Domus Aurea¹

The year is 2020.

The alarm went off at 6:47 a.m., two minutes later than the 6:45 it had been set for. He had checked the setting more than once. The display always read 6:45 when he scrolled through it, and the buzzer always sounded two minutes later, as though the clock kept its own schedule that didn’t quite agree with the numbers it showed him.

He didn’t notice anymore. The mind smooths over such things the way water smooths over a stone, until one day the stone is gone and you cannot remember it ever having been there at all. Brian Smith opened his teal eyes. The sunlight filtering through the vinyl blinds felt painted onto the floorboards, a two-dimensional approximation of morning.

He took his first breath of the day, and the house breathed with him. He didn’t notice that either.

Brian was thirty-six. He lived in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. He worked at a furniture store. All of these facts about him were just as true as they had been the previous day. Beside him, Jessica was still asleep, breathing in a rhythmic, perfectly timed cadence. Inhale for three seconds. Exhale for three seconds. A perfect, unvarying loop.

Brian sat up and looked at the same off-white ceiling, the same hairline crack running from the light fixture to the corner, the crack he’d been meaning to spackle since they’d moved in. Monday. March 16th. He swung his legs over the side and his feet found the floor. The floor was cold. The floor was always cold.

He stepped out of the bedroom into the hallway of his house and went down the stairs. The third step groaned as he descended; he knew that it would click when he climbed it again that evening, the same step producing two different sounds depending on the direction one traveled. He remembered mentioning this to the home inspector during the purchase. The inspector climbed the stairs in both directions, twice over, and reported no anomaly. But Brian had watched him do it, and he heard the groan. And he was certain the inspector had heard it too, because the man’s left foot had briefly lingered on the third step.

Brian glanced at the linen closet. Yesterday, out of a sudden, inexplicable compulsion, he had measured it.

He ignored the dissonance and sauntered into the kitchen.

The light through the window above the sink was the color of weak tea, the color of a photograph of a window rather than a window itself. He filled the carafe and measured the coffee grounds. The faucet dripped in a pattern while he worked — he had begun, without meaning to, to count the intervals. Three seconds. Five seconds. Three seconds. Three seconds. Seven seconds. Then the sequence repeated. He’d written it down once, on a sticky note now adhered to the refrigerator door beneath a magnet shaped like a lobster: 3-5-3-3-7. He didn’t know why he’d written it. He didn’t know why he kept it.

It was somewhere in that hollow interval between sleeping and the day that the first small wrongness surfaced. Brian glanced at the kitchen table, before doing a double-take and looking back at it, this time staring intently.

Four chairs. We have three. The fourth one broke. Zack stood on it, the leg cracked, I meant to fix it.

And yet there it sat, the fourth chair, identical to its siblings, unbroken, slightly askew, as though someone had risen from it only moments ago and would, momentarily, return.

Brian blinked, and then were three chairs.

He poured his coffee. The liquid was black, bitter, but tasted fundamentally of nothing; like the idea of coffee consumed in a dream.

Through the window, the neighborhood stretched outward. Identical two-story homes lined the asphalt in pastel shades of mint and beige, sitting upon violently green lawns that never seemed to grow or require cutting. Above, the sky was a flat, matte cerulean, dotted with three cumulus clouds spaced exactly equal distances apart. The blue was thin. As if someone had painted it on the other side of the glass and hadn’t used enough coats.

Outside, Mr. Henderson, his neighbor, stepped out of his front door to pick up the newspaper. He did this every morning. But today Brian watched the motion with a cold, creeping dread. Mr. Henderson bent at a forty-five-degree angle, grasped the plastic-wrapped paper, stood, and looked toward Brian’s window. He raised his right hand. He smiled.

It was the exact same smile as yesterday. The exact same muscle contractions around the eyes. A mechanized sequence. Deus ex machina functioning without the Deus.

The drive to the furniture store took eleven minutes, and on the eighth Brian came to a stoplight on Algoma Boulevard that had not, to the best of his recollection, ever been there. He waited at the red light with no other cars around. The fog—

(there is no fog in Oshkosh in March)

—lay thick and pearl-gray along the road, swallowing the houses past the first row of lawns, and through it he could see the cross-street stretching away into nothing, a road that went nowhere, that had no destination, that existed solely to provide a perpendicular against which his own road might define itself.

The light turned green, and he drove. In the rearview mirror, the stoplight was gone.

The store was HOM Furniture³, and Brian had worked there since 2015, and he could not remember the interview.

