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when it’s real, when I could no longer pretend to be an adult or a child or anywhere in between at will.
    I began to think that my skin was turning into the fabric of the couch, because of the scratching. Slowly my back turned blue with small white and pink flowers dotted across it, and it spread to my arms until my entire body was covered. I was becoming a me—couch—hybrid creature and nobody noticed. I was, as I’d folded down into a turtleish stature, a child couch. What was my mission? What could I do with my new life? Should I use these new powers to scare people? Can I do something great now that I was not a regular human, like show everybody that humans are more similar than different: “We are not so different” they will say to each other while uniting to shun me.
    “Do you like the movie?” Guy asked while he leaned in towards me, snapping my mind back to reality, but I could hear him just fine from where he was.
    Pretending it was
Brazil
29 I told Guy that I liked it. It wasn’t
Brazil
, but
Something and Someone are Dead
and it seemed good but I didn’t want to like it and I wasn’t in the mood for fate.
    “We should do this more often.”
    “Do you usually watch movies like this?” I asked, grabbing for anything to say, but instead of answering he just kept leaning in towards my face… “I’m just glad it wasn’t CSM.” His face smelled like beeswax 32 and his breath was like baking soda and mint. I guess he wanted a kiss, a confirmation of a connection between us, but I wasn’t there. As he got extremely close I had to fake a sneeze to keep my personal space, I had just returned to humanity after transforming into a couch creature and I needed to regain my personal bubble.

Zero

    My shift began the same, hum in
    the dark with no escape, but the hum
    rattles in your head even when we’d sleep and I only
    thought it was sleep. Except this time,
    outside the ship, was a gaseous giant planet that orbits the same
    star as the Refulgent world we seek. The Sapphire Jewel
    sits outside the window now as I
    write this letter, a whole new hum
    here. It’s hard to fully grasp what you have
    accomplished by coming here, the quiet sounds of rain
    and thunder below us, and it is hard to imagine
    what I will accomplish when we meet the creatures who live here.
    The stasis process takes a quarter of your planet’s rotation to fully awaken
    my subjects, perhaps this will be our last letter home for
    some time as we adjust to a new life; we won’t have the time to write me a short letter, so a long one will have to do.
    The trip here was quite uneventful,
    as we Zeals, and I, would no doubt prefer. It has been a long time
    since we left… You’re not even sure who this letter will be
    sent to. My sister, dear ♪∂Ϟ♭♬, you hope they are well, or perhaps
    we are long dead,
    and my progeny receive this letter. Have you told them
    about me? About how you would sneak
    out during the night to watch
    the stars, how angry father would
    get because of how tired I’d be
    in the mornings, especially after mom died, forced to do chores.
    While I’ve been in stasis you had dreams
    of that time, you were young
    and happy, most of the time, I didn’t worry
    about silly interstellar implications of finding and meeting
    alien life or how all society was on the verge of
    tearing myself apart.
    Space travel, seeing worlds much larger than ours,
    and numerous, makes it all seem
    — ∂ϞϞ¥Ƙ

George’s Transient Downturn
     
    Reality is reality whether it really happened or not. I walked out of the station because I was confused. How had I even gotten there? George: remember! The air smelled like sour milk and my head felt as if I’d been crying. Even if it’s not a reality we’ve all shared, reality is in the mind of the beholder. Sometimes. I think. Reality is reality whether it really happened or not. Do we see the same view as others? Darkness backwards and lightness forwards, or as our hair and