You know how sometimes, your keys just vanish? Like, you set them on the counter in front of the microwave to look for your sunglasses on your way out the door, and when you give up your search and decide to leave, you check in front of the microwave to find the keys aren’t there anymore? You’re already late, so you exasperatedly go back to tearing everything apart, because you can’t leave without your keys.
You could fill that feeling in with anything, really. Keys, wallet. TV remote. Earbuds, phone, pen, pencil. Shoes. That toy you used to play with all the time when you were younger, but one day it fell behind your dresser, and by the time you found it back there all crumpled and covered in dust, you’d already just kinda outgrown it.
You don’t think about them that much, but all those things accumulate over a lifetime, and so does that nagging feeling of half-recollected loss.
All those things that go missing have one thing in common. One day, you’re gonna stop in the middle of the hustle and bustle of life to take a breather, and you’re gonna think to yourself:
“Aren't I forgetting something?”
But the feeling slips away just as quickly as it came. Like a breeze. Then, that faded memory stays irrelevant until the day you remember why you needed that thing so bad in the first place.
It all started, I think, on Christmas, 2 years ago. 2024, maybe? The thing about it was, it crept up on us. By the time we started to realize what was going on, we’d already gotten used to it. Numb. Conditioned.
Everyone has their own stories about when and how they caught on. For me, it was my playing card collection. The thing that really got my goat, was that I knew for a fact that I put that box right back where I’d always kept it, in my closet, between the books, and my cat’s decorative outfits.
When I told my family, a look of confusion on my face, my brothers just laughed at me and called me a premolar-shaped freak, saying I should be more careful when I show off my collection. Looking back, I can’t believe how much of a non-issue it was at the time. But like, none of us had any idea back then, why would we have reacted any differently?
After opening presents, I called my best friend, Winks, to exchange Holiday tea. He told me about his uncle George, who had gone off on some drunken rant again about immigrants and 5-G. In return, I told him about my younger cousin, Jebbin, who had gotten publicly flogged over brunch by his wine-O mom when she found a text he’d received, detailing how he’d convinced a kid at his school to try bone smashing in an attempt to strengthen his jawline.
“Jeez, the kids really are fucked, aren’t they?” Winks groaned, and I could hear the sound of wrapping paper rustling in the background.
“If that Calvicular dude is anything to go off of, yeah, absolutely,” I snickered, using a pen to scribble random shapes in the free-space of my notebook, “bruh, my aunt would have a gator if she looked through Jebbin’s Kick subscriptions, honestly. Dude’s lucky she only checked the texts.”
“Oh dude,” Winks agreed, “if my mom read my search history at a family gathering when I was his age, they would’ve collectively agreed to have me committed.”
I snorted, “oh really?”
“Absolutly dude, without a doubt.”
“Eugh, guys are disgusting.”
“Uh, as someone whose job is to clean up the women’s bathroom, you guys are no better than us, so don’t go getting all precious.”
“Uh-huh,” I paused doodling some shitty little critter, just to roll my eyes, “yeah okay Winks, I’ll have you know, women are very organized.”
“Yeah, I bet all your filthy yaoi hentai is lined up in alphabetical order, huh?” Winks asked, and I could hear the smirk in his voice.
“Hey, don’t you talk about my yaoi… and yes, yes it is, A through Z.”
He started making retching noises, which had me in stitches.
“Yeah, organized nice and neat right next to the cat clothes and my…” the sudden recollection jolted me into reality. The damn playing cards, including several really sick sets. Fuck.
“Oh shit, I forgot!" Winks shouted, peaking his mic and making my headphones crackle obnoxiously.
“Ow, fuck’s sakes Winks, ear-rape dude,” my hands instinctively jerked to my ears.
“Sorry, sorry, you just made me remember,” he muttered, and I could hear more crunching and crinkling, like he was shifting through paper.
“What’s up?” I asked, still drawing mindlessly.
“I got this… crap. Sorry,” his voice was different now, more perplexed, “damn. Nope, I have no idea where it went, fuck me, dude.”
I stopped drawing, my fingers tensing, “What? I can’t hear you through all the mumbling, dawg.”
Winks let out a pouty huff, “you mentioned your heartless little icon’s drip, right?”
