He didn’t like to fly. Not because he was afraid he was going to fall from the sky or whatever. He just had this thing about being in the air for extended periods of time. And after years of dealing with it, he went to a therapist to get some pills so he wouldn’t have to deal with it. Don’t take more than two and don’t drink while you’re on them the therapist warned.

So he did the reasonable thing before boarding his flight the other day to some place irrelevant to this story: he took ten and thought of Sylvia Plath as he swallowed three shots of Vodka. Good thing, too, because his plane hit a menacing storm cell and lots of bad stuff happened to all the people inside. But he didn’t notice. He was dreaming.

The bad stuff eventually stopped happening and the plane landed wherever it was going. He was still dreaming. Somebody tried to wake him but he was still dreaming. A discussion. Then some other person tried more vigorously than the first to wake him but he was still dreaming. Another discussion. Somebody then frantically called somebody because he was still dreaming.

Sitting across from the man who clearly had the wrong impression, it all seemed to make sense now.

K was tense as he ate the pasta the man who clearly had the wrong impression had clearly slaved over; he avoided eye contact. When K had agreed to “come over for dinner” he was expecting something masculine like pizza and beer. Perhaps they would also talk about women or something. (Perhaps K should have gotten to know him better first.) Instead, here he sat, across from the man who clearly had the wrong impression, so wrong in fact that he greeted K at the door in a mesh tank top and not much else, eating hand-crafted pasta and drinking expensive wine complements of the man who clearly had the wrong impression who implored that K not “bring anything.”

Although K was mildly concerned that the man who clearly had the wrong impression would expect something in return for all of his effort (you know how men are), he was troubled more by the fact that the man who clearly had the wrong impression got the wrong impression.

Sometimes guys are just being nice K scoffed to himself, eyes unwaveringly downcast.

A man was murdered last night. Two people–X and Y–saw what happened, and when the police came to investigate they both came forward.

Here is what X (a convicted felon) told the detective: Two men were arguing and shouting at each other and the one pulled out a knife and stuck the other one in the stomach a bunch of times. Then he ran off.

Here is what Y (a good person) told the detective: I saw a man and woman walking together. They both looked drunk. The man shouted at the woman and slapped her in the face. He looked like he was going to hit her again but she pulled something from her purse and stabbed him several times in the stomach. He fell over and she kicked him in the face. I didn’t see where she went.

The detective was at a loss. That night he went home and read his favorite story by Akutagawa Ryûnôsuke until he fell asleep. When the detective woke up in the morning the murdered man was sitting at the foot of his bed.

Here is what the murdered man told the detective: The details of what really happened are inconsequential now.

The man was confused, more confused than ever, in fact. He had always figured that a question such as this was straightforward–easy, simple, et cetera. But it plagued him. Why he had not until this point given it much–indeed, any–thought was anybody’s guess, and why now, at his refined age, should this question–when there are so many questions of greater import to be answered–demand such prominence was anybody’s guess as well. The question was of such unbearable heaviness that it would drive him to hang himself from the thing in his closet from which one suspends hangers. The people who would later dissect his body for clues would find that the question followed him even in death, scrawled as it would be across his chest in black marker, a final cry for help, perhaps, or a political message of some sort: Is it better to get peanut butter in the jelly, or jelly in the peanut butter? The people who would later dissect his body for clues would not know the answer to this question either, but they would posit that getting peanut butter in the jelly is preferable.

Rolling around the bottom of a box labeled “…or best offer” was a small pencil that could write by itself. People rummaging through other people’s junk passed it by in favor of grander junk like records or playing cards or sewing machines. K bought it for ten cents. He didn’t know that it could write by itself at the time; he bought it because he prefers pencils-which are surprisingly hard to come by-in this age of pens. He found it could write of its own accord when it began dancing atop the pretty wooden table upon which he had placed it after he got home: eat the heart and inner organs of a homeless man. K did as instructed and was later killed by the police in a vicious altercation. There was an article in the newspaper about it, though nothing was mentioned about K’s magic pencil.