Jellydisks

It wasn't exactly another 9/11 the day the jellydisks came, but I do remember feeling that morning that the autumn air was just a bit too rarified, too reminiscent of back to school anxiety—everything was heightened. And then the jellydisks began to descend.

Avery and I were vacationing in London. I turned to have a look at her face. Have you ever done this? Turn to look at someone in order to capture a moment outside of both of you? Truth is more defined in the human face than it is in the jittery pops of experience that happen around us.

So I turned and looked at her and realized that it was probably going to end between us. And then the jellydisks began to descend.

You can see the one that got the kid on the right. Look at the little bloke's posture. Poised as if he doesn't want the thing to fall off and shatter.

Yes, it was controlling him by that point. That's how quickly it happened. They lighted, they seeped.

We watched them fall, we all watched, just for a moment of awed unbelief. And then the one on the kid's head lifted him off his dad's shoulders (we found out later it was his mom's boyfriend) and dangled him like a piece of wet pasta.

Where's the video evidence?

There isn't any. We were all frozen. We, each of us, got taken by a jellydisk.

Street cameras were coated with them. You've seen those pictures.

The one holding the child dropped him gingerly onto the pavement. He writhed on the ground for a solid minute before his mother's boyfriend came. A jellydisk was still seeping into her.

As for me, my jellydisk told me a few things about cold and space, and how consciousness is universal, and how painful it is.

Avery and I split up very shortly after that. Her jellydisk confirmed what she'd already been thinking—that everything was too big, too spread out, and that there were two many corners humming with experience for a woman to be confined to a two-bedroom in suburban Massachusetts.

They fell to the ground, gave a hiss and a whistle, and popped. Their guts burned the ground (you've seen the pictures.) There was a smell of scorched something. We found out later it was zinc.

The dangled child, I'm afraid, is permanently scarred. He won't tell anyone what the jellydisk put into his head. Every morning he screams at no one. And lately he's been setting small fires.