Bad Brains
by Kathe Koja· 2025
When you hit rock bottom, sink your fingers in the earth and scratch around a little. Be sure it’s actually rock you’ve hit, that there isn’t a floor beneath the floor to which you’ve fallen. There’s almost always a greater distance you could drop.
Austen Bandy thought his life had cratered. But that was before his brain injury and the seizures. And the visions.
A painter without patron or public, Austen’s unsold grotesques line the walls of his bungalow like a barricade in reverse. At least Emily likes his work. But Emily is long gone, and with her Austen’s inspiration.
Since his divorce, Austen measures his days in integers: zero clients, one friend, twelve-packs of beer. His life has collapsed into two dimensions: he travels a line that begins at his house and ends at the shabby apparel store where he works, printing stock images on T-shirts for fewer and fewer customers, deviating from this path only when the booze runs dry.
After Austen stumbles in a liquor store parking lot, hitting rock bottom turns horrifically literal. He wakes in the hospital to find his head heavily bandaged and his temporal lobe on the fritz. But it isn’t the intubation that bothers him, or the doctors exuding strictly professional concern, or even the seizures themselves. No, its a shimmer: a shimmer of pure silver, sentient and motile, that only he can see. At first this liquid apparition — an artifact of Austen’s accident, surely — only teases the corner of his vision, a trick of the light. But then it appears in dark places, too: his morning coffee, the impasto of his paintings, the holes in his head. The thing is implacable, insistent — and then violent.