“I don’t even know where I’d begin,” I told the suited man sitting a cross from me, “and even if I did, it’d more than likely just end in me being put in an asylum.”
His face never changed. Stone-cold eyes stared through me. He looked decently dressed at a glance—until you noticed the coffee stain on his tie and the tag still hanging from his shirt.
“What about from the beginning?” he barked, never looking away.
“What beginning? The one that’s about to happen or the one I saw?”
Annoyance wavered on his face, we had been siting here for an hour now, the cold cuffs digging into my skin every time I shifted. There was no true way to start the story, or, no conventional way. Time had bent, it buckled, and I can see everything.
“I’m going to keep things simple,” he huffed, “you claim, that something is coming, but you say it’s already here. Can you, even if its nothing, give us something to go off of?”
I shifted a bit, his face stood so still while he spoke. It was, creepy.
“I- if…” words were forming, but I couldn’t seem to keep the breath to keep them moving. Something was keeping me from speaking and it couldn’t just be the anxiety. What if me telling them brought it to reality? Could I have imagined it? Was I really actually crazy?
He leaned forward slightly. The movement was small, but it made the space between us feel even smaller. I could smell the coffee on his breath, stale and bitter. There was something about him that didn’t add up. Not threatening, not quite. Just wrong. Like someone wearing a mask they forgot to finish making.
“You hesitated,” he said. “Why?”
My throat was dry. I had to swallow twice before I could speak.
“Because saying it makes it real.”
He started tapping a pen against the clipboard in his lap. The sound was sharp and constant, each tap like a nail in a coffin. It echoed in my head. My wrists ached with every shift against the cuffs. The room felt colder.
“And what is it, exactly?” he asked.
I looked at the light above him. The bulb buzzed, flickered once. I couldn’t tell if the sound was real or something in my head.
“I don’t know if it’s a thing. Or a place. Or a moment. It felt like everything at once. Like the future isn’t ahead of us anymore. It’s under our feet. Crawling backward. Climbing up into now. And I’m the one stuck in the middle of it.”
He still didn’t blink. He didn’t even write anything. Just stared. His eyes didn’t seem to reflect light the way they should. Like there was something between them and the world.
“You said you saw something,” he said. “What did you see?”
I closed my eyes. I shouldn’t answer. I knew that. Every part of me screamed not to. But the words were already forming. I couldn’t hold them back.
“I saw the sky crack open.”
He sat very still. No movement, not even to breathe.
“And what came through?” he asked.
This time, I didn’t answer right away. I didn’t want to say it. I didn’t want to think it. But the memory hit me like a wave.
“Not something,” I whispered. “Somewhere.”
“I met something,” I said. “It looked like me. But it wasn’t. It was built from the same dead material as the world around it. Stone skin. Glowing purple eyes. It watched me like it already knew what I was going to do.”
The man across from me finally shifted in his chair. It was small, just a slight tilt of the head, but it felt like the temperature dropped.
“What did it want?” he asked.
“I don’t know. It reached out to me at first. Like it wanted me to take its hand. When I didn’t, it got angry. I could see it… changing. Its skin turned soft. Pink. It started looking more and more like me. Even wore the same dress I had on. The same tired eyes. The same panic.”
He scribbled something onto his clipboard, then glanced up.
“You’re saying you were copied?”
“Yes. No. I don’t know.” I leaned forward until the cuffs bit into my wrists. “It didn’t just copy me. It was me. Every twitch. Every breath. It even got tired when I did. Like it was running on the same battery.”
He didn’t react.
“I ran,” I said. “That’s all I could do. I ran until the world became a blur. The more I ran, the more the world around me seemed to fall apart. Buildings appeared, but they weren’t right. Cars that had no color. People that weren’t really there. And I was fading too. My skin. My hair. It was like the color was being drained out of me.”
Silence filled the room again. I could hear the faint hum of the light above us. My breath was loud in my ears.
“I ended up in a shack. Small. Wooden. Empty. It gave me a place to think. To hide. That’s when I realized I wasn’t just in some dream. I wasn’t hallucinating. This place… this thing… it was real.”
The man set down the pen. Folded his hands over the clipboard.
“And how did you get back here?”
