Anamorphic Mother

Warning: Contains physical violence, gore, or abuse & mental health

Take Your Child to Work Day would never be the same for Alyssa.

If she could've seen the future involving her child's disappearance, she never would've fixed her lips to sing her own praises. This had to be judgment day for her years of patting herself on the back.

Her little boy's mysterious disappearance in the company's playroom had to be God reprimanding her. Punishment for an arrogant advertising executive.

"You lost him? There's no other exit in the playroom. You were holding him in your arms!" Alyssa chewed out her assistant. He had been given the responsibility to watch her son as she attended a meeting.

Nothing about her assistant's story made sense. It sounded like a scene from an indie horror science-fiction film. It didn't help that Nick was the only one in the playroom with Alyssa's son, Josh. The surveillance unit in the playroom malfunctioned. At the moment Josh disappeared, it recorded seconds of nothing. The camera then reactivated five minutes later, and the surveillance video only showed Nick crouched in the corner of the playroom, panicking.

No video evidence could exonerate him. No witness who could corroborate his story. All he had were his words. Tormented by the accusations against him, Nick could only stand by his story. An hour of interrogation made it more difficult for him to re-explain what he witnessed.

On one side, Nick had his boss, Alyssa, stabbing him with her questioning. And on the other side, he had the company's head of security dissecting every word.

"Let's go over this one more time." Mr. Richardson, the head security officer, spoke in a calm, fatherly tone while resting his hand on Nick's shoulder. He saw Nick as a son and hated to see the young man in deep hot water. "You held Ms. Rodman's son in your arms. Then the both of you ran around the room playing tag. You chased him for a little while. Couldn't keep up—got tired. As you were resting, you looked up to see the child run to the corner of the playroom. Then he disappears into the wall? You screamed, thinking he was going to hurt himself. But he vanished into the wall, like a phantom?" Mr. Richardson stared at Nick in disbelief, and behind his hard investigative stare, he wanted to believe the young man.

Nick swallowed a tear, then coughed at the stinging dryness pricking the back of his throat.

"That's what happened, sir. I know it sounds absolutely insane. He just melted through the wall. I ran after him. And then I—" Nick hesitated, catching himself when he realized that he was about to add another uncanny detail to his story.

"You—what?!" Alyssa barked at Nick. Her patience had marched away from her an hour ago. And now she found herself entertaining thoughts of murder. She knew she needed to control herself even though her baby was missing. Staying calm in this situation would be impossible for most mothers. Each passing minute became more difficult for her.

Nick's story sounded like a horror anthology premise, and this made him look far from sympathetic and innocent in Alyssa's eyes. In her mind, she couldn't face losing her child at her workplace, right under her nose. And the last person who held her son was her twenty-five-year-old assistant, whom she'd hired just a year ago. In the crime investigation shows she loved watching, she kept hearing in her head how the killer is always the person you least expect.

In her eyes, this had to be her assistant. He always seemed too perfect. Clean-cut, handsome, muscular build, highly intelligent, graduated top of his class, good to his mom. Nick had to be the killer.

But if he killed my baby, what did he do with the body? The thought invaded Alyssa's mind. Something didn't add up.

"I swear to you, Ms. Rodman. I'm not on drugs. Your little boy vanished into the wall. I screamed and then I ran after him." Nick paused again when he saw the flame of disbelief increasing in Alyssa's eyes. He continued even when he saw the murderous glint. "I ran after him and I slammed into the wall. I didn't go through it like your little boy. It's as if the wall was composed of vapor at first and then it went back to being solid." Nick bit his quivering bottom lip. He gnawed at his bottom lip with such ferocity that he almost dislodged the piercing in his lip.

Alyssa could only stare at her assistant. She wanted to slap him for telling fables. A thought in the back of her mind told her not to do that. As crazy as it sounded, Alyssa wanted to believe Nick. This almost drove her to the brink because her rational mind kept colliding with Nick's accounts of what happened in the playroom. Laws of physics tell us that a physical body can't pass through a wall.

"Listen, you son of a bitch! Don't insult my intelligence! You killed my baby and you're gonna tell me the truth! You understand!" Alyssa lashed out. She didn't slap Nick. Instead, her palm vise-gripped his chin, forcefully shoving his head back.

Mr. Richardson stepped in, not wanting to see a murder unfold. He eased Alyssa's hand away from Nick's chin with grace while stepping between them. His tall frame became a calm barrier.

