STOP THINKING ABOUT SPACE

https://gum.co/ADxCz

It’s Housewarming, the first story I wrote about Ariel, Spencer, and the Haunted City, reworked and reedited for release as one document instead of a million posts! And it’s pay what you want!

cw, vomiting, alcohol

“And I just, you know, I can’t with that guy, you know?” Ariel closed the fridge door and looked up to see if Photon would confirm if she did know. She was looking at him from across her neat little kitchen, her black brows knitted and her red lips pursed. Ariel looked at the carton of Chinese he had retrieved. He sniffed it. It smelled like peppers, which is what he had been expecting. He looked back up at Photon.

“You’re… sparkling, dear heart,” she said.

Ariel frowned, first at Photon and at the Chinese carton. Then he started to feel warm, a fuzzy little lump of anxiety rising in his throat. Was she…?

“What?” He ventured, half laughing. Photon was already across the room, a bottle of rum coming down from a cabinet Ariel had never seen rum come out of. Photon did not answer, brushing past him and the cold Chinese and reaching into the fridge for a gallon of skim milk she had bought for a recipe and promptly forgotten about. She forced both into his hands.

“Drink.”

“What.”

“You’re sparkling. Glittering. Aura is positively jumping, it’s bad, very bad, think you picked up a bug out there,” she burbled, taking the milk back and running back to a different cabinet to find a steel cocktail shaker with someone else’s wedding date etched into it.

Ariel blinked stupidly and sank down into one of the little white wrought iron chairs at her kitchen table. The fuzzy warm feeling had died in his esophagus. He let out a long sigh and stuck the fork into the cold noodles.

“I went by that fucking tree today,” he said.

“Knew it was up to no good,” Photon muttered, grabbing the rum from him. Ariel ate a slice of bell pepper, glaring bitterly into the congealed brown sauce. He sent his awareness around his body and realized he was starting to feel funny, down in the bottoms of his feet. Like the floor was vibrating. He never would have noticed if she hadn’t told him something was wrong. But of course Photon had seen it coming before he had. She always knew things before he did.

Ariel looked up when the shaker came back into his field of vision, the top off, full to the brim with the rum and skim milk mixture. It smelled like something else had gone in, or else the milk had long gone off. He sighed, loosened his tie, took a deep breath through his nose, and chugged like a frat brother.

The shaker hit the floor with a metallic ping. Ariel’s body shook, groaned, and went abruptly limp in the little chair. Photon thought his eyes had rolled back, but it was impossible to see through his closed and heavy eyelids. Sitting across the little table, she collected her cards and changed to a game of solitaire, which she won handily. She started another, noticing with some embarrassment that she had drawn first the ace of spades. The bulb in the ceiling light fixture went pop.

Photon looked up at Ariel’s inert, wheezing body. She stood up.

At last.

The voice was impressive, more vibrating her hair than her eardrums. Photon took off her glasses and laid them on the counter. She began to count.

I have come to your world in search of- hey.

Photon did not look back at his body.

Hey, what’s… why do I feel so…

She heard the body’s breathing hitch, sigh, and hitch again.

Oh. Oh no, oh no oh no oh he’s gonna-

She did not look back… but only because she thought he deserved a little dignity. She was very fond of him, after all, and he was so sensitive about these little situations.

Behind her, Ariel’s body violently vomited most of a bottle of rum, a half-gallon of spoiled milk and a single slice of bell pepper.

The Angel of Death gave him a playful punch in the arm.

“Adventurous. I can hardly believe the whole thing fit. You got moxie kid”

The young man was still staring at his body. What was left of it anyway. The mini bottle of rum had had a molotav cocktail effect. When the aquarium shattered it put out most of the fire but by then it was too late.

“what are my parents going to think?”

She put a warm hand on his ethereal shoulder. “They’ll miss you honey. I know it’s hard to believe since they’re both kind of-“

“No, no I mean,” he gestured to an area of the smoldering corpse that was still covered in smudged black runes and whipped cream.

“Well. Okay. They’re gonna have some questions. Figuring out your actual cause of death is gonna be a wild fuckin’ ride sugar, but it’s going to make a hell of a write-up in tomorrow’s paper.” She coaxed him up off the floor and led him through the cloud of quickly dispersing fish souls. “Besides, I just picked up a couple from the belly of a megalodon shark. They were surrounded by stolen bath bombs and nazi gold. You’re kind of vanilla.”

