Antigreen

Calliope was sure that she hadn't dreamt of anything at all. It was one of those nights where she closed her eyes and opened them again a moment later to daylight and the sounds of birds. In that forgotten blink the stars wheeled overhead her sleeping form and rushed to bring the morn in time, unfurling the canopy of the sky while she slumbered unaware. It felt like witchcraft, that stitch in time, some tessering embroidery beyond the reach of mortals. But she was romanticizing things: in reality she was simply so tired and worn that "dead to the world" was all but accurate. Memories didn't form when one was dead, because the dead were made of memories already.

Thank you, she thought to no one in particular. Overall, she actually felt somewhat rested–that was a rare treat. Still, more rest was always tempting… she rolled over to try and see if she could return to sleep as quickly as she'd left. Let her be dead again, for just a little while. Daily reincarnation was such an exhausting chore: she wouldn't have blamed Jesus if he'd chosen to linger in the tomb a few days beyond the orthodox three.

On that divine note, the sound of distant church bells made its way into her room, ear and brain, crossing so many membranes it was diminished and tinny by the time it reached her core. Sunday, the Lord's Day. That meant she had to go to work, in place of worship–closing shift, no less. Life demanded that she rise out of her narrow linen grave.

Or maybe she was late already. Calliope reached for her phone. Her heart thudded in her chest in the moments before she was able to see the time: Half past noon. Damn. Too late for her to go back to sleep after all–she had to get ready for work.

Her mind stayed largely empty of thoughts while she executed her morning routine without incident. The apartment was silent, meaning Erika had already left for work herself, so there was no one to interrupt her as she brushed her teeth and only then stumbled into the kitchen to have some excuse for a breakfast. Erika had already left the box of sugary cereal on the table for her, too–how nice. She poured herself some, naturally, and sat down to crunch on the stuff. It did taste pretty damn good after all.

Callie sighed. There was nothing good on social media this morning–not that there ever really was. Today seemed to have less content and more nothing, though: she'd refreshed her news feed at least six times only to see story after story that she'd already read. Talk about déjà view. Her reading comprehension was also mysteriously acute; in the time it took to finish her cereal she'd probably consumed more than two days' worth of text.

Come to think of it, everything looked sharper as well: the edges of things held the faintest tinge of chromatic aberration, like her eyes diffracted components of the spectrum more than normal. It reminded her of the all-nighters she'd pulled freshman year, where by six in the morning her sleep-deprived brain would reach new levels of jittered hyper-awareness. Never again, though: as she got older, such excursions into sleeplessness melted her brain a little more each time, and she couldn't afford to mire her mind any further. Rather than wanting nothing more than to dissolve into a mattress, though, at present she felt alert, awake, alive, and longed for sleep only a middling amount. The alien acuity would've been welcome–useful, even–if not for the sad reality that she had to work… an activity she'd rather be less lucid for. Going on autopilot made the time pass faster.

Whatever, she'd have to manage. Calliope grabbed the cream-white button-up and mint-green apron off the laundry rack and disappeared her body underneath. One of the saving graces of her job was that the uniform hid ninety percent of her, and, if she were wearing a facemask out like today, more like ninety-five. It would never be an even hundred… unless she started work as some kind of corporate or collegiate mascot. Ha. She wondered if the person wearing the giant question mark costume at MISC's football games got paid, and if the pay was good–if salaries were proportionate not to hours worked but to the amount of anxiety experienced while on the clock, she'd be a billionaire many times over.

Daydreams of wealth and success and all that came with it, paying for a body that she could maybe stand to look at: those were the screensavers her brain replayed during her subway ride to work. The fantasy was especially vivid today. She was this close to being able to smell the salt of her imaginary island getaway, if not for the traincar doors opening to allow in other, less pleasant scents into her nostrils. Ah, the smell of the T, the oldest subway system in America, delved in many cases under landfilled estuaries that insisted on redoling in their ancestral salty stench… how fucking wonderful.