"Wait! We need to stay calm so we can figure out what actually happened." The veteran security officer still maintained his genteel, father-knows-best baritone. "Jimmy is still working on retrieving the lost clip from the surveillance system. He told me there's something still logged, he just needs to access it. We're gonna get answers. But we can't jump to conclusions."

Alyssa raised her hand to Mr. Richardson's mouth. Her long, polished nails almost grazed his chevron mustache. She wanted him to stop talking. This is not what she wanted to hear.

Mr. Richardson wanted to be a comfort to both parties, but he knew Alyssa was too far to be reached. He had to stick with comforting Nick. He also had to keep him alive, hoping that the recovered missing surveillance clip would prove his innocence.

Each minute felt like an hour, and Alyssa had a series of worst-case scenarios playing in her mind. Mr. Richardson talked her out of calling the police. She knew how much the lead security man liked her assistant. The fatherly affection toward the young man became obvious when he gave Nick tickets to the Super Bowl last year on his birthday.

Alyssa loved Mr. Richardson. He attended her wedding, performed as a magician at Josh's birthday party, gave her little boy a toy action figure year after year, and made an effort to walk her to her car whenever she had to work a late shift. So she didn't want to break his heart by calling the police on Nick, whom he saw as the son he never had.

On Alyssa's phone, she never finished a text intended for her husband. Mr. Richardson talked her out of doing this as well. All she wrote was: "Honey, Josh is missing. I don't know what happened to our baby. He has to be in the building. I told my assistant to watch him and he f*cked up. So I'm calling the poli—" the text ended.

Alyssa kept pulling her phone from her purse, wondering if she should break Mr. Richardson's heart and finish the text to her husband. Her fingers would hover over three special numbers on her keypad. It took the power of God to stop her from pressing those numbers.

In the break room, silence settled over all three of them while they waited to hear back from Jimmy, Mr. Richardson's young security tech.

Time finally gave out when Jimmy burst in, phone clutched in both hands, a step too fast for the room's mood.

"I got the missing data! I got the missing data!" Jimmy kept repeating as he held up his phone. Excitement overtook him until he looked across the room and saw the pain in Alyssa's eyes. Jimmy toned it down, not wanting to cause a grieving mother more grief. The retrieval of the missing surveillance clip would cause this anyway.

Mr. Richardson felt a flicker of hope die the moment he registered that Jimmy's arms were empty. Just his phone. Which meant Josh was still gone.

"You have to see this to believe it," Jimmy said, his voice cracking. "I found the missing recorded clip locked in a secure folder. When I checked the server earlier, there was nothing there at first."

Before Jimmy could press play to show his boss, a woman's footsteps shot up behind him.

Alyssa was already moving. She crossed the room within the span of a second and snatched the phone out of Jimmy's hand before he could stop her.

"Ms. Rodman? I need to warn you!" Jimmy reached out, enduring a nasty slap to his hand.

Alyssa tapped play. Her boy's face filled the screen. She saw the bright little dimples, that same smile she saw when he gave his mom a kindergarten portrait of her and was thanked with kisses all over his face.

On the recording, Nick set Josh down and chased him in slow loops around the playroom.

Holding her breath, Alyssa expected to witness the murder of her baby. She made plans to execute Nick and paint the break room's walls with his blood.

Alyssa embraced the thoughts of annihilating her assistant Street Fighter-style. But something in the video sent her murderous thoughts spiraling to the ground.

What Nick told her was true. He sat Josh down. He tickled her child and chased him. Josh's little sneakers and his sky-blue tank top were a blur as he ran around the playroom. Nick couldn't catch him. He chased the child until he ran out of breath. Josh mocked him with a triumphant little Superman pose, then turned toward the wall. But he didn't run through it.

A noise made the child turn to look. That's when Alyssa saw it. A pair of hands reached beyond the wall, grabbing her baby around his ribs and pulling him into the rainbow-pattern decor. The hands were feminine. The same shape as her own. Long fingers, slightly wrong. Plum nail polish. Her nail polish.

***

Mono-yellow walls, liminal corridors, and the constant electric hum of faulty ceiling illumination surrounded Alyssa. Moments ago, this otherworldly interior swallowed Alyssa the instant she stepped through the exact spot on the playroom wall where the hands had disappeared with her boy. Nick couldn't follow. Neither could Mr. Richardson, though both had tried. The wall let her through and no one else. She didn't know why, only that it felt, for one impossible second, like being recognized rather than allowed.

All Alyssa could do was rewind her apology to Nick, uttering four words to the young man—"Sweetie, I'm so sorry."