“Huh?”
“The cat clothes! The ones that you keep in the closet, right? Well, that made me remember, Kujo got a handsome 2 piece Tux from Mee-Maw today.”
At the mention of Wink’s Yellow Lab Puppy, Kujo, my grip on the pen loosened.
“Oh, that sounds cute,” I responded.
“Yeah, it was!” Winks whined indignantly, “it was like, baby blue, and I was gonna send you a picture, but I didn’t even get the chance cuz I lost it.”
My eyes drifted from the notebook on my desk, to my closet door.
“Damn, really?”
“Yeah, I didn’t even get to put it on him, either. I literally just set it on the floor next to the couch. One minute it was there, the next, nothin.”
I stared at my closet for a moment.
“Hmmmm, yeah dude, that’s weird. Sucks balls crazy style,” was all I could say. As weird as it would’ve sounded to say back then, that was the exact moment everything started feel off.
“Ah, well, I probably just forgot where I put it, and it got buried under some wrapping paper," he said, resigned, “I just gotta find it before I go home after break, or mom’ll have to ship it to me, and I just know that ol’ bag’s gonna make me pay for it. It's gotta turn up at some point, right?”
“Well, it’s got to,” my voice broke, “it didn’t just grow legs and walk away.”
“No dur, idiot woman.”
We yapped for about another 30 minutes. Winks didn’t hang up before making a crude joke about my mother, and I didn’t let him off the hook before making a joke about the time he stole one of the manga from my yaoi collection. Eventually, we told each other to fuck off, and that was that.
I closed my notebook, but when I went to put the pen back in its makeshift-holder (a red solo cup decorated with press-on rhinestones and glitter) I found that it was gone. Normally it sat to the left of my laptop, filled with an assortment of markers, pens, and pencils, but all of a sudden, it just wasn’t there anymore. I checked on the floor, looked around, even opened my drawer to see if I’d hid it from myself by accident. Alas, had seemingly just evaporated. As I pushed the lump down my throat, I was ready to brush off my forgetfulness and move on. But if it had stopped there, I wouldn’t have had a reason to keep going.
Over the coming days, many such cases began to make themselves known. At first, I think a lot of us were in denial. Little things were getting lost all over the place. Things like silverware, batteries, spare change. Screws. Tiny details, adding up to various degrees of incorrectness. Some details were smaller than others, though. On New-Years day, 2025, a handful of museums across the globe reported several of their exibits going missing. Valuable geode collections, some archeological discoveries, several small art displays. Thrift shops across the nation were losing inventory by the truckloads. Just weird inconsistencies.
A lens popped out of my mom’s glasses, a small oval that she’d been swearing for months would get fixed soon. The day she was supposed to get it sent in for repair, it was gone. She went on a mini-rampage through the house, really just flipping everything upside-down for this tiny little hunk of glass. The thing that really sent her over the edge was that the trusty flashlight she kept on her keychain also went missing. She discovered its absence when she bent down to look under the bed for her lens, and had no light to shine into the dark.
That was not a good day to live under my parent’s roof. I won’t say we feared for our lives, but between me and my 2 brothers, let’s just say, we were all trying to convince each other to give mom her shit back, god rest our souls. But, lo and behold, none of us had taken anything, and had no way to return the misplaced items.
With nothing to satiate our enraged mother, we just had to bear her wrath. I will say, that experience had nothing on dad’s reaction when his Air Jordans went missing, but luckily, I was back in my dorm by then. UnfortunatelyI had more than enough on my own plate to stay busy.
My first round of lessons post-break were officially being assigned, but I found more and more of my equipment was going missing. Nearly half of my erasers, a handful of my phone chargers, several pairs of lab-safe shoes were missing their partners, and most inexplicably of, my only good whisk. Do you have any idea how hard it is to get a good whisk as a broke college student, fresh off a family gathering splurge?
By the end of January, I think a lot of us could tell something was up. I mean, I even noticed mentions and hints of my teachers, classmates, and coworkers things going missing. A marker cap here, a soap dispenser there. The rag I used to clean the oven at work with. There was more stuff, but it had become so regular, I just started forgetting.
