The Laughter by Sonora Jha

I shot them a message and the FBI wants to know why I took the boy to shoot guns. Of course they do. To ready myself for their questions as they circle back to my home for the second time today, and to rest my back still aching from sleeping at my desk, I went to LifeFloat this morning. I had a sensation, a half-waking vision of myself as a lobster, grotesque, sitting in a chair like a human, with a large, distended tongue, like no crustacean has, nor a human. This vision was the same and yet also different from one I'd had before. I am sitting at a cafe table with the boy, who soon turns into a lobster himself, but with a young lobster's body and so much of his boyish human face still visible in the lobster. I pin down his arms and start to eat that face. All the while, he keeps smiling at me with that flash of guileless query that his aunt and I would often see on his face.

For the first time in my floating experience, the pool started to close in around me until it was filled with two thrashing lobsters. The water turned warmer as if with blood, and I tasted metal on my lobster tongue. I found my head thrashing from side to side, and soon the high-density salt water was in my eyes and I was in the real world, with little clarity except that I ought to spritz my eyes with the dainty spray bottle of clean water provided on the edge of the flotation pool.