Happy Doomsday

by David Sosnowski

before he’d started school, which he’d been dreading—wisely, as it turned out—because there’d be a lot of people there and he didn’t like people, especially when they came in “lots.”

being weird was just synonymous with being smarter than they were,

Dev wondered if that was the job of fiction, to test-drive the impossible, to loosen our grip on conventional reality.

And that was the trouble with having a heart. Things got into it, and you stopped knowing how to live without them.

No wonder she couldn’t follow the simplest shall-not: the woman was an inbred idiot! And the sad generations that followed were just her idiot children . . .

“Have you met people?” Dev asked. “I have; they suck.”