Senseless

by Edd

It starts with the hollow eyes. I’m working my shift at the convenience store when this woman comes up with a sandwich and a Diet Coke, only her eyes aren’t there. In her sockets there’s a fuzzy darkness. She acts so normal that I ring her up as usual just to get rid of her.

There it is again on the next guy’s face, then the woman and her baby in a stroller – hollow eyes. Nobody freaks when they look at each other, so that’s how I know it’s a problem with me.

I call my manager to say I’m sick, then I call the clinic. When Anita gets to the store her eyes are hollow, too, and her lips are fading. It’s not her teeth I see, but the shelves behind her head, faint and dim.

I drive to the clinic through crowds of people with fading faces. When I get to the waiting room the admitting nurse has no head. She asks me to sit and I stare at headless people on the magazines.

When I see the doctor –most of him– he tells me he’s heard of this. It’s an immune disorder. It changes brains exposed to decades of advertising and movie storytelling.

The doctor uses his hands a lot when he talks. He waves, he gestures, he plays with a tongue depressor as he’s telling me this response affects perceptions. It masks expression. The brain extrapolates what’s behind the eyes, the mouth, eventually the whole head.

His hands fade away. Fuzziness travels up his arms all the way to his shoulders. There’s a white-coated torso on legs with bits of head and a lot of hair saying there’s been no cure yet, that whatever I’ve got has been treated as hysterical blindness. Here’s a referral for you, he says.

When I pass back through the waiting room the nurse’s head and arms are gone. A waiting patient is losing his legs, too. The nurse says something, but her voice is drowned out by the hum of her computer.

I walk to my car among diminishing people. The radio gives me static and patches of silence where there should be stations.

Lucy! I should get to her office and tell her I love her while there’s some of her to see. I start the car, and pull into a traffic of driverless cars. Intersections pass in a blur, green lights clearing my way to her.

A bump, the shocks mostly compensating. I slow, checking the rear view mirror and see nothing. It’s a nothing I know must be something. More thumps, and I stop altogether. My door opens by itself, my belt unbuckles, and I am pulled from the car.

Are they concerned about me? Are they screaming? I hear nothing, I see nothing, and then the first blow lands.

The Minotaur’s Gaze

by Rudi Dornemann

I grew up in a tenement that looked out on the back of the minotaur’s head. The minotaur statue is older than the city and taller than any building in it. Our tenement is nearly as tall, not nearly as old, and in far worse repair.

The statue gazes out across the plain of salt, which the scholars say was a sea that dried up years ago, and my siblings and I gaze with it into the hazy horizon.

The scholars don’t know who built the statue, or why, but everyone else says it’s a marker to guide travelers over the salt plain. However, everyone, including the scholars, agrees the plain is impossible to cross–too vast, too empty of landmarks. With all the wind-stirred dust, you can’t navigate by stars; by day, you can barely guess where the sun is.

My brothers and sisters and I do go out onto the plain at daybreak and dusk, when the twilight seeps into everything, and we might be walking on a flat of sky. It’s the one advantage we’ve got in the salt quarter. The old city has history; the river districts have trade and communication with distant lands; and the elite quarter has the evening cool of the mountains. A half hour at either end of the day to explore an empty blue world doesn’t seem like much in comparison.

We find our way back by the broken silhouettes of the mountains, and the prongs of the minotaur’s horns above them. One night, we found a man collapsed at the base of the minotaur statue, covered in salt dust. Under the white coating, we saw his boots and glasses were the blue of twilight on the plain.

We went for a healer and returned to find the man gone. The scholars and city guard told us he was a lunatic who’d wandered out onto the plain. We didn’t believe them; we knew the impossible when we saw it.

They built his pyre on our rooftop–our building was closest, and they didn’t want to move him far, which made us even more suspicious. We knew secret ways to the roof, so we crept up and stole his glasses and boots.

We argued all night and drew lots. In the predawn twilight, the glasses show me trails on the plain. I set my foot on one to see where the boots will take me…