Daze – Part 1

Here’s a short story that I’ve been working on for a couple of months now – Daze. The story’s actually based on a novel idea that I’ve been throwing around for a few years. In the beginning of the summer I was thinking about getting back into actually writing it and overcoming my writer’s block. So I thought “What better way to jump back into the swing of things than writing a side story that takes place in the same world?” And that’s how Daze was born. It really was a lot of fun writing so I hope you enjoy it!

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For as long as he or anyone else could recall, the colour of the sky was red. A terrifying crimson that persisted unwaveringly throughout the day and the night. As Micro looked up to take in the sight of the late afternoon sky, he could not help but be overcome by an immensely unsettling feeling. There was nothing else in his quiet, suburban town that was as out of place as the curtain of red above it. In their triangular formation facing south, the geese still flew fearlessly. The scent of barbecue smoke was just barely noticeable, but it brought attention to the distant sounds of children’s laughter in a park just out of his sight. He could hear the barking of dogs accompanied by their owners who were taking advantage of the pleasantly warm summer day. One by one these sounds disappeared from Micro’s attention, until the only thing he was aware of was the expanse of red sky and lighter red clouds that commanded his attention. He was alone in a silent world.

He had always believed that the sky was the wrong colour. But these thoughts were not shared by those around him, so it wasn’t something he brought up to others very often. Though he remembers finally bringing up this oft-asked question to his geology professor, and getting the same drivel involving molecules in the atmosphere and refracting light. That proved to be of no help, because it did nothing to quell the feeling of wrongness he felt. In fact, more than ever before, he believed that he had been placed in a strange and unknown world even though the familiar streets of his neighbourhood have not changed in the slightest since before he even learned how to walk. And that’s what worried him the most.

Suddenly a car horn blared and Micro was jerked back into reality. The sound came from a car rapidly accelerating towards him. The driver slammed the breaks and with a loud screech, a blue pickup truck stopped inches before him.

“Get out of the way, asshole!” the driver yelled angrily while blaring his horn.

“Sorry!” said Micro and he hurried over to the other side of the road. It was the third time this month he caught himself spacing out in the streets. The driver gave him a harsh glare before continuing his drive. He placed his hand above his racing heart. Micro waited for a few seconds until the thumping of his chest had calmed and while on extra alert, he arrived at his house minutes later.

His small, two-story house was empty this time of the day. The front door leads into a small entryway with a closet to the left for shoes and boots, a stairway that leads up into the main floor and a hallway adjacent to the stairs that takes you to Micro’s bedroom and the backyard. Micro kicked off his shoes and made his way upstairs. The main floor was essentially the rest of the house. It was one large u-shaped room that contained a kitchen, the living room, a study room and his brother’s bedroom. Micro rummaged through the refrigerator for sandwich ingredients, but eventually settled on leftover pasta.

A couple of hours after settling in, he heard someone opening the door and walking up the stairs.

“Hey Micro, you there?” said the voice. His brother let his work bag slink to the floor next to the kitchen entrance.

“Been here for hours.” replied Micro, lazily flicking through the television channels.

“There was a crazy crash in front of Clarence’s store just right now. Fire fighters have the whole area blocked off.” he said in a very aloof manner.

Micro thought about this for a second. Clarence’s store was barely two blocks away from his house. He would’ve had no trouble hearing the commotions of a crash from here. Much less the sounds of firetrucks. And yet he had not noticed until his brother pointed it out.

“Is Clarence okay?” he asked. He thought of the elderly man who was so quick to offer his contagious chuckle that owned the convenience store.

“Oh he’s fine,” said his brother. “Didn’t see the driver. But I doubt they’d want to see their car. It was completely totalled. Looked almost brand new. Apparently the driver lost control and drove full speed into a fire hydrant.”

“Sounds bad … I’m gonna go check it out.”

“If you’re going out, pick up some milk on your way back.”

Micro left his house and turned the corner around his block. Sure enough, Clarence’s corner store was only three streets down and he could already see groups of people standing around gazing at the crash. A fire truck blocks the intersection in front of the store but doesn’t seem to be in use. Beside it are two police cruisers moving what seems to be the totalled car. He couldn’t tell from this distance and the people blocking the street.

As he approached the scene of the crash, a single question popped into his head.

Why didn’t I hear anything?

Curiosity turned to anxiousness until he finally reached the crowd of people standing in front of the scene. He shuffled his way through the crowd and came upon the wrecked car. It took only a few moments for him to process what he was seeing. What lay before him was a blue pickup truck. A pair of paramedics were loading a body that lay on its back over a stretcher and into the back of the ambulance. The sound of the ambulance siren drowned out the nervous chatter from the large surrounding crowd. A tinge of guilt took Micro by surprise. He did not know why he felt responsible, but that didn’t matter. That small sliver of guilt he experienced made Micro suddenly feel very paranoid that he might become suspect to the crash. He begun imagining the gaze of faces in the crowd being directed to him. What made it even worse, was that it wasn’t just his imagination.

