Tiny Horror

Kaelen had not always been a performer. For the first twenty years of his life, he had been a patient in a world of white walls and padded silence.

The diagnosis had shifted like sand under a rising tide. Schizophrenia. Temporal lobe epilepsy. Dissociative identity disorder. The doctors at the Saint Judes Neurological Institute saw a boy who screamed when people touched him because their touch felt like a swarm of biting flies. They saw a boy who could describe the specific, hidden traumas of his nurses: the abuses, the infidelities, the quiet cruelties: with an agonizing, photographic detail.

"The brain is a bioelectrical engine," Dr. Sarah Lynn had told him during their first session. She was the only one who did not look at him like a broken machine or a monster. "In most people, the engine is shielded. In you, Kaelen, the shielding is missing. Your mirror neurons aren't just firing. They're overclocked to the point of melting. You're not crazy. You're just loud. You're hearing the song of the meat."

She had been the one to help him find the lead lined ways to survive. She taught him how to use white noise to drown out the psychic sludge of the city. She was the one who suggested he look into the world of mentalism. He would not do it to scam people. He would do it to provide a socially acceptable mask for the noise he could not stop hearing.

He could not hold a job in a grocery store. The loudness of the internal miseries of the customers made him vomit. He could not work in an office. The stagnant air of corporate resentment felt like drowning in grey sludge. But on a stage, behind the artifice of a show, he could control the flow. He could be the master of the noise rather than its victim.

Now, as he fled the Obsidian Hotel, the cold night air hitting his face like a wet slap, he realized the noise had finally found a way to kill the only person who believed his soul was not just a collection of firing synapses.

The tale continues...