The Apartments at Brightstone

“Morning Study of Mind” by Jocelyn Ulevicus

What bothers you is that lately, you can’t seem to remember going anywhere.

You are going places, of course. Since you’ve moved and started work, your days have developed a comforting rhythm: apartment, work, grocery, mailbox, apartment. But the downbeats of this rhythm—would it be rests? Your driving, at any rate—this is a step in the process you simply cannot recall. It’s like: you are in the apartment, enjoying cereal; you are at work, checking the machines. What came between? It’s not even a blur in your memory.

You wonder if it has something to do with your apartment. It’s a one-bedroom in a large complex called Brightstone. The apartments at Brightstone are advertised as “upscale yet affordable,” which sounds about right to you. The ceilings are high, the carpets fluffy and off-white, the fixtures sleek and cold and new. It is easily the nicest place you, in your decade or so of adulthood, have ever lived. The only indication you’re not the first person ever to occupy the place is the mail you keep finding in your box addressed to Keith Patterson. You are not Keith Patterson.

This aggressive newness is nice, most of the time. But it sometimes gives you the feeling that you don’t quite belong in your apartment. A symptom of this feeling—or maybe its cause?—there is minimal furniture in your apartment. No posters or prints on any of the walls. There are whole boxes in your closet you still haven’t unpacked.

You live alone. You don’t mind this. You’ve wanted to since you were a kid having to share a room with your older brother. Your new job set you up with the place when they offered you the position. A lot of their employees live here, they told you, but as far as you know you’ve never run into them.

You don’t see a lot of people around the complex these days, actually. It’s summer, and you’re told this is a time that locals either flee the hot weather or just stay indoors all day. When you do see people, they are distant and shimmering in the heat, like holographic projections. Occasionally, they’ll make a motion that looks like a nod or a wave. You smile and do a vague nod-wave back.

Another problem that might be affecting your memory: since moving, you haven’t been sleeping well. Some of it’s your schedule. You’re not third shift or anything. You’re not really any shift. Twelve to nine, four to midnight, five in the morning till five past noon. If there’s a pattern, you can’t figure it out. You’re paid reasonably well to do, so far, almost nothing, but the unpredictability of your schedule unsettles you. Sometimes you find yourself in bed, head buzzing, unable to remember if you’ve just got off a shift or if you’re heading into one.   

Sometimes, when sleep won’t come, you’ll walk through the complex, branches and storm-blown Spanish moss scattered around you, and feel like you’re the only person there. Like the rest of the complex—the parked cars, the TVs glowing through windows, all the apartments at Brightstone—are an elaborate illusion designed just for you.

***

This kind of thing happens to people: forgetting things, losing chunks of the day. The phrase “missing time” keeps popping up in your memory, which sounds about right. There’s nothing wrong with you, probably.

All the same, you’d like to talk about it with someone, just to confirm the sheer normalcy of it. You’d like someone’s eyes to light up as they say, “That happens to me all the time!” This could prove difficult, since, again, you live alone, and you do not know and never interacted with your neighbors.

All right: so you’re in a bit of a lull, human communications-wise. But you’re making an effort. Sometimes, you’ll walk over to the office and talk to the front desk people. They are usually kind. They are mostly women your age and a little bit younger. Three of them are named Jen. You have thought about commenting on the strangeness of this, but have decided against it.

You keep conversation with the Jens and the other front desk workers light. Often, you will talk about the weather. “Hot day today,” you will say. The median temperature is something like 96 degrees. They’ll say, “Sure is,” and you’ll say, “It’s not the heat that gets you, though—"

You’ve gotten worse at talking to people.

Your job, you think, is partly to blame. You knew going in that you’d be working with computers. What you didn’t realize is that you’d be working without people. The Centurion Mobile building—yes, that Centurion Mobile, the third-largest cell service provider in the nation—is populated almost entirely by banks of servers. What you learned at orientation (an automated Power Point in an otherwise empty conference room): There are thirty-three stories in the building. Your monitoring duties are confined to floors 8-17. You are discouraged from going to the other floors. You are forbidden from going to floor 32.

