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Haechan was charmingly bemused to find out that Mark had a gun. A nice one with a plated handle. It was a Colt MK IV series 80: the badass American pistol. Representing a macho, dirty, long dust road, cig hanging out your mouth, beer in hand, motel Americana. It was the service gun during both World Wars and the Korean war too, and liked to hang out in the front or back of your pants. This big mean showpiece that meant fucking business.
He enjoyed holding it and looking at it. Mark showed him how to unload and reload it, clean it, dismantle it, and put it back together. Haechan allowed these gentle lessons with his usual calculative focus, hands precise on the metal until he presented the intact gun with a smile on his face.
“Why’s a guy like you got a gun like this?” he asked, posing with it in the middle of the kitchen.
Morning-mussed, in boxers and a small tee, long legged and with his hips cocked forward while he held it out in front of him with locked elbows and clasped hands, squinting down the sight.
“I just liked it.”
Haechan opened it up and looked inside, making sure there were no bullets even though there never were, put the safety on, and pointed it just past Mark’s ear.
“Pow,” he said, and yelped as it was wrestled away, already grinning into Mark’s mouth.
Haechan had always been the one with the better dream connection.
“Okay,” Jaemin said, hefting Mark in his grip, “It’s time to go to bed.”
Mark vomited again, so easily he barely even coughed. It all just came up in a hot, almost tasteless stream, still straw-yellow and beer scented. It hit the toilet water with its fouled rim of piss dirt, and for a second the bubbles looked like whitish, semi-dissolved pills. Mark sputtered, and the next hot rush didn’t come so easily. He belched it through a partially closed mouth and it spattered out in a fan, drooling down his neck and into his shirt collar and exploding through his nose.
He woke up on his side in the guest bedroom. His phone told him it was 03:56AM. Someone had taken his shoes and jeans off.
Mark rocked himself up to sitting. His brain swam around in fishbowl-circles inside his skull. The interior of his mouth tasted sweetly animal, like it was coated in a veneer of raw meat. He tried not to vomit again, and got redressed, stumbled downstairs, opened and closed the squeaking screen door, and got in his truck.
It took a couple goes to get the keys in the ignition. The nausea was getting bad - rhythmic in its swells up under Mark’s diaphragm. His clammy hands trembled - one on the wheel, the other twisting the key. His truck coughed and sputtered and whined. Mark gagged then burped wetly. His eyes stung. The truck rumbled - squealed, rocking on its shocks. Mark gunned the ignition. It roared with life. Light blasted a path right into the clumsy, sparse forest that rimmed Jeno’s property. Spindly trees and dry bushes rooted in the dry gray-brown dirt swirled in a saline blur.
Mark rested his forehead on the wheel and burped again. Pre-vomit spittle welled in his mouth. He panted to choke it back. The headlights had been a mistake - they created a cliff illusion, like the surrounding world ended beyond Mark’s reach and dropped away to nothing.
Deep breath. Suck up the drool, collect it, and spit into the footwell.
Fuck.
Beads of sweat slicked his hands. His eyes burned from rubbing. He leant over and looked closely in the rear-view mirror. There was a thick whitish trail of mucus crawling from his left nostril like some sort of miserable mollusc. He blotted it with his shirt collar and it tacked cool and wet to his neck.
A window lit up in the house.
“Oh, c’mon,” Mark groaned.
He threw the truck in reverse and skidded across the drive so fast he almost took out a trashcan. A silhouette appeared in the bedroom window and darted away.
Mark’s shaking palm fumbled on the stick and jammed it into drive. The truck jolted in two sickly leaps, almost stalling, and then like the faithful beast it was, smoothed out into a low growl and trundled forward.
Jeno’s beautiful handmade front door burst open and Jaemin impacted the screen. Mark quit looking in the rear-view and stomped on the accelerator. Overgrown fronds and branches scraped the metal in a cacophony of grasping tendrils. Mark’s overstressed stomach bounced heartily into his throat with each familiar pothole taken too fast.
Halfway down the drive, where it widened out and got flat, Mark chanced the mirror again.