Despite the sensory overload that inevitably came with it, Calliope still enjoyed the subway overall. There was just something an-aesthetic about sitting there, waiting for a specific stop to come in a predefined sequence, having nothing else to do until it came. The crowds of people felt pretty impersonal, too, like they were more background scenery than real human beings… although today was an exception. Her eyes fixed on the graying man across the aisle who was in the midst of eating a BLT with extra mayo that'd already dripped twice into his lap; staring at him made her feel hot behind the eyes like there was a dynamo in her head. No detail could escape her at the moment.

The detail was a bit too much. She shut her eyes tightly just as the doors opened on her stop. Her gaze was kept downcast, either at her dirty Converse sneakers or the series of dirtier floors they tread upon, for the remainder of the journey.

"Hi, welcome to Cosmic Latte. What can I get for you today?" The voice of the drive-thru operator–Stella today, unfortunately–wafted by as Calliope hurried to the backroom. With haste, she'd be able to avoid her.

"Oh! Hey, Callie!" She took her finger off the headset mic and waved. Damnit, not fast enough.

"Hey, Stella. You're closing tonight too?" Callie fiddled with the tie of her apron for far longer than necessary, in the interest of postponing eye contact. Somehow she could still feel the older woman's blue gaze boring into the top of her head.

"I am. We're going to get so much cleaning done tonight, Callie, you're gonna love it!"

Calliope suppressed a scoff. Stella was fucking annoying with the way she treated the least remarkable job on Earth like it was absolutely essential, but it was almost comical, really. She always figured the neglected mother-of-three must have literally nothing else going on if she was going above and beyond with menial labor in a service job; it wasn't like she got paid any more for the effort.

She herself didn't get paid more either, but Stella would still penalize her verbally: Callie looked up to be polite and did her best to fake a smile.

"I'm sure we will!" She beamed. At that moment she was saved: a car pulled up to the drive-thru, and Stella turned to greet it, leaving her free to continue to the back as originally intended.

Calliope would've much rather remained there in the storeroom among the invigilant rows of floor-to-ceiling shelves filled with stocked product that would go untouched for a few months at minimum. It was quiet there, and mostly free of people, especially once the store manager had gone home for the day. But it was not to be: the backrooms were too liminal, somewhere she was only allowed to linger for at most a quarter-hour–and even that was only on her break. Above the flimsy table where they counted and divided the day's tips was the rack of headsets she was looking for to actually begin her shift. More than once, she'd thought about trying to hack them to play music over Bluetooth, or something–hyperpop would be better listening than drive-thru orders all shift. But it was a bit beyond her capabilities, not to mention that Stella would be apoplectic if she ever managed it and was discovered. Heh. It was at least something to ponder besides coffee and pastries.

She fell into the slow rhythm of the afternoon grind, the speed of thought slowing as if chilled by the same ice in the seemingly endless series of coffees she prepared. It was less stressful than the morning shift, (fewer drinks per second to deliver) even if it meant that she always arrived home rather late. Technically she was supposed to stir in whatever dairy product the customer requested using a specially-made helical spoon, but screw that. Callie'd long since perfected the 'technique' of whisking the cup with her wrist to mix the contents. It was faster, she'd argue, though a pathway to carpal tunnel, and Stella of course hated it with how much of a stickler she was for rules; Calliope took care to only do it when she was otherwise occupied. It was just one way to inject a bit of whimsy into the monotony, like the time she created a whole rainbow of milkshakes using all the different colors of syrup throughout the store, or the time she stuck Cosmic Crullers under her glasses like thick spiral-armed galactic goggles to amuse the rotating cast of high-school-aged recruits she worked alongside. Yes, she ended up with crystallized sugar in her eyes… but stuff like that made the otherwise brown and beige workflow colorful enough to bear. How could Stella deny her that?

