Conversation Between A Composer And Their Psychologist

“I’ve always heard it.”

“And you coped by writing?”

“Yeah.”

“Did writing help?”

“Yeah, when I write it down the music cadenzas. And I get to perform it and make a decent living too.”

“What do you mean by cadenzas?”

“It’s Latin for stop. Then diminuendo until a new tune starts up in allegro. And I write that down too.”

The psychologist wrote: persistent auditory hallucinations & delusions of grandeur. There might be a book deal in this; a construction worker who believes himself a composer. Hottest thing in ClinPsych since the man who mistook his wife for a hat.From Guest Contributor Harman Burgess

Harman's short fiction has previously been published in CafeLit and Friday Flash Fiction, as well as in the upcoming September edition of Scarlet Leaf Review.

Abracadabra Universe

I got to tell you, what a computer thinks a man looks like, adversarially evolved hallucinations, is the kind of shit that wears me out. But, apparently, it isn’t the kind of shit that wears most other people out. Their focus is just too taken up with acquiring the essentials – liquor, guns, toilet paper, travel bottles of hand sanitizer – for them to ever notice the heart lying in rags at their feet, or the African monkeys rafting across the Atlantic, or the shrill, jangly sound in the background that can be variously translated as “hello” or “goodbye” or even “peace.”

From Guest Contributor Howie Good

Howie is the author most recently of Stick Figure Opera: 99 100-word Prose Poems from Cajun Mutt Press. He co-edits the online journals Unbroken and UnLost.