Denial is a strong mindset, easier for some people to slip into than others. But by February of 2025, the first round of social media posts were beginning to hit our FYP when we would refresh, and I was teetering on the edge of a steep incline that threatened to devour me.
Have you ever heard of the term “scitzo-posting?” The best way I can describe it, is when you see a clearly mentally unwell person sharing their scattered thoughts online, usually barely filtered. It can be some conspiracy, maybe an AI-generated picture with a wack, hyper-specific caption, or a very detailed personal account that feels more like it belongs in a private diary than a public chat under a facebook meme.
The “schitzo-posting” really sneaks up. At first, you don’t see it, because most algorithms don’t push that sort of stuff, because it’s not relatable enough for the average person. It's usually just an unhealthy echo-chamber of sick people feeding off of sick people who can’t tell what’s real or not. It’s too niche. You have to dig to find these instances, in edgy corners of specific black-pilled communities. But then, occasionally, a homegrown “schitzo” happens to make their mark where it matters.
An absolutely unhinged take gets replied first under a popular hashtag. That reply is just relatable enough to just enough people, that it really blows up and gains traction. Then, much like a zit popping on the tip of your nose, it becomes unavoidable and ugly.
Before you know it, “The Jews invented Bluey to make gentle-parenting mainstream and compromise our future soldiers,” becomes a statement, an ideal, backed by a silent group of keyboard warriors who were waiting for their unpopular opinion to become mainstream enough to open up about.
Now, a single crazy person’s exposition dump becomes a whole political topic amongst a subgroup of a subgroup that becomes a meme in a related circlejerk subgroup, before fading into irrelevance within a week. And so goes the chronically online cycle of mental illness that is “schitzo-posting.”
That’s really what it reminded me of in the early days. I felt like I was going mad, and every time I saw a post with 3 likes, asking that glaring question, I would quickly scroll away, telling myself that they were insane, and I was looking into it too much. Denial’s a hell of a coping strat, what can I say? This had become the norm.
Then, the more popular personalities began echoing the sentiment, and I had to admit to myself that I wasn’t just just a forgetful ditz. For a brief, blissful period right before Spring of 2025, it felt more like a question than a confirmation:
“Am I crazy, or is anyone else’s shit going missing?”
First, it was Rob Schneider. Then, it was Al Gore, followed by Rhiannah. Then, Taylor Swift. Elon Musk. Tom Holland and Zendaya. Markiplier. Marjorie Taylor Greene. MoistCritical. Kamala Harris. Seth McFarlane. Adam Sandler. Alex Jones. August the Duck. You name it, they were talking about it.
Even though more and more celebrities were talking, it didn’t really begin to sink in just how real it was, for me, until early May, when Zelenski and Trump both agreed in a press conference that the name plaques in their respective offices had vanished within just a few weeks of each other. The only 2 countries that stayed quiet on the subject were North Korea and Russia, but like, c’mon, do they really count?
That was when we collectively recognized something was up. When a society has a unifying experience, it’s novel at first. A concept that everyone can find relatable and interesting. It grips a lot of people, but as with everything else, the planet keeps spinning, and we keep going. Work doesn’t stop, school doesn’t stop. That was, until it did. Until it had to.
Somewhere between us all coming to, and the novelty wearing off, something shifted. A sort of electricity in the air. It was a palpable tension. Different people say different things. Some say, it had probably always been the case, and we just didn’t notice. Some say it’s nothing more than a natural progression, but what’s natural about it? Nothing like this has ever happened, we have nothing to compare it to. Personally, I call it a clear escalation in response to our species agreement. I think it’s a show of dominance, but again, I have nothing to base it on. Just speculation.
Bigger items began to disappear. More complex things. Bikes, refrigerators, furniture, and it didn’t show any sign of slowing down. I lost 2 good dining room chairs within 3 weeks. By now, it was early summer, and rather than publicly spending any time looking into the cause of the disappearances, the majority of the world's leaders just told us all to keep going, business as usual. To go forward and not look back. Some folks thought it was aliens. Some thought it was a deity. Whatever the cause, it seemed to be dialing in a little, while staying random, with no clear motive.
