Ennui

This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design. When Gerald comes home to find his wife Gloria with another man, Phil, outrage gives way to something far stranger: a power to make people vanish simply by declaring them unreal. What begins as a savage marital humiliation quickly becomes a darkly comic experiment in solipsism, as Gerald starts to believe he alone may truly exist. Emboldened by this discovery, he removes Phil, a workplace rival, and then anyone else who inconveniences or disappoints him. As his boredom grows, Gerald's cruelty widens from one woman to all women, then to scientists, planets, galaxies, and finally the entire universe. Each act of denial strips reality further of balance, reproduction, and purpose, turning existence into a hollow joke. Yet absolute control brings no meaning, only emptiness. In the end, Gerald is left alone in a featureless void, forced to confront the possibility that his own identity was just another illusion. Darkly satirical and bleakly absurd, this story turns a fantasy of power into a devastating joke about ego, boredom, and the cost of mistaking control for significance.