Spheroid

Today’s prompt: “Describe an image that is embedded in your brain in detail and why it remains there.”

You’re not sure when the image showed up, exactly. It’s been at least a few months, but it could have been longer. It has this tendency to slide into your consciousness from the outskirts, first fading from your brain when you wake from a dream, then intruding into your thoughts as you zone out during Zoom meetings. It emerges from your subconscious when you’ve had a few drinks, or when you’re driving down a road you’ve driven many times before. You lose your focus for half a second, and there’s the spheroid.

Sometimes it’s more of an ellipsoid. Sometimes it’s a reddish purple, and sometimes it’s a bluish purple, and once it was blindingly white. Sometimes it has warts all over it, and sometimes there are runnels carving through the surface like a brain or maybe a volleyball. But somehow you know it’s always the same thing.

And then it hatches, and massive wormlike appendages explode from your head.