“I didn’t,” I said. “At least, I don’t think I did. I think part of me is still there. That’s what’s wrong. That’s why I can’t tell if this is real. You. This room. The cuffs. Maybe I never left.”
He nodded slowly. No shock. No doubt. Almost like he had been expecting that answer.
“Then let’s start from now,” he said. “If you’re still in it… what comes next?”
I looked at him, and something in his face shifted. For the briefest moment, I saw my own eyes staring back at me.
I pulled at the cuffs, but they didn’t budge.
“Okay, this gives us… something, as unbelievable as it might seem! So how about we try something, close your eyes and try to remember, anything.”
I stared at him, but again, his face remained unchanged, and I was beginning to feel more and more uncomfortable. But I followed his directions, and started to close my eyes.
At first there was only black. Then a slow creep of light. But not light from anything warm or bright. It was a dull, ashen glow, like the world itself had given up trying to shine.
The grey dust settled over everything. It clung to broken signs and collapsed buildings. There was no sky. No clouds. No sun. Just a ceiling of nothing, stretched out forever above a world that had stopped breathing.
There were no birds. No trees. No people.
No fire.
Nothing moved except the dust, stirred by a wind that didn’t make a sound. It didn’t even feel cold. It just was. Still and empty.
I stood in the middle of it. Alone. My feet left no prints. I turned in a slow circle, searching for any sign of color. There was none. The landscape stretched out into the same copy of itself again and again. An infinite loop of lifelessness.
And then the sensation hit me. That strange, shuddering pull deep in my chest. Like a tether had gone tight. Like I wasn’t supposed to be seeing this.
“It’s quiet,” I said.
“What’s quiet?”
“Everything. There’s no noise. No wind. No birds. Just… stillness.”
His chair creaked. He was still listening.
“I’m standing on dust. Not sand, not dirt. It’s like ash. Soft but heavy. It doesn’t move unless I do. There are buildings around me, some fallen over, others still standing, but empty. They look like they’ve been forgotten for a hundred years.”
He didn’t interrupt.
“The sky isn’t even a sky. It’s just this endless smear of grey, like someone erased the clouds and left nothing behind. There’s no sun. I can’t tell what time it is. Feels like everything stopped.”
I waited for him to say something, but he didn’t. I kept going.
“There aren’t any shadows. That’s the weird part. There’s light, I guess, but it’s flat. Lifeless. Like it’s coming from nowhere. Even fire would’ve been something. Even that would’ve had color.”
He spoke softly this time. “And what do you feel?”
I paused, struggling to pin it down.
“Tired. Not like I’ve run a marathon. More like… the kind of tired you feel when you’ve been carrying something heavy for too long, and you’ve forgotten what it is. And alone. Completely alone.”
A moment passed.
“Are you scared?” he asked.
That one took me a second longer.
“No,” I said. “Not really. It’s more like I’m supposed to be here. Like I’ve been here before.”
I felt the air shift. Maybe just a draft. Maybe something else.
He cleared his throat.
“Open your eyes now.”
I did.
He was watching me closely. The calm mask was back on, but there was something flickering behind his eyes. A twitch in his brow, maybe. Or the way he tapped his pen against the table, just once.
“Anything different now?” he asked.
“No,” I replied, though I wasn’t sure that was true.
Something about the room felt… thin. Like a wall had shifted. Nothing obvious. But it was there.
His eyes lingered on mine for a second too long.
“You okay?” he asked. His voice was tighter, cautious.
I didn’t answer. I was still catching up to what I saw. Or rather, what I was seeing.
Because I knew now. I wasn’t the one who ran through that grey wasteland.
His gaze never wavered, but something shifted in it—like he knew. Like he was seeing through me now, past the cracks in my story and into something darker. He leaned back in his chair, the faintest smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.
“You’re not the first to say that,” he muttered, almost to himself.
I stiffened. “What?”
He didn’t answer. Instead, he tapped his pen again, eyes narrowing ever so slightly, before he looked up.
“Tell me,” he said slowly, “do you ever wonder if you’re the one left behind?”
The words hung in the air, heavy. I opened my mouth, but the room felt like it was folding in on me. The cuffs dug deeper into my wrists, but I couldn’t pull away.
“Tell me,” he pressed again, “what happens when you stop being you?”
And in that moment, I didn’t know if I was ready to find out.