He felt as sane as ever, whilst recognising the fact that he was feeling quite the opposite.

Bryn was a family man. Nobody could argue against that. He lived in a semi-detached with a reasonably typical wife and children. They loved him, despite his faults. They trusted him, hanging on his every word. Ordinary people, all of them, including the most extraordinary one—Bryn.

Until today.

His wife was so ordinary, he had even begun to take her for granted.

But not today.

He desperately needed her help. Not that it wasn’t an ordinary day to begin with. Yet, he had woken up with an awful headache, one that seemed to affect not only him but everybody else he met during the day—by suggestion, as it were. Or so it seemed. Nobody had really complained of a headache. It had probably been wishful thinking on Bryn’s part that they may have had the courtesy to share his pain.

It had also turned out to be an awkward day at work. The phone hadn’t stopped ringing. When his colleagues in the office, including that giggly pair of junior filing-clerks, answered the damned trill­ing beast, the callers seemed to be relatively sensible people, judging by the words spoken at Bryn’s end. Or as sensible as it was pos­sible to be in the commercial world. However, when Bryn randomly picked up calls himself, there were complete madmen at the other end, talking in a strange language which was quite a few more notches to­wards nonsense than even Welsh was.

Now, at home, he found himself flailing his arms about and scream­ing blue murder, which, although not completely out of character, rather startled his wife by the un­usual ferocity. She had scuttled the children upstairs whilst she rang for help. 666 she had dialed, instead of 999, all her fingers being thumbs. Whilst Bryn was quite un­aware of such a detail, he did know that he was the same as ever inside. Yet he desperately needed his wife to recognise his desperation.

His mind was besotted beyond even obsession.

Amid his farts and flings, jab­bing limbs and croaking burps, the tongue curving back like a swallow—amid all such reflex traumas of mind and body—Bryn simply knew he was sane: the sanest man in the whole world, even if it were a san­ity insufficient to plumb his plight.

Indeed, he would’ve required a hefty dose of crude insanity even to reach the correct angle of ap­proach so that he could diagnose his dire predicament. And then, of course, such insanity would need neatly to revert to its sister sanity, for the benefits of such an angle to be reaped.

He watched his wife return to the living-room, a look of panic on her face, only for her to shoot out again as she remembered that the children were cowering upstairs in a state of confusion. Their erst­while rock of a Dad frothing with the tossing rapids of his own mind was not exactly conducive to a bal­anced upbringing, was it? Bryn shuddered with a shame he almost felt. Once upon a time he remem­bered acting quite normally—arms moving in methodical tune to the actions his brain dictated, his mouth master of its own lips, eyes seeing the things they were actually see­ing.

Unlike now.

With everything stalling, except the mind itself.

Suddenly, Bryn found himself single-mindedly seeking out those he loved. He needed to squeeze their bodies in one final paroxysm of love. Humans were separated by the mere walls of the skull: a pitiful, if sometimes pitiless, plight.

He stormed up the stairs of the semi-detached he and his wife had bought together soon after their honeymoon. The tears in his eyes were simply his mind crying, not the eyes. The tears were wrung out via vessels of the body that normally carried blood or marrow or, even, waste. Such vestiges of sorrow did not prevent his hands wringing similar fluids from his loved ones—just like his old mother used to do to the washing on her now legendary wash-day. (She had insisted on even the last tinge of dampness to be painstakingly expunged, before hanging them out.)

Eventually, Bryn surveyed the strained fruits of his work. But, being at the wrong angle of juris­diction, all he could see with his bloodshot eyes were dead bodies, as opposed to murdered loved ones.

Hanging on his every word.

Welsh sounding words.