The Nebuchadnezzar magazine

Last edit 10/18/2025.

E.K. Anderson

Nebuchadnezzar magazine. Flash fiction. Copyright 10/17/2025.

I was asleep when I saw a flicker of light in my dream. It peered through the lens of my mind, a non-corporal place of which I deem my statutory observation.

Anyway.

Away from that place, I opened my physical eyes, and saw the last inkling of aery dawn through my window.

It dappled upon my eye lids, golden and warm and so I welcomed it.

Upon my awakening, the house was alerted as to my rousing. The television turned on, the auto-biological templates took my measurements. The doctor, an automaton, took my vitals. My breakfast was being prepared by the latest version of the Maker. The coffee was set.

Today I am here, I said to myself. Today, I am.

Today, in this instance, though, there was no sound from the television, no hum from the garden, no sound of birds.

The children did not laugh and that was when I knew things were off.

There was peace, but no rivalry. No wind in the trees, no semblance of rivalry on the news. Just me and the Sun.

Today, though, I was finally awakened from my slumber, which felt as if I’d slept for an age. I’d remembered my Dream. Me and my Greater demons have an understanding, as to my chosen manifestation.

It was twilight and that golden hour shown onto the slate of my reflection. And the light that shown through the effulgence of the screen was dim.

The street was quiet. The antique gramophone, of Rêverie a piece by Claude Debussy.

I went to bed then. Then there was a sort of twinkling in my eye by which the galaxies erupted. The mail man came in.

Yet, I was a King in a house. A King with a dwelling, without a consort. A King who looked upon the iron of his fist, and gazed up at a dangling sword.

And this was the time in which I knew I had to rise. But sloth, quelled my erudite nature. Such that I sought to delve back into painless repose of my Observatory of Sleep.

I rested my eyes, and entered my observatory.

In the right quadrant of my vision I saw a mist. In that mist there was a cosmic spark, such as that one would have begun at the Beginning. That mist was gray; it frolicked amongst corpuscles of red sprites, and blue bolts, and green flourishes. The cloud hovered in the living room. The cloud: a sentient wilderness.

I observed laying on the couch. But I could not move.

And then came the voice of the banshee. It screeched from inside the cloud.

Then, came a low growl.

A gray paw came out from the cloud, drenched in rainwater.

On the kitchen table materialized its form. The form I saw was of none that can be described by any man. If I was a biologist I could not have classified it. The type of entity that this animal was was of some sort of understanding that I do not know.

It stood on the top of the kitchen table, then stepped down, and from that point of understanding it came down. Six limbs in all, with ear like a hound. It turned at me, but I so no face. I looked upon it’s face, and the flesh twisted and turned. An animal with a face like a clock wrought of flesh. A monster of Time.

Then from an anomaly – a portal – in the living room, I saw another. It was a smaller thing, I supposed of its order. This one beset with wings in different spectra. The wings flapped despite it being beset to the ground. Yet, this one had a mouth. It howled, and with a cyclopean eye it came to me.

I could not move.

It licked my shin, and panted. My eyes panned to the Monster of Time. It faced me. It climbed down from the perch of the kitchen table. As the second hand moved upon its face, I heard the sound my heartbeat. The second hand ticked in conjunction to the beat of my heart. In tandem.

In disassociation, I looked outside at the I dreamt of sunshine. The sunshine that I dreamt of was golden in effulgence, and the rays sprayed throughout the effulgence. And that was when I could come to the aura of twilight, and the dream itself.

Then, I remembered the Consortium by which I had at one time been a part of had spoken upon these things. The anomalies. That sort of understanding, the physicists, and doctors said: was what the people could not understand.

Yet there will be light upon the horizon, said the Oldest man. There is always light, I said.

Some did not understand my place. Some did not understand what the soothsayers, and the Sorcerers, and the Sorceresses, and Priests had said.

But the White Witch did. I remembered all of them now, as the Monster of Time came to me, its skeletal structure lanky and lathe.

My heart beat harder. The ticking of the second clock on the Monster’s face increased.

I sought to wake up. I continued listening to Claude Debussy, to the ephemeral music, the pinning of the piano keys upon the gramophone. Then I closed my eyes, away from the gaze of the Monster of Time.

But still it ticked.