DMT
They tell you that a coloring book is a gentle thing. They say it’s a tool to keep the children quiet, a placid kingdom of bold outlines waiting to be filled with the bleeding chaos of a Crayon box.
But they don’t see the architecture of the lines.
I have spent a lifetime realizing that the world is perfectly designed before the color ruins it. Color is a liar; it’s a brilliant, distracting coat of paint slapped over a structural flaw. Red screams an emergency that isn’t there; yellow begs for an optimism it hasn’t earned.
When I set out to write my masterpiece, it wasn’t an act of artistic expression. It was an act of public service. I stripped the landscape of its vanity. No azure skies, no emerald hills. Just the raw, naked geometry of truth.
The children loved it at first. They brought their wax stubs, eager to defile my crisp, empty borders with messy magentas and chaotic cyans. But then they noticed the boundaries. Have you ever looked closely at a truly sinister boundary? My lines weren’t just thick; they were absorbent. No matter how hard a child pressed a cerulean blue against the paper, the black lines seemed to creep outward, just a fraction of a millimeter, swallowing the pigment whole.
By the third page, the realization hits the reader like a bucket of ice water: you aren’t filling the spaces. The spaces are emptying you.
The suspense lies in the final page. It’s a beautifully intricate drawing of a quiet, ordinary living room. There is a fireplace, a rocking chair, and a large, empty silhouette standing right by the window. The caption at the bottom reads: ‘Color me before I step off the page.’ They try, of course. They scrub frantically with their brightest oranges and yellows, desperate to keep the shape pinned to the pulp. But the wax won’t stick. The page stays stubbornly, terrifyingly blank. And then, they hear the floorboards creak behind them.
One, here comes the two to the three to the four Duh what comes next?
We are entirely too obsessed with sequence. We bow down to the tyranny of the chronological, believing blindly that because one happened, two must follow, and three is inevitably waiting in the wings.
What a beautifully predictable way to live a boring life.
My connect-the-dots book was designed to cure humanity of its addiction to order. It looks innocent enough on the shelf, a smiling cartoon giraffe on the cover, promising a simple, numerical trajectory. But inside, the numbers are having a magnificent, satirical breakdown.
You start at 1. You draw a straight, confident line to 2. Naturally, your eyes drift toward 3, but 3 is halfway across the page, hiding under a bush. Instead, 4 is sitting right next to 2, mocking you.
“1, 2, 4, 3… Duh, what comes next?” the margins whisper.
The joke, you see, is that the human brain will choose comfort over correctness every single time. The users of my book don’t stop to question why the numbers are playing musical chairs. They just want to finish the picture. They want the satisfaction of the reveal. So they follow the fractured sequence, zigzagging wildly across the parchment, laughing at the absurdity of it all.
“Look how silly this is!” they chuckle, drawing a line from 47 straight down to 12.
But as the ink flows, the satire curdles into something altogether cold. The lines don’t form a giraffe. They don’t form a castle or a steam train. As the final dots connect, skipping from 99 back to a jagged, forgotten 0, the perspective shifts.
The reader steps back, expecting a whimsical shape, only to realize they have just precisely traced the intricate, undeniable blueprint of their own front door lock.
And the final dot, number 100? It’s positioned exactly where the key is turning right now.
## Mom said everything was okay
If you want to commit a perfect atrocity, do it with a smile and a reference to authority. People will forgive almost anything if they think you had permission.
My biography is not a confession; it is a celebration of compliance. From the day I could walk, my mother instilled in me a deep, abiding respect for institutional approval. She was a woman of strict protocols and impeccable tailoring, the kind of person who could dismantle a neighbor’s reputation over tea without ever raising her voice.
Whenever the neighbors complained about the missing pets, or the strange, rhythmic thumping coming from our sub-basement at 4:00 AM, I would simply look them dead in the eye, tilt my head, and offer a placid, angelic smile.
“Mom said it was okay.”
It is a magical phrase. It disarms the skeptical and paralyzes the curious. It transforms a macabre anomaly into a minor domestic eccentricity. If Mommy said it was okay, surely there must be a reasonable explanation. Surely, we aren’t keeping a collection of historical anomalies in the fruit cellar.
The book chronicles my rise through the corporate ranks using that exact same philosophy. A little creative marketing here, a sudden, inexplicable disappearance of a rival board member there. When the auditors finally arrived with their flashing lights and briefcases full of dread, I didn’t run. I didn’t hire a lawyer.
I merely handed them a beautifully bound copy of this very book.
The final chapter details this exact moment. It explains how, while they are busy reading this very sentence, trying to determine if the narrative is a brilliant parody or a literal roadmap of horrors, the air vents in the room have quietly sealed shut.
Don’t panic. There’s no need to look at the ceiling.
Mommy said it was okay…
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