Arthur stood before the bathroom vanity, watching the silver backing of the mirror flake away like dead skin. In the reflection, his face was a map of a country that didn’t exist anymore. The skin was the color of bruised fruit and old parchment, stretched tight over a skull that felt three sizes too small for the thoughts inside it.
He reached up, his fingers trembling as they brushed through his hair. It was a thick, light brown thicket now—feral and charged with a static that made the fine hairs on his arms stand up. It felt less like hair and more like an antenna, catching signals from the floorboards, from the pipes, from the weeping cracks in the ceiling.
“Quiet,” Arthur whispered.
The static only got louder.
The Geography of the Interior
He leaned in until his nose nearly touched the cold surface of the glass. His eyes were the problem. They were two emeralds dropped into a basin of red ink. The capillaries had blossomed into a crimson web, a frantic network of roads leading nowhere. He tracked a single pulse in his temple—a rhythmic thump-thump that sounded like someone hammering a nail into soft wood.
Then he saw it. The mark on his forehead.
It wasn’t a wound, not exactly. It was a leak. A dark, jagged puncture where the “sensible Arthur”—the one who paid his taxes and remembered to buy milk—was slowly draining out. In his place, something vibrant and terrifying was rushing in.
The Melt
The walls of the bathroom began to lose their resolve. The sage-green paint started to swirl, liquefying into a watercolor haze that bled into the air. The world was losing its edges. The hard lines of the towel rack and the door frame softened into smears of teal and ochre.
Arthur opened his mouth to scream, but the sound didn’t come out as a voice. It came out as a color—a bright, jagged yellow that tasted like copper pennies.
He realized then that he wasn’t looking at a reflection at all. He was looking at a window. He was the king of this melting room, crowned in a light brown halo of chaos, presiding over a kingdom of beautiful, absolute nonsense.
“There is so much more to see,” the room whispered, “once you stop trying to make sense of the light.”
Arthur stopped blinking. He didn’t want to miss the moment the last of the logic finished draining onto the floor. He gripped the edge of the sink, his knuckles white, and stared into the emerald heat of his own gaze, waiting for the rest of the world to catch up to his madness.
The Crazymad Writer Writes Again 