At the bend, bent over with hands on knees, barefoot and wearing boxers and a shirt. Jaemin had chased him as far as he could. Mark swallowed back another swell of thin nausea saliva.
And then he was swallowed up, just as the tires stopped grundling over dirt and rocks and hit the asphalt. There were no other headlights in the darkness. Mark rolled out onto the highway, and took off.
The pre-dawn sky possessed a malicious murkiness, even out in the woods with no light pollution. Miasmic quality of the moon and stars - a subtle brown tone where there should be blue, as though the coming sunrise would illuminate the whole sky blood-red, and the endtimes would finally come.
Mark thought about driving into a tree.
His head hurt. His stomach hurt. And he was suffused with a bone deep tiredness that had little to do with still being drunk or the lack of sleep. It would be easy. He could close his eyes, step on the accelerator, and then it would all be over.
“It’ll be okay, man,” he said, rolling the words around in his dry mouth. It didn’t help.
On hot days you could fry up a burger on the sunbleached rust-buckets decaying out back of Sal’s. They’d tried it once - smash-burger with cheese and onions, egg on top. It worked, but tasted chemical from the leeching paint.
Mark sucked a trickle of sweat off his upper lip. He’d stripped this overalls to his waist and his white wifebeater sagged under the pits, humid ovals from stitchline to mid-rib. He had his cap on backwards to keep his wet hair out of his face and the back of his neck tingled with pre-burn heat.
Clang.
“Fuck!” Mark yelped, “Don’t fucking do that!”
Ben swung under the hood, laughing. He pitched hard into Mark’s side and jostled his grip on the wrench. Only seasoned reflex kept his hand tight.
“It’s lunch. We’re going to the deli. You coming?”
“Nah. I’ll give you cash for the usual.”
Ben’s smile became artificial at the corners. “You gotta take a break sometimes.”
“I know.”
Ben did not leave. He stayed, watching.
“If - if you wanna talk about it anytime, you know we’d all listen, right?”
Mark knew they would. The day Mark’d seen Haechan for the first time, it’d been under the hood at Sal’s. He’d knocked on the rolldown door and bent a little on the duck-under, cautious but relaxed, and asked for Pete. Handed over his order, then left.
He looked at Mark on the way out.
“Who was that?” Pete had commented, “Never seen him before.”
Mark was the baby, and they’d all roughed him over for it once Haechan had visited him too many times at the shop for Mark’s ‘he’s my friend’ excuse to hold water. But it’d been goodnatured - just the same as when Ben started dating a girl who worked nights at the bar the next town over. Didn’t seem to bother them that Mark was gay so long as he was the best auto electrician they’d had.
One night, after Mark had finished replacing wires destroyed by mice, Sal had come up on him and clapped him hard enough on the back to almost send him sprawling into the dirt. “Nice kid,” he commented, “He treatin’ you right?”
“Yeah.”
“You treatin’ him right?”
“Yeah.”
Sal ruffled his hair. “Good.” And then he’d stomped away to have a quiet drink in his office and go over the numbers.
And Mark had gotten all the sorrys from them, but it hadn’t gone back to normal. It would never go back to normal.
“Me and the guys - we’re going out for beers tonight. You wanna join?”
Mark swiped another roil of sweat off his forehead, and bent back into the engine. “Nah. But thanks.”
Plink. Plink. Plink.
Mark opened his eyes, and found himself in the Dream. The great salmony sandstone tunnels that opened up cathedral-like beneath the earth. To go forward was to fulfill whatever burden, wish, or skill he had been chosen to receive.
Water dripped from the immensely high ceiling. The path stretched before him. It wound off through the stalagmites - only identifiable from the rock around it by its walked-down sheen, and vanished around a bend. A low peachy light oozed from the rock - it was dark still, and the shadows were long and impenetrable - but the path was clear.
The click of his throat thrummed. The ozone scent of power clogged his nose and pulled his skin into gooseflesh. Wrath of potential and purpose gripping at him, fluffing his hair with the static. The antechamber of myth that lead to a hundred billion outcomes.
He turned and walked the other way.
