Delirium Ryan Cheng

You wake, and it is six-thirty on a Monday morning, and the sound of your alarm is sending little waves of revulsion into your brain, and the sun through your window is a flash-bomb thrown at you from heaven with love, and the melatonin is seeping from you like sand dragged back into the ocean but you fix a smile to your face with toothpicks and you down your coffee like it’s the nectar of the gods and it really is when you’re far enough gone to be mainlining the caffeine into your bloodstream but before you can

You wake, and it is pitch black and hot as hell and the sweat soaks through your shirt and your blanket and there’s probably puddles there maybe with alligators, and you peel it off you like the wet pages of a library book about the Ruminant Animals of America, and you lurch up and check your clock and 6:65 glares back at you in LED hate, and you check your phone and it’s Saturday and you say Oh Good but your blinds are glowing red so you throw them open and your lawn is on fire and and you say Oh God and everything is on fire and the floor trembles with the mad laughter of the deathrow-free and it’s your laughter and then You wake, and you’re climbing Mount Everest to find the Sage of the Immortal Mysteries, and the wind burns cold on your skin and howls like it hasn’t had a day of nice summer weather in four billion years but you’re used to it, born and raised in Wisconsin, and your toes find the safe places in the rock and you pull yourself over the ledge and into the cave and see the Sage of the Immortal Mysteries but it’s just a goat and you say Sage of the Immortal Mysteries Grant Me Your Wisdom but it’s just a goat so it says Maah and you say Bruh and it trots over and gnaws on your face and as the saliva drips down into your eyes you see stars dropping into an empty pond like overripe plums and cosmic eggs forming in the middle of black holes like bezoars and it’s all so simple and

You wake, and you’re in class and the teacher is droning on about Kafka on the Shore, and as you wipe the drool off your desk you see alligators and mysteries and a weekend ocean, and you put your head down cause you need to get back there and the teacher calls on you and you don’t have any pants on but you don’t care even though everyone’s laughing and you shut your eyes and it’s all dark on the inside of your head but there’s still alligators and mysteries and a weekend ocean and you can’t fall asleep so

You wake, and you’re in the break room and you watched Inception last night and If You Tried To Interpret This You’d Probably Go Insane but you do it anyways cause you really couldn’t care less about internal auditing at 1:30 pm after lunch, but it doesn’t mean anything so you go on with your boring life, and maybe you have a midlife crisis but that’s about it, and then you die.

Teach a fish to climb a tree

Allyson Mills