Month: February 2016

Shattered Reality

Image licensed by Shutterstock.

Déjà vu. Everything is the same as it was before.

Jordan sees her by the register, standing in line with a gallon of milk and a plastic bag of carrots. She looks so much like the woman he’s been searching for, the woman he loved for many years, his wife and the mother of his child. He wants to run to her, to embrace her, to tell her they can be a family again. But before he can move he knows it isn’t her.

She looks the same. She has the same dark brown hair, the same olive skin, the same heart-shaped face. He knows that if he approaches her, she’ll grab her ear and smile in the same self-conscious way that won him over so early on in their relationship. It’s Karen, but it isn’t his Karen.

He was foolish to toy with something as brittle as space and time. He breached the barrier between the worlds, and the universe shattered, torn into a billion partial reflections of his own reality. He was flung clear of the blast, soared headlong into a cosmos that was not his own, and now he must find his way home.

For a moment, just like every other moment since the accident, he considers that this world is good enough. He reaches for her. Puts his arm down. Reaches for her again. Finally, he hangs his head. This is not his home, not his Karen. She’ll have chosen another Jordan, and they’ll have had another baby Angelina. Not his home. Not his wife. Jordan turns away.

He opens the palm of his hand, raises it toward the ceiling, and a gateway appears, a hole in space that only he can see. He marches forward, resigned, and is consumed by gray.

Maybe the next world will be his own.

Enter your email address and click "Submit" to subscribe and receive The Sign.

Innocent Blood

Image licensed by Shutterstock.

The boy strolls through my alley alone, and I bare my gums behind the shadows.

I was like him once. Over a thousand years ago, I would lay beneath the stars and dream of far off places. I was a bundle of youthful optimism and endless possibilities.

That was before I changed.

I’d strayed from our clan’s caravan and was playing in the woods when I stumbled on an old woman, sitting atop a pile of gray stones. She was crying. I asked her what was wrong, and she only answered that people were selfish, that there was no such thing as love. In my childish idealism, I proclaimed that she was wrong. She sneered, insisted I was a foolish boy, said that I knew nothing of the world and its ways.

I stood firm in my convictions.

She asked about my family, asked if they would still love me if I were different. I nodded vigorously, echoed what I had been taught by my mother and father, that blood and clan were everything.

“All right,” she said, “let’s see.”

She stood, gnarled and ancient. She was hunched at the back, yet she managed to tower over me. She held out her hands, closed her eyes, and in a language I did not know, she began to speak.

A breeze stirred, a rustling of dirt and leaves that seemed to rise up from the earth. It cut through me, spoke to the different parts of myself, commanding them to change. Skin became fur. Teeth became fangs. I fell to all fours in disbelief.

“See if your family will take you back now,” she said, and she laughed, a wild cackle that made my chest grow cold.

I loped back to my village, stumbling as I learned to control foreign limbs. I found my family’s tent among the caravan and called out to them. When they came outside, I tried to tell them what had happened. But only animal sounds escaped my muzzled throat, and at the sight of me they roused the clan and fetched their weapons. I was forced to flee into the night with stones and arrows at my back.

I had lost everything. My mother and father, my brothers and sisters. I kept trying to return, but every time they chased me away. I stalked the woods, searched for the old woman so she could change me back.

I never saw her again.

The years that followed hardened my heart. I prayed for death to take me, to put me out of my misery, but in her cruelty the old woman had made it so I couldn’t die. Instead I wandered the world, and all the while the world changed.

Now, I prey on innocent blood because I’m jealous of what can no longer be mine. I tear their throats out with powerful canine jaws, and I delight in their blood as it drains from their faces to spatter the ground beneath my paws.

The boy stops beside me and I grin, open my maw and prepare to pounce.

Enter your email address and click "Submit" to subscribe and receive The Sign.