“I can show you him again,” It said, somewhere out of sight, low and sibilant and hissing. Mark blinked, and found himself faced towards the glowing path, brighter now. He turned and the cavern rotated with him. Rocks gently scraped over themselves behind a fat fleshy stalagmite glistening with salt and wetness.
“I can show you him again,” It repeated.
Mark, curiously, felt no fear nor elation. His usual dry hangover ache that came with wakefulness was gone. Faint scrabbling came again, this time from his right, but It spoke from the left, almost as though It was touching his ear. “I know what everything wants.”
He took a step backwards. The glow stayed in the center of his vision, so he took another and another, and watched it move further away, hoping that he wouldn’t be pulled forwards in the space between his blinks.
Slimy, filthy grind. Its hot beastly exhale ruffled the hair at Mark’s nape. They stood like that, frozen. Mark winked one eye shut and then the other, trying his hardest to not lose track of where he was, lest the Dream buffet him around at its will.
And abruptly It was gone. Darkness came with coldness. Mark stumbled, reached, and heard something out there.
“Ma-ar - uhk.”
He woke up on his stomach. The icy dawn grayness poured through his flimsy curtains and drug itself all the way to the bed, kept tucked back against the far wall. His feet poked out the end of the blanket and his arm was numb. It was Monday.
“Hi,” Jeno said. His eyes bowed into neat crescents. “How are you?”
“I’m okay.”
Jeno lingered. Shoulder bumped up on the wooden porch rail, fiddling with his nails. The breeze rocked the sunflowers in the backyard into each other. An empty beer bottle next to Mark’s boot rolled to clink softly against the chair leg.
“I haven’t seen you around,” Jeno continued, “At the shop - are you still working with Sal?”
“Yeah.” Mark was. The only thing that smoothed out the dreadful, humming agony was work. Deep in the guts of cars that should’ve been scrap metal, Mark found some kind of peace. He came home with grime streaked up to the elbows and black under his nails, multiple hours after Sal and the guys had told him his shift was over - always sympathetic. Just let me get it to run, Mark would say, I’ll go home once I get it to turn over, and eventually they had stopped, and let him stay as long as he wanted.
They’d drawn the line at the weekends.
“You eating okay?”
Mark shrugged and took a draw from his beer, then offered Jeno one from the open box dropped on the table. They’d been outside for too long and were warm, but Mark’d been planning on sitting out and looking at Haechan’s garden until he got too drunk to think at all.
Jeno took it. His mouth pinched like maybe he thought he shouldn’t have. He held it cautiously with both hands and squinted at Mark through his bangs, assessing. Mark didn’t give a fuck what he looked like, and swilled back the remainder, then tipped it onto the porch with the others.
Jeno took a hesitant sip, and invited himself up to sit on the other side of the table.
The small patch of garden Haechan had worked on was getting overgrown, but the sunflowers were still there. Their faces looked towards the house as they followed the sun, and there was a brief window where they seemed to look directly up at the house. Mark waited for it, but wasn’t sure if it was accusatory or reassuring. It felt different all the time.
“I’ve never been any good at cooking,” he said, surprising himself, “Haechan did all that. He tried to teach me.”
“I can bring you some stuff to put in the microwave. Or Renjun would come over if you wanted someone around. And you -,” Jeno took a deep, shuddering breath, and scrubbed around his eyes with his wrist. “You can always come to our place - you’re welcome all the time.”
Haechan hadn’t meant to grow them. He’d gotten a pack of mixed seeds in a magazine and scattered them haphazardly across Mark’s dirt-patch, brown grass lawn, then tried to retrace his steps so he could drench them all with rainwater that had collected in the leak-bucket, who’s usual position was the upstairs landing. He’d replaced it sulkily, and loudly proclaimed that he’d done it wrong, and should have dug some holes so they wouldn’t get washed away. But the sunflowers thrived.
Mark had come home several nights in a row to be dragged outside to look at the fragile sprouts. “I wonder what they’ll be,” Haechan wondered. He stuck sticks in the ground so they’d have something to hold onto, and watered them a little too much.
“I dunno. I don’t have anything to say.”
“I don’t care,” Jeno snuffled, “You can just hang out.”
