Tonight, in America:


  1. Dough-faced nightmare men emerge out of ovens all over the country to grab their creators and bake them until they are just right.
  2. A cabal of market researchers has captured a school bus and taken it down to their lair under the sewers. They are slowly building a perfect understanding of Humanity through rigorous experimentation. Their findings are not comforting.
  3. 47th Avenue is packed with corpses. Everyone steps around them on their morning commute, irritated. 
  4. The mirrors are all delayed by 5 seconds. Mirror manufacturers across the country apologize profusely and assure everyone that normal service will resume shortly.
  5. The heat is unbearable. People in Manhattan are slowly joining together in huge sticky piles which flow through the streets in giant waves, screaming in either protest or celebration. You cannot tell which.
  6. People everywhere have the sense that they have forgotten the existence of someone who was once very important to them. Didn't they used to have a husband, once? Didn't they have a sister?
  7. The ocean is no longer present. Boats are stranded on piles of dying fish, hundreds of meters deep. There is no moisture on the former ocean floor.
  8. Cows everywhere have begun moving west. No-one can stop them. If halted by a barrier, they beat themselves to death against it. When they reach the west coast, they keep wading out into the open sea.
  9. No-one understands you when you talk about simple, everyday things. You find yourself having to stop to explain the concept of "School" or "Coffee", multiple times a day.
  10. The Trash Queens have been seen moving through the great landfill oceans on the west coast. Their bodies are long and sinuous, festooned with shattered glass and broken mirrors that glitter in the moonlight. They are gathering. For some reason, this brings you hope.
  11. You find yourself going to a lot of funerals for people you don't know. Churches and cemeteries everywhere are forced to expand due to unprecedented levels of attendance. 
  12. The crooked limbs of sewer-witches snake out of the drains to grab unwary travelers and demand cigarettes. 
  13. You become unable to understand other people, except in abstract terms. You know someone is your friend, but you cannot connect that fact to any kind of emotion or feeling within you. When people hug you, or cry, you don't understand why.
  14. At 11:30, a random member of the population is selected to be burned in effigy. This is enormously cathartic to everyone.
  15. Tonight, 12 random teenagers from across America gain the sudden and unstoppable urge to kill each other. This happens every year. They walk away from their homes and families, travel out, and will not rest until the other 11 are dead. No-one questions this, or knows why. 
  16. You hear stories of people throwing away their contact lenses and glasses. They kept seeing the wrong things.
  17. People on the street have forgotten to dress themselves. You walk past a man with one shoe, a woman without pants. You look down and realize you've forgotten to put your shirt on. 
  18. The moon takes up most of the sky tonight, and people have gathered in candle-lit vigils all across the city to it set. You see mobs gathered on balconies, roofs, on the streets, all looking up as it slowly goes under the horizon. You're surprised to find yourself crying.
  19. Coffee has stopped working. You are tempted to riot.
  20. The old dead meat in all the dumpsters and drains deep under the city twists together into a slaughtered god which rises, screaming and bloody, to retake the world. It gets a small column on page 3 of the New York Times.