The magic was wrong.
We found this old silk hat. You know.
And there must have been some magic
in it.
I am only writing this because
if I do not I
fear I shall
go mad.
Ordinarily this sort of thing has to do with rabbits.
Possibly doves, or flowers,
almost definitively not
tentacles.
But this hat had other magics.
You might even spell them with a k.
Magicks.
It was that sort of hat.
A bad hat.
And when my friend Sarah placed it on her head,
she did not
begin
to dance around.
In fact, her eyes turned ninety degrees so that they were
vertical slits
in her face
and her lips disappeared, and lock of her hair turned red
like blood.
And the whole world twisted and
somehow Sara got little
or the hat got huge, and
I don’t know
maybe it ate her? Sort of?
And the last thing I saw was Sara’s head
broken eyes staring vacantly at me,
neck growing horrifically from
the brim of the hat.
It had sprouted tentacles from its crown,
and there was a mass of something
squamous on the brim.
It had veins in it. How can a hat have veins?
She was wearing a necklace that I had not seen before.
It looked like it was made of spiders,
or maybe they were teeth.