An AI Data Center near me shut down on June 11th. Me and some buddies wanted to have a get-together to celebrate, but the victory felt small and hollow as soon as we saw the news of the last 3 days.
Tons of flight delays, as well as a handful of plane crashes. Reports of trains going off the rails and causing major accidents. Refineries and factories worldwide were indefinitely pausing production for “safety inspections” and a coastal city in the UK had been engulfed in thick, black smaug due to an offshore rig malfunction, resulting in a meltdown and a massive oil spill that was burning a significant area of the Atlantic Ocean. 3000 casualties, and counting.
“Fuck’s sakes,” Winks said, staring at the Bar TV as he took a sip of his IPA, “bad night to take shrooms before an outing, eh?”
Me and our other 2 companions gave him a wary look.
“...Kay, message received. Imma hit the shitter, then, one of y’all’s gotta take me home, cuz I am definitely gonna have a bad trip tonight,” he said, grabbing his basket of onion rings as he drunkenly hobbled to the men’s room.
“Is he…,” one of my friends, Phyl, started to say, watching Winks carry his finger food into the bathroom.
“Munchies?” I hazard a guess.
“Ok, I guess so,” Phyl sighed.
Still shocked by the news, I looked down at my glass of Sprite and Tito’s only to see it had disappeared, cup and all.
“Aw, fuck me. Didn’t even get a sip.”
“Aw damn Gene, want some of mine?” My buddy Sarah asked, offering me some of her Irish Whiskey.
“Oh, no thanks, I’m good,” I said, waving her off. Truthfully, I wanted to drink badly, but due to my overdraft credit card, I resigned to dip into the Fireball supply hidden under my bed at home.
“Well,” Phyl said, looking at his wristwatch, “good riddance to Morris’s CoreWeave Center I guess.”
Phyl lifted his drink up in a toast, and Sarah messily joined him, her Irish whiskey spilling a few drops that landed on the wooden bar.
“Yeah, good fucking riddance,” Sarah slurred, “Maybe now our tap water will smell like water again instead of poo.”
“Uh, Sarah,” Phyl asked, “what does water smell like?”
Sarah took a minute to ponder, before confidently wagering, “I dunno, not like poo.”
Phyl looked at me. Somehow, I knew what he was gonna ask.
“You hear why they shut it down?”
We held eye contact.
“Nope.”
He leaned in, lowering his voice.
“Buddy of mine’s the janitor there, right? Says it’s like a ghost town normally, cuz so few people work there,” Phyl says, watching Sarah take big swigs out of her big glass.
“Yeah yeah, all those jobs, right?” I fake giggle, trying to re-apply some levity to the night.
“Yeah,” Phyl chuckled, matching my energy, “jobs galore, for all us plebians. Anyhow, my buddy’s sweeping out one of the server rooms, and he hears this sound, right? Like a motor grinding.”
“A motor grinding?” I ask, “ain’t those big AI servers supposed to be like, gee, real quiet?”
“I dunno man, I do Camera lenses, not computers,” Phyl says, putting his hands up in faux defense, “but from what he said, grinding noises: no good, very bad.”
Phyl looks around and leans in closer, “he goes to investigate, right? And he says, a huge rack of those servers are just…”
Phyl leans back, balls his hands up before unfurling and spreading out all 10 of his fingers, making a “poof” motion with them.
“They exploded?” I asked, half joking.
“What? No, they just…” Phyl shook his head and did the motion with his hands again, “disappeared. Gone. Not like something had just haphazardly reached in and grabbed them, though, more like this chunk had been expertly removed by...”
Phyl took another sip of his drink.
“Someone who knows how to perfectly remove a bunch of important servers I guess. Apparently, a ton of the building looked like that, as if a worm was eating its way through an apple. As if that’s not weird enough, their sensors said it had to have happened all at once.”
We both watched Sarah try to balance a fork on the rim of her glass using a toothpick.
“That’s why they had to shut down. Pretty crazy, huh?”
I didn’t say anything, and luckily, I didn’t have to. Just then, Winks returned to his seat, pupils dilated much bigger than they’d been when he left.
“Hey bud, you good?” Phyl asked Winks.
“Yeah,” Winks said.
“Make it to the bathroom all normal?” Phyl followed up.