It was wrong in the way that everything else that day seemed wrong, which is to say in no way at all. It was exactly what a furniture store should be, scrubbed of every accident and imperfection that would mark it as a place where actual human beings had ever set down a coffee cup or scuffed a heel. The showroom floor gleamed. The sofas sat in their tableaux—

—and Brian moved among them clocking in, hauling, lifting, while some small unsleeping watchman at the back of his skull tallied the inconsistencies and found the sum increasingly difficult to ignore.

The recliner he carried weighed nothing. He set it down and it weighed two hundred pounds.

The aisle he walked down was longer than the building that contained it.

His manager—a heavyset man named Gus with a voice like a radio left on in another room—clapped him on the shoulder and said, “Big day, Brian. Big day,” and walked off, and Brian stood there a long while trying to work out what was big about it. It was a Monday. Mondays were never big.

It was in the loading dock, around ten, that Brian met the delivery man. He wore brown coveralls and a cap pulled low, and he was unloading boxes from a truck that bore no logo, no plate, no company name; just a white panel van the precise off-white of a tooth gone slightly bad. He was an old man, or seemed old. There was something ageless in the stoop of his shoulders, in the deliberate care with which he handled each crate as though it contained something more delicate than upholstery.

“Morning,” Brian said.

The old man looked up. His eyes were very pale, the gray-blue of an overcast sea, and for a fraction of a second something passed behind them. Recognition. Sorrow. The particular weariness of one who has set a great many things down and watched them carried away.

“Mr. Smith,” the old man said.

Brian didn’t remember telling him his name. His shirt didn’t have a nametag. He was about to say so when the old man went on, mild and unhurried:

“You’ll want to take the small ones first. The heavy things’ll still be heavy later. But the small things…” He hefted a slim-flat package, the kind that held a disassembled bookshelf. “The small things get lost. You set them down somewhere and you forget where, and then years go by, and you think, ‘what was it I was carrying? What did I put down?’” He smiled, but it failed to reach the pale eyes. “Doesn’t matter how strong you are, Mr. Smith. Some weights you can’t pick back up.”⁴

A chime sounded somewhere—a delivery, a doorbell, a school recess bell, impossible to say which—and when Brian turned back the old man had finished unloading and the van was pulling away into the fog, soundless, leaving no tire tracks on the wet asphalt.

Brian stood in the loading dock with his heart going too fast and no reason that he could name for why.

Déjà vu, he told himself. Just déjà vu.

He hadn’t the word for what he really felt, which was the older, sadder cousin of déjà vu—anemoia.⁵

Through the door came a man who was well-dressed, almost carefully so—his fashion born of the habit of wealth rather than a statement of it. Dark coat, good shoes. He was handsome like a sculpture someone had spent a very long time on. He wandered the showroom floor, running his fingers along the backs of chairs with a thoughtful expression, almost as though he were reading the furniture rather than looking at it.

“Can I help you find something?” Brian asked.

The man turned, and smiled a smile that was polite and distant and utterly devoid of any reason to exist. The accent was faint. European, maybe. Old. “I’m just browsing, thank you. Though I will say: this piece is load-bearing in all the wrong places. Whoever designed it didn’t understand what shelves are for.”

Brian blinked. “It’s a bookshelf.”

“Yes,” the man agreed, and the smile didn’t change. “It is.”

He left without buying anything, and the feeling came again: that trembling, half-remembered recognition, that déjà vu that wasn’t quite déjà vu, because déjà vu felt like remembering something that hadn’t happened, and this felt like remembering something that had happened but had been taken from him.

At 12:15 PM, Brian took his lunch break, pulling his faded sedan into the drive-thru of a McDonald’s. The intercom crackled with static. He ordered. He pulled up to the second window.

The fry cook handed him the paper bag. His nametag read August. He was a teenager, maybe early twenties, his hair a brilliant, blinding gold which caught the light around him, entirely incongruous with the dull polyester of his uniform, and he wore an expression of such profound and specific exhaustion that Brian almost laughed—the kind of tired that went beyond early shifts and minimum wage, the kind that settled into the bones and stayed there. As August extended his arm, their fingers brushed against the rough paper of the bag.

A sudden, violent vertigo seized Brian.

The sensation vanished, replaced by the smell of stale frying oil and exhaust fumes. August stared at him, blinking slowly. His eyes were an unusual shade of violet, and there was a profound, echoing emptiness in them, a hollow space where something brilliant and terrible used to live. For a moment, his exhaustion seemed to crack open, and something else looked out from behind it. Something startled. Something that recognized Brian the way Brian had recognized the man at the loading dock.

