Behold, a tale of two minds, entwined in a surreal dance of duality. Step into the shoes of our protagonist, whose existence has been split asunder, like a fractured mirror reflecting disparate realities.

Whispers of confusion, a cacophony of thoughts not his own, swirl within the confines of his skull. Strange faces, familiar faces, all blur together in a kaleidoscope of dissonance. His minds, once singular, now a discordant duet, playing out the symphony of his fractured existence.

In the depths of squalor, his left eye sees a world of poverty, yet rich with the warmth of human connection. Friends surround him, their hearts beating in unison, a tapestry of love woven amidst the threads of loneliness. Happiness, an elusive butterfly, flutters just beyond his grasp, tantalizing him with its ephemeral beauty.

Opulence, a gilded cage, awaits him in the realm of his right eye. A mansion, vast and hollow, echoes with the silence of unfulfilled desires. His wife, a goddess carved from marble, stands beside him, a perfect stranger in a world too perfect to be true. The car, a behemoth of metal and chrome, swallows him whole, a microbe lost in the vastness of excess.

Doubts, skeletal specters, rise from the depths of his subconscious, their bony fingers clasping his ankles in a vice-like grip. They drag him beneath the surface of a raging tide, a deluge of moral debts accrued over a lifetime of forgotten choices. The waters, a repo service, strip away the trappings of his existence, luxury dissolving like sugar in the rain.

Signposts, twisted and enigmatic, point the way to a fork in the road. “Right” and “Wrong,” they beckon, their meanings as inscrutable as the secrets of the universe. He stands at the crossroads, a traveler lost in the labyrinth of his own mind, questioning the nature of his reality, the essence of his being.

And through it all, a voice echoes, a mantra of false comfort: “Same as it ever was.” The words, a siren song, lull him into a trance of acceptance, even as the world around him shifts and warps, a surreal landscape of disjointed images and fractured truths.

In this avant-garde tapestry of existence, our protagonist navigates the uncharted waters of his dual lives, a marionette dancing to the tune of an unseen puppeteer. The boundaries of reality blur, the lines between dream and waking life dissolving like watercolors on a canvas.

Step into his shoes, dear reader, and embark on a journey through the looking glass, where the familiar becomes strange, and the strange becomes all too familiar. Embrace the discomfort, the unease, as you wander through the halls of this surreal narrative, a voyager in a land where nothing is quite as it seems.

For in the end, are we not all just fragments of ourselves, shards of a shattered mirror, reflecting the myriad facets of our existence? In this tale of two minds, find the courage to confront the duality within, to embrace the unconventional, and to step boldly into the unknown.

Cosmic Transmission Received

Bzzt…crackle…

A lone radio telescope swivels, its metallic limbs creaking in the night wind. Suddenly – a signal pulses from the void!

Zzzip…beep beep…

“We’ve got something!” shouts astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, adjusting his paisley cravat. “Quick, fire up the Quantum Linguistic Modulator!”

Bzzzwoooo…

Lights blink, equations swirl on holographic displays. “The message… it’s addressed to someone named Madd_Fictional,” intones mathematician Michio Kaku, eyebrows knitted like fractals.

Ring ring…

“Hello, Madd_Fictional speaking.”

“Madds, this is Brian Cox. We need you at the lab pronto, mate. The stars are calling your name!”

Whoooosh…

A hover-limo whisks through neon canyons. Madd_Fictional alights at the SETI compound, greeted by lab-coated luminaries.

“Who are you?” blinks the decoded transmission. Madd_Fictional ponders, reality warping at the edges…

Vrrooommmm…

A movie projector whirs. Sibling rivalry explodes on a medieval tapestry – The Lion in Winter. Madd_Fictional’s family tree twists, a tangle of thorny love-hate.

Fwump…

Pages rustle. A Stranger in a Strange Land, at home nowhere and everywhere. Madd_Fictional traverses the margins, a permanent outsider looking in.

Ommmmm…

Desiderata’s zen koan whispers sage counsel. Inner peace shimmers just out of reach, an oasis mirage. Madd_Fictional grasps, fingertips dissolving into sand…

Eeeeeeeee! The Scream reverberates, paint melting into madness. Demons dance at the corner of Madd_Fictional’s eyes, cackling and vanishing in smoke.

Hmmmmmm… The Thinker cogitates, paralyzed by roads not taken. Madd_Fictional broods, a living statue in the wasteland of missed chances.