While in the process of apologizing, her heart sank and her legs buckled, causing her to fall back. Nick had to catch her. His strong arms held her against his chest.

She wished for his arms now. There was no phone signal here, no calling 911 or texting her husband. This place seemed to reject anything that hadn't been made inside it. What surrounded her looked like an infinite office building gone feral: half a sofa jutting out of drywall, a coffee maker fused to a desk lamp, cubicles arranged with no memory of a hallway's logic. The carpet and the walls wore the same sick yellow, as if the whole place had been designed by something that had only seen an office through a fogged window.

"Josh! Baby, can you hear me?" Alyssa called out. Her voice cracked down the corridor. Something in her chest told her to stay quiet. She didn't listen.

In the distance, a song answered her immediately, raising the hairs on her skin.

Fergie's "Glamorous" featuring Ludacris, thin and warped, drifted from somewhere ahead—the same song she used to dance her one-year-old to sleep around her living room, back when nothing about motherhood made sense and that ridiculous, glittering pop song was the only thing that worked. Whatever lived here knew to use a mother’s past memory as a leash.

She followed the sound into a kitchen that was hers yet wasn't. The same layout as her office break room, but the steel had gone soft and wrong at the edges, like it had been recast from memory instead of built. It felt like her eyes were peering through a subtle anamorphic reflection. This was her office kitchen, but darker and out of reality—rebellious against the laws of physics. Her own phone sat there, connected to a smart speaker with too many buttons on the screen, still playing the song on a loop. Oddly, the song stopped looping and ended with finality when Alyssa cautiously stepped into the kitchen.

And then she saw her.

Not a stranger. Herself—beautiful, but built wrong as if 3D-printed from a faulty AI-generated image. Too many eyes, arranged in pairs down the side of her face. Twisted metal in her earlobes that were supposed to be earrings. The floral print on her dress ran the wrong direction. A tattoo on her left arm mirrored, backward. She was dancing, slow and exhausted, with Josh asleep against her shoulder, humming along to a song that had clearly stopped mattering minutes ago and that she couldn't bring herself to stop.

Alyssa's foot caught on something before she could speak. A body. Not a man. Tall, skeletal, unmistakably dead, its skull caved in on one side. A few feet past it, a second body, but significantly smaller. A boy, warped like everything else here, his shape stuttering at the edges like a signal losing its hold on the picture.

The distorted Alyssa followed her gaze and something like grief moved across all those spider eyes at once.

She held Josh out. An offering and an apology. There was a light bruise darkening on Josh's forehead, already fading to yellow around the edges. He was breathing.

The distorted Alyssa never spoke. She didn't need to. Alyssa understood the shape of it the way you understand a nightmare the moment you wake up, all at once and completely: the thing dead on the floor had come to kill distorted Alyssa's baby and succeeded. She couldn't stop him in time. Hours later, he came back again when she attempted to fix what he broke. This time, she was ready to protect a baby who didn't belong to her in this world. A version of Josh from the other side.

A tussle ensued when he tried to rip Josh from her arms. Filled with rage, the distorted mother beat the tall monstrosity to death with one fist and left him lying there on her kitchen floor. Then she held the baby she wanted but couldn't keep while his blood dried on her knuckles. After treating the small bruise on Josh's head, she thought about not giving him back at first.

Alyssa knew what the thing on the floor was, in the way a mother knows things without being told. Every mom she spoke to about a year after Josh was born had a story about the monster, if you asked carefully enough. A thought that arrived uninvited in the middle of a 3 a.m. feeding, ugly and specific and never spoken aloud, gone as fast as it came, and never quite forgotten. Something that fed on exhausted, frightened new mothers and whispered the worst thing they could imagine about themselves until they believed it. She met this demonic creature once herself, in the blur of her own fourth month, and simply refused to listen to him.

The distorted Alyssa, in this other version of everywhere, wasn't as lucky the first time. She made sure she wouldn't lose a second time.

Alyssa took her son back into her arms. She planned to carry her baby back toward the wall that introduced her to a universe she couldn't explain. She couldn't hate the woman standing across from her. It was like looking at the worst year of her own life, reflected back with the volume turned all the way up.

The distorted Alyssa reached out, and their hands met for a moment over Josh's small, sleeping body. Neither of them said anything. There wasn't a version of "thank you" built for this. Alyssa leaned down and pressed her lips to the bruise on her child's forehead.

Ten seconds. Maybe less. Long enough for something to pass between two women who would never speak again, and then her baby's eyes fluttered open, and a small, sleep-thick voice said the only word that mattered.

"Mommy?"

The End.