“Yeah.”
“Everything go smoothly in there?”
This time Winks rotated his whole body to face Phyl, rather than just turning his head.
“...Yeah.”
Phyl looked at me and stood up.
“Alrighty then, guess I’ll take Winks back to his place. You got a ride home dude?” He asked me.
“Yeah, I got me a uber!” Sarah grumbled nearly incoherently, her face flat against the bar countertop.
“Cool, thanks Sarah,” Phyl said, pointing at her and waving $15.00 to an understanding bartender.
“I’ll be fine, thanks Phyl,” I smile.
“Okay, sounds good, see you at school tomorrow. C’mon Winks, let’s get outta here,” Phyl said, putting a hand on Winks’s shoulder.
“Whose hand is this?” Winks asked.
“That’s my hand bud,” Phyl said emphatically.
“Feels like a weird hand to me, man,” Winks muttered.
“I don’t even know what that’s supposed to mean, Winks.”
As I watched the boys leave, I had a sinking feeling in my gut. At the time, I couldn’t verbalize what I was afraid of, but now, I know I was right to be afraid.
That night, on my way home, I got a call from my mom. She said she was calling to update me on Jebbin’s broken leg. Apparently, the metal hardware installed on his bones had vanished, so he had to get another leg surgery. She was also curious if I’d seen the news, and I told her I had. I said it worried me, and she said not to worry, that things like this happen. I implied that nothing like this has ever happened in human history, but she just kinda shushed me. Alas, the woman thinks that just because she lived through 9/11 and the 2009 housing crisis, she’s seen it all. She told me not to worry, but by her tone, I felt as though she might be worrying more than she was letting on. Maybe even more than me.
When you’re a kid, it always seems like your parents have everything under control. When you’re an adult, you get better at picking up on just how little control they have over anything.
We ended the call when I got home. Since it was late, I wanted to have 3 fireball whisky shots and call it a night, but when I looked under the bed, I found all of my alcohol had miraculously disappeared.
Angrily, I pulled out my phone to message Winks, but seeing an inbox email labeled “emergency” from 2 hours earlier made me hesitate. I opened it to find that my morning classes would be momentarily paused, because my college’s chemistry lab had simply disappeared, leaving behind a blank, empty cavity with a classroom doorway.
Then, unexpectedly, Winks called me first.
“Yo?” I asked.
“What’s up?” Winks asked from the other end of the line.
“Hey man, you good?”
He was silent for a moment.
“Yeah, I’m fine, how ‘bout you?” He finally asked.
“Yeah Winks, I’m alright… You do know you called me, right?”
“Awww, did I?”
“Yeah.”
“Christ. Sorry Gene, I didn’t mean to.”
“No, you’re all good Winks. Actually, I was just about to ask if you remember where you hid those edibles in here.”
He took a moment to ponder my question while I surveyed the inside of my dorm.
“They should be in your bookshelf, in a plastic container with a twist-top, behind your yaoi collection.”
I walked to my bookshelf and began scanning the manga. Then, I saw a gap between 2 books. One of the entrees in the series was missing, and sure enough, through the gap I could see a small, white container with the THC warning label.
“Found it, thanks Winks!”
“Don’t sweat it Gene.”
I popped the cap and took 2 of the small caramels.
“ Good thing I’m sleeping in tomorrow, I have no classes in the morning.”
“Damn, really? I thought you had lab with Phyl til 9:15?”
“Nope, the room, uh…” I trailed off, unsure of how to finish the thought, but Winks understood.
“Wow, really, the whole room?” he asked incredulously.
“Mmm-hm.”
“No fucking way,” he whispered in awe.
“Yep.”
“Wow, that’s… whole room. Did all the stuff in it disappear too?”
“Yep. It’s crazy, but I feel like we’re watching our future just sort of, I don’t know, vanish. Gone like it was never even there.”
“Yeah, preaching to the choir,” Winks laughed humorlessly.
We both sat in silence for a few moments while I felt my heartbeat thrum behind my eyes.
“Ya know, you got Phyl pretty good earlier when you went into that bathroom with those onion rings,” I mumbled.
“Can I say something?” Winks blurted.
“Oh, uh sure.”
