
Wave of Mutilation

The problem was the lifting of the invisible barrier between the story and the reader. “I have to create a fictional space,” Christian says. “Can you do that? I mean if this is just a story then anything you do in it will just be another part of it, it will follow from what came before,”
Douglas Lain • Wave of Mutilation
You realize that this story is very nearly finished now and pause at the end of this sentence in order to consider other, more satisfying, conclusions. The space you can see through, this hole in the world, doesn’t exist. It’s just a trick that I’m pulling. It’s a trick that you agree to let me pull even as I give the trick away. Somehow the trick
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Samantha and then stopped to examine my wife’s reflection in the window on the right side of the plane. I could see the lights from the airport, the red and green dots along the runway, on the other side of my wife’s transparent profile. Samantha was a spectral presence on the surface of the window and to see the world outside I had to look through
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Even as he admits his fictional status, Grover becomes more and more afraid, more and more convinced of his own existence, and more committed to the initial premise in the title.
Douglas Lain • Wave of Mutilation
“The mind knows no limits when used properly,” the voice said. “Think of a pentagram, Donald. Now put another inside, a third, and a fourth. No pencil is sharp enough to draw as fine as you can think, and no paper large enough to hold your imagination. In fact, it is only in the mind that we can conceive infinity.”
Douglas Lain • Wave of Mutilation
“Think about those Road Runner cartoons where the Coyote runs off the side of a cliff and then remains suspended in midair. He’ll only fall if he looks down,” Dad said. And this was the secret. Life itself was a matter of refusing to look down or, if one couldn’t avoid looking, then the trick was to find a way to look without seeing. People could
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“Everything is in flux. Everything is equal, but if you ask people what they think or how they feel they say they’re just as stuck as they were before.”
Douglas Lain • Wave of Mutilation
Holding onto an idea of her identity, even though the idea is a fiction, is what she’s aiming at.
Douglas Lain • Wave of Mutilation
Unreality, the disappearance of a center, meant that I had a destiny.