This is your workday: you walk through rows of processors as big as cars and check to see if they are in working order. They always are. The whole system is like a plane that flies itself. Then, you check a computer that keeps track of the other computers. Everything, it shows again and again, is well. Everything is as it should be.

You don’t fully understand what you’re doing at work, or really, what you’re doing here at all. You would like to talk to the front desk people about this. You would like to say, “Did you know that my brother died last year?” or “Have I told you that after, I quit my job and moved down here alone?”

Instead you say, “It’s the humidity that gets you.”

***

There is one front desk worker with auburn hair and a heart-shaped face. A shy smile. She’s one of the Jens, actually. You enjoy talking to this Jen. You haven’t, like, memorized her work schedule or anything, but you do make it a point to go in and talk to her when you pass the leasing office and she’s behind the desk.

Actually, you kind of look for reasons to go in while she’s there. You go to her with complaints. Which is hard, because there’s seldom anything wrong with your apartment. It would be nice if you could go to her with other, non-apartment complaints, like “My brother got drunk and smashed his car into a wall and I feel nothing,” or “Have you ever completely lost the ability to remember going anywhere?”

In your moments of alone time—which, between work and your apartment, is more or less your entire day—you find yourself thinking of things to talk with her about that don’t involve the weather.

So today, when you go in to get your mail and she’s there, you find yourself saying, “So I’ve been getting a lot of mail for the previous tenant?”

“Sorry about that!” she says. She smiles reassuringly. “Go ahead and bring over what you’ve got. We’ll forward it to him and make sure you don’t get any more of his mail.”

“Oh,” you say. “It’s not, you know, a problem or anything.”

“Don’t worry, we’ll take care of it.” She takes out a post-it and begins writing. “Just bring that mail by the office whenever you get the chance.”

Back at your apartment, you consider the massive pile of Keith Patterson mail. You’ve let it accumulate longer than might be considered normal. It’s just t seems like like he would be an interesting person. A selection of mailings: camping catalogues, National Geographic, tech magazines, a birder newsletter. You have not been able to cross the threshold from “being interested in things” to “having interests.” You wish you got mail more like Keith Patterson’s. You wish you got mail.

You know you shouldn’t have kept all his stuff, but receiving Keith Patterson’s mail has made you feel a strange bond with him. You feel like you’d be friends if you ever met. You’ve thought about searching his name online but decided against it. Better to keep the image of him you have in your head.

You stuff the lot shamefully into an old duffel bag and bring it to the main office. Placing it on the desk, you feel an embarrassment bordering on horror. Jen’s going to think you’re weird. She probably already does. “Sorry,” you say. “I guess I let it add up.” You unzip the bag, begin placing envelopes on the desk. “Will you still be able to get it back to him?”

“Of course!” she says. “We’ll make sure it gets back to…” She trails off, staring at one of the envelopes in her hands. She’s quiet for a moment. “That’s strange,” she finally says.

You ask her what’s wrong. She looks up at you. “Maybe you weren’t living here when it happened,” she says.

“When what happened?”

“Keith Patterson,” she said. “He disappeared.”

Jen fills you in on the story: Keith Patterson, at a local bar with friends, stepped out to take a call. He has not been seen since. For weeks, his family formed search parties, put up posters, held press conferences with local news. Nothing. Eventually, the story died down. They never found a body.

“It’s like he just vanished,” she says. “We didn’t know what to do with his apartment. For a while, we just kept his stuff in there, but then…”

“Then I moved in?”

Eyes wide, she nods, and you don’t like the feeling in your stomach when she does.

***

At home, you put Keith Patterson’s name into your search engine. It turns out your imagined version of him was not so far from the real one. He was—is?—around your age, a little older. His friends and family note that he was kind to everyone and had a lot of hobbies. Foul play is not suspected, police say, but how could you know anything for sure in a case like this?

