Here is a post I wrote today for Frayed that I am especially pleased with. Frayed players should read no further as it contains spoilers.

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You pass your time card through the clock with a ka-chunk. It’s just after noon [How is that even possible? It seems much later than that. Fuck, now the bus’ll have to wade through lunch hour]. You take the stairs beside the loading dock, out into the alley, shrugging on your coat. It feels like the end of the day, like you have had hours of effort siphoned from you. The September air is crisp and pleasant, a kind of door you can put between you and the insular grey air of the warehouse. September, a month whose middle comes four days early now, twin skewers of tragedy protruding from the calendar, ground zero of a new era. The curriculum of your senior year at the University transformed overnight as fear took hold, tainting every topic. You quickly grew weary of your classmates’ unending screeds, as terrorism was now pertinent to a diverse array of subjects, the academic fallout of the new world order. Curfews on campus. The new social schisms of For and Against. Dissertations now scrutinized, filters checking for dissent. And no protective measures so far have made you feel any safer, perhaps the opposite. You look at your hand as you walk, a mysterious energy coursing under the skin, unknown agents perhaps at this very moment invading your body and mind. What level of alert should you be at?

You are approaching the mouth of the alley when your brain splits open, or at least something as startling occurs. Rings of bluish white light slice out of your head, superimposing grids of scan lines across your vision. It’s the sensation of pressing your face against a television screen not quite in tune. Images flash: a lanky black man with a huge ‘fro, looking like a character from a blaxploitation film, wielding a powerful handgun; two hulking ogre-like creatures; a combat of some kind, stylized, video game action; a ragged batlike shadow. Your hand sings with electricity and a voice informs you “Here our defenses failed and the timewraith lay hold of that which Hightower coveted.” The scenes snap loose and twirl ribbonlike into nothing, the sense of a planet-sized sphere shrinking back to its hidden compartment in your brain. It’s like waking from a dream, images still behind your eyes, wondrous yet somehow comprehensible.

You’re still walking towards the bus stop, the fantastic nature of this event rapidly fading into the mundane after just a few steps. [Shouldn’t you be more concerned? This happens to people with brain damage or mental disorders.] Waiting for the bus and getting on board are tasks relegated to a subconscious sub process you vaguely acknowledge. All the seats are taken, so you snag an overhead leather loop. Your stature and rugged look commands a few extra inches of personal space, but it is soon lost to the slippery whims of inertia as the bus creeps ahead. Today even less of your mind is concerned with the passengers surrounding you, a crush of layered clothing wrapped around a warm, smelly human frame. Random conversations bubble to the surface and pop in the air, a stew of sound bites. “Then he say, ‘Ma’am, weez all out of the salami!'” “Cannot fucking believe how he dicked me over. Both tickets, man!” “An insufferable drunk, to be sure, but he held my mother’s heart on a fob chain tucked inside his breast pocket.”

The conversations blend into the engine sounds, you stand looking at nothing, your body making tiny automatic compensations as the bus stops and starts. You feel like nobody and at the same time you feel like the only real person on the bus. Without concentration, a wash of mediocrity could easily flood this scene, coloring you and everyone else in shades of grey. What can you do or say that would matter at all right now? Even the otherworldly events of the morning would falter on your lips, eclipsed by the shrill pronouncements from the back of the bus, warning everyone about the CIA’s nanotransmitters at the sticky white core of every Twinkie manufactured after 1969.

City lunch hour traffic delays your ride by fifteen minutes, but at last you find yourself deposited at the corner where your rickety apartment building is located. The foyer smells like old people, furniture polish and dust. You tromp down the wooden stairs to where a large basement has been divided up into three apartments. After an almost superstitious combination of key, lock and door handle jiggling, you stand inside your apartment.

A red light throbs on your answering machine, next to your dying plant. The light is so rare that you at first mistake the device for some kind of bomb.