Djelloul Marbrook

There are certain days when things don’t hold their shape. This is not just a middle-age weight problem or distortion through a tear drop. It can happen in bright sunlight. People go convex and concave. Buildings seem to play with hula hoops. Sentences play hooky on their periods. Things are not exactly where they ought to be and you are not exactly who you ought to be, which is of course exactly what your parents told you. In this world you don’t ask if anybody can come out and play because God knows what would come out and play. This is the world of utter caprice, and you deserve admission because? Because you’re not feeling yourself today and all the available people whom you’d like to be have warts and purple noses. Perhaps this is your doppelganger’s world, not made of the usual materials. Perhaps you don’t have to go to work or home. Perhaps this is your work. You’re a mage. If the buildings want to wobble, help them. Reach up and correct the planets, refocus the sun on the other side of the street. Why limit yourself to the powers of Superman or Wonder Woman or Batman? They’re figments, this is the real deal. Can you bear it? Of course this kind of thinking got Giordano Bruno burned at the stake by the stodgy old church. He had been playing with star beasts, which the church thought even worse than playing with oneself. And here you have innocently strayed into the land where people are always telling you to go, and it’s… well, the doorman does look like the Jabberwock, not that you’ve ever really seen the Jabberwock, but all monsters have a certain familiarity, all of us having been Odysseus and Sinbad in previous lives and dimensions. This is the world fogies, preachers and politicians worry about. They fear we’ll find it and they won’t be able to scare us anymore. —DM