New? Here's Part 1!
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I got out and pulled out my phone, but Holly put her hand on the lit up screen. “No flashlight,” she told me in a hushed tone. “We go in with no light. Following the path as best as we can.”
“How are we going to see anything?” I questioned in a doubtful but quiet tone.
“Our eyes will adjust enough,” she informed me. “If we have a light out, we’ll be easy to spot by good old dad. He’ll know exactly where we are. He’ll have the upper hand without needing to turn on a single light.”
“Alright,” I muttered as I turned to face the tunnel of darkness ahead of us. “What do you think made him choose this place?”
“Probably cause it’s out in the middle of nowhere,” she replied. “You sent the address to Mahli and Evette, right?”
“Yeah, and told them not to come unless they don’t hear from us in a couple hours. Or rather, to call the police then.”
“Good.” She was so determined, seemingly so ready to just run into danger that I felt inferior. Here, for the first time in my life, I was presented with some real stakes. In the story of my life, this would be the peak, the climax, the point when the situation demanded that I became someone better, yet I found myself feeling like I was being carried through it by Holly. I was a sidekick, not the hero.
“Alright, let’s go,” I said, resolving to be more of an active participant in my own life for once.
We silently made our way into the all-consuming darkness. It was a kind of darkness I had never seen before. The city only really got so dark. At night during the winter, the street lights reflected off of the snow, and during the summer, it was darker but there were lights everywhere anyways. For the first time in my memory, I was walking in a darkness that had no nearby light to drown it out. It was a cloudy night, blocking the moon and the stars. Holly and I were alone as we walked down the old beaten driveway of an abandoned house.
Our eyes adjusted slightly as we approached the house, but not enough to have us be able to see anything clearly. I could vaguely make out some shape of the house through the contrast between the house and the sky above, but all I could tell was that it was a two story house that towered above us. All around us was darkness, filled in with what I assumed were trees. The woods were silent though. The whole place was silent. I had my doubts that Solenne was even being held here, but why would he send us to the wrong place if he wanted to lure us out?
I wanted to ask Holly these questions, but as soon as I opened my mouth, I realized how dumb that would be so I shut it and tried not to lose her in the darkness. She stopped suddenly and held out her arm to stop me from moving any farther. We stood there in silence for a little while as Holly searched the surroundings to the best of her ability.
But there was nothing. The silence was so complete that I had started to think that it was the wrong place, that somehow we ended up at the wrong abandoned house. Or, that it was a ruse to get us out here for some reason.
“What now?” I whispered as quietly as I could as closely to her face as I could do without making impact.
She shook her head, something I could only tell because I felt the air moving around her. I knew that we had to go inside of the house, but without a light, it was too dangerous to try. We didn’t know how long the place had stood abandoned, or what happened to it in that time. A house that had only been abandoned five years prior could have holes in the floor. It was a big risk to take.
I took out my phone and turned on the flashlight. “What are you doing?” Holly hissed at me.
“We can’t just stand here in the dark,” I whispered in response, flashing the light on the house in front of us.
If it wasn’t for the fact that we were told it was abandoned, I wouldn’t have known looking at the house. It was in a surprisingly good condition. It looked worn, sure, but none of the windows on the front end of the house had been broken. The front door hung slightly ajar, but besides that, it looked almost habitable.
“That’s odd…” Holly commented.
Honestly, the house looked almost homey. If it had some warm lights inside and wasn’t surrounded by a haunted forest full of probable nightmares, it would have made a wonderful home. The lawn was vastly overgrown, with bushes making their way towards the house in a slow creep and the grass that did remain standing at six feet tall like some sort of over-sized blanket.
“I wonder why this place was abandoned…” I muttered as I wandered carefully towards the ajar front door. “It doesn’t look like it was abandoned because it was falling apart…”
“No, or because it was a historical building…” she added. “The design looks newish, like something out of the nineties…”
“Maybe the previous owners died and left it to an uncaring relative who just left it to rot,” I suggested as I pushed the door open and revealed the interior of the house.
The first thing I noticed was the smell of the place. It didn’t smell like stagnant air and mold. It smelled like burned out candles mixed with firewood. The front door opened up into an open concept living room on the left, with a hallway leading down into the darkness just ahead of us, a rough looking staircase leading upstairs on the right, looking like it had been built right into the wall. There were pictures on the wall, but most of them were so covered in dust that it was hard to see what was hidden in the frames. A little shoe-rack sat next to the door on the right, sticking out of an open closet with a couple coats in it.