“Have a good one,” August mumbled, his voice lacking any inflection.

“Yeah. You too,” Brian whispered, his hands shaking as he rolled up the window.

He found a woman sitting on the curb beside the lot where he’d parked—beside a beautiful, impractical car, low and silver and expensive in a way nothing in Oshkosh was—eating a McDonald’s hamburger with novel fascination as if it were the finest of gourmet meals. Everything about her said money, said inheritance, said generations of soft hands and good schools, and yet she watched the fog with contentment.

“They taste better here,” she said, without looking at Brian. “Did you know that? In the—in here. They taste better. I don’t know why.”

“I, uh.” Brian slowed. “I guess, bro.”

“You look tired.” Now she did look at him, and her eyes were warm and dark and very, very old. “You always look tired. Even when—” She stopped herself. Tilted her head. Smiled, the smile of a wealthy stranger making small talk. “Sorry. You just have one of those faces. Like I’ve seen it somewhere. A photograph, maybe.”

“People say that,” Brian said.

“I bet they do.” She popped the last bite into his mouth, dusted her hands, and rose much too gracefully for someone sitting on a curb. “Take care of yourself, Brian.”

He hadn’t told her his name.

By the time he thought to ask how the woman knew it, the silver car was gone, and the parking space it had occupied bore a faded chalk hopscotch grid he was quite certain hadn’t been there that morning, the numbers running

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
∞

and then nothing, the grid trailing off the edge of the asphalt and into the fog where the white lines kept going, faintly, into a distance that should have been impossible for the parking lot.

He didn’t even make it two blocks before flashing red and blue lights filled his rearview mirror. Brian pulled over, his heart hammering an uneven rhythm. The officer who approached was immaculately pressed, the brass buttons polished to a mirror shine, his posture rigid, his expression carved from granite. His nametag read GOSS.

“Was I speeding, Officer?” Brian asked.

Arthur Goss did not soften. “You failed to engage your turn signal exactly fifty feet before the intersection. You engaged it at forty-six feet. The law is the law. Equilibrium must be maintained.”

Brian stared at him. “Four feet?”

“Transgressions, no matter how minor, invite chaos,” Goss replied mechanically. He scribbled a ticket and handed it through the window. The paper felt unnaturally heavy. “Drive safely, Mr. Smith.”

In the rearview mirror, Goss remained standing on the shoulder, perfectly still, watching the car shrink into the distance long after there was anything left to watch.

He parked in a nearby lot and got out. Needing to feel solid ground beneath his feet, he walked down a cracked concrete sidewalk past a small strip mall.

A man walked in the opposite direction. He was tall, with a stiff, military gait, wearing a faded red jacket. Claude, read the embroidered patch on his breast pocket. As they passed each other on the narrow pavement, Claude stepped aside, offering a sharp, courteous nod.

The rhythmic clack-clack of Claude’s boots on the concrete briefly, impossibly, sounded like the grinding of heavy iron plate armor.

Brian stopped, turning to look back. The veteran was just a man walking toward a bus stop. Nothing more. But Brian’s chest ached with a phantom grief, a sense of having lost a brother in a war he had no memory fighting.

Perhaps it was the opposite of deja vu: Jamais vu. The illusion that the familiar is entirely alien.

A few storefronts down, a small crowd had gathered on the sidewalk around a man performing on an upturned crate. He called himself Dandy. He wore a faded harlequin-patterned shirt—half crimson, half mustard—and a chalk-white mask that covered only the upper half of his face, leaving his mouth exposed. His mouth was always smiling, in a way almost suggesting it had been installed.

“So a guy walks into a house,” Dandy said, and the word came out differently—heavier, somehow, as though the air pressure shifted around it. “And the house is bigger on the inside than the outside. Classic setup, right? But here’s the punchline—” He leaned forward. The light caught his mask, and for a moment the expressions painted on it seemed to shift, the frozen comedy and tragedy trading places. “The guy never leaves. He just keeps measuring. And measuring. And the rooms keep growing. And eventually he realizes—” A pause. The crowd was silent. Dandy’s smile didn’t waver, but something behind his eyes collapsed. “—he’s not measuring the rooms. The rooms are measuring him.”

Nobody laughed at this joke.

