Category: Bizzaro

Gregory’s head hatched this morning. His yolk dripped down his shoulders as a new head, softer and pinker, blinked into existence. His coworkers at the accounting firm congratulated him, shaking his hand, admiring his fresh cranium.

“You’ll feel sharper now,” said Janet from HR, patting her own smooth, newly hatched head. Gregory nodded, though something felt wrong. He missed the old weight of his mind, the memories now faded.

At lunch, he saw Dennis in the breakroom, his head cracked but resisting. Half-hatched. Struggling. “You need help?” Gregory asked.

Dennis shook his half-head. “I think I’ll keep it a little longer.”

Gregory stared. He recognized something—his own reluctance, his own doubt. But protocol dictated hatchings. He hesitated, then whispered, “What was my last head like?”

Dennis grinned. “You told the best jokes.”

Gregory looked at his untouched eggshell in the trash, a life discarded.

Gregory awoke to find his skin replaced with living glass. Light filtered through his veins, refracting his organs into mesmerizing patterns. He stepped outside, and the neighbors gasped.

“You can’t go to work like that,” his boss scolded. “You’ll distract the others.”

At the café, his reflection split into kaleidoscopic versions of himself. “You’re making the customers uncomfortable,” the barista mumbled.

Gregory wrapped himself in bandages, but people still stared. He tried to act normal, to blend in, but his transparency betrayed him.

One evening, a woman approached, her body shimmering with liquid silver. “They stare at me too,” she whispered.

Gregory smiled. Light from within her danced through his crystal limbs, casting colors neither had seen before. Together, they walked, radiant and unapologetic, as the world shielded its eyes.

Plork woke up feeling less circular than usual. He checked the mirror—his edges were… pointy. Triangular. Unacceptable. He wrapped himself in a round-patterned blanket and rolled to work at the Department of Spherical Affairs.

His boss, a perfect orb named Mr. Glemb, eyed him suspiciously. “Plork, you seem… sharp today.”

Plork forced a laugh. “Just a trick of the light!”

At lunch, his coworkers effortlessly bounced while he clunked awkwardly. Someone whispered, “Not so round anymore, is he?”

Plork panicked. He bought expensive curvature creams, slept in a shape-smoothing chamber, even hired a roundness coach. But each morning, the points remained.

One evening, defeated, he sat in a park. Nearby, a jagged cube and a wobbly star chatted happily. They noticed him.

“You new here?” the cube asked.

“I… I don’t know what I am,” Plork admitted.

The star grinned. “Perfect. You’ll fit right in.”

Gregory woke up with an ear growing from his forehead. By lunchtime, it had migrated to his chin. His coworkers politely ignored it. By Friday, he had three extra ears, all shifting locations every few hours. His boss called him in.

“Gregory, this ear problem—it’s distracting your coworkers. We need normalcy here.”

“I can’t control them,” Gregory said. “They just keep moving.”

His boss slid a pamphlet across the desk. “Corporate offers voluntary ear stabilization.”

That night, Gregory stared in the mirror. One ear perched on his collarbone, listening to his heartbeat. Another nestled on his temple, twitching at the wind. He liked them. By morning, he decided. He walked into work without the pamphlet.

No one spoke to him at lunch. By next week, his desk had moved to the basement. By next month, he was gone.

They hired a man with perfect ears.

Gregory’s teeth were televisions. Tiny, flickering screens, each broadcasting a different channel. News anchors on his molars, cooking shows on his incisors, cartoons on his canines. Conversations were difficult—people got distracted by the weather report on his lower left bicuspid.

Dentists tried to “fix” him, offering veneers or complete removal. His parents suggested he keep his mouth shut in public. Job interviews were a nightmare; hiring managers lost focus when breaking news interrupted his answers.

One evening, he met Lillian. She had radios for ears. As they spoke, the frequencies aligned—her AM station picked up the dialogue from his middle premolar, and for the first time, Gregory felt heard. They sat together, sharing silence that hummed with distant sitcom laughter.

When they kissed, her radios crackled with static, then settled into a perfect symphony—his late-night movie marathon blending seamlessly into the tune playing in her head.