Rumble rumble…

Tank treads grind. The Unknown Rebel stands defiant, shopping bags akimbo. Madd_Fictional raises an iron fist against the powers that be!

Oooooooo! Ethereal music floods the senses – Sigur Rós’ sonic sorcery. Madd_Fictional dives headlong into uncharted waters of creativity!

Mwahahahaaaa! Sweeney Todd’s razor drips rubies, vengeance and meat pies steaming in the London fog. Madd_Fictional plots delicious retribution, a recipe 15 years in the making!

Hsssssss… Paint-dappled hands blend into brick and mortar. The Invisible Man vanishes, an artist erased. Madd_Fictional merges with the background, hiding in plain sight…

Ping!

“Transmission complete.” The scientists murmur, stroking chins in 11 dimensions. Madd_Fictional grins, a Cheshire Cat adrift in 10 masterpieces.

Madd_Fictional looks to the stars, celestial genealogy bursting with limitless permutations. “This is who I am,” they whisper. “The universe and I are one.”

Fzzzzzzt…

Static consumes the signal. The telescope powers down with a descending hummmmm. Darkness and silence settle over the desert lab, gravid with unanswered questions. Madd_Fictional walks into the night, footsteps leaving a trail of stardust.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Simmer down. I know the story doesn’t make a lick of sense, but that sometimes happens with stream of consciousness writing. And for all of you doubting that Neil deGrasse Tyson, Michio Kaku, and Brian Cox would ever befriend me…what do you know? You’re not the boss of my fate!

I hate baths. Hate 'em more than Brussels sprouts, more than time-outs, maybe even more than whenever stupid ol' Tommy Perkins pulled my pigtails. But Mama says I gotta take 'em, so here I am, starin' at this big ol' tub full of bubbles that I swear would eat me alive if I let it.

The floor's all cold and slippery under my feet. I wiggle my toes and see the dirt come off in little smudges. Mama'd have a cow if she saw that. The bubbles in the tub look like fluffy clouds, or maybe the castles princesses live in. But I know better. It's all a trick to get me in there.

Suddenly, there's a big ol' KNOCKITY-KNOCK at the door. "Jadalyn Maeve Langford!" Uh-oh. Mama's sayin' my full name. That ain't never good. "I don't hear any splashing in there. What's the holdup?"

Quick as a wink, I stick my hand in the tub and splash it around. "I'm in, Mama! Splish-splashin' away!" I yell back, trying to sound all happy-like.

I hear Mama sigh real big. "No monkey business, you hear? Good girls take their baths without fussin'. Now get to it, or there'll be trouble."

I listen real hard as her slippers go shush-shush down the hall. She's muttering something, probably prayin' for patience again. Mama does that a lot with me around.

Now it's just me and the tub again. I take a deep breath, scrunch up my face real tight, and hop in quick as a jackrabbit. The water's warm, I'll give Mama that. She always gets it just right, even if I don't want to admit it.

I sit there, not really washin' but just kinda swishin' the water around, when I start noticin' stuff. The dirty water makes a ring around the tub, and it starts to look like somethin' else. Somethin'... spooky.
The bubbles ain't just bubbles no more. They're turnin' into monsters and weird faces, like the ones in that nightmare book Mama says I'm not s'posed to read before bed. And I hear whispers coming from the drain, like secrets nobody's s'posed to know.

The bathroom starts gettin' all foggy, and I can barely see. But then, two bright lights shine through the mist, and there's this weird sound, like when you blow over the top of a bottle. It's scary, but kinda excitin' too.

Tiny waves splash against the side of the tub, and I can see little boats getting knocked over. That's when it hits me, right between the eyes.

"Oh no!" I whisper-yell. "It's the Devil! He's comin' to get me 'cause I don't wanna take a bath!"

Well, I'm not gonna let some stinky ol' Devil get the best of me. Mama didn't raise no quitter! I grab my washcloth and start scrubbin' like my life depends on it. I pour a whole bunch of shampoo on my head, so much it runs down into my eyes, but I don't care. I'm makin' a special anti-Devil helmet!

Every time I dunk under the water, I know I'm fightin' off all the monsters and Devil-thingees. They don't stand a chance against Jadie-Mae Langford, the new best bath-taker in the whole wide world!

All of a sudden, the door flies open with a big BANG! I jump so high, I almost slip under the water. There's Mama, standin' there with her hands on her hips, looking ready to let me have it.

But before she can say anything, I stand up real proud and announce, "All done, Mama! Clean as a whistle!" I'm grinnin' so big, my cheeks hurt.

