Tick, tock, tick. There's a countdown clock inside my brain. Play the game, play the game, I tell myself. But I can't let him win. Not when it comes to my memories, to what I know about my brother's death. I can't let him win. Can't let Dad gaslight me. Again and again and again.

I wrote ROBBY's Come to Play, a light sci-fi short fiction, in early 2024---a gut reaction to waking up alone in bed one pre-dawn morning and feeling a crazed urge to smash apart my phone and terminate its screeching alarm.