This Bubble Five

Unconfident curiosity,

A safe passage,

Run away…?

Three and a half miles Northeast of the Wrench.

When the tanned man passed Andy’s car and kept going, he never looked back. He just kept heading to the west. Andy and Kathrin stayed right where they were. They were turned around in their seats, staring out the back window, watching the tanned man walking away, listening to the metal scraping weakening to a sandy rustle.

They said nothing for the longest time. As long as they heard that noise the tanned man was too close, and even though he had went around them, spoke in a different language and left them be, he still came from thin air right before their eyes.

But sand was less threatening than metal, and Kathrin was growing anxious. She looked at Andy and whispered, “What exactly is going on?”

Andy glanced her way, took another look out the rear window, and when the tanned man’s droning march didn’t deviate, he looked at Kathrin and whispered back, “I have no idea.”

“How did he just appear like that?” Kathrin whispered.

“I have no idea.” Andy whispered back.

“Why is he carrying a mirror?”

“I have no idea.”

“Why are we still sitting here?”

“That’s a good question.”

They looked out the rear windshield again. Because they were sitting near the top of an incline, they could see all the way down to the bottom, which covered two blocks, and the tanned man had yet to finish it. All they could really see of him now was the quiver of the reflection of the gray sky in his mirror. He was still hunching down as he walked, and he didn’t seem to be in a hurry.

“Where do you think he’s going?” Kathrin asked.

Andy had turned around and wrapped his fingers around the key in the ignition. The loss of strength he felt before was rolling down the hill away from him and after the tanned guy, so he could feel the key in his fingers. When he turned it and heard the engine turn over, the strength he felt in his wrist was reassuring.

Kathrin jerked around, startled by the engine. It turned over and went right on into its regulated hum. She jerked around to gaze out the rear windshield again. Andy turned and looked as well. The tanned man’s mirror continued to quiver its slow way down to the bottom of the hill. They looked at each other.

Kathrin put her hand on Andy’s forearm and squeezed. “Let’s get out of here.” she said but in a whisper.

Andy reached over and put the transmission in drive. He gazed in his rearview mirror and eased on the gas. His car rolled toward the top of the hill. He didn’t press too hard on the gas, not wanting to rev the engine too loud, although he figured the tanned man heard the engine crank. There was no mistaking that.

Kathrin never took her eyes off that quivering mirror, and Andy kept his eyes glued on his rearview mirror. They topped the hill and started down the other side which wasn’t as deep as the hill behind them. At the bottom was an intersection. Both lanes of the street they were on were one way, but the left lane had an arrow painted near the stop sign line that gave a left turn only. After passing through the intersection, this road became a two way street running along the deserted cargo yard of a train depot sitting on the right.

Andy slowed at the intersection but didn’t stop. Out of habit, he turned to the right, which would take them to the edge of downtown instead of to the left, which would take them along the eastern edge of downtown, offering several points to get them back into its heart.

He took his car over the several places where the railroad track zigzagged across and passed up the depot now at their left. That road came to a T-junction. Already they were out of sight of the tanned man, but Andy came to a stop, looking both ways.

“What are you doing?” Kathrin whispered.

“I’m trying to decide…” Andy said, his voice trailing off with his thoughts.

“Decide what?” Kathrin whispered.

“Where to go.” Andy said. He would glance to the left, which would take them further away from downtown and into the older neighborhoods mostly forgotten. Yet, his gaze would linger on the right which would take them along the southern border of downtown, giving them other opportunities to go back in.

Kathrin wasn’t looking either way. She was staring at him, questioning. Andy caught her gaze and then shifted his eyes back on the street. “Well, where can we go? What can we do? Seriously? So far we’ve only seen two people and one of them might be an alien.”

“The neighborhoods.” Kathrin said, staring at him but seeing her idea from earlier.

He looked at her.

“More people.” she said, her eyes focusing on him now. “We have to see if they’re actually asleep or not.”

“Just walk up to a random house and go on in?” Andy asked.

Kathrin nodded. “I don’t think they’d answer anyway. They’re asleep.”

Andy studied her. “You know this for a fact.”

“It has to be.” Kathrin said, shrugging, “or else there would be many others running around trying to figure out what’s going on.”

“There wouldn’t be anything going on if more people were involved.” Andy said, his thoughts drifting off with his focus now.

“Except for the sky.” Kathrin said.