The wind whistled in the eaves. The sunflowers rocked back and forth, and finally seemed to stare right up the porch steps, piercing but summer-warm.
“Thanks,” Mark said. He looked Jeno in the eyes - wet and pink around the rim, clumping up his lashes. Jeno looked up and scrubbed at his face again. Mark’s fingers itched for a beer.
In the cavern again, Mark backed away, and let the yawning void take him.
There was nothing. He remained, ears pricked, waiting.
No noise came. Not even his heartbeat or the whisper of his rushed breath. It was still and quiet. Pressing in on him almost like a touch - coating his tongue and reaching down deep into his esophagus to finger at his innards - squeezing his skin, making him aware of his gooseflesh and the fit of his clothes.
“I know you’re in here,” Mark mouthed. His eyes dried out as he strained to keep them open in the face of unrelenting emptiness.
And abruptly it opened up before him. Vibrancy of color a stun to the occipital lobe like a punch - blue on blue as far as the eye could see. No sign of land, just an immense flatness, perfectly still. The horizon was marked only by a whisper-thin white line. A world of mirrors.
Mark’s chest heaved. A thin sheen of water soaked his shoes and socks. He took a step and watched the ripples distort the reflected cirrus cloudforms.
“Hello?”
Muffled and insignificant before its magnitude. There was no echo. The wispy spiderweb patchwork of cloud rolled overhead and underfoot in an imitation of waves, even in the absence of wind. It truly was a perfect reflection, excluding one chalky, too-dark blotch a dozen yards ahead of Mark.
Water leeched up to the hem of his jeans. No mistake - it’d pushed up the salt crust on the rim and interrupted the careful layer of water. Behind him, a similar trail marred his intrusion.
A footprint. The same size as his. Too much pressure on the ball of the foot had mashed it deeper into the ground, but it was unmistakable.
There was a miniscule black dot dancing at the meniscus between planes, haloed by the piercing wedge of orange-white sunshine as it melted down off the edge of the earth.
Mark took off after him.
“Does it scare you that the end of the world is coming?”
Mark startled a little. Taken off guard. They’d just made dinner and sat down to eat it in front of the TV. He’d been expecting the usual argument about movie picks, not that.
“Is it?”
Haechan scoffed, poking a piece of tofu. “Do you think the world won’t end?”
“I know about global warming.”
“It’s not that - well, actually, humans will all die, and a lot of animals too, but it might be good.”
Mark bit the interior of his cheek, then released it, nice and slow. “How is that good?”
“It gives something else a chance.”
“Haechan, what are you talking about?” Mark barked, more tersely than he meant. It’d been a long day. “The world isn’t going to end.”
“It is. One day. All humans will die, probably because of each other. And a lot of animals will too. But when humans are gone, it might work out.”
“So it’ll be fine. Do you like the tomatoes? Jeno grew ‘em.”
“And then, after all of that, the sun will expand and swallow the Earth completely. There will be nothing left.”
Mark ripped Haechan’s plate out of his hands and slammed it on the coffee table. He grabbed Haechan’s wrists, knowing it was viciously tight, and shook him. Teeth gritted, sour in the soft palate, and burning behind the eyes.
“SHUT UP! CAN’T YOU JUST TRY TO BE HAPPY?”
Haechan stared. His hair was in his face from being shoved around and he looked faintly shocked. His unmoving expression contrasted sharply with the strobing, meandering effects from the TV. An explosion lit him up yellow, then abruptly cascaded into blue. An inverse of the movie played in his glossy eyes.
Mark swallowed a big aching lump, and sat back down.
“I just - I don’t want you to be like this,” he croaked, “I really need you to take your pills.”
In the cruel light of day, Mark saw visions of Haechan as though through a honey filter. Spinning in slow motion in the recalled half-memory of winedrunk movie nights, strung out tall with his fingertips against Mark’s palm as he twirled like the sugarplum fairy, all glowing and round cheeked like a female lead in a 00s film, down to the foaming, luminous aura.
