The World of Myth Magazine

The Alien of Orchard Lake placed second in the 2021 Open Contract Challenge. Here’s a teaser for Chapter One.

Ebar hated the feeling the drugs were giving him.

“It’s just a little sedative to calm you down,” Doctor Franklin had told him when he was first admitted. “Just to help you relax.” Then he had turned to the two large, muscle-bound orderlies standing at attention and commanded, “Grab him!” Which they did, holding Ebar’s arm tightly while an even larger and more muscle-bound nurse administered the shot. Her name tag read Freida but to Ebar it could have easily read Goliath. He’d never had someone man-handle him like she did. In moments he was in La La Land.

At the time, being ganged up on by a doctor, two orderlies and a nurse at the Bison County Psychiatric Unit seemed unfair, if not overkill, to the skinny and normally agreeable Ebar. But at four against one, the odds were definitely not in his favor. He had no choice but to give in, and he’d been in La La land ever since, drifting into and out of consciousness for the next three days. And for each and every one of those days, whenever he was conscious, the more Ebar thought about it, the more unfair the whole thing seemed. After all, he’d only gotten into a fight with that idiot, Al. He hadn’t tried to start a third world war.

By the fourth day, Ebar was just plain mad. He’d come out of the drug induced fog in his brain and made a snap decision to make a run for it. Time to get out of here. He went to sit up to get out of bed, but couldn’t. He looked down to find his arms and legs were restrained by thick leather straps. What was going on? He struggled for a minute, tossing this way and that like a boat on a stormy sea, but got nowhere. Reluctantly, he gave up, lay back and closed his eyes. A memory came to him of a Franz Kafka book he’d read about a guy who had been falsely accused of a crime and slowly went insane trying to cope. Is that what was happening to him?

Panic set in and his heart starting racing, pounding like a drum in his chest. Unwilling to give up, he fought against his rising fear. Keep it together. You’ve got to get control of yourself.

He focused on his breathing, taking deep breaths, in and out, in and out, and after a minute, he felt himself calming down. Good. Whatever was happening, he wasn’t going to let them get the better of him. He took another deep breath, let it out and stared at the ceiling. He began counting the perforated holes in the tiles but found he was too preoccupied to keep track of them and quickly lost count, the holes eventually blending together into a gapping morass of nothingness.

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