Andy was already leaning toward the steering wheel, so all he had to do was shift his eyes upward to see the sky through his windshield. He hadn’t been paying attention, so he didn’t know if the clouds had moved from where they sat now.

Kathrin grabbed his forearm again. “Come on.” She nodded to the right.

Andy considered that direction a moment and then shifted himself a little in order to glance out the rear windshield. The space behind them was open due to the separated train track routes, but there was a business standing at the right corner of the T-junction, blocking off most of their view of the middle of downtown, however, they could see the intersection they just left. So far, they didn’t see the tanned man emerge, wondering where they had gone.

Kathrin had turned to look as well, unable to help herself. When she was satisfied the tanned man wasn’t following them, she looked at Andy. He looked at her, faced forward, and then turned the steering wheel to the right. He let off the brake and pulled out onto the street, heading along the southern edge of downtown. They had to go over a major train track that ran perpendicular with all the others and eventually curved to the northeast along with some of them. They went down a short hill to a red light intersection, but the red lights were dead. Andy stopped the car anyway and gazed to the right. The road went back into downtown. They were looking at the top of the hill where the tanned man appeared. There was nothing. No movement. All of downtown was looking at them, wondering how they got way over there, wondering why they were there, inviting them to come back and stifle the loneliness.

Andy and Kathrin could almost see the different personalities of each building, imagining what their eyes looked like, their mouths, the sad and anxious looks they were giving the couple, and it was funny, because for the first time ever, Andy and Kathrin felt like they knew each and every one of those buildings personally. Old friends that they could ask a question right now and actually get a voiced answer.

That thought didn’t scare them. It surprised them, but they felt warmed by the idea.

Andy turned the car to the left, though, turning his back on downtown, and took Kathrin with him. Those so-called friends of brick and mortar were keeping their mouths shut. Keeping a secret: the one walking around their feet with a mirror that scraped the ground in a metallic growl.

¥

There was another dead red-light intersection as soon as the trees started to shroud the street. An old convenient store sat little and abandoned to the left and there was a flower shop beside it, separated by the red lights’ intersecting street. The windows of both buildings were dark, but Andy and Kathrin knew there were eyes looking out at them. The eyes of more inanimate objects. Even the buildings looked at them, asking for help. ‘Please fix my legs,’ they imagined them saying. The emptiness woke the buildings of their hometown to a realization that their legs of stone or brick couldn’t move, but there was supposed to be movement. Emptiness was wrong.

Andy turned his car to the right onto the intersecting street, and he felt relief when they huddled between the close knit buildings along the outer edge of this neighborhood. One of the things Andy and Kathrin found that they both shared was a taste for coziness. When they grew comfortable enough around each other, Kathrin would invite Andy over to her apartment and they would cuddle up on her couch underneath a blanket and watch movies. Andy never tried to let his hands wander during those times, and most of the time his fingers would be intertwined with Kathrin’s.

The clutter of this street touched somewhere in the realm of that same coziness. It relaxed them, both imagining a large gate closing in behind them, hiding them from view of the tanned man.

Andy took it slow. They were already passing up houses, many that desired that same kind of closing off from the world. There were tall fences running along the sidewalks, but whether they were made of wooden posts or brick, there was no real way of telling, because they were wearing the overgrowth from the hanging trees that roofed the yards on the other side. Some of the driveways cut from the street with gravel or cement and were cubby holes dug inside the overgrowth. Others were closed off by gates of iron or paint-chipping wood, locked down tight behind large iron bolts.

Sure, Kathrin was probably right about everyone being asleep, but still, these were other people’s houses. One day of something like this happening still wasn’t enough to break the habit of decorum. Besides, who’s to say others weren’t awake and aware that something was wrong?

Andy kept driving. Kathrin hadn’t said anything, but she was targeting each house they passed, gazing over the tops of fences to glimpse the small portion of the structures that poked up high enough to be seen. There was plenty of evidence that there were homes along this street, just not enough to know what type of homes they were. And maybe Kathrin was considering the same idea that others were probably awake. The agonizing thing was not knowing who those people were.

This street had more priority over the intersecting street, it seemed, because the stop signs weren’t for Andy and Kathrin. Andy eased the car on through, though, he and Kathrin exchanging glances either way before he continued on. There were other houses down those streets, as well. There were even cars parked out along the edges of the lanes, no one inside them, their headlights dead and gray, but noticing with sudden surprise that someone was passing by at the distance, watching them pass and shouting a muted plea.

