Beyond Madness by Saber Alganzouri

As Tawasul News continues to present the literary worlds of writer Saber Alganzouri, this short story opens another door into his strange and unsettling imagination, where reality slips into the surreal, and ordinary human gatherings become scenes of fear, mystery, and unanswered questions

In “Beyond Madness,” part of the collection “Adam in the Parallel World,” a wedding celebration on the beach begins with music, dancing, and noise, then suddenly turns into a collective state no one can explain. Nobody leaves. Nobody understands what is holding them in place.

Between wedding and mourning, sleep and wakefulness, love and curse, Alganzouri builds a compact and haunting story around one terrifying question: what if madness became a public possibility, and death was the only other choice?

Beyond Madness

Short Story

By Saber Alganzouri

From Adam in the Parallel World

The wedding on the beach was loud.

The groom was singing among his friends, and the bride was dancing among hers.

The sea was angry. The waves rose high. The tide was strong, and the ebb was slow.

Midnight passed, and the party was still wild. Wine mixed with orange juice, and the drunken guests left the wedding hall for the sea.

They went far into the water.

Dawn approached.

The bride whispered to her groom:

“When are we going to our hotel room?”

He answered with longing:

“I want to steal you away and go there, but I feel as if my will has been taken from me.”

She held his arm and said:

“Then steal me away. I am tired.”

Suddenly, one of the guests shouted:

“Which of you feels unable to leave this place, as if someone is preventing you?”

Voices rose, overlapping:

“I do... I do... I do...”

All at once, the noise stopped. The waves calmed. Everyone returned to the chairs. Before them were tables filled with cups of tea, jam, butter, and bread.

It was breakfast time.

Someone said with a confused smile:

“Before hunger, everything is defeated.”

At that moment, the mayor had arrived at his office.

They told him what was happening on the beach, and reports began pouring in. Similar cases were happening everywhere.

All wedding and mourning gatherings were still in place: event halls in mosques and churches, across the city. No one had left.

The mayor decided to inspect the cases himself. He took with him a police force and ambulances.

On the way, they passed a mourning gathering.

They entered the hall and found the mourners asleep.

He instructed his team to investigate the causes, then continued checking the remaining cases.

He reached the beach.

The sea was calm. The waves had receded. The noise had stopped.

The bride and groom were in a state of shock. The man looked into the faces of the people. They were silent, as if they were wax figures.

He shouted:

“What happened to you?”

He received no answer.

He ordered them to be transferred to hospitals, and the bride and groom to the hotel.

The sleepers and the awakened were distributed among medical facilities. But the emergency committee convened by the mayor reached nothing.

In the evening, he received a phone call.

It was his superior.

He said in a worried tone:

“The matter is serious. The blood tests contain something strange. We are facing only two possibilities:

death or madness.”

Then he added, sadly:

“The awakened will not sleep, and the sleepers will not wake. The infection will spread.”

The man fell into a deep sleep.

Meanwhile, his superior was still following the reports, his eyes wide before the screen. He said to himself: had what happened been real?

What a curse. The bride and groom’s tests were negative, and their immunity was strong.

They woke after a long sleep and found nothing before them except to begin their honeymoon and make love.

In the neighboring rooms, the beds were empty.