I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom

by Jason Pargin

a rail-thin man by the tire air machine having a tense argument via either Bluetooth or psychosis.

her teary panic evaporated, and out from behind that cloud beamed horrible, horrible sunlight.

Abbott himself was definitely not happy, and in the aftermath of any transaction, this kind of mismatch in demeanor generally implied that one party had gotten screwed.

Dozens of platforms with largely identical functionality served radically different populations with diverging cultures and use patterns, often overlapping the same users who switch personalities based on which app they have open.

if he were about to die, he was going to go out how he’d lived: with absolutely no idea what the hell was going on.

If you think that, say, a cashier failing to wish you a Merry Christmas is a sign of impending Christian genocide, you’re probably not the type to hash out differences over brunch.

knew that they could not perceive the sanctity of that place, that the organ tuned to sense the sacred had been removed when they were too young to even understand what was being extracted from them.

in isolation, human minds tend to get strange, like a self-portrait painted from memory, in the dark, using a live snake as a brush.

For all I know, they’ve already told Homeland Security that the infamous Abbott Coburn is on the way, hauling a suitcase nuke, an alien corpse, a human corpse, a Soviet YouTube makeup influencer Manchurian Candidate saboteur, and two bags of illegal guns and cash.”