Before she knew it, the color of the sky outside had gone from blue to orange to black, a night darker than the dark roast coffee grounds she tossed into the trash. Try as she might, she just couldn't seem to relax, even as Stella turned the sign on the door from "Open" to "Closed" and they commenced the nightly rituals necessary for closing. Without any customers the store was quiet and empty save for the sound of scrubbing–so why could she not scrub her brain of its jitters? Callie wondered if maybe all the caffeine she'd handled throughout the day had somehow seeped into her skin, into her brain, to keep her so perpetually on edge. Goosebumps rose and fell on the back of her neck in irregular migrations.

"Callie, could you clean the bathroom, please? Thanks." A voice from the blue sent a shiver down her spine. She nearly jumped before remembering that it belonged to her thirty-something year old coworker and not some boogey-Thing lurking in the dark. What kind of monster would hide underneath the counters in a coffee shop, anyway? She was being ridiculous.

Cleaning the bathroom sucked, but at least it would be bright in there enough to banish whatever shadows whose appearances she feared. She wheeled the vomit-yellow mop bucket across the store and trudged into the restroom nobody had used in hours.

Once inside she was greeted by an unwelcome sight: herself, angled a bit from above in the large mirror that overlooked the sink. She grimaced at it before preparing the mop, first in the bucket and then pressed against the floor. Even as she swabbed it left and right, her eyes kept being drawn upwards by the illusion of motion in the glass.

Her reflection mirrored her actions perfectly. She moved the mop right, and so did she; same went for the left. All was as it should be–so why did she feel so unnerved? Callie'd always had a love-hate relationship with mirrors: she had to look into them to see and fix herself, her hair, but it was rare she remotely liked what she saw. Last night though injected her with a shot of paranoia, turning the relationship firmly towards the "hate" end. Calliope was stricken by the insane notion that the mirror wasn't actually a mirror at all and that her reflection was just a very, very good mime, eager to get one over on her. What the hell was wrong with her, thinking that? She shook her head–and so did the mirror.

Ugh. At that, a spike of anger; she reached her hand towards the surface and, rather than meeting the skin of her fingertips, felt only the cool glass. Like she should have expected. Time seemed to stop, and her heart beat in her ears like a timpani, and she whispered to herself words she knew were a mistake:

"Are you… still there?" They mouthed in unison. Stupidity washed over her immediately. She was being utterly irrational, staring at her own reflection like that like it would actually reply.

But then a fleshy warmth grew against her fingers, and It blinked in the mirror; symmetry was broken.

Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

Her eyes went wide, and Its did not. Calliope recoiled, backing right up into the mop bucket that she'd forgotten was there… and promptly fell on her ass. From her new position on the floor she could no longer see anything in the mirror but the ceiling. After several long moments, nothing came of it; it was empty, or appeared to be. Thank God for that.

She ran through a checklist in her head. It couldn't be sleep deprivation, because she'd slept more generously than usual. It couldn't be a trick of the light, or she wouldn't have felt it against her fingers like that. That meant that this was not only a visual but also a tactile hallucination. Which, from the little that she'd read, seemed a worse prognosis for her sanity: toucher seemed the rarest of the senses to be faked.

The options weren't great. She could turn and leave, tell Stella that she wasn't feeling well or something to get out of cleaning… but could she really turn her back on the mirror? Was that safe? Otherwise… she could stand up and face It, whatever the hell It was, and hope that didn't make the hallucination worse somehow. She dreaded the thought. Maybe… maybe she could just ignore it? Pretend It wasn't there, and continue mopping. She doubted she was strong enough for that.

Calliope shut her eyes and stumbled to her feet. She'd look on her own terms from a more stable position. Another skewer of fear went through her heart as she realized that the gesture was pointless and she was denied even that choice: she could see the mirror, occupant and all, on the backs of her eyelids in the same space it would've been if they were lifted.

It stared back and offered no explanation. There was that prickle again, in the outer layer of her skull, or maybe it'd been there all along; she got the sense It'd been waiting to see if she would notice.

"Have you… have you been there all day?" She choked.

A pause. "We could show you. You requested otherwise."