His anxiety switched to confused amusement instantly. “Aren’t megalodons extinct?”

She took his hand and led him into the light.

“This is gonna be a long trip sweet pea. Let me tell you some shit.”

So I moved into this apartment that had been built before 1950. I think to myself, “Gosh, it would be awful if this were haunted,” and then I kind of laugh because this apartment IS SO NOT HAUNTED. You don’t paint the place butter yellow with white trim and go, “IT LOOKS HAUNTED.” And it’s a great place. Built-in bookshelves. Hardwood floors. Fireplace that probably worked once upon a time but now just looks nice. Original tile in the bathroom. There’s even a balcony. And for a two-bedroom apartment, the rent is low. Low enough that I don’t need a roommate, so screw it, I’m not getting a roommate. That balcony is MINE. BWAHAHAHAHAHA.

Two weeks pass, and it’s freaking bliss. It’s my first time living on my own outside of college. I live close enough to my job that I can walk to work. I have a cat. The cat loves the place, too. It’s just mostly chilling and hanging out. I’m not living like a queen by any means, but it’s NICE. Like, really nice.

And then I get sick. BAD sick. Might have been a really bad cold or the flu, but regardless, I was in bed, unable to do more than shuffle around the apartment and maybe occasionally take a shower.

The second night of being really sick, I wake up in the middle of the night, and there’s a thing in my bedroom doorway. Which is kind of an odd place to put a thing. And to make it worse, it looks kind of person-shaped. Even worse, it looks like a person would look if the person were wearing a hood and cloak. And this thing is pitch black. Like, absorbing light pitch black. I didn’t have the light-blocking curtains then, so I could still see the stuff in my bedroom. Everything except this thing.

I sit up, and I stare at it. It stands there. I stare at it. It stands there. I stare. It stands. I run through a mental checklist of all the furniture in my room. I point to each piece of furniture in the room. “Bookcase. Bureau. Bedside table. Bedside table” None of which, you might notice, could be mistaken for a person wearing a cloak standing in my doorway. I point at it. It stands there. I count off the furniture again. Done, I point to the thing in the doorway again. And then I realize something, the way you realize where you left your glasses when you’ve been looking for them for ages. And I say, “I’m too damn tired for this.” And I roll over and go to sleep.

But hold up. We’re not done.

Night three of being sick. My dishes are rattling in the sink. I roll over and listen to them clinking around. It is obviously the sound of dirty dishes in the sink the next room over. I look for my cat to see if she’s the one causing this. She sits behind me on the bed, looking from the doorway to me and back again, and we stay in bed, listening to the bowls and forks move around. “Better not miss a spot,” I say, thinking whoever - or whatever - is in my kitchen is doing my dishes. “I don’t want to have to do the dishes in the morning.”

I’ll go ahead and tell you now: No dishes were washed. I ended up having to wash them all. Years later, and I’m still pissed off about it.

SO NIGHT FOUR. Okay. This is the big one. Night four.

The thing is back. Only it’s not in my doorway anymore. It’s closer to the bed. I wake up in the middle of the night, sit up, and there it is. About three feet away from the foot of my bed. And it’s standing there, not moving. I stare at it. It stands there. We’ve been through this before. I know how it goes. But I keep staring, and it keeps standing. I can’t see its face. I can’t any eyes. The whole thing is pitch black, and just… standing.

I count off the furniture a couple times. I stare at each bit of furniture, making sure I can identify it and that it’s where that particular piece of furniture is supposed to be. All the furniture is accounted for. I stare at the thing again. I staaaaaaaaaaaaare at it. I still can’t make out any features. It still isn’t moving. And I go, “You didn’t even wash the dishes.”

To which it, of course, says nothing. But that’s okay, because I don’t need it to talk for this conversation to go down.

“You’re not paying rent. You’re not going to, either, are you. Not like you can get a job when you can’t even do the damn dishes. Just rattled them around in the sink, didn’t you. I had to do the dishes myself. This morning.”

And it keeps standing there.

So I’m like, “So look. I pay the rent here. I pay the bills. You can stay. I don’t care. But we’re going to set up some ground rules. If you stay, you have to help out around here. Do the dishes. Feed the cat. That sort of thing. But if you’re not going to participate, if you’re going to freeload, you can’t stay. I can’t have you creeping around like a creeper. And I’m doing EVERYTHING here. So you decide what you want to do. You can stay, no problem. Or you can go. Either way, I’m too tired to deal with this right now. So good night.” And I rolled over and went back to sleep.