The feel of him - his heat - he’d slept tucked so close to Mark and turned the mattress into a sauna. His satiny plushness. The way he’d tilted his head up to let Mark suck at his throat and the bluntness of his chewed-on fingertips. How he sat in front of the TV in Mark’s clothes with one knee drawn up to his chest so he could lean his chin on it. The neutral salt-chalk taste of his saliva and the hot sting in Mark’s diaphragm when he smiled into kisses.
Mark didn’t sleep so well these days - didn’t sleep, because he traversed the open space - the world-between-worlds. The flat blanket on the open side of the bed taunted him with its emptiness the same way the endless tundras did. And his misery was contagious. Infectious sadness, poisoning people who wanted to help him. Rotting his house, filling it with trash, and soaking the air.
There was no escape from it. But that was good, because to be happy would be to forget Haechan altogether. Not while there was a way to see him again.
On Thursday night, Mark unlocked the front door, walked in, turned on the lights, and caught Renjun standing in the kitchen. She was holding the conch shell. Mark threw his bag on the table and prepared for an argument.
“You can’t bring him back,” Renjun warned. “You know why.”
The conch was one of Mark’s latest finds. Their house choked with the remnants of dreams - seashells, flowers, glittering rocks of unknown origin. Mark awoke in his bed with physical memories to keep.
“I know.”
Renjun looked at him. Outside, the sunflowers swayed in the twilight. Renjun and Haechan had always gotten along, especially when they were trying their best to not. Renjun knew Haechan in ways that Mark would never be able to understand, because she held the same secrets up in the blackness of her pupils.
The deep and miserable sacrosanctity of the dream connection. Renjun looked well lately - healthy. She lacked her usual sleepless gaze and sallow flesh, and her hand was steady on the shell as she replaced it on the benchtop.
“When did it start?”
“A week after.”
“After the funeral, or-” The funeral had been a sycophantic affair. Haechan’s mother had commanded the podium and sobbed about her talented baby. Mark stood up and left before his turn at the eulogy. His notecards weighed down his breast-pocket. They were still there, unread.
“After I found him.”
Renjun shuffled. Unnerved. Good. Mark shrugged his jacket off and slung it onto one dining chair, then sat in the other.
He put his head in his hands. “What do you want?”
“I just wanted to make sure you were okay.”
“I’m not.”
The honesty clumped up in Mark’s throat and choked him. He was too tired to feel embarrassed, and just let it roll through. His tears pooled in the hollows of his palms and ran down his forearms to the tabletop. Renjun came up behind and held him tightly with no hesitation.
“I’m so, so sorry. I wish I could make it all go away.”
Renjun left about fifteen minutes later. They stayed in that clumsy, backwards embrace until she’d forced Mark to promise to come over for dinner. Mark closed the door behind her and began the solemn ascent to his bedroom.
Alone in the muddy darkness, lights off, vodka bottle in hand and bare feet on the cold wooden boards, Mark pressed play on his only saved voicemail.
Wheezing breaths burst through the speaker. In and out, staticy from being too close to the receiver.
“...muh…auhn…Ma-ar - uhk.”
Snotty. Drawling.
“Heu…eul.” Gasp. “Heu-el…me-e.”
A sob or cough turned into a wet, choking burble. Mark’s hand shook on the bottle as he took a swig, staring unseeingly at the plasterboard.
“Mwade uh - auh…’issh…mis-tuh-ake.”
There were no other words after that. Just moaning and gurgles as Haechan asphyxiated alone in the yard. The voicemail timed out at the maximum of 15 minutes.
Sometimes, when Mark listened to it, the whistle at the end of Haechan’s exhales and the groan on the inhale smoothed into something he wanted to hear. “Sorry,” he seemed to say, over and over, until it ended.
Half the bottle was gone. Mark took another drink, laid down, and hit play.
Mark encountered no other dreamers in the great expanse. He saw great ballrooms, endless stone temples, dungeons, empty cities of amber, sunken ships and abandoned hospitals. He wondered frequently if he visited the same places that Renjun did - he hadn't made the deal, so perhaps he was barred from the collective unconscious. Instead, he searched alone.
Sometimes he saw Haechan at the end of long hallways or inamongst the pines. He never caught up.
In the moments before sleep and after waking, Mark wondered what he would say if he reached him. What did he want?
