[FICTION]

[04/21/2026]

Big Brain

by Sascha Zenari

“The problem is, your brain is too large for your skull, and it keeps expanding and pushing against the bone, leading to your chronic migraines,” the Doctor says. She points a long rod at the diagrams she has drawn of my brain on the billiard green chalkboard in my high school chemistry classroom. At the end of the rod is a Mickey Mouse gloved hand that tickles at the diagrams until I release a small giggle. 

The Doctor’s monkey medical student looks at me over his glasses and frowns. He’s also wearing a polka dot bowtie, which is half obscured by his fur, so I’m not sure what he’s so serious about. The Doctor asked me if it was okay that he sat in on the appointment. It felt like a question you couldn’t really say no to. Like, Do you consent to AI taking notes during this meeting? It saves us all a lot more time. 

“That’s likely what your low mood as of late is attributable to. Most people with larger intelligences are depressed. They’ve gone through all of the possibilities and realised the worst is probably true.”

The Doctor pulls down a white curtain with a circle plastic toggle at the end, covering up my brain diagrams. I stare at the blank slate of the shiny sheet. She puts down her rod and looks at me. I guess this means she’s waiting for me to say something, but I can’t remember my line. 

Maybe it’s, If my brain is bigger than most people’s, wouldn’t I have figured out how to be happy by now?

The Doctor glares at me. The fluorescent lights blink back off her eyes, so I cannot determine what they are saying. Her face is sweaty and slightly grey. I get the feeling that she hasn’t left this room in a long time.

“Don’t be fucking stupid,” she says. 

I’m finally allowed to leave with scripts for SSRIs, mild painkillers, and a stern warning to avoid any anti-inflammatory activities and foods. The monkey walks me out of the building. 

“It’s not all bad,” he says. He offers no further elaboration, but I decide to believe him anyway, and nod sincerely. I stand on the steps of the Science Block and look into the distance. There’s a student in a tunic on the oval a long way from here who could be me from the past. The sheen from her red hair ribbon blinks in the sunlight over her ponytail. 

I take the train home. There’s hardly anyone out. I am alone in the train carriage, with my giant brain and all the thoughts with free space to roam around in there. I shut my eyes, conjuring the most idyllic scene I can muster. Claymation sheep chewing cud against a background of 2D block-coloured shapes, one blue for the sky and one green for the grass. They chew in circles and stare back at me. I shift in my train seat, unsettled. Since I am so intelligent, I can practically see the pink flesh of my superior, juicy cranium, pulsing with blood, beating rhythmically away beneath my very nose. It throbs closer and closer to the walls of my skull. 

At the station, a drunk man in a collared shirt and chino shorts battles his way up the wrong escalator. He’s grasping a fast food bag in his right hand, a crumbled drink in his left, taking the steps two at a time. He is never quite fast enough to crest the peak of the hill and make it to the end of the escalator. He stumbles, constantly,determined to overcome his fatigue and too-heavy boots. I keep thinking he’s going to eat shit, but at the last moment he composes himself and continues his outrageously loud clunking up the stairs. Everyone else is using the other escalators silently. I walk around to the next set of escalators down, watching him but never quite seeing his face. The kind of anonymity that usually only happens in a dream. I think about it for the rest of the way home but I cannot understand why he doesn’t give up. What peace would be brought to him if he knew the solution was just to stop, relax, and let the escalator take him down to a stable, still, paradise? The train station concourse.   

When I was a kid, home sick in the middle of the day, I watched an hour long television program that ranked animals from least to most intelligent. They eventually determined that the average turkey was the dumbest. Even dumber than a jellyfish, which has no brain, just a nucleus. They figured it out because the turkey has a brain the size of a peanut—they used those words—which is tiny in comparison to the rest of its body. I imagined being so pissed off if I were a turkey watching that. 

When I arrive home, I go for a jog in the light afternoon sun, realising too late that it certainly counts as an inflammatory activity. My shoulder blades chafe together as I run, pinching my skin. My brain swells hotly until my skull feels it on the inside. Inevitably, a migraine crescendoes. I close my eyes in a stuffy room and don’t open them again until it’s dark out. The light always hurts too much. 

SASCHA ZENARI is a writer from Eora/Sydney, Australia. Her writing appears in The Zodiac Review and Journals of Love and Literature.