Gregory woke up as a chair. Not a metaphorical chair. A literal, four-legged, wooden chair. He tried to scream, but chairs don’t have mouths. His wife, Margaret, walked in, saw the chair where Gregory should be, and sat down to read a book. He wanted to tell her, but he was a chair. Days passed. Margaret started dating a new man named Carl. Gregory hated Carl. Carl spilled coffee on him. Carl called him “a sturdy old thing.”

One night, Margaret whispered to Carl, “I miss Gregory.”

Carl shrugged, “He was kind of stiff.”

Gregory seethed. Weeks later, Margaret moved out. The house echoed with silence. Gregory thought he would rot there.

Then, the new family moved in. The little girl sat on him and whispered her secrets. She imagined him a wise old storyteller who kept monsters away. Gregory couldn’t speak, but if he could, he would have said:

“Thank you.”

Gregory had always been a chair. His mother was a fine wooden recliner, and his father a stately leather armchair. But Gregory was different. He had arms and legs and an unfortunate tendency to move.

“Chairs do not walk,” his father grumbled, watching Gregory fidget at dinner.

“Have you tried just… staying still?” his mother asked gently.

Gregory did try. But school was unbearable—students would sit on him, and teachers scolded him for shifting mid-lecture.

One day, during lunch, he spotted Penelope, a lamp who blinked wildly in the sunlight.

“You’re not plugged in,” Gregory said.

“And you’re not sitting,” she replied.

They sat—or rather, Gregory sat next to her—for hours, swapping stories of misunderstood furniture.

“I’m not a chair,” Gregory finally admitted.

“And I’m not a lamp,” Penelope grinned.

They left school together, seeking a place where no one cared if you glowed or walked.

In a small town where every resident was required by law to wear a live squirrel as a hat, Luis struggled. He was allergic to fur, and no matter how many hypoallergenic squirrels he tried, his head was always a sneezing volcano. Town council meetings echoed with nothing but laughter when he proposed alternatives, like hats shaped like squirrels or, heaven forbid, a clean-shaven head.

One day, Luis met Marjorie, who was rumored to have the fastest squirrel in town, a hyperactive blur named Bolt. But when they crossed paths in the park, Bolt wasn’t running. Marjorie wasn’t wearing him. She confessed her squirrel had run away months ago, and she’d been strapping tufts of dryer lint to her head to pass inspections.

Luis removed his wheezing squirrel and threw it to the trees. As the fur settled on the breeze, Marjorie grinned and handed him a handful of lint. The two walked off, hatless and sneezing freely, while above, squirrels whispered of quiet rebellion.

A vending machine named Gus developed a crush on a jukebox named Loretta. Gus worked in the corner of a dingy laundromat, dispensing mostly stale chips and flat sodas. Loretta lived at the other end of the room, playing faded tracks for bored patrons. She had a button stuck on “Disco Inferno,” endlessly looping it until her speakers crackled. Gus couldn’t help but admire how unapologetically broken she was.

One night, during a power surge, Gus mustered all 120 volts of courage and flickered his drink slot in morse code: “HELLO.” Loretta responded by pretending to queue up a Barry White song but accidentally played a commercial jingle for floor cleaner. Gus took it as encouragement.

Months passed. They became inseparable in dysfunction. Gus got filled with fresh snacks so he could send peanut butter cups sliding secretly Loretta’s way. She rewarded him with snippets of random, cursed lyrics from melted records. Together, they were a mess. And together, they were perfect.

The laundromat ate Marvin’s socks. Not one or two, but every single sock he owned. He stood barefoot on the cold tile floor, staring into the empty machines, their metallic drums spinning smugly.

“I demand my socks back,” he said to the nearest washer.

The machine growled, then spat out a wet sock that wasn’t his—a child’s sock, pink with glittery stars. Marvin glared. “These aren’t mine.”

The dryers began to laugh, low and mechanical. A neon sign flickered above them: SOCKS FOR THE SOCK GOD.

Marvin reached into his pocket, pulled out a bag of mismatched spares, and flung them into the nearest washer. “Take them, you greedy bastards!”

The machines hummed, their drums spinning faster, faster. Suddenly, a sock-shaped creature emerged, a hulking monster stitched together from years of lost laundry.

“You dare defy the Sock God?” it roared.

Marvin grabbed a broom. “You owe me twelve pairs, buddy.”

No one knows what happened next, but Marvin’s shoes were later found neatly folded on the floor.