Member-only story
Hallucinogenic Rodeo
Microfiction
Hal sits in the Room, the screens around her eliciting Codes all the while she knows they’re buzzing through her brain bit by bit. Or so it feels. So it feels all the time in this interconnected world where computers seem to rule the hour every day.
The therapists told her it would always be like this. For all of time. For as long as she’s still breathing. For as long as blood rushes through her veins and keeps her temperature from bottoming out.
Breathe, she tells herself. Breathe.
The counselors come in one by one, getting different vitals from her and recording them on their screens. They are not gentle with their probes or their instruments as they press into her with fingers or tools, her skin a map of fingertip-like bruises from the ways they’ve prodded at her.
She closes her eyes and pretends to keep her mind blank even as thoughts rush in and out of her brain at will. Skittering, madness, incoherent at times — but always somehow hers.
Her thoughts are ever scurrying for cover, anything to hide away from the probes.
She sighs, brings a hand up to her forehead, knows the cameras are watching her.
It’s always this way.