“This place almost looks inhabited,” I muttered to Holly as she silently stepped into the house and started looking at the photos on the wall.
“Do you think he’s been living here?” she asked in a low, slightly horrified whisper.
“Maybe…” I muttered. “But why would he send us here instead of to where he currently is?”
“Maybe he is here,” she answered. “And just waiting for the opportune moment to strike. We should stick together.”
“I think that goes without saying.”
She took out her phone, flicked on the flashlight, and we headed into the adjacent living room. The whole house was silent, only occasionally creaking. Somehow the complete silence made the place all the more eerie. Someone had been here, but now they weren’t, or were hiding.
The living room had a fireplace that looked like it had been used recently, with a gentle residual heat still radiating from in. In front of it on the floor lay a collection of wild papers, just like the ones that Holly had thrown together in her attempt to plan out an encounter with the man who lured us here. Upon seeing the papers, Holly immediately dropped and started looking at them.
“Anything?” I asked as I flashed my light around the room, illuminating a big grandfather clock, a bookshelf, and an armchair positioned next to what looked like a gas lamp.
“It’s a lot of math,” she answered with a sigh. “I can barely make any sense of it. It looks like he was trying to solve a problem of some sort…” She shuffled through the papers some more as I searched the room for more clues. “Oh, look at this! Looks like a blueprint of some sort. Calls it a quantum flux detector…”
“What could that be for?” I questioned as I headed back over to her. I peered down at the design. It was like some sort of sensor or tracker. It had a screen of sorts built into it that seemed to display readings of quantum fluxes or whatever that meant.
Holly put it back down and got to her feet. “Let’s keep searching the house. We’re here for your girlfriend, not to try to learn quantum mechanics.”
“Right.”
The dining room was adjacent to the living room. In the center of the room was a big old wooden table with four chairs around it, two of which had their backs broken off. This table was likewise covered in papers with another gas lamp on top of it, along with some candles here and there.
“Looks like more math and stuff,” Holly commented after glancing at the papers for a moment.
The kitchen was next, and had clear signs of habitation. There were dishes in the sink, which I didn’t think would have running water, but I guessed the sink was a good enough to leave dirty dishes anyways. The rest of the first floor consisted of another living room like area that was absolutely covered in dust, another staircase leading up, and a bathroom neither of us decided to go into.
“Shall we go upstairs?” Holly suggested, pointing at the spiral staircase we had found on this side of the house. It looked like it was in better condition than the other staircase, so I nodded in agreement.
The second story had two unused looking bedrooms immediately on the right of the staircase. We checked both of them. One of them was painted blue, and the other pink, and both had broken cribs piled into the corner. “Do you think these were supposed to be our rooms?” Holly suggested in a solemn tone.
I didn’t want to answer, but I found something to say. “We still don’t know if this is just some house he’s taken over over the years,” I reminded her. “It could be something else entirely.”
She nodded in a half-convinced way. There was no way to stop someone else’s thoughts from going where they felt they needed to go. It's impossible to convince someone if they've already decided on the truth.
We left the empty baby rooms behind, passed by another washroom, and went into the first door on the left. A great big window occupied a good portion of the far wall. Below it sat a desk covered in even more papers, but there was a black notebook sitting on top of all of them. The room itself had bookshelves lining the walls, and a couple lamps and reading crannies. I picked up the notebook and opened it, flipping through it in search of something notable.
“Holly doesn’t seem to think that the experiment is as dangerous as she thinks,” I found on one of the later pages. “Personally, I think it’s madness to use her as a subject for a device we haven’t been able to test… but she wants to see if we can get twins out of it instead of just a son. She wants to see if we can bend reality to our will.”
“What’s that?” Holly asked, peering over my shoulder. I hastily closed the notebook.
“A notebook,” I answered unhelpfully.
“I can see that. Who does it belong to?”
“Our dad, I think…” I told her hesitantly. “At least the thing I was reading referred to a Holly and a dangerous experiment, along with a pregnancy.”
“Give me that,” she said as she snatched it out of my hands. She started flipping through it, reading as fast as she could, though the penmanship was hard to read at times.
“Why do you think he would have led us here?” I questioned as she read. “Why would he give us his notebook like this?”
“Maybe there’s something he wants us to know,” she answered as she flipped to the back of the notebook. “Oh, here!” she exclaimed with enough volume to fill the house.
