The strains of Joachim Raff's Symphony No. 5, "Lenore," drift out of the utter blackness.
Bill didn't change out of his pajamas that morning before leaving for work. He also skipped breakfast, thinking he might get a donut from the cart outside. On the way to the bus stop, a whole fleet of alien ships passed by pursued by an angry green giant. Bill idly wondered if the giant could photosynthesize.
When Bill got to work, he decided not to go into the office today after all because the building had been turned into a school for mutant children.
As he wandered around the park, Bill watched a bodybuilder exercising with a medieval broadsword. He wondered if the man also worked at a desk job some place, or perhaps was involved in politics. He looked up at the flagpole and saw there was no flag today, only the rope clattering against the metal pole in the wind.
Bill became lost in a crowd aimlessly drifting from street to street, surrounded by so many voices it might as well be silence. When the crowd turned as one to devour a lone sign-shaker outside the local pizza place, Bill continued to walk alone towards his apartment building. He noticed one of his neighbors lying dead in the entrance to the building. His head had been cut open and his brain was missing. Bill didn't remember the name of the dead man, and he wasn't sure if he had ever known it. He wondered when someone else would move in.
When Bill was young he used to imagine that his friends had been recruited for important positions in the army when they moved away. It was only later that he realized it really was just the random movements of adults causing it. He thought that most of his life had been a long series of goodbyes, learning not to mind very much when people left, and learning not to form very close relationships with people he might not know for very long.
That evening, Bill watched three hours of the evening propaganda before the lights and television suddenly went out. Bill drank a tumbler of Victory Gin in the dark and went to bed early.
The next morning, Bill felt very ill, as if he had swallowed a slug which was now gnawing on his liver. He stared at the manatee on his calendar and tried to remember if it was the first of the month yet, and whether he should flip the page. He also could not remember when he had scheduled his next doctor's appointment or whether he had written it down on the calendar yet. It was the weekend, so he decided to sleep for forty-two more minutes. During that time, he dreamt he was floating through space and wearing a cowboy hat and spurs, although the only animals he came across were three dead horses long-since frozen in space and a planet populated solely by apes and enormous worms.
When Bill finally got up, he noticed that his second heart had stopped beating, and he wondered when he'd gotten one. He-
Author's note: just a short thing here. Tis the season of the Unbound Worlds fantasy cage match. It's over, and it was mildly entertaining. Terry Pratchett's Librarian did very well, but lost the final match. Anyhow, I've also been rewatching some of Don Hertzfeldt's surreal animations. This little thing is inspired by It's Such a Beautiful Day, Hertzfeldt's film about Bill, an otherwise ordinary character who seems to be dying of an unspecified neuropsychiatric illness. And this story in no way does justice to the original, but it was still fun to write. Here, Bill in a way goes up against all kinds of extraordinary creatures and people and circumstances, but emerges unscathed and in fact oblivious, because his only real enemy is his own illness. Starting from the top: Hulk and the chitauri, the X-men, Conan the Barbarian, a horde of zombies, recruiters from Ender's Game, 1984, the chest-burster from Alien, the worlds of Firefly, Dune, and Planet of the Apes. The story ends with Doctor Who.