Down Down Down

By moritherapy•Horror (Psychological Horror)•Issue #04 (active)•Published on: 2026-10-21•140 words•2 reads

Eventually, I have to go to bed; I can handle about 40, 48 hours without sleep on a consistent basis, but then that’s it. A few minutes, then I fall asleep (falling is just the right word), and the nightmare begins. Always the same. This huge fist rushes at me, over and over again – I wish it would finally make contact, get it over with, but it never happens. The fear and anxiety are overwhelming, I cry and sweat in my sleep but cannot wake up. Instead, as it goes in dreams, I’m simultaneously living in this unbearable dread of the fist, and plunge into an interminable descent in an out-of-control elevator.

For years, I saw my psychiatrist, dear Dr. Jangles, week after week. His deep, slow voice was the one thing that kept me going.

He died yesterday.

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moritherapy

"Isabella Mori writes pretty much everything that's not nailed down: Fiction (a 15th century monk whose best friend is a comfrey plant), nonfiction ("All the way from the eocene on Highway 400"), and poetry, with an emphasis on Japanese forms such as haiku and haibun. Their great love is hybrid work, like in their latest book "Believe Me", which combines poetry, stories, interviews and research on topics of mental health and addiction. They run Canada's most unusual poetry prize, Muriel's Journey, which celebrates socially engaged poetry and has two first prizes. Isabella lives on the ancestral, traditional and unceded lands of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples aka Vancouver, Canada."

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