Andy and Kathrin were starting to feel the unease of such a notion. Kathrin more so than Andy, because she remembered how he could hear those whispers. Even though they surmised the voices Andy heard was the tanned guy before he appeared, imagining the buildings were alive and actually having them talk were two different things.

So they thrust themselves back into the clutter of the next street block. The deeper they got, the more the distance from the outlining border of the neighborhood became a comfort. Fences were replaced by tall hedges with gaps in their middles to expose the mouths of sidewalks, sometimes squeezed by the continuation of those hedges all the way up to front doors.

No matter at what house they looked, there was something keeping them away, and they just couldn’t tell themselves that all of it was free reign. Maybe it was that sentiment that kept them driving. They didn’t want to feel like everything was theirs just because they were lucky enough to be awake during whatever this was. Not even if the eyes of those houses they were starting to see were looking at them with silent appeal. ‘My owners are asleep! Come and wake them up! I’m lonely!’

“When are we gonna stop?” Kathrin wondered.

Andy caught her muttering but didn’t answer. Instead, he wiggled his fingers while keeping the steering wheel in his grips, not just observing the passing houses but considering them now. How strange that it felt like a big responsibility.

The next intersection was the same as the last, except that the far left corner opened to a stretch of lawn. There was a sidewalk running from the street to the front door of the house that was tucked away next to a wall of trees, separating it front the previous house. It was a white structure, single story, with a contrasting roof of black shingles. With all the windows along the front, Andy and Kathrin went rigid when they felt as though the house was sitting there, bored, and then suddenly looked up, noticing their presence.

Now it just stared at them, nothing to say but wanting to talk. Andy didn’t realize he had slowed down.

Kathrin pointed at the house, “How about that one?”

Andy didn’t stop the car at her question. He was staring at the house when something dropped out of the corner of his eye, and he looked ahead. Kathrin was screaming before Andy registered that something was there in the middle of the intersection, in front of his car. His eyes bulged and he slammed on the brakes, metal shrieking and his car bucking forward, Kathrin pressing her hands against the dashboard to brace herself out of reflex, still screaming.

She stopped screaming when the car settled, only to exclaim over and over again, “Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh my God!”

Andy was staring forward into a new set of eyes now. A set of glowing golden eyes fixed with a lazy expression of tanned skin. The tanned man was rising from a landing squat to settle in his familiar hunch, his left hand holding the tall mirror on his back.

He just stood there, staring.

Eyes still wide, Andy jerked the steering wheel to the right and slammed on the gas. The engine roared, the car swerved right, the back tires barked against the asphalt, taking Andy and Kathrin down the intersecting road and leaving the tanned man in the intersection.

“Did you see that?” Kathrin squealed, “Did you freaking see that?”

“No, I didn’t see that!” Andy exclaimed. “What just happened?” He was gazing ahead, watching the cars along the sides of the street as he sped toward the next intersection. Kathrin turned around in her seat, eyes just as wide as Andy’s, mouth open in awe. Then she grabbed Andy’s shoulder. “Andy! He’s not there!”

“What?” Andy gasped, risking a glimpse in his rearview mirror.

“He’s not there!”

“What do you mean?”

Kathrin sat back down in her seat, “He’s not there anymore! He just….” She shrieked again when the tanned man dropped down between the trees and landed in the street in front of them.

Andy’s eyes bulged again, “Whoaaaaa!” he cried, slamming on the brakes, tires squalling a line along the asphalt.

The tanned man rose to his hunch again and stared at the couple. He had landed just as close as he had last time, which was too close for how fast Andy was going to stop his car. So, he swerved to the left, squealing a semicircle around the tanned man, coming close to jumping onto the curb, but he banked hard right, his car jolting to the shift in weight, and then righting itself when he kept to the left lane, hitting the gas hard.

“How did he do that?” Kathrin screamed, pressed into her seat, latched onto Andy’s arm with her left, her right gripping the door handle. She was staring ahead, still questioning, “How did he do that? How did he do that?”

“I don’t know!” Andy was exclaiming. “I don’t know! I don’t know!”

“Take this next turn!” Kathrin was patting Andy’s arm now, “Take this next turn!”

“What?”

“Take this next turn!”

“Why?”

“Take this next turn! Do it!”