He finished up his emergency Saturday shift alongside Ben. He’d gotten the call at 4AM and had turned up to fix a busted axle. Of anyone, he was glad it was Ben who’d picked up.
“Thanks for being so nice,” Mark commented. He hung up his overalls in his locker, next to all of his trinkets. A picture of him and Haechan triumphantly holding the keys to their house was taped to the inside of the door. Mark was smiling huge and Haechan glowed, clutching the keyring overhead and squeezing Mark just as tight. “I really appreciate it.”
“No sweat,” Ben said, “It’s the worst thing in the world to lose someone like that. But it’s gonna be okay - you gotta believe that. Everyone says it, but it’s because it’s true. Not understanding's the worst part. I always wished I coulda asked my brother why. But it'll eat at you. Have you tried therapy? I can give you my psych's number, or, like, there's BetterHelp.”
After dinner, Mark and Renjun went outside while Jaemin and Jeno washed up.
The summer night was clogged with humidity and the shrill, rhythmic wail of cicadas. Renjun watched the rim of the forest passively, as though she was a million miles away. They had a vegetable garden. In the low light, the mesh pulled around the tomato plants looked like fresh snowfall - false geometry, marbled sculptures, not unlike the materials of the other world.
"I've been thinking a lot about Haechan," Renjun started, "And you of course. But I think there was an inevitability to it - one day he would've done the same thing. He never liked it - the world, or the dreams. I would meet him there sometimes. He was always in the worst places. Not on purpose - he just ended up there. His burden was so much greater than mine, but he was always so happy to see me."
"I'm still sad but I've been able to reconcile it logically. At the same time I do often wish he were still here so we could talk. I think, like... he had this great pensive thoughtfulness about the world that was never cynical. It feels very unfair that out of all people it was him that died. But he was suffering so much. It must have been a relief. That's how I'd like to remember it. His big personality, and him trying so hard, and then being able to have this release where it was finally over."
Mark told everyone who mattered that when he’d found Haechan, he’d looked peaceful - like he was sleeping. Laid under the sunflowers like he was taking a summer siesta. He was at peace - must not have been happy, and there was no other way to fix it. And it was a horrible tragedy, but Mark was moving on. He’d get over it.
Haechan had clawed his way almost up to the back porch. There had been dirt and grass under his fingernails. His eyes were open and so bloodshot the sclera looked violently red all the way around. There was a trail of chalky vomit from the sunflowers to his body, and he looked scared, even in death. Mark found the pill bottles later on the bathroom counter. He'd hoarded them for months. There was no note.
A worm in the grass, surrounded by beetles. It was thrashing around - eaten alive. Six feet under, those same worms were probably eating Haechan.
Did suffering end with death? What was worse: a bleak nothingness for all eternity, or the inability to escape?
“How could he do this to me?”
There was no answer.
At the end of all things, upon a beach of snow-white sand, Mark found him.
Mark walked over and sat next to him. He was throwing pebbles into the rippling tide, face pensive.
"There is no end to the universe. Did you know that? It just goes on forever."
Haechan said it just as he had on the night before he died, tucked close in their bed. Mark had thought it meant he was getting better. Now he understood the great horrible listlessness lurking within.
Mark sucked on his lower lip. Big fat tears collected at the corners of his downturned mouth.
“I'm dreaming. I knew you weren't him the whole time,” he gurgled, choking, “I just wanted - so badly, I don’t -”
Haechan put a hand on his cheek and thumbed away the tears. He looked like he always had before that awful day. His hands held that same absorbent hotness and his eyes the same terrible melancholy depths. Mark coughed and held his hand tight to his face, nuzzling and pressing it to his mouth.
“I have to go now.” The sun was sinking fast into the ocean. “Promise me I won’t see you again for a long time.”
And the sun impacted the sea, and the world was reduced to nothing.
Far out, deep in the outer pre-forest ring at the edge of town, there had been a nice house. Porch, vegetable garden, happy yellow paint on the cladding. It was all boarded up and warded now. The garden was overgrown. The trees were taking it back - vines crawled up the flaking walls to clog the gutters. No one lived there anymore.