You stop scrolling when you see the name of Keith Patterson’s employer: Centurion Mobile.

You think, That’s strange.

You close your laptop and don’t open it again for several minutes.

This is how you talk yourself down: of course, the two of you lived in the same complex, because the people at Centurion set you up there. It was just coincidence that put you in the exact same unit. Besides, who’s to say anything bad happened to Keith Patterson. He could have left to start over: a different city, a different apartment. A new life.

It doesn’t sound so bad.

You get up from your chair, and the emptiness of your apartment suddenly seems like possibility. You could get an easy chair to watch TV in, or a couch for when friends come over. Maybe—you think of Jen and, like some high schooler, blush—a loveseat. There are hours to go before your next shift. You could start looking for one now.

Your fears and worries, you tell yourself, are all in your head.

***

You expected the heat, but not the storms. They come out of nowhere. You’ll walk out to check your mail in sunlight, then be drenched by the time you reach your apartment. They swoop down with unexpected violence. More than once, you’ve woken up to your windows rattling with thunder. You’ve taken to playing your old clock radio in your apartment, a kind of mental filler when there’s nothing to do and no one to see. They’re always talking about the storms on it, the ones that have passed, the ones on their way. The Big One is coming, one of the DJs intones ominously. Brace yourselves for this one, folks. He sounds excited about it.

You’re getting dressed in your bedroom, running shoes and your standard-issue Centurion red polo. Today will be different, you’ve decided. Today, you’ll remember. You grab the keys of your trusty Corolla thinking Focus, focus… You’re heading for the elevator at the Centurion building, keys still in your hand. Clearly, you drove to work. Why can’t you remember doing it?

You get an idea you’re mad you haven’t had until now: take a walk around the neighborhood. There’s so much to see beyond Brightstone. You begin your walk and head toward what you think is the way toward town. You pass the next-door unit, which is identical to yours. At Brightstone, all the units look the same.

You’ve walked a couple minutes when you realize a hitch in this plan. You don’t remember coming and going in the complex, which means you don’t know which way the exit is. Stay positive, you think. You’ll keep walking and find it eventually.

A thick cluster of trees surrounds Brightstone. There are so many trees here. When you moved in, you thought it was nice. It blocked the sounds of traffic outside and helped you feel, though you weren’t going outside very much, that you weren’t losing touch with nature. Now you realize another function of the trees: they obscure the outside world entirely. They never seem to change, either— in height and species and thickness, the trees look just as similar to each other as the Brightsone units.

After a while, you worry you might not be able to find your way back. You check the unit numbers, but they’re ordered on some byzantine system, and they don’t help. You walk back what feels like the same distance, but no dice. Your walk becomes a jog as the beginnings of panic bubble up in your throat. Your shirt is soaked by the time you find your unit again. You walk up the stairs, winded and defeated.

You need a way to shake things up.

Which is why the next day, you walk into the office and ask Jen, “Would you like to go to dinner with me?”

She looks surprised, and then says yes. You are surprised. Everyone is pleasantly surprised.

You leave the office, and the sound of chirping greets you. It hardly even occurs to you that you can’t think of a time you’ve seen birds here. You think, It’s a beautiful day here at Brightstone.

***

The Centurion Mobile building has no windows. The exterior is designed to give the impressions of windows in a Brutalist-style grid pattern, but this is an architectural illusion. Its concrete halls are lit only by clean, harsh fluorescent bulbs and the sickly green light of the computer processors. It’s bad for cellphones, ironically enough. In the peaceful boredom of your rounds, you’ll sometimes be moved to text your mom, who must be worried about you. No service every time you check your phone.

The lack of windows, you were told, protects the computers from outside elements: extreme weather, fluctuations in temperature and light. The cellphone information of millions of Centurion subscribers is stored in these computers. Text messages, photographs, bank accounts, playlists, programmed reminders and alarms. People’s entire lives are in there.