We froze. The house stood still and quiet. Holly returned to the notebook. “It reads,” she continued in a whisper, “tonight we are undertaking the experiment of a lifetime. If we succeed, we will have broken the laws of physics and quantum mechanics, and created something out of nothing - in our universe at least. Holly’s water has broken. She’s downstairs preparing for the birth. I am set to join her in a bit, but I’m so uneasy about the whole thing. If something goes wrong, I don’t know what I’d do…”
“So you were right,” I commented as I stared out of the window in a sort of daze. “It was an experiment gone wrong. Our mother died in the process, but it worked. The two of us are here…”
She closed the notebook. “There’s nothing in here after that point,” she said, her mind somewhere else already. “It doesn’t tell us what happened after. Why is he out to get us?” she questioned.
“To set things right,” a low growl emerged from the doorway. I spun around and flashed my light on him, revealing the man who had attacked us in the street. His ragged clothes and appearance, but most of all, his shadowed and broken eyes. He lunged at Holly with a knife in hand.
“Holly!” I cried out as I lunged at her with all the speed I could muster.
I collided with her, and the two of us fell to the ground. Everything went dark as our flashlights were obscured by our bodies. I immediately rolled off of her and said, “are you okay?”
“I think so,” she muttered, as she pulled her phone up and illuminated the room. It was just in time for us to see our bloodthirsty father scrambling to pick up the knife he had dropped in the darkness.
I didn’t think. I lunged at him and grappled him with all the strength I could muster. “Let go of me!” he growled. “You don’t know what you’re doing!”
“Then tell us!” Holly screamed at him. “Why do you want to kill me so much? Why me?”
“To set things right! You were never supposed to exist!” he screamed in response, still struggling against my grasp. “You know about the experiment! How much simpler can I make it for you? If it weren’t for you, then your mother would still be alive!”
He broke free and fell forward. I tried to grab him, but he slipped out of reach. He hit the ground, spun around, and flashed the knife at me. I jumped back to avoid getting cut. He got to his feet, and Holly and I could only watch as he held the knife up at the two of us. His eyes darted from her to me.
He came flying at me. I jumped back, dropping my phone in the process. Holly jumped back at the same time. For a moment, it looked like there were two of him, but the next moment there was just one again, and standing in front of Holly.
“Do you see it now?” he questioned in a desperate tone. “Reality isn’t stable when the two of you are close together!”
We didn’t have time to think about what he was saying because he lunged at us one more time. A loud creak filled the room. Suddenly, he was gone, replaced with nothing but a painful crash and screaming from below. Holly flashed her light where he had been. The floor had collapsed underneath him. We could see him for a moment, but all of a sudden, the floor was back.
“He was being literal,” Holly said in a grim tone. “Grab your phone, we’re going downstairs.”
I did as she said, and we carefully ran back downstairs to where he had fallen to, the living room. But there was no sign of him down there.
“He’s gone…” Holly muttered. “What is going on?”
A door slammed shut behind us. We spun around and saw a door we didn’t notice when we were first going through the house. “Where do you think that leads?” I questioned with a deep sense of uncertainty in my chest.
“The basement,” she answered as if she had some memory of this place. “Come on.”
She cautiously walked over, opened the door, and flashed her light inside. There was nothing but stairs and the wall. She looked back at me. I nodded, and followed her down into the abyss.
We could only see the stairs directly in front of us. The basement seemed a mile underneath the surface, a place where no person should have ever gone, the precipice of the void. I don’t know what Holly was thinking or feeling, but my guesses were that she was determined, scared, and angry, but hurt, most of all. All of our outlandish suspicions had proved correct. We were the consequence of some ridiculous experiment undertaken by two scientists who were trying to play god. The man who had attacked us and tried to burn us alive really was our own father, one of the two people who created this mess to begin with.
The whole situation was simply unfair. We did not choose to exist. We did not choose the parents who decided to experiment with themselves. Yet, as we descended into the basement where we were born, the only solution to the problem they created seemed to be our elimination, the consolidation of Holly and I into one.
The more my mind comprehended what was going on, what was to come, my heart raced faster and faster. The staircase felt like it was going on forever, but I knew it was a normal length. Time slowed as my mind moved faster and faster. I hated everything about this. I just wanted to know why we were so similar, but I never wanted this. If I had known this was the truth… maybe I would have left it buried. Maybe there’s a version of reality where that is how things turned out. Or maybe we were always bound to end up at this single point, the universe demanding that a balance be made. Nothing can come from nothing.
