The Gritty Reality

The smell of ionized dust and charcoal is thick enough to taste, a gritty metallic film that coats the back of my throat every time I breathe. My right arm is currently a useless, tingling appendage hanging at my side because I managed to sleep on it at a 49-degree angle last night, and the pins and needles are making it difficult to point at the obvious. I am standing in what used to be a state-of-the-art server room, but is now a blackened graveyard of silicon and melted plastic. The heat was so intense that the aluminum casings on the primary units have warped into a series of jagged, silver waves.

Across from me stands the insurance adjuster, a man who looks like he was pressed between two heavy books and left to dry. He is not looking at the destruction. He is looking at a tablet screen that casts a pale, sickly blue light onto his face.

I try to flex my numb fingers,

The Taste of Reality

The leaderboard for ‘Kingdom of the Shattered Sun’ flickered at 2:35 AM with a strobe-like intensity that made my retinas ache. I sat there in the dark, the only sound being the low hum of my refrigerator and the wet, rhythmic smack of my own chewing. I’d just taken a massive bite of sourdough toast when the flavor hit me-not the tang of yeast, but the unmistakable, fuzzy bitterness of green mold. I spat it into my hand, 5 seconds too late, staring at the blue-green colony I’d just partially ingested. It was a visceral, revolting reminder that things aren’t always what they seem on the surface, which is exactly how I feel when I watch Luv2Flex drop another $5,555 on a virtual castle skin.

Contextual Dignity

Jordan K., a prison education coordinator, understands that value is entirely contextual-a hallucination we all agree to participate in so that society doesn’t collapse into a heap of meaningless matter. He’s seen men trade 5 packs of cigarettes for a single hand-drawn card. When Jordan goes home, he watches high-stakes mobile gaming. He sees the whales not as tragedies,