You know exactly what joke your brother would make if he were fun-drunk instead of mean-drunk: They’re keeping bodies in there. Pod people, he’d say, preserved in green goo. How else do you think they power the computers?

You allow yourself to imagine it: stumbling on a room you were never supposed to be in. Rows of people, pale and naked, floating in glass containers. You walk slowly through the blue-lit rows, dumbstruck. You approach a pod, its glass foggy and translucent. You wipe off the condensation and see a face. Maybe it’s Keith Patterson’s face. Maybe it’s your face.

Why isn’t it funny to you now?

And why aren’t you allowed on the 32nd floor?

You pause in the middle of your row. The electricity of a hundred computers pulses around you. They produce a low, thrumming rhythm that, in movies, signals that something terrible is about to happen.

The elevator in Centurion is sleek, almost space-age. Stainless steel walls with lighted blue buttons. It moves quickly and quietly, without sudden jerks or lurches. Whenever you reach your intended floor, a robot voice announces,

you have arrived.

You examine the columns of buttons. 32 is there with all the rest. There’s nothing to stop you from pressing it, if you wanted to.

The next floor you’re due to check on is 17. Your hand lingers between the buttons.

Then, a buzz in your pocket. A confirmation of your dinner reservations with Jen. When you have service, you’ll send her the time, and maybe even a smiley face.

On the elevator, you hit the button for 17.

Sometimes rules are just rules, you think. A lack of explanation doesn’t always make them sinister. Secrets do not necessarily indicate a conspiracy. Going along and getting by is enough. Dinner with Jen is more than enough. Faced with a choice between that and discovering the truth—whatever that might be—you’ll choose dinner every time.

***

Jen meets you at the front office. She’s dressed up, as are you. You’ve never seen her out of her front desk uniform before. She looks so pretty, and you tell her this. She smiles. You walk toward your car, keys in hand. You tense for a moment, but it’s like bracing for a Novocain injection. Easy, don’t fight it—

You and Jen are in the restaurant. You were worried about maintaining conversation, since this has not been a strong suit of yours, but the two of you are talking so much that you haven’t even looked at what you want to order. The restaurant is—Italian? Greek? You don’t really care. It’s the only restaurant in the city you know or have been to. You’re enjoying talking with Jen so much that this doesn’t even strike you as weird.

You learn in the chatting that follows: Jen has two sisters. She’s not a local either. She only moved here about a a couple years ago. She’s thinking about going back to school for art therapy. The conversation flows easily. You both smile and laugh a lot, even though neither one of you is saying anything particularly funny.

Interest in other people, you think, is what will save us. Since sitting down, you haven’t worried about your memory, your job, or even Keith Patterson.  It seems funny to you now that these once took up so much of your waking hours.

Near the end of the meal, you mention the storm you keep hearing about. “Should I be worried?” you ask.

She waves her hand. “You get used to them,” she says. “Mostly they blow over. We only have to evacuate if it gets really bad.”

You hadn’t considered this, the logistics of it. You’d get in your car, not sure where you’d end up.

“My family’s just a few hours north of here,” Jen is saying. “I usually just stay with them. Do you have a place you can go?”

“Um,” you say. You think of your mom and how little you’ve spoken since the funeral. You think of the friends back home you haven’t heard from. You say nothing. Jen’s smile flickers. Quiet settles over the table like a lumpy picnic blanket. Finally you go: “Home is a long way for me.”

“I don’t want to put you on the spot,” she says, “but there’s always room at my mom’s. You could stay with us if you like.” Her offer makes you feel a lot of things: grateful, excited, nervous. Mostly overwhelmed, which is what shows on your face. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I didn’t mean to make things weird.”

She did not, you tell her, and you feel bad for giving her the idea that she did. You’re filled with a sudden urge to repent, to confess. So you go: “I was worried you would think I was weird.” She asks why, and you tell her about Keith Patterson’s mail. “Keeping it was just this thing I did for a while,” you say. “It made me feel connected somehow. But that’s silly. I know that now.”