Once we hit the bottom of the stairs, Holly searched the area for any sign of him. A light flashed on in a room on the other side of the cement-walled basement. She shot a cautious look at me and then marched towards the light. She reached for the doorknob, but I lunged for it.
“Step back,” I whispered to her, unsure of what might be waiting for us on the other side. She nodded and took a couple steps back.
I opened the door. The light blinded me for a moment. When my eyes adjusted, I found myself staring at a whole new mystery. A collection of machines and computers filled the room, all of them buzzing and on somehow. Our father, Richard Holtz, sat in a lab chair in the far corner of the room, his blood trail now clear from the door all around the room to the spot he was in.
He coughed. Blood came flying out. “I’m dying,” he told me in a tired and defeated tone. “You win.”
“Why did you come here then?” I questioned as I stared him down. I didn’t trust him. How could I?
“I wanted to show you…” he paused to catch his breath. “The place where you were born. The machine that made you and your sister exist at the same time…” he let out a heavy sigh. “Maybe if I had told you the truth, you would have come here of your own free will.”
My mind suddenly shot to Solenne. “Where is Solenne?”
“Your girlfriend?” he questioned before nearly coughing up a lung of blood. “Out back in the shed. Unconscious, but safe. Invite your sister in, would you?”
“He’s unarmed,” I called out to Holly without moving my head away from him.
She slipped into the room. I couldn’t see her, but I could feel her eyes burning across the space between us and boring into him. “Why me?” she immediately questioned, her tone made of fire and brimstone. “Why did you try to kill me and not him?”
“We were only supposed to have a boy,” he answered in a solemn tone. “When Holly passed, and I was left holding the two of you, looking into your eyes, identical to hers, I realized what we had done, and how to fix it…”
“But you couldn’t go through with it,” she continued for him. “So you left me in a barn and hoped I’d simply die there. But my parents found me and saved me.” She paused. I thought for a moment, she was going to lunge at him and rip out his throat or something like that. A single tear fell to the ground. “Why did it take you twenty-five years to try to correct that mistake again?”
He slowly pulled out a little device that resembled the one we found a blueprint to, though it looked worn and poorly constructed. “I thought things were fine,” he confessed with a sigh. “This can detect abnormalities in the quantum flux of reality, the very thing that your existence creates.” He paused. “But it was quiet for years. Then the readings started happening. Sporadic at first, but then suddenly all too much. So I thought I had to correct it… But do you want to know something?” His voice dropped to a whisper. We drew a little closer to hear him better, getting close to the strange machine that had been promised to distort reality.
“What?” she questioned.
“I think I can still fix it,” he said before flicking a switch on the machine next to him. He slammed his hand on a button and the quantum machine roared to life. The house seemed to shake as it came to life.
“Holly!” I screamed, realizing what he was trying to do. I grabbed her by the arm and flung her out of the room with all the force I could muster. Caught off guard, she flew into the doorway and let out a howl of pain.
A light emanated from the quantum machine that blinded me temporarily. A clanging sound echoed through the room, through the blinding light. Then it disappeared. The lights turned off, and there was a moment of silence. A pause to see what had happened. I pulled out my phone, flashed it around, and saw that he was still sitting in the chair, and Holly was standing in the doorway, holding her face with her hands.
The lights flashed back on.
“What did you do?” I nearly yelled at him.
“It didn’t work…” he muttered, completely ignoring me. He coughed up some blood. He looked at me with a pathetic look in his eyes. “I tried to send her back…”
I rushed over to him. I grabbed him by the collar and held him up. I punched him in the gut, overcome with such an anger, such a rage. I kept wailing on him until Holly called out to me, bringing me back to my body.
“Arthur! You’re going to kill him!”
I threw him back down on the chair and backed up. I stepped out of the room and looked back at Holly. “I’m sorry… It’s just… he just doesn’t care about us in the slightest. He’s an idiot. A selfish idiot.”
“That doesn’t mean you should punch him to death,” she reminded me with a stern tone. “Go find Solenne. I’ll stay here with him.”
“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” I questioned.
“Just go.”
Her tone told me not to question her again, so I took out my phone and navigated through the house that would have been my childhood home if something horrible hadn’t happened in that basement, if my parents knew anything about being responsible. I went out the back door by the second staircase upstairs and found the shed among a bunch of bushes and grass that had just about buried it entirely. I followed a small path through the grass to the shed door. I pulled it open. I flashed my light inside.
