom mirrors. There were rumours of an LSD dump in the reservoir. Doctors complained that there was no standard procedure for treating so many for psychosis. Somebody blamed violence in video games. A week later, they had mass, depth. Archetypes, like a fat sodden guilt that would sit in the fridge and pout whenever the door opened, were haunting the under stimulated, the lonely, and the old. Stocks in drug companies soared, there was a run on anti-psychotics. Cities were drastically effected, tall office towers especially, but not as much as the small towns, rife with tiny disasters. In one rural area, an entire nursing home committed suicide.
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Fishermen catch a missile.
Pictures of the Mermaid Parade.