You’re feeling so good about sharing that it takes you a moment to notice tears welling in Jen’s eyes. She’s still smiling. She doesn’t want you to know. You remember then how she reacted at seeing Keith Patterson’s name on the envelopes. Like she’d seen a ghost. Like she was revisiting and sudden and irrevocable loss.

“You and Keith…” you say. You stop. “You knew him.”

She nods. You tell her you’re sorry, and you are. But underneath your sympathy are a dozen swirling ideas and suspicions. Keith Patterson as a romantic rival. Remembering going places. The unchanging, seemingly empty apartments at Brightstone.

You should tell her about your fears. Instead, you ask her if she ever has the feeling something bad is going to happen. “Like the signs are all around you,” you say. “Warnings are everywhere and you just don’t know how to read them.”

She shrugs. “Something bad did happen.” She puts her hand on your forearm, comforting if not romantic. “I don’t know why you’re feeling what you’re feeling,” she says. “But not everything is a sign. Sometimes things are just… strange.”

You manage a smile. “That’s true,” you say. You almost believe her.

Then your phone rings. You check the screen, ready to send it to voicemail, then see that it’s work.

You tell Jen you’re sorry and take the call. It’s an automated recording, that weird mix of a human’s voice interspersed with a robot’s. They want you to start your shift tomorrow two—hours—early to check some computers in the 14th—floor—offices. An email will be sent with further instructions.

You didn’t know there were offices on the 14th floor. You didn’t know there were offices on any floor.

The recording ends. You offer Jen an apology wince. “Work.”

“Do they always call at odd hours like that?”

You tell her no, they haven’t. At least not since you’ve worked there, which—

You stop midsentence. You were going to say how long it’s been, dating back to when you moved into Brightstone. Then you started the mental math and found nothing to add up. You don’t know how long you’ve been living here. You can’t even piece together an approximate date.

You have no idea.

Knives clink around you. Jen looks across the table, expectant, big eyes getting wider. A table receiving a birthday cake takes in breath to sing, and it sounds like a long, collective gasp.

You lean forward across the table. “Have you ever had this thing where—"

…You’re in an ice cream shop, holding one cone and handing one off to Jen. She smiles and opens her mouth to say…

…You are outside an apartment that must be Jen’s. She walks to the door alone. As she opens it, she turns around and meets your eyes…

…You’re in front of your TV, eating Chinese take-out you don’t remember ordering. Your cell phone says it’s three in the morning.

What the fuck.

You search your phone for traces of the last few hours. No photos, no texts. Nothing since the call from Centurion. You’re not drunk. You don’t drink much since your brother died. You grab your laptop and search unexplained memory loss. Two likely explanations: stress and lack of sleep. Well, sure.

You see another tab open. Apparently you were searching it earlier:

people disappeared no explanation

You start scrolling through. So many people have vanished in the past ten years alone: Gabriel Diaz, 23, Atlanta. Curtis Hartfield, 32, Rochester. Lots of men, late teens to early thirties. Most of them without enormous debts or shady pasts or any of the usual reasons people vanish. Philip Cutler, 29, Omaha. They smile from the low-res cell phone photos provided. Follow-up pieces last about a year, and then they vanish from the news too. Weird, you think. They all lived in cities with Centurion Mobile buildings.

You have to get out of here.

Or maybe not. Maybe you’re just tired. Maybe your nerves are shot. A walk would help clear your mind, you think, or a Coke from the fridge. A glass of water.

But you can’t bring yourself to do any of it. Instead, you keep scrolling through pictures of the missing and turn up your radio. It gets weird this time of night. Men talk about alternate dimensions, alien abductions, and always, of course, the weather. The Big One is still headed this way. This one, they tell you, is going to be very bad.

***

The email from work takes you down a hallway you’ve never been down or even noticed. At the end you find a cubicle farm, medium-sized and empty.