She was talking about the intersection up ahead. They had a stop sign, but Andy didn’t even see it. He slowed just enough to put the car into the turn, the back end slipping along the asphalt in a series of short rubber-scraping barks until they were facing down the new road. There was more clutter here, trees hanging overhead, tall bushes reaching out into the lanes, unkempt. Houses with small yards, dirt driveways with cars and trucks looking over their shoulders, wondering what the excitement was about.

Andy hit the gas again. This street went on for a while. The distant blocks were fading to the oppressive gray of the day, keeping everyone asleep, despite the noise, despite the tanned man’s presence.

“Was he jumping?” Andy gasped.

“Flying!” Kathrin panted. “Flying or something!”

“No way!” Andy breathed.

“Had to be!” Kathrin panted. “Didn’t you see how he just landed in…?” She shrieked again.

Andy saw it, too, first leaning toward the steering wheel, feeling the speed needed to get far from the tanned man, now jerking back in his seat, eyes widening as the tanned man sprung from the left side of the street, landed in his hunch, and twisted around to face the car.

Andy slammed on the brakes.

The tanned man lifted his right hand, extended his arm forward, and faced his palm ahead. Andy’s arms were all geared up to jerk the steering wheel in either direction, but something made him freeze up. Regardless of what he was doing, his body tensing up, he was seeing the tanned man’s gesture, somehow understanding it, or at least assuming something about it. Either way, he didn’t turn the wheel. He just held the brake pedal down, hearing the barking of rubber ease into the abrasive grind.

Then, the car stopped and settled back onto its shocks.

Andy and Kathrin said nothing as they stared ahead.

The tanned man held his rebuking pose. When it appeared the couple didn’t intend to run anymore, he swept his hand around to his left, keeping it parallel with the road, but his wrist pivoted downward, leveling his palm and fingers. All but his index finger curled inward, and his new pose ended with him pointing at the house on the left side of the street.

Andy and Kathrin kept staring, the sound of the engine idling the only sound around.

The tanned man kept pointing, unflinching, not blinking. A statue in the middle of the road.

Andy’s eyes darted to the left of the street, seeing the yard with the large trees, standing tall on either half designated by an old broken sidewalk leading to the house. He rolled his eyes back to the tanned man, who was still pointing.

“What is he doing?” Kathrin whispered.

Squinting his eyes, Andy said, “Pointing?”

Kathrin considered the house in question for the first time, “At the house?”

“I think so.” Andy said.

“Why?” Kathrin asked.

Andy didn’t answer.

“What’s in there?” Kathrin asked.

“Maybe…” Andy said, “we’re supposed to find out.”

“He wants us to go look?” Kathrin questioned.

Andy shifted his eyebrows, “Well…maybe so.”

“Then why didn’t he just say so?” Kathrin scoffed.

Andy thought about it, “His language.”

“What?”

“He speaks a different language.”

Kathrin remained silent.

“Maybe this is him trying to get his point across.” Andy added.

“How did he jump that far, Andy?” Kathrin snapped.

Andy shook his head.

“Who is he?” Kathrin hissed.

“And why does he seem to be interested in us?” Andy whispered back.

Kathrin rolled her eyes toward Andy. Andy met her gaze. It was on her face, he could see it, and he didn’t blame her. He couldn’t believe what he was about to do. He put the car in park, released the break, and opened his door.

Kathrin watched after Andy as he eased out of the driver’s seat and stood behind the opened door. He rested his hands on the top of the window seal and gazed at the tanned man. He cleared his throat, licked his lips, and raised his chin enough to project his voice, “Who are you?”

The tanned man brought his arm back down at his side in a slow and graceful motion.

Andy waited for a response, feeling the tanned man’s languid expression masking the consideration taking place behind it.

Then the tanned man spoke, “Ego tantum narro primoris lingua.”

Again, his voice carried as though the whole neighborhood spoke together as one. Andy thought there would be an accompaniment of a gust of wind, but there was nothing. The tanned man’s voice was the air itself. Andy could feel it covering him and the part of the door in his hands. He could feel it dance between his stomach and the window a few inches in front of him. He heard Kathrin utter a soft gasp inside the car.

Andy cleared his throat again, “U-um…I-I’m sorry….but….I…I don’t understand you. Y-you speak a…”

The tanned man reached up with his right hand and pointed at Andy. “Vos es meus testis hic.” His arm eased back to the side, keeping parallel with the ground, “Illic est unbalance in vestri universitas.” His index finger once again rested upon indicating the house at the left. “Vestri testimonium est in illic. Vado animadverto.”

