I sit languidly in my chair, watching the fly buzz about the room, hear the faint tick tock, tick tock of my watch as my lifeless hand hangs dumbly, swinging slowly for no apparent biological reason.

Hiromi, for all her vibrance, can't keep me there.  I drift . . .

Another in a long line of dreary days and unending nights. Another in a long line of weeks stuck in the loony bin. What the hell was I thinking taking a job here? Oh yeah. Money. I was thinking of the money. I hate that stuff. Rules your life. Pointless slips of paper, all of them the same size and shape – well, used to be, now they got those ugly colorful bills now – but all worth different amounts, depending on what it says on the front. And what do those numbers on the front...

This isn't a story I just began for the Writer's Club, this is one I've been working on for weeks, but its climax has to do with our inspiration paragraph a bit. So here it is. It's very, very, strange. (Word of caution and all that.) The reason this story exists is this: It began as a nondescript, strange text message to a phone number of someone I didn't know. Prank texting, for lack of a better way to describe it. And I caught the fever of surrealism. Think of it as T.S. Elliot on...