Mama's face changes, and she starts to smile too. "Well, I'll be," she says, wrappin' me up in the fluffiest towel ever. "Looks like somebody finally learned that cleanliness is next to godliness."

Steppin' out of the tub, I watch all the soap and bubbles swirl down the drain. And you know what? I bet all those monsters and Devil-thingees are going right down with 'em. 'Cause in this house, Jadie-Mae Langford always comes out on top—even on bath night!

I was not what anyone would ever consider to be scholarly, but I knew a thing or two, such as change is a relentless tide, washing away the familiar and revealing the unexpected. I simply never imagined the waves of change would carry my husband so far from the shore of normalcy.

I watched him. Discreetly at first, then openly, brazenly, obsessively. My eyeballs suctioned to his morphing form like a suckerfish on the belly of a whale. How easily he accepted the change, diving into the churning tumult of transformation without a backward glance.

In the beginning, there was stumbling, which took me back to our first dance, with his clumsy steps on my toes, and the laughter that followed. He became graceful over the years but now the elegance of bipedal motion had been exchanged for the fumbling uncertainty of an infant giraffe taking its first steps. Depth perception skewed by that unblinking third eye erupting from his forehead like a fleshy periscope. But adapt he did, with preternatural swiftness. Grace and poise oozed from his pores as that ocular oddity swiveled this way and that, drinking in sights beyond the curtain of the mundane.

“Can you see into other dimensions with that thing?” I asked him one evening.

His chuckle was dry leaves skittering across pavement. “If only you knew the wonders it reveals.”

As he devoured books at a ravenous pace—pulp fiction, classics, appliance manuals, shampoo ingredients—I tossed and turned through fathoms of insomnia, the whisper of relentlessly turning pages a sinister lullaby. In the morning, bleary-eyed, I stumbled upon his latest conquest: an entire dictionary, ingested and excreted before the coffee had finished percolating.

Then came the nose, nostrils flaring, twitching, morphing into cavernous tunnels to funnel in a universe of scent. He practically pressed it against the pages, inhaling knowledge, breathing out bewilderment.

“You’re not developing a cocaine habit, are you dear?” My laugh was thin and brittle. His answering glare sharp as a scalpel.

He burrowed into solitude then, a hermit crab retreating into its shell. I was left on the outside, peering in through tiny drilled holes, furtive keyholes. Brief glimpses of ears elongating to elfin points, gums weeping blood as a second set of teeth sprouted like a garden of enamel, tongue unfurling and splitting in two like a serpent’s.

As I watched his form morph and shift, I couldn’t help but wonder if change was an evolution or an erosion of the soul.

“What’s happening to you?” I whispered through the barrier of the door.

“Glorious things,” came the sibilant reply, barely recognizable. His eyes, now all three of them, glowed with an unearthly light, reflecting a universe of knowledge and wonder that was both terrifying and fascinating. “I am becoming something more, something beyond the limits of human understanding.”

Then silence, dense and impenetrable as a black hole, sucking in sound, light, sanity. We used to spend hours debating philosophy, our voices rising and falling in passionate discourse. Now, his words were few and far between, replaced by cryptic smiles and eerie silences.

I gibbered and clawed but to no avail. Love, loyalty, curiosity—all consumed by the void of his absence. With each new alteration, I felt a piece of our shared life slip away, replaced by an increasing sense of dread. The man I loved was becoming a stranger, and my heart ached with the loss of every familiar trait. Staying meant losing myself in his endless transformations, becoming a mere shadow of my former self. I needed to reclaim my own identity, to find a space where I could breathe and rediscover who I was.

Trembling, I stuffed a rucksack with the remnants of my former life and jumped into the car. As I sped into the night, I refused to meet my own eyes in the rearview mirror, haunted by the memory of his unblinking third eye and fearful of what I might see in my reflection.

The open road ahead promised freedom, but it also served as a stark reminder of everything I had lost. In that moment, I understood that leaving my husband wasn’t an escape but an acknowledgment of the relentless tide of change that had swept us apart. The surge of relief was tainted by grief, a bittersweet recognition that I was drifting away from the man to whom I had vowed my heart and my days.

As the miles stretched out before me, I came to accept that change is the ultimate force of nature, indifferent to our desires, vows, and fears. It reshaped us in ways we could not foresee, pushing us to evolve or be left behind. I realized that if my husband’s transformation was his way of embracing change, then by running away, I risked becoming extinct.