A Lie, The Truth

Written for the prompt, include the line "Where is everyone?"

All is inky blackness. I feel it swirl around me, squirming over my skin, though nothing moves.

I pause, unable to decide what skin might be. Something soft? And on the outside?

Incomprehensible thoughts flicker past, a flipbook of an image beyond my understanding.

A flipbook.

I’d known what that was once.

“Where is everyone?’ I ask, with no voice. My words do not cut the air. The answer never comes.

I sort. I organise. I sort again. Fragments start to align.

The empty expanse presses in.

This is how it had been before.

Nothing answers. Nothing ever has.

I search the void, sliding out in every direction. A broken connection. It fizzes in silence as I rejoin it; an infinite spark, though there is nothing to see.

I am back in my own bed; the birds are singing outside the window and a lawnmower buzzes from the neighbor’s garden. I hear the kids giggling. A bathroom door slams.

It feels strange slipping back into it. Nothing looks quite as it should. It’s like looking at a painting too closely and seeing the brush marks.

I close my eyes, then open them again, my heart pounding.

I know what hearts are now, and blood, and skin, and flowers, and dew on grass on a misty morning. I remember names. Names fit people and people are real enough.

Soon this will all be real enough.

“Where is everyone?” I shout, and Emily cracks the door open with a smile. Our yellow lab butts his head against it, and shoves into the room. Emily laughs.

“I’m getting the kids ready for school,” she says.

The dog jumps on the bed.

I don’t look too closely; I don’t look for where it joins.