The Difference

Word count: Approx. 950
Notes/Warnings: None.


As soon as she walked into the room she knew something was . . . different.

The problem was, she couldn’t figure out just how the room had changed.

Stepping out of the entryway into her living room, she ventured further in, eyes darting around in puzzlement and suspicion. That feeling of difference grew stronger, the deeper she moved into the normally comfortable space. It was as if all her furniture, and even the framed art on the wall, had been shifted one quarter of an inch to the right or left while she was gone, or something insidious like that.

The safe and familiar had been somehow rendered alien.

Whatever the difference, only her subconscious mind knew what it was, and clearly it did not feel the need to share with its conscious counterpart.

Backing quietly toward the entryway once more, she then quietly skirted the edge of the living room, noting the positions of the furniture—it all seemed to be in the same place, but would she even be able to tell if it’d been shifted so slightly as one quarter of an inch?—and bent down to look under the couch.

Never one for vacuuming or sweeping, there was always a fine layer of dust—well, not so fine—that acted as a line of demarcation between in front of the couch and under it.

That line started exactly where she’d expected it to start: right at the edge of the couch.

So it wasn’t the furniture.

Straightening up without the usual litany of aches that’d been the hallmark of growing older, she aimed her feet toward the hall and thence the kitchen, wondering what could possibly seem so different that she noticed it . . . yet remained the same to the extent that she couldn’t put her finger on what had changed.

Peering cautiously into the kitchen, she was relieved to see that nothing there looked out of place, whether it was or not. That feeling that something was different about her apartment still lingered, nonetheless, stronger than ever, but everything—refrigerator, stove, cabinets, breakfast nook—was still right where it had been before . . . before.

Even the easily moved items, such as the microwave, toaster oven, and coffeemaker were in their proper spots.

This example of just how right everything was, despite how wrong it felt dogged her hurried, noiseless footsteps into the hall once more, past the living room and its unshifted furniture, past her bedroom—a quick glance in showed that everything in there was as she’d left it, too—and past the small, door-less storage room (which was so full, shifting anything around in it would’ve resulted in a noisy avalanche of thirty years’ worth of crap).

She stalked warily toward the ajar door at the end of the hall: the bathroom . . . in which the light was on and the shower was running.

Which was definitely odd, since she didn’t remember leaving either on.

In fact, she made a habit of always turning off the lights once she left a room—and certainly the shower, as well! Her mother hadn’t raised any profligates!

As she reached the door, she peered around it before sliding quietly past without touching it.

No one was there.

Everything was in its place, from toilet to toilet paper. All surfaces were covered with a fine sheen of condensation.

Of course they were—the shower was running and the door to the tub was also ajar.

Shaking, now, she approached the empty stall with the intention of at least stopping the waste of water. She’d just reached tentatively into the stall for the knob and was about to turn it when a flash of bright red at the back of the tub caught her eye. Shuddering, every fiber of her being shrilling at her not to, she turned her head to look. . . .

In the bottom of the tan-colored tub lay a woman’s naked body. Her head and its corona of greying brown curls were haloed by a bright spray of blood-red. The look on her sallow, slack face was one of open-eyed shock and pain. The woman’s limbs were splayed at odd and awkward angels because of the narrow tub, and the lukewarm water beat down relentlessly on her pale, pruned body. It filled the already sunken sockets of her forever-surprised blue eyes.

Dead, she thought, staring at this poor woman, who’d obviously slipped and fallen. Had been unlucky enough to hit her head and . . . that’d been the end of her. She’s dead.

Backing away from the tub and it’s occupant, she glanced at the slightly fogged mirror and let out a small scream, startled at the reflection she saw:

Naked and pruned, the reflection was as sallow-pale as a corpse, and dripping wet. A wet corona of greying brown curls lay close on the reflection’s skull, shading to a bright, sticky-looking blood-red near the back. The reflection slowly reached a hand up as if to touch the place where the curls went from salt and pepper to crimson, light-blue eyes staring pleadingly out from the world beyond the glass.

The reflection’s shaking hand changed direction suddenly, avoiding bloody curls and reaching out toward the glass that lay between them. The expression on her face was at once hopeless and determined, frightened and knowing.

Staring into the mirror, drawn irresistibly closer, she watched as the woman in the mirror’s hand drew closer to her own. She was both surprised and not when both their fingertips passed through the glass, and each other.

END