The tanned man said no more, again, holding his directing pose. Andy hesitated to pull his eyes from the tanned man, but somehow he figured even this guy had a certain level of patience and looked at the house. Like many on this street block, it had an opened yard with thick grass and enough trees not to choke off the view from the street but to spread a green canopy overhead.

Andy glanced at the tanned man who remained posed, and then bent down to look in at Kathrin. She was already looking his way, eyes big and curious. “Come on.” he whispered.

“Are you for real?” she asked.

He shrugged, “It’s what we wanted to do, anyway.”

“Yeah, but,” she glanced out at the tanned man, “is he gonna follow us?”

Andy tried not to look over at the tanned man, but he couldn’t help himself. He was quick to rest his eyes on Kathrin again, “I don’t know. I don’t think so. I think he just wants us to go look.”

“How does he know?” she asked.

“He’s probably the one who knows exactly what’s going on, Kat.”

Kathrin rolled her eyes in the tanned man’s direction and then back to Andy, leaning toward him and whispering lower, “You think he did it?”

Andy shrugged again, “I don’t know.” It was all he could say. They didn’t know the tanned man’s intentions other than that he was trying to show them something. If they were to go in and find out that the people inside, if there was anyone inside, were asleep, couldn’t they move forward, regardless of this insisting presence?

Andy reached in, offering Kathrin his hand. She took it and eased over the compartment between the seats. She scooted across the driver’s seat and stood up next to Andy. They both looked over at the tanned man. He eased his arm back down to his side and just stared at them with his lazy expression, waiting. There was no misunderstanding of what he wanted them to do, so there were no more words spoken, no more gestures.

“Come on.” Andy whispered, still holding Kathrin by the hand as he started toward the curb.

It was hard turning their backs on the tanned man. Kathrin kept making glances over her shoulder. The tanned man was watching them go up the sidewalk but remained where he was, that same lazy look on his face.

Kathrin wrapped her arms around Andy’s, “I can’t believe this is happening.”

“Is he following us?” Andy asked. He hadn’t looked back ever since they started up the sidewalk.

Kathrin glanced back over her shoulder again. The tanned man stared back at her from the middle of the road, several yards from Andy’s car, which sat running idle, the driver’s door still open. She turned back and huddled close to Andy, whispering, “No.”

“Okay.” Andy said.

Kathrin shared his gaze at the house. Most of its front was taken over by a large screened-in porch. The frame, several large posts with thin half walls between each one, was built of wood painted a dark blue that was peeling away. The bottom was the foundation, gray cement that had also been painted a dark blue a long time ago, most of the paint faded and some of the edges cracked and chipped. Behind the rectangular portions of the screens was the dark gray of the unlit porch interior. Those screens, though, they were staring back at the approaching couple.

“He just wants us to go see?” Kathrin asked. “That’s it?”

“I guess so.” Andy said.

“You think they’re asleep? Really?” she asked.

“Isn’t that what you believed?”

“This is so crazy.”

“Tell me about it.”

There was a short set of stairs made of the same faded cement, but there were patches of wiry fabric attached to each top. The fabric was a dingy green, once hard plastic quills, now flattened mesh, and the tendrils that spread out from underneath were a forgotten black.

They stepped up and Andy reached the handle to the screen door. When he pulled the rickety thing open, it shuddered, and the rusty spring wailed as it stretched. The green carpet inside was still intact, though most of it was flattened like the mesh on the steps. Kathrin imagined it being a lighter shade of green before. Now, it matched the tired porch swing hanging motionless to their right, its blue coat fading and chipping, the two chains holding it up a rust brown.

The front wall of the house was a gloomy white, webbed veins rising up from the surface of the paint, some places wearing mildew several years old. The windows on either side of the front door were made of two single panes, one below, one above, and resting loose inside their old black iron frames. Their interiors were guarded by dark brown curtains that probably hadn’t moved aside in the last five years or so.

The door was made of the same wood but was never painted, left its raw tree patchwork brown. The window at the top half was separated into six different rectangles by thin frames of the same wood. These too were closed off by a white curtain on the other side.

The handle was an old tarnished iron bulb. There was no way of telling if it was locked, knowing the locking mechanism was on the other side. Andy grabbed the knob and started to turn it.

Kathrin shook his arm, still in her grips, “Shouldn’t we knock, first?” she whispered.