Dandy straightened, clapped his hands together, and let out a high, wheezing giggle that sounded genuinely delighted. “Tough crowd! Alright, alright—who here has ever been in love?”

The drive home took eleven minutes again, but the sun’s position remained fixed at its noon-zenith though the dashboard clock insisted it was past five. The houses on Maple Court had always been identical—it was a development, they were built that way—but he had never before registered the totality of it, the way every lawn was the same shade of impossible green, every mailbox canted at the same six-degree angle, the same single cloud hanging over each one in the windless sky like a thought balloon emptied of its thought. He counted the houses to his own: twelve. He had always thought it was eleven. He counted again. Fourteen now.

He sat in the car in his driveway for a long time. The house was in front of him—his house, with its slightly-off proportions, its too-wide front door—and he counted the windows. He’d lived here for six years and had never counted them, and now that he was counting he couldn’t make the number stay still. Five. No—six. He counted again. Five. He was sure it was five. But the geometry of the house seemed to suggest there should be six, that one of them had been—

removed
plastered over

—Brian counted five windows.

His own house received him the way a stage set receives an actor, and he almost half-expected applause from some unseen audience. The hallway was longer than the house.⁶ He knew this the way one knows things in dreams—immediately, completely, without the possibility of doubt—the front hall stretching back past the kitchen, past the stairs, past the place where the back wall should have been, running on into a dimness where the runner carpet faded and the family photographs on the wall showed faces he

did not

recognize

though they wore his clothes,

stood in his rooms,

smiled his

wife's
smile—

and Brian shut his eyes and counted to ten, and when he opened them the hall was the right length, and Jessica was calling from the kitchen that dinner was almost ready, darling, won’t you come and sit down.

Jessica had made dinner. Chicken, rice, green beans. Zack was in his high chair, smearing rice into the tray with the dedication of a fresco painter.

“How was work?” Jessica asked.
“Fine.”
“Did you eat lunch?”
“Yeah.”
“What’d you have?”

Brian confidently opened his mouth to deliver an answer, but then could find no words. He knew he had eaten lunch. He remembered taking his break, remembered sitting down to eat. But the one detail he failed to recall was what he had eaten, as if the information had been redacted from his mind. It was on the tip of his tongue, just out of grasp.

“…A sandwich,” he finally conceded, unsure of whether that was even true.

He stared at his plate for a few seconds, before setting down his fork with a bothered sigh. “Jess. Do you ever feel like… something’s wrong? Not, like, wrong-wrong, nothing dangerous. Just…Off. Like the walls moved three inches to the left while you were sleeping and you can’t prove it, but you know.”

Jessica looked at him. For a moment, she said nothing, but the silence itself was loud, and her face did the talking for her. She wore an expression of patient love for her husband, but also concern born of those traits.
“Brian. You’re tired.”

He half-chuckled. “I’m always tired, honey.”

She reached across the table and squeezed his hand. Her hand was warm. Her hand was real. It was the most real thing in the house, and Brian held onto it. “Have you called Dr. White?”

The dining room had four chairs. He didn’t bother counting them again.

Later, while Jessica bathed Zack, Brian was watching TV in the living room in an attempt to take his mind off the extremely weird day. It was just stress and exhaustion, he tried telling himself.

A woman in a lab coat—dark-skinned, with tribal tattoos and hair that seemed to contain flecks of actual starlight, though that was absurd, that was only the studio lighting reflecting off of glitter—was being interviewed about NASA’s Europa Clipper mission. The lower third read Solange Stella, Aerospace Engineer.

“There’s a whole ocean under the ice that no one’s ever seen,” she said. Her eyes, luminous and faintly violet, seemed to look directly through the camera, through the screen, through the living room wall, and into Brian’s kitchen, where the faucet dripped its patient sequence. “We think it might be alive.”

Brian turned off the television. The screen went black, and in the blackness, his own reflection stared back at him—except the reflection blinked a half-second after he did.

He picked up his phone.

He called Doctor White from the bathroom, the door locked, the fan running to mask his voice, sitting on the edge of the tub with the phone pressed hard against his ear.

She answered on the first ring, as she always had, every time, without fail. ‘Dr. White,” she answered. Her voice was a balm—low, unhurried, infinitely patient, yet laced with a maternal warmth that felt as old as the world itself, an accent he had never quite been able to place, something old-world and far-off.

