By S. C. Huddleston, the first entry in his upcoming serialization, stay tuned for more entries like this and other great works from Triglyph entertainment!

Marie

Propinquity is fickle, as I’ve said before, and many things exacerbate the flicker of the nervous wings in my belly. I never did pass Maslow’s safety section, according to that bespectacled woman who scribbled on a pad every time I shifted positions in her chair. I hold fast to the hardcover in my grasp as I approach the window. It’s ironic really, how the weight of fictional worlds grounds me in reality. This particular cover, lime green around the binding, holds many stories within. The one I’ve just been reading tells of two people, each completely made-up by the other, in love. I suppose that’s where I find myself now, staring out into the vivid reds and peaches of Maple Park in late October. Maybe I’ve made her up too and if I get too close, she’ll fade away.

     Marie Alexandria is beautiful. Her soft skin blushes as summer’s breath cools. She moseys along the path that is bordered with empty benches.  She brushes her bangs behind her ear just before crossing the street that separates her from me. I wonder if she’s noticed me through the glass.

     I gulp a bit of air.  It doesn’t help and neither does the book with no time left to read.  She’s coming, and I can see her through me.  I glance at the beer belly in my reflection and hope that my heart is enough.  I tell myself to be brave.

     The birds whistle louder as she reaches my side of the road.  I’m filled with elation.  I step out to meet her smile and deep brown eyes. She gazes back with the affection of a lifetime of love already lived. 

A tear falls and she clears her throat to say, “I want you.”

I look into her as I squeeze fingerprints into the cover of my book. “Marie, it has always been you.”

     We hold each other like the last couple dancing at a wedding, with jazz music and drunken uncles, because we’ve been together the longest.  It begins to rain, but we don’t stop.  We just giggle and hold tighter. After a few moments more, Marie steps inside and I put on a pot of water for tea.

     At least, this is how it would have gone had she made it across the street in one piece.

Jackets

     They call it a glitch, the people with T.F.A., Transient Fault Agency, marked on their jackets. The people that can’t see them, I haven’t met many like me, call it a near death experience. See, Marie wasn’t supposed to splatter her way across the road in my direction, thank the Gods. Talk about pouring her heart out. That’s where the Jackets come in to set things straight. Have you ever felt déjà vu? Do you remember your foot slipping from a loose gravel edge just prior, or a gust of wind from a killer taxi, or the crack of the ice between your feet? You’ve been reset, redone, rebooted. It’s obvious in how the eyes remain still until the sensation has fully passed. You might have been accused of spacing out from time to time as the one that’s been reset usually takes a bit longer to bounce back when the filibuster on Newton’s laws is finished.

     I can see them. I don’t know why but I’ve always been able to. It used to frighten me when I would see one holding a glowstick to the back of my mother’s head in the bathtub while another replaced her clock radio on the counter, or one holding a glowstick to my kid brother’s arm the time he jumped off the bunk bed to help demo the blanket fort we’d just spent the night in. He caught it, his arm, on the corner of our small dresser. He’d forgotten we’d moved it. I quickly learned to stare straight ahead like everyone else around me until the Jackets left. I remember wishing for a father to scare them away before I was tall enough to push the lawnmower. They scared me after that still, but I didn’t like to admit it being the man of the house and all. They never caught on to my knowledge of their existence. Until today.

     There are two. Jacket One is dealing with the driver and the vehicle. The glowstick swirls the blood of my beloved away, as well as the tears of the hysterical man with one foot out the driver’s side door, just inches from the ground. Jacket Two, straight through the untrimmed chest of my reflection, seems to be scanning Marie’s whole body with his glowstick, up and down, up and down, while she stands reverted with one hand holding her bangs behind her ear. When he finishes, sheathing his device, he offers me the slightest glance without alerting the other, and removes the device once more just as the other passes him to leave, to look as if he is still hard at work. He seems to mumble something under his breath. Jacket One places his wrists together to open a portal, this also used to frighten me, he steps forth and disappears. Jacket Two takes the bracelets off his wrists and dangles them around Marie’s pinky finger. Offering another glance back to me, I can see a smirk creep across his lips before he too vanishes through the portal.

     I could stay here, frozen and pretend not to have noticed like I’ve done all my life. I know, weak, but I’ve made it this far. Besides, my books are here, and Marie and I are finally going to make up after the stupidest fight. None of this is helping my stomach and I don’t remember if I took my Prilosec this morning. I wait a few second more, to make sure they’re gone before I break the freeze. She’ll be out for a few minutes at least. The worse the damage, the longer it takes. I put my book down and stare back through my reflection at her motionless beauty and await her arrival as if nothing has happened.

