Midday. The light is thin and blue. The doorknob is smooth and cool and highly polished. I stand with my nose to the jamb for a moment. There is a nauseous scent. Rotten fruit and dead skin.
Inside I see my left brain as an enormous prawn. It sits alone at a double desk. Its legs work against each other with a hollow wooden clacks. Its mouthparts emit an incessant wet drone. It swings a heavy foreleg and knocks my Smith-Corona off the desk. The typewriter splashes into the pool of fluids in my brain pan, keys akimbo, workings racked. The prawn ticks me out a message, “What were you doing with this that you couldn’t have done with a brick?”
A bit of falling dust alerts me to the presence overhead of Harlan Ellison, who is boring through the ceiling with an antique hand-cranked drill. “Hey, there!” he shouts, “that’s no way to treat a Smith-Corona!”
The prawn, alarmed, overturns my desk and claws its way out through the large window. It hops and rolls across the shrubs outside, smears mud on my mailbox and vanishes down an open manhole.
“Damn,” Harlan says, spitting into the pool at my feet. “you were lucky I was here.”
You can contact me here. Thanks.