The Room

I sat alone in the darkness, mesmerized by the flickering streetlight below. Its irregular glow was neither comforting nor ignorable, and I found myself unable to look away, as if the effort required was beyond me. The apartment was bone-chillingly cold, stripped bare except for the folding chair beneath me. I couldn’t remember how I’d come to be here, and the realization arrived not with panic, but with a calm vacancy. My body felt numb, my hearing muffled, and all I could hear was my heart thudding deliberately in my chest, as if counting something down. Blinking, I noticed the streetlight seemed closer, though I told myself it couldn’t be. My reflection in the window was unfamiliar—not fearful, but expectant. The fire crackled behind me, louder than before, though I hadn’t moved. My clothes were tattered, stained with blood, and mismatched. None of it was mine. The thought settled heavily: If these weren’t my clothes, whose were they? And why was I wearing them? Images tried to surface, blurred and incomplete, but my mind recoiled. Did I hurt someone? Did I… kill someone? The question echoed, as if already asked before.

I tried to stand, but my legs didn’t respond. A low mechanical hum came from the door, reminiscent of a childhood memory, but louder and closer. The view outside the window distorted—the streetlight vanished, buildings softened and disappeared. Fatigue, intoxication, mechanical failure in my vision? None fit. The longer I stared, the more deliberate the change appeared. My watch was motionless at 6:00. I tried to reconstruct the day, but nothing followed after the subway ride to work. The absence of people and activity deepened my isolation. I waited for something to contradict my assumptions. Nothing did.

A knock at the door—loud, repetitive, evenly spaced. I called out, but no response followed. Silence returned, and the sequence repeated in my thoughts. I stayed still, waiting for the world to resume its function. It did not. The chair beneath me began to vibrate, the motion intensifying until I was thrown backward, landing flat against the ground. The ceiling split open, revealing a red void—no motion, no light source, no edge. It remained open, stable, and unchanging.

I tried to move, but my body adhered to the floor, not paralyzed but held in place. A surreal hand descended, its surface not quite skin, details blurred and inconsistent. Contact occurred at my chest—no pressure, just overlap, as if two incompatible states briefly occupied the same space. My vision fractured, the room lost cohesion, and the red expanse widened, redefining itself as everywhere. Information arrived without sequence. The hand was not reaching for me, but indicating alignment. The paralysis had been preparation. The room receded into insignificance, and the hum resolved into a vast resonance. I was not being taken; I was being reclassified. Concepts like inside and outside, before and after, peeled away. My name became descriptive, a tag denoting function. The red was no longer a color but a state, a permission granted to perceive what had always surrounded me. Others were there—not bodies, not minds, but arrangements. Their presence was unmistakable, the resonance adjusting to accommodate them. Fear arrived too late to matter; there was only correctness. Somewhere, a room still existed, but that version of me had already been archived. What persisted now was simpler: I was part of the condition.

The air grew heavier as I stood, the red aura pressing against my skin. Silence vibrated faintly, the echo of the endless hum returning behind my eyes. I took a step; the floor allowed the action. Somewhere within the red, something shifted, adjusting to my presence. A thought surfaced: You are upright now. Observation may proceed. Standing had not been escape; it had been consent. The window showed an ordinary sky, dull and gray. The folding chair creaked softly, painfully normal. My hands shook, but there was no mark, no proof of change. The room smelled the same—stale air and old wood. Silence settled in, thick but empty. The worst part: I could remember everything, with a clarity that felt deliberate. Something had sorted me, examined me, and decided—if only temporarily—where I belonged. Outside the window, something flickered—a subtle misalignment, like reality hesitating over its own definition. I didn’t move to investigate. Mercy hadn’t been denied; it had been deferred. Exhaustion won out, and I surrendered to sleep.

The pounding on the door snapped me awake, but the world was wrong. I stood alone in a cemetery, facing the headstone of a man dead for more than a hundred years. Fog clung to the air, the ground soft and welcoming, darkness pressing in. The headstone changed—it was mine. The dates shifted: my birthday, and two days ago. Was I dead? Had I slipped into some fractured reality? The stone reset itself, restoring the original inscription. Confusion curdled into terror. The fog charged across the sky, three moons rose, their pale light crawling across the cemetery. Every headstone emerged, names watching, dates whispering of unfinished endings. The cemetery was awake, and it knew I was there. The ground trembled, graves pitched and slid toward a widening rupture, headstones vanishing into darkness. The abyss swallowed them, an endless void like a waiting mouth. I stood at the edge, knowing the ground was not breaking apart—it was opening. The earth pulled everything down, and I clawed at the ground, desperate to stay with the living. The rumble was deafening, and a cold certainty settled in: if I blacked out, there would be no waking from it.

My mind betrayed me, drifting backward to childhood and survival. My father died in a car accident when I was six; my mother followed a year later, sinking into depression and choosing her own end. After that, I belonged to the state, passed from foster home to foster home. By eighteen, I’d lived with five families, none seeing me as a child—only as a stipend. College lasted three semesters, then I failed out. I took a job on a construction crew, a mindless drone carrying out menial tasks. I quit, unable to endure the constant directives. A crash from the sky shocked me back to the present, the crevasse opening wider, and I tumbled downward into the abyss. I accepted my fate, relaxing into a freefall. Then, without warning, I was stopped mid-fall—suspended in time. A hand cradled my body, lifting me from the chasm. Who—or what—had cared enough to rescue me? I needed an answer. Exhausted, I fell into a deep sleep.

I awoke in my childhood bed, my parents standing over me. Was this a dream, or a suppressed memory resurfacing as a final mercy? The vision disappeared, and I was back in the empty apartment, time stopped, no longer myself but a spectator in a cruel experiment. My will was broken. The pounding at the door jolted me back, and as it creaked open, I braced myself for whatever evil waited. My body went rigid; I couldn’t speak. Then, my mother stepped into the room and smiled. “Wake up, sleepyhead. It’s time for school.” Relief washed over me—it had all been a dream. Fifth grade would start as promised.