“Sarah,” Brian breathed, running a hand through his disheveled hair. “Doctor White. I think I might actually have to get on those meds. I… I’m losing my mind. The house. The street. The people, they’re moving like clockwork. I bought a burger from a kid and I thought he was going to catch on fire. The walls are measuring wrong.”

A soft, measured sigh came through the receiver. “Brian. Breathe for me. What you are experiencing is a severe dissociative episode. Hyper-vigilance, coupled with derealization. It is a common trauma response.”⁷

“Trauma from what?” Brian’s voice cracked. “I sell couches, Sarah! I move sectionals!”

“The mind often invents the ghost before it builds the haunted house,” Dr. White said, her tone unbothered by his panic. “You are merely projecting your internal instability onto your environment.”⁸

“It’s…not just the house,” Brian insisted, his eyes darting toward the door. “It’s everything. Even the people. I keep seeing strangers and feeling like… like I owe them something. Like I failed them.”

“Brian.” Gentle. A hand laid upon a fevered brow. “Listen to my voice. You are not losing your mind. I assure you.⁷ You’ve called me about this before, you know.”

“I have?”

“Twice. Once in January, once in February. You described the same things. The windows. The drive time. The feeling of—discrepancy.” The sound of a page being turned. “You didn’t remember the first time, either, when I brought it up during your second call.”

Brian’s mouth was so dry that it hurt for him to gulp. “I don’t remember calling.”

The faucet dripped. 3-5-3-3-7.

“I know. These feelings of unreality—of disconnection, of the world being slightly off—they are textbook, for someone with your history. The gaps in your memory from 2014. You aren’t alone in this, Brian. I promise you. You have never been as alone as you fear.” She let the words land. “In fact, I recently started a local support group. For people like you. People who feel they’ve…come back from somewhere, even if they don’t remember leaving. We meet tomorrow evening. Seven o’clock. I want you there, Brian.”

Brian swallowed hard. The silence was deafening. “Okay. Okay, I’ll be there.”

“Good.” And was it his imagination, or did something shift in her voice then—some vast and ancient tenderness, the relief of a shepherd who has counted the flock and found, at long last, a missing lamb upon the road? “We’ve all been waiting for you. Bis bald.”⁹

The line went dead.

The community center consisted of cinderblock walls painted the green of institutional indifference, fluorescent tubes humming overhead at a sixty-hertz frequency that set Brian’s teeth on edge, one bulb at the far end stuttering in a rhythm that was almost a word in morse. On a card table by the door sat a percolator of coffee and a plate of store-bought cookies that no one would eat.

He walked into Room B. A circle of folding chairs was arranged on the speckled linoleum—except the room extended further back than it should have, the far wall retreating into a shadow the building’s exterior couldn’t account for. The moment he crossed the threshold, the back of his neck prickled with that now-familiar wrongness, that recognition-without-memory, because he knew these people, despite having never met them.

At the head of the circle, in a chair no different from the others yet somehow throned, sat Doctor Sarah White. She was beautiful in the way of a stained glass mosaic, her silver-white hair pinned back, her face composed into an expression of such serene and bottomless compassion that to look at it too long was to feel one’s own grief rise up unbidden in the throat.

“Brian,” she said. “You came.” She gestured to an empty chair. “Sit. We were just about to begin. Everyone—why don’t we go around, and each of us introduce ourselves.”

The man in the flannel went first—broad-shouldered, sitting bolt upright as though his chair were a battlefield, his forearm threaded with old scars. “Claude. Claude Redding.” His voice was low, steady, weighed down by unkind sights. “Army. Retired.” His knuckles were scarred, the fingers slightly crooked, as if they’d been broken and healed more than once.

“Solange Stella.” The woman in the blazer, reading glasses pushed up on her forehead, who spoke precisely, each word placed like a rivet. “I’m an engineer. NASA.” She cleaned her glasses on her sleeve. “I’ve been having… dreams.”

“Devin. Dee’s fine.” A young figure in a white hoodie with red stripes, anxiously checking a watch that Brian was fairly certain had no face. “I build things. Clocks, mostly.” A short, sharp laugh. “I keep having this feeling that everything’s—timed. Like the whole day is on a schedule and I can’t get off it.”

“Arthur Goss.” A man whose posture had not changed since the side of Algoma Boulevard, though the uniform was gone now, replaced by a plain dark suit. “Law enforcement. Twenty-two years.” His eyes weighed Brian for exactly as long as was fair, and no longer. “I’ve been seeing patterns. In the case files. Lines that shouldn’t connect, and do. As if the law itself were—” He stopped, seemingly finding his own words ridiculous. “Never mind.”