Andy looked up into the shrouded window a moment. “Well,” he said, “I guess…if it’s locked, we’re gonna have to…” He had twisted the knob before he finished, and it turned. He pushed out of curious reflex, and the door resisted at first, but then jolted as if breaking from an old crusted seal, the glass panes in the wooden seals rattling in their loose saddles, and the door opened with a quiet whine.

Another Bubble Five

Rejection turned sour.

Sour turned bitter.

Bitter turned revenge.

At the Wrench.

The runaway boy had the wrench in his hand. He just had yet to move it. He could, but there were the consequences of that he considered. He didn’t consider them under a shaky uncertainty. No, more like a mounting anticipation.

If he was to do this, he wanted it to matter. Rebelling was just obnoxious unless one spurred a change in the system. That system being his home, and since he was one of the children, then yes, anything he would do to rebel would be scolded and not taken seriously. Especially since the scolding would only last a few seconds, taking place in the foyer, the front door open, his mom or dad’s hand on the knob, a bundle of important things gripped in their other hand, and then they were turning, burning an image he could still see now: a silhouette of the parent figure, no details except the hands cradling the important stuff against their sides and that they had their backs to him. The light that shaped them blazed toward him, the light of something better, maybe a future, some business plan, another life. Then the door closed, snuffing that light, leaving him in that dim hallway.

He would stand there, a person, not feeling like the child his parents considered him to be, because there was so much with him there in that hallway. So much on his face, on his chest, in his hands. So much to say, so much desired, so much to present, and none of it was seen. It all looked and felt like what he saw his parents experiencing as they lived, and he wanted to share it all with them, but they didn’t see any of it. They saw of him what they wanted to see.

So, now, his grip on the wrench tightened. If this was a trigger then somehow its projection could be aimed. He hadn’t paid attention before when he pulled the wrench at random, the excitement alone that the quakes were happening tuning out everything else.

It was already tilting toward him. The direction was pointing toward the middle of town. He remembered the quakes making him think something happened within the town itself and expected car alarms or police sirens. Maybe he read the quakes right.

Just trying to pull the wrench free was hard enough, though, and he wondered if trying to shift its direction would be just as difficult. He stopped thinking about it and gave it a try. With just one hand, he pushed the wrench back the way he walked from, up the power line pole clearing, and the ground buzzed. It sounded like the hum of a swarm of bees, but instead of raising the hairs on the back of his neck, a sensation that would have him looking up for the attack, he felt what he thought of as running water hitting his knees and flowing down his calves to the tops of his feet and out away from his toes to head toward the middle of town again.

He pushed harder and the invisible current quickened. If he was kneeling in a shallow creek, then the water level was rising. He could hear the trickle turning to a bubble, and he just knew somewhere upstream was the deluge pushing this new flow.

Yeah, it might have been a warning, but knowing about the coming deluge wasn’t going to stop it from happening. All there was left was the moments before it struck. And if it was going to be a deluge, it might as well be a big one.

He grabbed hold with his other hand and shoved.

The deluge gained more ground, shoving waves ahead of it. They crashed against his knees and drowned his feet. The trees behind and in front of him did their Christmas tree dance. It sounded like rain, he thought, but when he glimpsed the ground of the banks of the stream he imagined, he saw them melting under the march of the deluge.

It was pivotal, he thought, when the deluge would strike. It didn’t stop him from pushing the wrench, though. Let it come. Once it finally arrived, that shadow of a future, a blurred foreshadowing, an approaching visitor, there would be a crash. A slam! One big collision against something that distinguished this place from the ones before, the ones that were already slammed, being slammed, or next in line. When it slammed, hope would break, plans would be forgotten, and destruction would ensue unbridled.

Then his parents wouldn’t have anything to distract them. But would he even present himself after all was said and done? Or would he be satisfied that they’d have nothing to occupy their time? Revenge without a happy conclusion. Nothing to soften the blow. Just a lesson learned and a scar to remind them. It’d be up to them to work their way back up from the rubble they’ll soon find at their feet.

He picked up his left knee and planted his foot down on the vibrating ground. Now, he shoved with the extra weight he put behind it, calling the quakes and waiting for the deluge to bombard this part of his world.

This Bubble Six

An exploration,

Dwelling of watching darkness…

…that’s haunted by the living.

Three and a half miles northeast of the wrench.