     The bracelets! That damn Jacket left them and now she’s going to wonder where they came from.  I wonder why he would risk it. I’m out the door to grab them. The portal is still open, a twisting gaping yaw of almost neon smoke formed into an almost solid gate. If that even makes sense. I could look through, just stick my head in to see, but I’ve never dared. I could decapitate myself. Talk about using my head. Instead, I watch as the outer wisps are pulled inward toward the center as if I’m standing on the cherry side of a lit cigarette being inhaled, only the cherry is more blueberry in color. It’s gone just as Marie blinks for the first time in her post-glitch life.

     “Sam, how did you get over here so fast? You startled me,” she says. The Bronco barrels by on the road behind me.

     “Sorry, I saw you coming from the window.”

     Marie reaches for a small bulge in her pocket. I hadn’t noticed it, but I know what it is before she opens her hand.

     “I think you should have this back, Sam.” The birthstone is dull, but I can still make out the CLASS OF 1982 on the side of my father’s ring.

     “Oh…if that’s what you want,” I reply. I know, weak.

     “I just think we need time.” If only she knew. But a tear actually does fall. She’s serious. Then, “I need time. The box of condoms that you found on my counter wasn’t mine. It was Drew’s.”

     “My best friend Drew?”

“This isn’t all my fault, Sam. Your obsession with glitches and jackets and portals…it’s all kind of… cuckoo, for lack of a better term. I can’t do it anymore. I’m sorry for what you’ve been through, but I can’t hold you up anymore. You need to deal with your shit.”

     The bracelets, now safely stowed in my back pocket, begin to vibrate and emit a high-pitch whistle. She doesn’t notice. A dog across the park drops his rope and starts to bark.

Green

***

     “You were supposed to grab them and come through,” moans a figure in the corner of my room. His hands are on his knees and he’s chasing his breath. The portal behind him is green and looks as if it were built right into the wall.

     I reach for my glasses on the nightstand. It’s Jacket Two, the one that looked straight at me and smirked. “What?”

     “Why didn’t you go through?”

     “Go through what?” I don’t know how much he knows.

     “Don’t give me that bullshit. I need you to come with me right now.” He stands straight, sees the bracelets on my bureau and puts them back on his wrists.

     “I’M NOt Going anywhere,” the conviction in my voice quivers away with each word. I know, weak. I wait for him to lunge at my throat.

     My eyes adjust to the low light of the portal. I can see the frustration in his long blink and the clench of his jaw. Sweat is pouring from his bald head like he just stepped out of the shower. The F and A on his jacket are soiled in red. “Fuck it,” he says, “you’re nothing like your father.” He steps into the green without another word.

     The portal flickers once, then twice, and then I’m out of bed and into my jeans and tennis before it’s too late. I look back at the stacks of stories around me, there are double this in another room. I see the ring he knocked beneath my bed when he grabbed his bracelets. We need time, I think. I take a deep breath and walk through with nothing in my hands.

     The other side is not different from our own. This is not a story of other dimensions or worlds though, after all I’ve seen, they probably exist. As far as I can tell, peering into the grays and blacks of Maple Park in the moonlight, the portals are no more than teleportation devices. Then I look down.

     “Sorry, kid,” says Jacket Two from over my shoulder. “The glitches gotta go somewhere.”

     The pavement glistens beneath autumn stars from the gloss of the drying blood of my Marie. Drew’s Marie. Her body lies cold near the drain in direct view of my apartment window. The scene is horrid, even the second time around, but suddenly I’m hit with the realization that my mother died in a bathtub when I was a child. Charlie! I wonder if he made it to the emergency room before all the blood in his body gushed out of the gash in his arm. I wonder which side of the portal is real, but I’m too afraid to ask.

     He could see my terror. “He was going to bring you here, your dad, when you were ready. Somebody should have cleaned her up.”

     “She’s not garbage.”

     “You’re right. I’m sorry. Sam, I need your help for twenty minutes and then you can go back to your books and your girlfriend and the rest of your life.”

     “What could you need from me? And what do you know about my father?” A pain starts in my stomach, I should have grabbed my meds.

     “I don’t have time to explain it all right now, but I need you to come with me to the office. It’s not far. You’re the only person capable of accessing his personal files. He made sure of it when he matched the security system to your DNA.”