So you’ve exsanguinated your 400 guys to get the iron for your sword. Cool. But now you have 400 bodies lying around.

Why not put those to good use and cremate them. Use the carbon from those 400 bodies (you won’t need all of them) and now you can make a nice mid-high carbon steel sword.

“Did you know,” she said, her voice soft and dreamlike, “That if I had the blood of two to four hundred average-sized adult humans, I could forge a sword?”

Ariel looked over his shoulder very, very slowly. He looked at Photon. Photon, who still had not moved, continued to stare into the snow globe.

“No,” he said. “No I did not.”

“And I could use the carbon from their bones to strengthen it.”

The water ran in the sink. Soft music continued to play in the living room. A dog barked in the parking lot behind the building. Ariel Park said:

Actually, we’re looking for quite a few good short stories, and we have some specific themes in mind:

Winter stories

Mysteries

Opposites Attract

Office Romances

Pretend Couples

Second Chances

Reunions

Meet-Cutes

Friends-to-Lovers

Homecomings

Between now and June 30th, send us your romantic short stories using these tropes as inspiration. We’re looking for outstanding original stories of 10,000-to-30,000 words. Think it could be part of a series? Let us know!

We are looking for diverse casts with MCs who identify as LGBTQ+. Submissions can be for adult and Young Adult audiences. Exceptional plot and character-driven erotica will also be considered.

Like, in horror movies, an otherworldly voice may hiss like radio static, while a creepy monster may jerk and stutter from position to position like a video that’s dropping frames. The influence of a hostile, alien presence may be indicated by visual “tearing”, like the film is being played back from damaged media, or by deliberate audio/video desynchronisation.

Video games get in on the act, too. The use of simulated glitches to represent reality-warping effects in horror gaming is well documented, of course, but it goes beyond that. In the language of gaming, a portal to an alien realm may bleed stylised pixels and crackle like a PC speaker with the volume cranked too high, while the sound effects associated with “unnatural” magic might introduce digital distortion to an otherwise naturalistic soundscape.

The fact that human beings dream and have incredibly vivid imaginations gives us an inherent ability to doubt our own reality. This allows us to either question our own experiences or question our own knowledge of the laws of our world. And this, in turn gives birth to much of what drives horror, in general.

The idea that somehow, a fundamental boundary is being violated is basically at the root of all horror, whether explicitly - such as a gateway to hell opening, or subtly, in that something not right seems to have made its way into our realm of the mundane. Horror largely relies on this sense that a line that should not have been crossed has been.

The idea that ones perceptions of reality starts to change as one approaches a border between realms is a pretty old one. It goes all the way back to stories about the fairy realm where time and color are distorted, and fairy dust can alter your perceptions of just about anything. Or portals to the underworld where the flow of time and the rules of realty change.

And I think that signal distortion, interestingly enough, largely comes from attempts to replicate the effects on perception of much older sorts of boundary crossings - altered states of consciousness - be they dreaming, drug included, or stress related. Things like an altered flow of movement or time, colors and shapes bleeding into one another or leaving trails, things seeming to oscillate or strobe, pop in and out of existence. Things like flashing lights, white noise, and even pixilation are all pretty well documented occurrences, even before the advent of photography.

Looking into migraine aura and hallucinogens is particularly interesting because some of the depictions of what people experience look very much like signal decay - and some of them predate the actual medias.

I recall when google first released Deep Dream that a lot of people commented how eerie it was that a system built entirely on one interesting way computer  vision might “fail” replicated almost perfectly organic hallucinations. If you combine this with the way that things like The Matrix and the “Brain in a Jar” thought experiment have worked their way into popular consciousness, it’s easy to see how a sort of “digital realm” and distortions associated with that have also become pretty standard indicators of boundaries, especially ones that are meant to indicate that something about the world is false. But I think it’s important to remember that in a lot of ways, our brain and our eyes are just as prone to signal decay as any computer or camera, and our old folk tales about fairies and stories about witches that sound suspiciously like stories about ufos that sound suspiciously like hypnopompic and hypnogogic hallucinations with sleep paralysis can attest to that.