There aren’t many signs that people work here: no calendars, no plants, no gag posters or family photos on the cubicle walls. A tube light in need of changing blinks ominously overhead. But the office was in use not long ago. The chairs are pushed out at various angles. The static of sleeping computers fills the air. A Nutri-Grain bar sits half-eaten on someone’s desk. It looks like an office the day after a nuclear apocalypse.

You shake the mouse at the first desk and get started. You don’t want to spend more time here than you have to.

After a while, you settle into the comfortable rhythm of work. Eventually you stop scanning the corners for killers or radioactive zombies. The computers are fine, and the expense reports and billing sheets coming up as the screens awaken are too boring to distract you.

Then you come on a computer with a screen already lit. Weird, you think. You glance at the document they have open and scroll to the top. It looks like a list of Centurion’s holding properties, companies and organizations under their ownership umbrella. Interesting. Right away you find a software company you had no idea was related to Centurion. You scroll down and find businesses not even tangentially related to cell service: gas stations, medical supply companies, a Midwestern bookstore chain. It hits you: what else could they own?

You do a document search for holdings in the area. Don’t look at this, you tell yourself. But you’re already scrolling. It’s all there: the grocery where you shop, the restaurant from last night with Jen.

Brightstone.

Overhead, the light blinks with increasing urgency. A single, intoxicating sentence keeps repeating in your brain, the not-quite-truth of it hardly registering: It all makes sense. Centurion is behind what’s happening to you. Keeping you disoriented, keeping you isolated. Centurion controls every aspect of your life: your work, the food you eat, the place where you sleep.

The people you love.

Jen is on their payroll. She could be a helpless pawn, like you. Or she could have a more sinister purpose. Watching you, making sure you stay in line. Ensuring you don’t learn too much. Like Keith Patterson. What happened to him? What was her role in it? You don’t want to know, but you no longer have a choice.

You know what you have to do.

***

Nothing prevents you from pushing the button. There’s no access card required, no passcode. The lady robot voice just goes floor 32 and the elevator begins its almost unnoticeable climb. When you pass 18, you get a thrill. You’ve never been this high in the building before.

At floor 29, your upward motion stops with a sudden ka-THUM. You shoot your arm against the wall to brace yourself. Does the elevator know you shouldn’t be here? The speakers start up.

don’t panic

the voice announces, female but not human. you are stuck.

You right yourself and press the door open button. Nothing happens. The voice repeats itself. you are stuck. You press the button again. No result. You start hammering it with your index finger.

Then, suddenly, it’s over. The lights return to their muted blue. Your gut sinks slightly as the subtle upward motion resumes.

The door opens with a slight *ding*. Floor 32.

At first glance it’s like the other floors: beige walls, fluorescent lighting, servers humming low like a distant insect swarm. But in the middle aisle there’s a desk, something simple and Ikea-cheap. Charging on top of this desk is an old computer monitor, way more like your parents’ Windows 98 than anything Centurion would own. Yet the browser is modern: there are dozens of tabs open. You click through. Lots of searches:

missing time

humans battery power machines

can’t remember or won’t remember

There are more news stories about the disappeared, including one headlined Keith Patterson: New Clues to His Fate. You’ll go back to that one. There’s a series of screenshots of texts. The senders all have the same names as your friends back home, names you haven’t seen in you literally don’t know how long. The messages say you alive? and thought of you for some reason, hope you’re cool and I just hope that wherever you are, you’re safe and you’ve found peace. Which can’t be right, because you haven’t heard from your friends all this time you’ve been here. Another tab is a folder of emails from your mom you don’t remember reading. You haven’t responded to any of them.

 You stop at the next tab. It’s thumbnails for a series of videos. The footage is so grainy that at first it’s hard to make out the angle or the subject. It’s a low-angle shot, you come to realize, of the driver seat in a four-door sedan. The seat is empty. A minute of nothing, then someone opens the door and gets in. You get in. You turn your key, turn on the radio, and start to drive.

