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Dreams, a commentary (No. 1)

21Mar2025

Dreams, eh?  They’re just stories, right?  Stories your own brain tries to tell you while you aren’t paying attention.  They don’t really mean anything.  That’s what you’ve got to tell yourself.  Over and over, you’ve got to tell yourself that, that they don’t mean anything.  You have to.  Because if they did actually mean something.  If those stories your own mind was trying to tell you while you weren’t paying attention, if *those* stories meant anything, anything at all….

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Taskforce on Tentacles and Teeth

03Dec2020
Stories have entered general circulation, concerning one of the things that goes bump in the night.  Well, less a story, perhaps, than a description at this point, and a theory or two.  Too little is actually known for it to be a story, as yet.  Which is to say, when faced with a collection of facts, the average human wants very much to assign action and motivation, to create a story, to get a grip.  But that act of creation does not make a truth.  And we here want to discover the truth behind these things that go bump in the night.  

So.  The facts.

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A Box Full Of Fog

13Jun2018
There was always fog.  Morning, noon, and night.  Thick and cloying; it muted sounds, made of speech a buzz, coated the tongue, and reduced all colors to shades of grey.  Summer, winter, no season seemed to exist under the fog. He thought he recalled a time, perhaps when he was still a very young child, when the sun had shone freely on the city.  It was now little more than a vague, bright disc that did nothing to brighten the fog or to dry the droplets that condensed on his beard. The fog even made its way indoors. It was inescapable, and had been for years.  He was used to it now, and he assumed that everyone else was, too.
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the Great Work

10Oct2017

The effluvium of piscine decay was the last scent I expected to encounter as I sat in my favorite coffee shop some five blocks off Salem’s antique waterfront. Initially, it presented as little more than a tickle at the back of my throat – a whiff of something I couldn’t quite identify, but which upset me nonetheless. I became distracted from my crossword without even realizing I’d lost my concentration. But the odor built in both intensity and pungency, until it reached a point at which I could identify it for what it was. It was then that I looked up and saw the thing in the doorway.

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