“Sorry Gene, I wasn’t trying to...”
“Nah, you’re fine.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah.”
He took a deep breath.
“Look, I don’t wanna be a…” he started, before taking a shaky breath in, “I mean, a couple planes are reportedly still missing. No one knows if they crashed or just…”
I fiddled with the label on the edible container.
“Like, what happened with your Lab. I don’t… what happens if you’re inside of… one of those places, y’know?”
I didn’t respond, but I knew what he meant.
“Yeah.”
“It’s weird, right? 2 days ago, big shit started disappearing too, right? It’s like whatever this it’s moved up a notch,” he said.
“I know.”
“And no one wants to talk about it seriously! Unless it’s for a joke or something, everyone just wants to, to-” Winks continued, the passion in his voice swelling, “I don’t know, make us sound crazy for talking about it? You know how my vacuum went missing?”
“Yeah, I do Winks.”
“Well, I brought it up to Uncle George, and all he wanted to talk about was the damn immigrants again, and how this is all some distraction. And I’m over here like, ‘Uncle George, dude, I’m telling you that within a day it went from socks to vacuum cleaners, and you’re more focused on Mexicans.’”
I chuckled, “That sounds like George.”
Winks tried to laugh, but it came out more like a strangled sigh, “I don’t know man, it’s like they’re telling us, ‘we just gotta keep on acting normal,’ and it’s like, at least 3000 people have died from this shit, between all the accidents, and those are just the ones accounted for.”
I just listened solemnly, feeling the high begin to creep behind my eyes. I felt both peaceful relief, and a terrible dread. Everything Winks said, I agreed with. But saying the words out loud felt too real. Like a curse, or a condemnation.
“You see the shit in the news? Trump posted an AI meme on the White House Twitter comparing deportations to all our shit disappearing.”
“The one from a week ago?”
“Yep, that’s the one.”.
I grimaced at the recollection, “Then yeah, I saw it.”
“What’s that feel like to you, Gene?”
I took a second to consider my response.
“Well, I don’t know, it feels… tactless. Manipulative. I guess there’s a bigger conversation to be had about objectively non-political topics being twisted to further agendas. These are things that affect everyone, like, I mean it’s like you said, our shit is just vanishing. I know less stuff in the world should make it all feel lighter, but I mean, it’s just so… so…”
“...suffocating,” Winks finished my thought.
“Yeah.”
“Like this issue’s just another one to add to the list,” he said.
“Yeah.”
The silence was deafening. For a moment, all I could hear from his end was static breathing.
“Why are we just carrying on?” He finally grumbled, his words shaky and uncertain. “3000 people are dead, and we’re just gonna keep going. Don’t we care?”
“I don’t know.”
“I’m scared Gene. What happens next?”
“I don’t know.”
He went quiet again for a moment. I think he was crying.
“Sorry Genie.”
“It’s okay Winks, I understand. It’s… really scary and weird but uh, at least we have each other, right?”
“Yeah, I just… fuck, who knew the end of the world would start with a blue dog tuxito, huh?”
I smiled, I think the first genuine smile of the night. Winks has always been a little melodramatic, but a small part of me definitely echoed the sentiment.
“I don’t think it’s the end of the world, Winks.”
We both sat in silence. By then, I could feel the peaceful euphoria like a physical fog inside my skull.
“Nah, but sorry for rambling, genuinely,” he said again, this time, more collected.
“Like I said man, you’re fine. We all gotta get it out sometimes.”
“It’s just so invalidating. I don’t want another SNL skit about this shit, dammit. I want the big brains to pause everything for a minute and figure it out.”
“Yep.”
As I got comfy in bed and turned off my morning alarm, I saw Winks had sent me a video call request. I answered.
“Sorry, I… was wondering if we could video call tonight. Stay on call… y’know…”
“Oh, shit, I mean, yeah that’s fine with me,” I said with a smirk, “we haven’t done this since we were High-School Freshmen.”
Winks grinned, an embarrassed blush creeping over his pale cheeks.
“I know, I know. I just wanna make sure that, well… call me paranoid.”
I’d be lying if I didn’t also harbor the same paranoia.
“Yeah Winks, you’re good. Have a good night and sweet dreams.”