Micro looked up to see the crowd had now become dead silent, and an uncountable amount of faces were now staring directly at him with a blank and distant expression. Everyone from the police officers monitoring the scene to the bystanders with their phones out. No one moved nor did they say a word. They all just stared at him.

The unnerving display did not register with Micro at first, he had thought he was looking at something fake. But a few seconds of stillness had brought on to him the jarring truth that the deadly silent scene on this street was entirely real.

Micro turned and ran for his house, his heart pounding. He looked back once and the crowd remained frozen in spot, their blank eyes still focused on him. He didn’t dare look again. The quiet houses zoomed past him in a blur as he rounded the blocks one after another. Finally he reached his house and entered, panting. He locked the door, leaned backwards and stood there for a few seconds catching his breath.

“Did you see it?” his brother’s voice boomed from the top of the stairs and made Micro flinch at the sound. When his heartbeat resumed to its normal pace, he finally responded after a long pause.

“Yeah it was pretty crazy.”

The initial fear he had experienced at the crash site had disappeared. Though he was young, only fourteen years of age, Micro was gifted with a great amount of intelligence. He is the youngest student at the Fern Institute, and his scholarship had been more than enough to pay for the student housing unit where he and his older brother lived. He was seemingly able to figure out a solution to any problem no matter how unsolvable it seemed. That’s why his fear now slowly disappeared. Because he had just concluded that the scene that unfurled just moments earlier could not, and did not, happen.

“I’m going to go do some homework.” Micro said from the bottom of the stairs.

“What about the milk!” his brother replied from the top.

“Sorry, I forgot about that.”

He heard his brother audibly groan and couldn’t help but smile.

The short hallway which faced the front door takes a sharp right into the narrow laundry room with a door in front of the washing machine and one adjacent to it. The door adjacent to the machine led to the backyard while the door in front of it led to his room. Micro unloaded his backpack and immediately began working on his homework. He usually hated working on the desk in his room because he thought it was too bleak of a place to focus on anything. That had changed over time. He had been quite unsuccessful in making friends and would often retreat to his room after his day’s classes to be alone. The quiet familiarity made it a comfortable place to stay for hours upon hours.

Micro completed the final question on his calculus assignment and a quick glance at his alarm clock revealed that it was just past 10 o’clock. He wasn’t up to playing video games through the night and opted instead to watch movies on his phone until he fell asleep. Somehow he was too tired to change into his pyjamas as well and just slumped into his bed.

Knock Knock.

Micro paused. The knock came from the door to the backyard. He pushed the curtains over his window aside and took a slight look. A dark figure stood in front of the backyard door. The light from the room was making it very difficult to see anything in the darkness outside but as his eyes adjusted he noticed the outline of a white cloak. The person looked tall but he could only see the back of their head. They were too close to the door for him to see anything more than their back and left arm. The person has not yet noticed him peering through the window.

Knock Knock.

“Coming.” said Micro as he went to swing open the door outside of his room. Before him stood a stranger taller than him by at least a foot. He was dressed in nothing but a blue-white cloak, which upon closer inspection appeared to be a patient’s robe. The full intensity of the reddish black night washed over him, silhouetting him in a nightmarish glow. The sky’s red hue did not falter even during the night. He looked young but his mature face made Micro unable to discern his age. The stranger opened his mouth to speak. His lips moved but no sound escaped his mouth.

“What was that?” Micro asked confused. Again the stranger opened his mouth to speak but Micro did not hear a word.

“I can’t hear what you’re saying…” his voice trailed off when he noticed that the world had become dead silent. The cool breeze coming through the backdoor, the sound of the washing machine, even the television upstairs in the living room. He could no longer hear any of it. Nothing but the sound of his shallow breath and the blood pumping to his ears remained. He didn’t even have the time to process this because the room he was in started to become unnaturally distorted. He started seeing a completely different location superimposed on his vision. The entrance to the backyard he was standing in and another location he could not discern were both visible to him at the same time. One instant his eyes would focus on the stranger standing in the doorway before him, another instant he was looking at a dark location that resembled a cave. Occasionally he would see both locations in some jarring, unsynchronized amalgamation of both which brought Micro to his knees in a dizzying daze. He tried closing his eyes but that made it much worse. It was as if closing his eyes merely opened his eyes to another world, because instead of the narrow laundry room, he could see the cave-like area that had appeared as just a watermark over his vision while his eyes were open. The cave wasn’t so much a cave but rather a large, dark and empty room. He could not comprehend what this place was or where it could be. Every second made it harder and harder to focus his mind on anything.

The moment he reopened his eyes and the dark room re-appeared on top of his vision along with the narrow entrance, the disorientedness he felt had doubled. Not even his knees could support him any longer and he collapsed onto a floor that felt like it was madly spinning him around.

The stranger in the doorway had remained unflinchingly still all the while. Micro was just barely able to see his lips move once again as the stranger approached him. Micro’s eyes closed again and slowly his mind went blank.