Unlocked. This old house was open to them just like the coffee shop. Just like they assumed everything else to be. Andy and Kathrin leaned forward and peered through the widening crack between door and seal. And just like everything else, the lights were off inside. What they saw were guesses of someone else’s tastes. A clutter so intricate that there was hardly a separation from its dark contour and the window at the back of the house, seen by way of a combination of positioning of a hallway beyond this first room and the doorway to the room in which that far window occupied.

The window of that far room showed a clear view of the backyard, and so the gray light from outside gave clarity to that far room. It became a white and yellowish color, reflecting off the white walls and the wooden floor, reaching out into that hallway, cutting past the far room’s doorway to leave the walls on either side in shadows, marking that one chosen spot on the hallway floor, and blooming into this front room. The gray light from outside cut Andy’s and Kathrin’s silhouettes onto the dark clutter there, but the light extended past them to shake hands with that far reaching bloom.

Edges of objects twinkled and glass bodies reflected the event at the door, entertaining themselves with their own physical powers. They all played the footage in unison and compared the results with one another in silent exclamation.

Andy and Kathrin saw a dark brown wooden floor, the arm of a darker brown leather chair right next to the door, a coffee table a few feet away, parallel with the front of the house, magazines and books and coasters and bookends and a T.V. remote and used candles in tarnished bronze holders covered the top, a couch with multicolored quilts draped over the backrest, a blue comforter and old fashioned pillows piled on the cushions, pushed against the wall of white not too far ahead of the staring couple. A shelf of dark wood was attached to that wall, running as long as the length of the couch below it, holding a mass of objects that should have brought it tumbling down onto the floor: pictures and whatnots and a wooden choo choo train, a small gas lamp which was one of the many objects that recorded this new development off its surface.

To the right, that wall wasn’t seen, covered by an elaborate construction of wood and electronic devices. The T.V. had the center space, its dark surface one of the biggest reflective recordings among the glass objects. All around it were what Andy and Kathrin surmised as a DVD player and a satellite receiver, a VCR and a stereo, though each rectangle of metal and plastic was draped with some sort of colored cloth and was used as a stand for even more whatnots of a smaller variety, mostly figurines of cartoon characters almost forgotten by today’s youth. The rest of the space was filled with DVDs, video tapes, cassettes, and CD’s.

Andy and Kathrin both were tempted to call out a greeting from the door. Neither one had yet to set foot over the threshold.

“So, like…” Kathrin whispered, “…do we go in?”

Andy leaned back from the door. Kathrin went with him, glancing back over her shoulder. Andy shrugged, “I…guess we…”

“Andy!” Kathrin snatched him by his shoulder. “Look!” She pointed out toward the road.

Andy looked.

“He’s gone!” Kathrin said.

Sure enough, Andy’s car sat running idle in the middle of the road alone. Andy stepped across the porch to the whining screen door. Kathrin followed him, and they paused there on the steps. They looked both ways down the street, although they couldn’t see past the wall of bushes to the right. There was a wooden fence separating this yard from the one on the left, but it wasn’t tall enough to block their view of the neighboring house. The road stretched on that way, but they still didn’t see the tanned man. Neither did they hear the scraping of the bottom of his mirror against the asphalt.

“Why did he just leave like that?” Andy muttered.

“After all the trouble he went through to get our attention, right?” Kathrin offered a sarcastic snicker that might as well have been a scoff.

They both shared a glance, and in that glance, the opened door at their back was forgotten. They looked out toward Andy’s car. The driver door was still ajar, not just a rushed gesture imposed by another, but a sudden convenience.

Kathrin looked at Andy. A second later, Andy regarded Kathrin. There were only a few steps before they reached the sidewalk, and the yard wasn’t that long of a walk. Then Andy looked back toward the front door to the house. He had left it ajar. He looked into that dark layer between seal and door.

Kathrin looked back at it as well. The dark layer, was it really so dark? The grayness gave it a bit of color. The gray was all they had to work with, really.

They looked at each other again. Andy smiled, “We wanted to see, right?”

Kathrin looked at the door again. She let out a sigh, “Yeah.” She didn’t turn her head back toward him.

Andy turned his back on the yard and took a step back up. He put his hand on her shoulder. She looked at him. He nodded toward the front door. “Come on.”

She looked at the door, reached up to run her fingers through her hair, and then let her hand slap against her side. She nodded without looking back at the car, “Okay.” and they walked back to the opened door.

Next Chapter: Action Bubble!