A wealthy-looking man across the circle inclined his head. “Laurence.” For a moment Brian was certain he had seen those pale, sea-gray eyes that very morning, in a loading dock, behind brown coveralls.

“Phyllis Heart.” A pale woman with eyes red-rimmed from lack of sleep. “I counsel couples. Marriages.” A small, tired smile. “Which is ironic, because I can’t figure out what’s wrong with my own everything.” And Brian thought of a silver car, and a hamburger eaten on a curb, and they taste better here.

“August Black.” The young man smelled like cigarettes and grease and something else—something that might have been ash, or the memory of ash. “I work at McDonald’s. I keep feeling like I’m supposed to be somewhere else. Higher up. Which is stupid, because—” He rubbed his face. “Sorry. Long day.”

“Maya.” A woman with paint under her fingernails, sketching without looking up, the lines of the sketch settling into stillness only in Brian’s peripheral vision. “I paint murals. Lately I’ve been painting things I’ve never seen. Places that don’t exist. And they feel like memories.”

“Christian, but you can call me ‘Cash.’ Accountant.” He leaned forward, hunching his posture slightly. “Numbers have been wrong. Or more like, too right. Everything adds up. Everything always adds up. In accounting, things shouldn’t always add up. There should be errors. Discrepancies. But there aren’t. And that’s the discrepancy.”

At the far end of the circle, slumped in his chair with the boneless inertia of the deeply sedated, sat a man whose name tag read Julien Elliot. His eyes were open but focused on nothing. His mouth moved occasionally, forming words without sound, and the words—if you watched his lips closely, if you traced the shapes—were not in any language Brian knew. They were not, he suspected, in any language anyone knew. The woman beside him, the marriage counselor, gently rubbed his back.

“Victor Dominus.” A tall, angular man in a charcoal suit, leaning against the back wall, refusing to sit, his dark eyes radiating a quiet, sovereign authority. He occupied the space he stood in with the immovable certainty of a load-bearing wall. His name was all that he gave. After a moment, Dr. White nodded and moved on.

They were normal people. A heir, an engineer, a clockmaker, an officer, a counselor, a fry cook, a painter, an accountant, a CEO. But as Brian looked around the circle, his heart hammered against his ribs. The flickering lights cast shadows that stretched too far across the floor, and for a fraction of a second, the shadows did not match the people casting them.

They looked like gods stripped of their altars. Plucked from the void and forced into a vivarum.

“Now,” Doctor White began, folding her hands. “I find it best if we go around and share one thing we…remembered this week. It needn’t be large. A feeling. An image. A name. We don’t need to make sense of it, not yet. We’re only here to hold it. Together.” Her gaze moved over them all, mother to children, shepherd to flock. “Who would like to—”

The heavy wooden door of Room B clicked open.

Two figures stood in the doorway, carried in like driftwood on a tide.

The first was tall, in a long red leather coat the color of arterial blood, pale-skinned, with long curling hair the impossible pink-gold of a sunrise that had been described to someone who had never seen the sun. Hir eyes were too green, and the physical light around hir seemed to blur, to glitch, at the edges of hir.

The second was smaller, in traditional Japanese clothing, with short pink hair and a quiet, watchful intensity that reminded Brian of someone studying a specimen.

They were supposed to be dead. He was sure of it.

Doctor White rose to her feet. Her expression remained serene, but something beneath it had gone very, very still—the stillness of recognition older than the others’, older than the room, older than language.

The figure in red surveyed the circle of frozen, half-remembering gods in their borrowed human skins. When ze spoke, the voice came warped, layered, a chord struck on a broken instrument, familiar and unfamiliar all at once:

“Sorry we’re late.”

“is this the support group? for the recently deceased?”

After a pause, the voice came softer, the green eyes finding Brian’s across the room and locking onto him, as if ze had come here to find him specifically:

“Hello. I’m Aelita. Most people call me River.”

“Come in, Aelita. Eden,” Dr. White said softly. “Take a seat. We were just beginning.”

And the fluorescent lights flickered, and for a moment they were stars—ancient, burning, impossibly far away, arranged in a constellation that no human astronomer had ever catalogued, because it had existed before astronomy, before humans, before the house that was in fact a universe collapsed into its own rooms.

Then the lights steadied, and they were fluorescent again.

And somewhere, in the space between the walls, something that had been waiting for a very long time

stirred

remembered

opened its eyes