A Supercool Guy
by Stuart Cavet
March 22, 2026 | Fiction | Disturbed, Satisfied
Her sleeping brain has alarmed her at this dark hour, telling her that his honesty was all cover, that the heart on his sleeve lies discarded among all his cast-off clothing, that there is no window into his soul, and that there is ick in his schtick. She leaves the room, the fey illumination from her bedside lamp or the almost soundless tread of her fairy-like footsteps waking him up.
He remains sprawled and stiff, uncovered and cold, in her unfamiliar bed. He is, in fact, utterly immobile and finds it impossible to move. He cannot even wipe the sleep from his eyes. Last night he had all the moves.
He feels flat, and he is: flattened out, pancake thin, like a cut-out, a human template, barely exceeding two dimensions, an anthropomorphic sheet of glass. He can hardly believe it, yet he sees it, and it’s true. But how does he see it? Does he have eyes? His vitreous body appears to contain no organs and no nerves. Last night he was, if anything, too full of himself.
The bitter, brittle reality of his present predicament, he reflects, is that he dares not even try levering himself off the bed and shuffling to a mirror to see the full extent of his transformation. There is no choice but to recline and repine.
She returns to the room, fully dressed, and observes him coldly. He looks back, just lying there, as a flatfish probably regards a predator swimming above it. He feels fragile, defenseless, exposed.
In her own way, she is as transformed as he. Last night she had seemed an empath; now she is most decidedly on the warpath.
She casts a glance ‘down there.’ Her expressionless expression doesn’t change. He takes a look himself, swiveling his ‘eyes’ as best he can. All is smooth and sexless, of a piece with the rest of him: not a bubble, not a bump, not a ripple, not a dimple.
She leans over him and is about to lift him. Hey! Whoa! Hold on! Go carefully! he tries to cry—afraid that he’ll break under his own weight if not properly supported—yet he has a case of glassy lockjaw and excessively viscous vocal cords, making him as mute as a Murano vase.
She lifts him anyway. She carries him, knocking him against the doorjamb, chipping one of his shoulders, and then losing one of his legs. However, it’s surprisingly painless: he is completely numb.
She manages to open the front door, takes a step outside and suddenly lets go of him, dumping him on the pavement. She says something about being transparent and leaves him shattered and spilling his see-through guts before the waking world.
good piece and a beautiful picture too; but the revenge plot is a bit implicit, but overall fantastic!
Good work Stuart!