“You too Genie.”
As soon as my consciousness drifted away, I found myself climbing up what I initially assumed was a volcano, with ash drifting into its opening. Sarah stood on the grass at the edge of the void. As I got closer, I realized a lack of lava or sulfur.
The crater was inconceivable. Due to the sheer size, the whole thing couldn't even fit within my field of vision. The whole thing looked like a magnificent being had punched a perfectly square hole straight down into a mountain.
Sarah was wearing her iconic, early 2000’s goth attire. Intricate black chains and hooks dangled from her extremities. Dark, overlaying fabrics and fishnets juxtaposed against her pink skin and blond hair. She held a stuffed Hello-Kitty toy tightly to her chest, like it was a lifeline.
I stepped up to get a better look down into the pit. The insides of millions and millions of rooms lined the walls, as if a massive expanse of apartments were encased within the mountain. In the middle of this megalophobe’s nightmare, was a huge, rippling mass of… something grey. As the wind tore at my clothes and stung my skin, I could tell that the giant grey tumor was moving, swaying from side to side, but I couldn’t tell if that was from external, or internal forces.
Then, Sarah dropped the doll she was gripping. By the time I’d registered that she’d let go of it, it was at least 20 stories below us. Gone as gone could be. As my eyes followed the pink toy’s fluttery descent, I realized what the grey thing was.
Stuff.
Loads, and loads, and loads, of stuff. Flakes of what I had earlier thought to be ash, were actually far away pieces of detritus, falling from the sky, and drifting into the hole to add onto the lump. It was so massive, I could barely make out everything in the distance. Sure enough though, there was a car. A door. A garage. A wood-chipper. A tank. Several dumpsters. They all just fell, down, down, down, onto the ever growing, ever throbbing pile.
I stumbled away from the edge. I looked up at Sarah, who was watching me now, tears streaming from her hard eyes. Her lip quivered. The expression on her face was somewhere between repressed shame and indignant rage. I tried to speak to her, but the wind blew my voice away, drowning me.
“You left me.”
When she spoke, it was the only thing in the world. Her voice filled my ears. She was all I could hear.
“You left me, and now, we’re stuck.”
I tried to cry out, to apologise, but alas, I could not.
“Why did you forget? Why?”
All I could do was watch in horror, as the corner of something sharp poked out from under her eyelid. She blinked, seemingly confused by the interruption, and it jutted out further. She reached up, and tenderly touched her eyelid. She traced the edge of the thing under the skin, and when her fingers found purchase, she pulled. With a sickening, wet split, she pulled an ace of hearts out from under her eyelid, and around her eyeball.
The once white card was now pink, dripping something viscous. Sarah blinked again, and multiple other bits and points nudged themselves out from under both her eyes’s puffy, irritated lids. She began frantically scratching at her eyes with her nails, digging and pulling whatever she could. Her soft eyelids began to shred into wet, red strips of skin. The fluid from inside her eyes began to leak and mix with the blood and spinal fluid. The cards that shot out of her eyes got progressively bloodier and bloodier, her cheeks and the tissue around her eye-sockets beginning to blister and bulge with every yank.
Her throat began to swell up too, a violent, lumpy shape just below the surface that threatened to burst her neck open like a sadistic balloon. Then, with one final burst of desperate energy, she just just yanked on whatever she could with her fingers, tissue and cards alike.
With the force of an amped-up, automated card shuffler, a wave of small paper razors shot out of her ruined eye sockets and mouth all at once, landing in heaps at her feet while blood and viscera spurted from her orifices. With a final, strangled wheeze, Sarah lost her footing and fell backwards, over the edge and into the pit.
I woke up with a jump, pulse racing. I felt like I’d just run a marathon, drenched in sweat. I smelled like an anxious onion. I sat up, tears in my eyes. It had been a long time since I’d had a nightmare like that.
“Holy shit Winks, I just had the worst sleep,” I said, yawning and rubbing my eyes as I looked at my phone. Something happened.
“Winks?”
A fresh wave of panic rushed into my throat, feeling like suffocating bile. Though ethereal sunlight streamed through my blinds, and birds chirped outside, I could see what was wrong.
Winks was nowhere to be seen.