In the far reaches of memory joy persisted. Mark had been there for a sixth birthday party and remembered it with the inconsistency of too many retellings. Jealousy of the little girl’s room because she had clouds painted on her ceiling; Mrs. Anderson’s big smile while she cut the cake.
See, the couple who lived there had a kid who got cancer - one of those freak incidents - incurable, obviously. So she died.
And then she came back.
They locked the doors and the windows, unable to face the world while knowing what they had done, and within a week the pair of them were splattered all over the walls. Rumor was that the police report said they’d been all-but shredded.
That was the trick. The Dream gave you everything you ever wanted, but it had a cruel sense of humor. Every living thing fears death, so that’s the one thing it won’t let you cheat.
And the thing that came through wearing their daughter? It was stuck there, unable to leave the bounds of its binding circle. Couldn’t go back, couldn’t get out, doomed to stare through the cracks in the boards all day.
It hadn’t always been boarded up. Back in the old days when Mark and Jaemin would scum around and tip stolen vodka into their 7/11 slurpees, Jaemin’d dared him to go up to the windows and look in. It couldn’t get out, so no harm, right? And they wanted to know what it looked like - it had become a thrill for them, theorizing about what would’ve piggybacked on such a desperate dream.
Mark hadn’t wanted to, obviously. But Jaemin was beguiling with his broad shoulders and froglike smile, and he knew how to get alcohol which was thrilling to Mark and his repressed, browbeat-protestant upbringing. Eventually, after a couple circles around the perimeter and a promise that Jaemin wouldn’t be too far behind, he agreed.
They’d gone at night because they had to - if anyone caught them they’d have been hauled away and it would have been walled off. It was a small town and the council had earnestly believed that no one would be stupid enough to set foot there. Many years later, they’d erect chainlink fences with barbed wire at the top to deter other kids from trying to climb over, but then? The collective memory was fresh and evil. Something not right had made it to the physical plane. Like forgotten fruit, the discovery lingered. Everyone was waiting to discover a new and unpleasant residue.
The autumn leaves had no crunch - it was damp out and the grass beneath was too lush and forgiving. A distant fox screamed in the underbrush. The wind stole its way up Mark’s jacket and rubbed cold fingers at his spine.
It hadn’t had time to decay. The glass in the windows was intact and the house cheerily faced the road, still its familiar and welcoming yellow. The porch didn’t creak and the only evidence it was abandoned was the absolute unnatural stillness and the red tape square to the doorframe. The back door had the same. Years later, the red was the only thing still vibrant about it.
The sincere wrongness struck Mark. It’d been percolating while he and Jaemin did their laps, but with each step it compounded. A phantom pressure encasing his body - identified as the foreign object. Something was coming. At the nucleus - the epicenter of a silent storm. Ozone static coaxed his skin into itchy gooseflesh and numbed the roof of his mouth. Something was coming.
The living room window caught the streetlights like a mirror and showed only his face against the yawning blackness within. Behind him, Jaemin had stopped. His toes butted against the clean shadow of the roof. The air caught around Mark and held him. Silence rung in his ears. Congestion built in his sinus cavity and filled his whole skull, culminating in a swampy dissociation that weakened his knees. The quiet turned into a slow-building high-pitched squeal.
He cupped his hands around his eyes and leant to the glass.
Mark never told Jaemin about it - hadn’t really gotten a good look at all, it was over so fast. He’d lied, saying he got spooked. Traipsed back home with mud all up his back and ass from the way he’d tripped over himself to get away.
But he’d never forgotten. Cause when he’d bent down, trying to block out the backlight to peer in, it had been right on the other side of the glass, looking back.
It was him.
Mark went home after work. He stopped in at Jeno’s on the way, said hi to Jaemin, chatted for a while, and forgot his jacket on their coat rack. It was midafternoon and the sun was still high in the sky when he stepped outside, Colt in hand, and it warmed the crest of his cheeks as he laid back onto the grass, right under the sunflowers.
It felt like the touch of a too-warm palm. And Mark put the muzzle to his temple, and smiled.
"The universe is getting bigger all the time, and it might never stop."