Disney World is a wonderful place to meet fellow practitioners of self-harm. The artificial veneer. The deranged wholesomeness. The omnipresent cheer. This gleefully psychotic atmosphere attracts depressives of all shades. If you look closely they can be spotted throughout the park—a girl with bandaged wrists spinning inside a giant teacup, a boy picking his scabs bloody while ascending Splash Mountain, a father with neat scratches etched along his inner thigh waiting in line for his son to meet Mickey Mouse. I often fantasize about scaling the grand, geodesic Epcot dome and leaping from the top, or shotgunning my brains across the singing animatronic miniatures of It’s a Small World.

~

Hundreds of birds gather on a signal tower at dusk. Contrary to popular belief, birds do not use their song to communicate. Rather, they transmit information through power lines. How so? Telekinetic abilities have been documented in several species, including a renowned Australian cockatiel named Astrea that could rattle the bars of its cage without disturbing a single feather.

~

The boy next door ingested a large dose of LSD and attempted to decapitate the family dog, a half blind, arthritic labrador that in all fairness should have been long ago euthanized. His mother, my neighbor, attempted to disarm the incoherent teenager whom she had given life and soon found a kitchen knife embedded deep in her throat. When the police knocked on my door for a statement, I was unsurprised. He always did seem a bit off, I confessed, troubled but bright. I neglected to divulge having a week prior sold the boy a strong sheet of tabs—for an outrageous price, I might have added.

~

Many suburban developments are left deliberately unfinished. Construction firms fold or building permits languish in bureaucratic purgatory. Bulldozers rest beside mounds of upturned earth for months on end. Half paved streets reveal the vacant guts of incomplete fire hydrants. Model homes remain devoid of occupants, the display furniture smothered in plastic. Riding my bicycle through the desolate cul de sacs, I get the sense of being watched. Sometimes I notice distant figures traversing the muddy plains of empty lots, homebodies deprived of their natural habitat, forced to wander the sad patch of land where their dreams have failed to manifest.

~

An old friend started dating a tattoo artist’s apprentice. She let him practice on her legs and soon enough these limbs were covered. A roaring tiger on her left knee. A switchblade pointing down her right shin. A human skull atop each pale foot. I asked how bad the work hurt and she blushed. There was no pain, she said. The whirring needle was her sole pleasure.

~

Thousands of ships sunk during the Second World War continue leaking oil into oceans around the globe. Riding a glass bottomed boat through Pearl Harbor, one can still see the viscous black spume bubbling on the water’s surface, inky coils reaching up from the downed vessels. Besides untold gallons of fuel, over a thousand dead soldiers remain entombed inside the rusty hull of the USS Arizona alone, which will continue weeping her cargo for the next five hundred years, long after the bloated corpses have disintegrated, themselves destined to become fossil fuel.

~

I opened a book where I’d left off. The reading was slow, the prose tedious. I was more than halfway through, determined to finish, spite having always been my most faithful motivator. A spider mite went skittering across the text. Thoughtless, I smeared the pinprick sized creature into the page, leaving a faint red smudge, pulp on pulp. Only after I killed the bug did I realize how alike we were, both living our days stuck between two pages.

~

Liberty Township was closed by local authorities after an invasive species of ivy proved unmitigable. An old widow had taken to gardening as a distraction following the death of her husband from lead poisoning, which he contracted due to a compulsive habit of consuming paint chips. The widow planted the imported ivy on a trellis beside her shed. Within days the vines had spread to her house. The brick exterior was soon blanketed brilliant green. When the widow’s eldest daughter came to drop off groceries, she found the vines had snuck inside through an open window. The daughter discovered her mother in bed, cocooned in emerald spirals, leafy spears blooming from every orifice. The ivy appeared resistant to herbicides, growing at a rate faster than could be cut back. Liberty’s remaining residents were forcefully relocated, while a salt moat was constructed around the forsaken territory’s border, encircled with warning signs.

~

Does a tendency to deliberately stand in harm’s way make you courageous, careless, or curious?

~

A trick of the light, my face submerged in water, refracted so my head appears to be sliding off the neck. I’m trying to beat the world record for holding one’s breath—nearly twenty-five minutes. There’s a timer going, but I’m unable to check my progress. I lost count after thirty seconds. Hard to think with a mind flooded, like an underwater cave in which young whales go to play, only to find themselves lost, trapped in a fathomless maze, their perfectly preserved skeletons marking the lonely place they ran out of air.

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Matt Lee is a writer, actor, and teacher from Maryland. He co-edits Ligeia Magazine. His work has been featured at Occulum, SURFACES, and The Blue Pages, among other venues. His novel Crisis Actor is available from tragickal.

*Image credit: Ed Atkins, Untitled, 2018.