Solenne sat bound and gagged to a wooden chair like something right out of a movie. When she saw that someone had come, she stopped squirming around as if to pretend that she hadn’t been trying to escape. I had never seen Solenne so dirty and misshapen before. Her long blond hair was a mess, tangled up in itself, and her dress was covered in dirt, probably from being forcefully dragged here. It was an unsettling way to see her.
“It’s me,” I told her in a comforting tone as I ran to her side and immediately pulled the gag off of her.
“What’s going on? Where are we?” her questions flew out of her mouth faster than I could answer them.
“My biological parents’ old place,” I answered as I fiddled with the rope around her wrists. “My bio-father was the one who kidnapped you to get Holly and I here.”
“Why did you have to get me involved?” she asked with a sharp but still scared tone as her hands were freed and she got to untying her own feet. “Shine a light, would you?”
Once she had finished untying herself, she looked at me with a stern look on her face. “Can we get the hell out of here already?”
“Holly’s downstairs with him. We can’t leave without her.”
“I am not going into that house,” she informed me.
“Can you make your way to the car out at the end of the driveway then? We’ll be there shortly.”
“Alright. Just don’t take too long,” she said before flicking the light on on her own phone and storming out of the shed. She was gone before I had the chance to say anything else.
A part of me felt that she was being rude, but I really couldn’t blame her for being in a bad mood. She was just kidnapped and used as bait for me. That’s downright shitty.
I ran back into the house, down the stairs, and found Holly leaning against the wall by the door to the quantum room. The door was shut, and no light crept out from the bottom of the door.
“Everything okay?” I asked her in a quiet and solemn tone.
“Yeah… I guess…” she muttered. She pulled the quantum flux detector out from behind her and held it up. “He was right. It does go off when we’re together…”
“Is he?” I questioned, unwilling to finish the sentence.
She nodded. There was a sadness to it. “We got our answers.”
“Yeah,” I responded as I slid down the wall next to her. “Definitely not what I was expecting.”
“At least there was a reason,” she said, sighing. “Not just random violence…”
A long silence passed between us as we sat in the dark basement of what could have been our childhood home. My mind wandered to Solenne, who was waiting for us, but I couldn’t bear to force Holly to move.
“What should we do with him?” she questioned. “Leave him there?”
“We should call the police, I think,” I answered. “We were defending ourselves, and I think they’ll be able to handle it.”
“I guess you’re right…” she muttered before she got to her feet. “We should get going. How was Solenne?”
“Scared and upset, but generally unharmed. Hopefully she recovers from this experience alright.”
“Hopefully at least one of us does,” Holly replied with a somewhat grim tone.
“Yeah…” I mumbled in response as we made our way out of the house that could have been home. That idea kept popping into my head. What would that reality have been like?
What would it have been like if our mother didn’t die during the experiment? What if our family would have stayed together in this house and lived a somewhat normal life? How long would it have been until they would have tried to kill us in order to correct the horrible thing they decided to do?
We found Solenne sitting against the hood of her car with her arms crossed and eyes on the cloudy sky above.
“Hi,” I said to her as we approached. She glanced over at us and let out a heavy sigh.
“Sorry about earlier… This is a lot.”
I shook my head. “Don’t worry about it. You were just kidnapped. It’s okay to feel angry and scared.”
We hugged nice and tight. It was so sincere, so warm, it suddenly made me feel like I hadn’t hugged her in years. When we pulled away, she looked over at Holly.
We hugged nice and tight. It was so sincere, so warm, it suddenly made me feel like I hadn’t hugged her in years. When we pulled away, she looked over at Holly.
“This must be your sister,” she said, holding out a hand. “Nice to finally meet you.”
“Sorry about the conditions,” Holly said as she shook her hand politely. “Shall we get back to the city?”
“We should probably wait for the police,” Solenne answered. “I called them, by the way. Told them we were at some abandoned house that once belonged to a scientist or something. They knew which one I was talking about.”
“That’s good…” Holly muttered. She opened up the driver’s seat door and got in anyways. She closed the door behind her, leaving me alone with Solenne outside.
“How are you doing?” I asked, putting a soft hand on her arm.
“I’m alright,” she answered quietly.
“That’s good…” I mumbled. I slid next to her on the hood of the car, and we leaned there for some while with our eyes on the sky above us. There was a chill in the night air, but with everything that happened, it seemed so inconsequential.
The police arrived a few minutes later, or at least that’s how much time felt like had passed.
We told them what had happened. They called in for an ambulance and waited for backup to arrive before sending some people in. It was a long night of explaining to them. The stretcher carrying his body wheeled past us, catching our eyes with that sort of grim solace that only death could bring. They lifted it up into the ambulance, closed the door, and drove off.
