found drama

You’re fleeing the monster. Run through the city. You never see it, but you can hear it. Hear its growl. Hear the rumble of its footsteps. You hide behind buildings. Dodging. Evading. Never more than a step ahead. Sounds of destruction and carnage. But you’re running out of places to run, to hide. You make it to the last house on the island and duck inside, down into the basement. There are already so many people there huddled, looks of terror on their faces. You face your own terror. But terror isn’t hopelessness. You wade through the water in the basement to the window. Someone is trying to kick a hole through the wall. But you pry open the window. It’s too narrow to squeeze through, but you keep peeling back layers until you’re out and swimming beyond the monster’s reach, falling over the edge of the world.

You are overrun by them. An infestation of a grotesque mouse-octopus chimera. Little black oily vermin; naked tails and little furry rumps that coalesce into a mass of writhing black tentacles. Traps can’t hold them. And as they swarm, you try to stomp them out. Black ichor runs from their wounds. But, once cut in half, they regenerate. And each severed tentacle, like the hydra, regrows two-fold. And they’re getting bigger.

You are sitting in a treehouse, trying to plan a trip, the two of you. You believed that you had narrowed down the destination and all you had left was to book it. But things got complicated. New suggestions came in. People kept appearing with new ideas. You couldn’t possibly do them all. Maybe over a lifetime you could, but you felt pressured to expand the scope. You tried to write down each of these ideas. To rank them, to sort them. Someone said that hey maybe the two of you could combine two of the trips? Half as much time in one spot and then move on to the next? It’s overwhelming, it’s too much. You climb up from the treehouse, up to the top of a hill, then the top of a dam. Everyone follows you. You drop your pen. Your paper blows away. Someone hands you another sheet of paper, but it’s torn from a glossy magazine. The pen is replaced with a marker. You try writing but the ink just smears. Every voice get louder. Everyone shouting over everyone else. You climb down to retrieve the original pen. You try writing the place names over again but you can’t press hard enough and the paper rips into a dozen pieces, then a hundred. The wind picks up. Water rushes over the dam.