What's New

A psychotic break or a new reality?

There are unseen forces in the world tampering with your lives. Being labeled a paranoid personality means I’ve seen both the real and made up conspiracy kind. “What’s new?” asked Johnathon Wright, my therapist. I can’t afford the best. Insurance doesn’t cover it.

“They think it is funny,” I mumbled, lowering my head against my chest.

Doctor Wright twiddled his pen between his fingers, a sure sign he was frustrated with my enigmatic reply. “They?” He pondered, twisting his lips into a maskless smile.

“The Newbies,” I replied, choking on their name. “I’ve seen them. The Newbies got careless. I saw them in a dream. I remembered when I awoke. They were careless in letting me remember. The Newbies think traveling through time and making jokes of our lives is great creative fun, spinning us off into alternate shattered realities.”

I was on a verbal roll, hardly aware of the good doctor’s presence, when in popped in one of the Newbies with a gun in his right hand. Time stood still, shivering silently around us, Jonathan’s pen raised like a question in the air.

“You’re ruining things. Come with me. I’ve lost money with you ruining my art.”

“You think you’re God’s of the universe playing the future’s game, turning free will into a joke. I’m not going anywhere.” I dove for his knees, hearing the shot crack that he fired pass over my head. Shattered time flung us grappling together, my hand grasping his hand on his gun.

Flashes of my alternate lives struck my sanity full force. My desperation wrenched the gun from my assailant's hand. A second’s release was all it took. I sat back stunned, ears ringing, as he fell limp to the floor.

“How’d he get in here? Stay still. I’m calling the police.” Doctor Wright dropped his ever present pen to pull his cell phone out of his pocket.

A flash of stolen insight gathered in my mind. Here was the power of time itself. Another second gone and the power was mine. I could be a time traveler, changing fate with any emergent dreamed up whim. I slowed my breathing, felt the pulse of time beckon, closed my eyes and made time stand still.

“This should do the job.” I wiped any of my fingerprints on the gun away, stood and traded Doc Wright’s cell phone while shaping his fingers holding the weapon. His mind left with only one reason would reveal how he’d shot an intruder with the mad man’s own gun. He’d say things happened so fast he couldn’t remember any more details.

I’d put a wrench in the Newbies plans. Stepping free of the moment, I wandered out of Doc Wright’s office into the vast unknown, my mind pulsing, tingling, in dream-like rapture fulfilled..

Some alternate realities are more powerful than others, in the way their confluences meet with others. I nodded as my dream grew brushing aside all others into my new reality. I watched as an alternate world crashed into each of its gathering clustered companions, broke and shivered apart. Each traveling Newby trapped within it screamed out captured into a dream-like existence, creatures lost in my memory’s embrace.

“Gone. All gone.” Only a trace of a half forgotten conspiracy theory whispered on my words trembling on my smile.

“I’m mad, of course. Dreams are imaginary things.” I shook my head, letting the last one falter and escape into the unknown. That is where pure horror lies, with its endless possibilities assailing our fears and doubts.

I blocked them away for safe keeping, wondering what Doctor Wright and I would talk about in my next counseling session.”What’s new?” He’d ask, twirling his pen. “It’s up to us to make our own.”

WC 664