     “Are we in danger? Whose blood is on your jacket? I don’t even know you.”

     “I…was your father’s partner. He said this day would come and that if it did, I was to do exactly as I am now. My name is Jack Kent. My friends call me Kent.” I was pretty damn close.

     “Where is he now? Whose blood is that?”

     “I’m sorry kid,” he replies with the slightest nod.

     Kent places his wrists together and opens another portal of blue. “Greens are backdoors, away from crowds. Your father helped develop them. They open with rings as a quick escape when needed. Blues are official T.F.A. portals, and people notice them on this side, but they are the only way onto agency property.”

The Office

     The lot lights show asphalt crumbling like a burnt pastry and fading yellow lines. A cat fight echoes in the alley behind two dark dumpsters blocking the way. A breeze whirls debris in the desolate dark. It begins to rain. The building, the color of a manila envelope, looks out of place in this part of town. Some of the windows are glowing at a time when no others do. Kent waves his wrist in front of a black box beside the front door. The light switches from red to green and the door unlocks.

Inside, the front desk shines a kaleidoscope of colors and a speaker mounted somewhere within greets us in a woman’s voice, “Welcome,” she says. Without notice, Kent continues down a corridor with doorless offices on either side, some alight as the windows suggested, but all empty. I follow closely. A flight of stairs and another corridor brings us to the office of the man who Kent claims was my father. No door and no name to verify. This one was dark. Kent tugs on the finial of the green lamp on the rolltop desk on the far side of the room. Books are stacked on either side of the desk, they’re leaning on the shelves, and even scattered on the floor. Next to the lamp is a silver frame, but I can’t make out the photograph before Kent knocks it to the carpet and cracks the glass as he frantically searches through the drawers and the cubbies.

“What are we looking for?”

“A flash-drive,” he holds it in front of me as soon as he finds it. “This is where you come in.”

I place my finger in the groove on one side of the drive and wait for the prick. A light illuminates my blood in a single strip on the skinny side. After a moment, the cap pops off, exposing the metal adapter.

“Some security system.”

“Just wait,” he replies as he slides the drive into the tower.

I watch as the light of my blood enters the tower and travels upward toward a sphere in the middle. The monitor on the desk turns on without a sound. Kent clicks on a blue file labeled SCRIBBLES and a stream of pictures swarm the screen as they are transferred to the drive. One percent, two percent, three. Some are word documents that are mostly blotched out with black lines. Others are of people, some of suits walking alongside jackets, others of bodies so badly beaten they must be dead. Schematics of glowsticks and bracelets and something called an ANTI-RVTR. Twenty percent, twenty-five. I don’t understand any of it.

“They’re creating glitches,” says Jack, again reading the expression on my face, “at the top.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know, but I bet your dad did. He said he was on to something. I figured he was developing some new portal ring. He would never say.”

Fifty percent, sixty percent, seventy, eighty.

“Almost there,” Kent whips around with a smile that immediately dissipates.

He’s dead in an instant, and I’m on the ground with what feels like a horse kick to the back of the head. My ears are ringing. I blink, slowly. Next to his body, in what is becoming a pool of his blood, I can barely make out three flannel shirts inside the frame between the cracks. Another blink. Someone steps over me. It’s Jacket One. He’s removing Kent’s bracelets. I can’t move. Another blink. He’s gone. I try to crawl to him but fall flat again. Another blink. I rise and fall. A few inches further. Another blink. In the frame, in one of the flannels, is me. I’m holding Marie’s hand. A child is laughing between us. My eyelids shut again and this time I can’t open them. With the darkness comes silence.

Red

     “Earth to Sam,” Marie claps her hands in front of my face.

I snap back to the cries of our son in the other room. I can smell the leaves still soaking on the stove when she opens the door to tend to him. My head throbs and the orange peel on the ceiling is a swirling galaxy of dizziness. It’s all I can do to get up. The light on Maple Park beyond my window is beginning to dim. There is nothing, and no one, in the road. I wonder how I got here and if it was all a dream. I try for the door and trip over a stack of books.

Underneath my bed I can see the class ring that my father gave to my mother. The ring my mother suggested I give to Marie. I grab it and tilt it from side to side as I look it over. I remember one schematic from the screen. I slip the ring over my finger and firmly press the top of the stone until I feel the prick.

  A portal of red appears in place of the door in my wall. Through the wisps I see myself, wrinkled and gray. I stagger to my feet and stumble through.

     “You’re not cuckoo,” says the bespectacled woman as she scribbles in her pad.