You click through to the next one—it’s the same. You scroll down. There must be over a hundred. The pounding in your head starts up again: It all makes sense. None of it makes sense. You scroll to the last video and click play. It’s you staring right at the camera, your face a mix of curiosity and horror and, weirdly, relief. You keep staring.

Red lights come on around you. An alarm begins to blare, a near-deafening klaxon from all around you.

don’t panic

The elevator voice piped in from somewhere you can’t see:

don’t panic. we are coming for you.

You run through the computer rows until you hit a stairwell. You don’t stop running until you’re out of the building and then in your apartment, door locked, breathing heavy, all the lights turned on.

***

You’re not sure how many days pass until there is a knocking on your door.

You haven’t showered. You haven’t left the apartment. Your eating has been as sporadic as your sleeping. Outside, the weather is biblical. Rain lashes against the window like it’s trying to break in. Wind rattles the door in its frame. The Big one is upon you.

When the power goes out, you find a few stray batteries for your radio and one candle, a  scented one from your mom. You’re down to three cans of tomato soup and a box of mac and cheese. You have decided that you won’t disappear like Keith Patterson. You won’t give up like your brother did. Here, in your apartment, is where you will make your stand. Gathered around you like a barricade are your phone, your TV, and your radio. You’re not sure what you can trust anymore. There are messages on your phone you refuse to check. There are TV reports of imminent foreign wars. Your radio warns you that if you’re able to leave town, the time is now.

The knocking happens during a lull in the storm. It’s gentle but persistent. After a minute, it stops. You hear a soft voice calling your name. It’s Jen.

“Your neighbors have been knocking,” she says. “They told me you hadn’t evacuated. They were worried.” A pause. “I was worried.”

Now you know she must be lying. You don’t know your neighbors. Who knows if you even have them. Right?

“Please come with me,” she’s saying. “It’s not safe for you to stay here.”

She can’t be trusted, you think. And yet you find yourself saying: “They don’t know if it was an accident or not.”

A pause. “If what was an accident?”

You explain, haltingly, straining to be heard through the door: Your brother drove drunk a lot. As far as you knew, he never hit so much as a mailbox. No arrests, his car in near-perfect shape. His friends told you the night he died, he hadn’t even had that much to drink.

“After it happened,” you say, “I didn’t tell anyone where I was going. I just packed up and moved down here.”

There is quiet behind the door for a while. You start to wonder if she’s still there. You wonder if she was ever there to begin with. Then she says, “You don’t have to keep doing this.”

“Doing what?”

“Disappearing.”

In your apartment, the candle flutters and hisses. Outside, there’s only the canned-applause sound of the rain. Maybe you’ve been wrong. Maybe you could open the door. You imagine it: Jen smiling cautiously on the other side. She offers her hand and, tentatively, you take it. You can see the two of you jumping into your car and just going, and this time, you’ll remember the drive because how could you not remember? The radio plays and you drive fast and far, far from here, far from servers and storms and the apartments at Brightstone.

About the Author

Billy Hallal was born near Cleveland, where he now lives. He has worked as a computer instructor, a live-in group home supervisor, and a barback. Some places where his work can be found are Gone Lawn, Novel Noctule, and Thrillist. He believes peaty scotch is the best scotch. More info and pubs at billyhallal.com.

About the artist

Jocelyn Ulevicus is an American artist and writer with work forthcoming  or published in magazines such as the Free State Review, The Petigru  Review, Blue Mesa Review, and Humana Obscura amongst others. Working  from a female speculative perspective, themes of nature and the unseen;  and exit and entry are dominantly present in her work. Ulevicus is a  2020 Pushcart Prize nominee, and her in-progress memoir, The Birth of a  Tree was shortlisted for the 2019 Santa Fe Literary Award Program. She  currently resides in Amsterdam and is currently working on her first  book of poems.