“Would you be alright with escorting me to the police station so we can do some preliminary data collection on the case?” the officer asked us once the ambulance was long gone and he had our attention again.
“For sure,” Holly said in a daze. He nodded, got back into his cruiser. We hopped into the car, and Holly followed the lonely car along the country roads until we arrived at the little police station that looked like it was in the middle of nowhere. It looked worn down and old.
They assured us that everything they did was standard. They collected our statements officially, as well as had us thoroughly describe the event separately. They took fingerprints. We were there until four in the morning. We were exhausted and just wanted to go home. The adrenaline of the event had worn off, leaving us in a daze as we floated through their questions and answers.
“Are you sure you’re okay to drive home?” the officer asked us as he escorted us back to the lobby of the building.
“I can manage,” Holly said with confidence and certainty.
“I can manage,” Holly said with confidence and certainty.
“Alright, if you’re sure,” he replied, opening the door leading outside for us. We smiled and nodded at him as we left the building.
Once we were on the road again, Holly let out a big yawn just as the city started breaking over the horizon. “It’s almost dawn,” she said in a tone of distress and tiredness.
“Yeah, the sun will be up soon,” I responded. “A new day, the first day of the rest of our lives.” I hoped to be hopeful and optimistic in this scenario. The truth was that we had come out of it with our lives, but the experience would always scar us, and healing would be a whole other journey.
I glanced over the seat back at Solenne, only to see her asleep in the back, head against the door, hair covering her face. The first strands of light were shining through the back window and illuminating her blonde hair. It almost looked like a halo.
I returned my attention to the road ahead, lit up by the city’s lights, the windows of a thousand buildings reflecting the morning light, making the whole city look engulfed in flames.
“Do you think he was right?” Holly asked in a hushed tone, as if she wasn’t even sure she wanted to hear the question herself.
“About what? No way,” I answered.
“He wasn’t wrong abut weird stuff happening around us…” she muttered in protest. “What if that was what that loud noise was when I dropped you off at home for the first time? Maybe that’s why the barn collapsed in on top of us. Us being near each other breaks down reality in random ways…”
“You’ve thought a lot about this.”
She nodded. “I’ve had lots of time in the hours since he told us…”
“Look, Holly, we’re exhausted and just went through one hell of a traumatic experience. We shouldn’t be trusting our brains this early in the morning,” I reminded her but I knew my words were lost on deaf ears.
“I guess you’re right,” she admitted in a whisper of disbelief.
The rest of the trip was silent. I directed her to Solenne’s apartment building. We pulled up in front of it.
“Solenne?” I said softly back at her. “We’re home.”
“Solenne?” I said softly back at her. “We’re home.”
She didn’t stir. I shook her a little to wake her up. She jolted up and looked at me with panicked eyes. After a quick moment, she calmed down. “What?”
“We’re home,” I told her. “Do you want me to spend the night with you tonight? Or the day, more like?”
She shook her head. “No, it’s okay. I’ll be fine.”
She shook her head. “No, it’s okay. I’ll be fine.”
I watched her get out of the car and sheepishly make her way to the door. I didn’t know the source of her idea to be alone, but I couldn’t do anything about it. I wanted to ask Holly for her opinion on the matter, but once Solenne was safely inside of her building, Holly immediately took off without saying a word. We arrived at my apartment a little bit later and I opened up the door.
“You want to stay the night?” I offered. “I can sleep on the couch, and you can have the bed.”
She shook her head. “I want to go home. I’ll be okay.”
“Alright, sleep well. I’ll see you soon.”
She half-smiled. I returned it and got out of the car. Just before she drove away, I noticed the quantum flux device resting in the side of her car door. I didn’t know what to think about that at first. My mind was spinning and dizzy. I just wanted to sleep, to lie down and turn off my brain for a bit. I slugged my way into my apartment, fell onto my bed, and gave myself to the darkness.
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With everything that has been going on, I felt a week off from posting was appropriate. If you do not follow my Facebook page, here is a link to 12 (mostly) Canadian books about Racism, Anti-Blackness, and Anti-Racism, Plus Places to Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is.
With the July session of Camp NaNo on the horizon, I'll be trying to finish up this series before I start another project. Additionally, tomorrow on the 8th of June, my poem "wandering drunk through the night" will go live on the Vanity Pneumatic YouTube channel (here). I look forward to doing more videos in the near future.
Until next time,
-Zero
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