Her own voice, high and clear and colder than the space between atoms, between stars or galaxies even. Hers, and yet not hers, the way that a voice on the phone sounded different in lightwaves than airwaves, the way the vacuum bristled more brightly between Casimir plates than otherwise.

When Calliope responded, it was in a lower and more fearful tone than that: "I… what? No, I–please, I don't understand, sure–"

Flash. Her eyes reopened on the morning. She brushed her teeth and scarfed down cereal and donned her uniform and left the house and, and everything was there better than she could've remembered it, but for the edges of the vision which frayed off into the void. It was the burning behind her eyes, like dry ice. It was just a colour, but It burned: It was the fringing aberration at every single seam. It'd watched and heard and known her every move and thought and overtuned her mind like an antenna to do it. That was why she felt so strange.

It faded, and she was back in the coffee shop's bathroom with a feeling of mortal violation.

"We observed. We kept your silence."

Her trembling eyes were drawn again to her reflection's own. But of course, they belonged to her no longer–they lacked some essential marker of humanity that she couldn't describe, but was nevertheless clear. Too late, she realized she had looked too long: those dark irises gave way to flicts of color that she had not, should not have ever seen. Fugitive pigments that winked in and out of existence on a whim, that no earthly chemistry could have reproduced. The names of those alien hues popped into her head at first sight like they were self-evident–praseochlor and hexaphlox and octarine, stygian blue and autoluminescent red, all shimmering in the depths of those starry eyes like so many nebulae.

It then impressed the truth upon her without words. Her mind buckled under the pressure, and a thousand-score or so of neurons died–subtlety was not yet Its art. But she understood. It was not a hallucination or any product of her imagination. It was beyond her in every sense and It would at the least observe; she could escape It no more than the ocean could escape the moon. Her choices were to try to ignore It or to cooperate–nothing more. It showed her analogies, all very patronizing: a doctorfish preening a sea star, a Fresnel lens to magnify the sun through, a character in an RPG. She was to be the conduit through which It could finally experience the world.

In the whirlwind of thought she felt for a moment a wisp of feeling that resembled loneliness; It had not been lonely before her. But it was fleeting… the rising pain in her temples drowned it out.

She understood, even if she didn't agree, even if understanding gave her a headache worse than anything. It hurt badly enough when It acquired the handle to her mind like a book to read… when It instead expressed nonverbal concepts directly into her brain she felt like her head might explode from buffer overflow. But just as she feared that something in her would break, the pressure around her skull gave way. That left only the faint clammy sensation.

Calliope struggled to string words together.

"I… I kinda get it, but… why mirrors? Why me?"

The image of the unreal thing behind her doppelganger flickered for a moment. She remembered the texture that the clay had had in art class in the seventh grade. They'd been told to sculpt self-portraits and hers had come out lumpy and misshapen–how so Calliope of her. She understood then that It used her face as a convenience, a shadow between her and the great bulk she'd glimpsed and wished she hadn't–it was to protect her mind from shattering into a million pieces. She supposed she should be thankful. But her question persisted; this was twice now that It'd appeared to her in a bathroom mirror of all places.

It smiled–it actually fucking smiled. The effect of its first expression was far from comforting, however. Callie feared that if those thin lips parted Its mouth would have far too many teeth–or something unimaginably worse–hidden away inside.

Her eyes flew open without conscious order. It placed a pale hand on the rim of the mirror like it wasn't even there. Pale… paler even than she was, Its skin almost translucent, the way it blurred at the edges reminding her of underlight blooming through film. Then, to her horror, It started crawling forwards, hand over hand until It was fully out–dear God. It sat right on the edge of the sink, which groaned a little under the weight. That proved that It really did have mass and wasn't an illusion after all. The part of her brain still responsible for caring about her job worried that it would break and shatter into hundreds of shards of porcelain–like that was her greatest fucking concern right now.

The other Calliope Mondegrene stepped gracefully onto the floor, walking past her while she, the original, stayed rooted to the spot. Its gait seemed unnatural and wrong… she couldn't bring herself to look too closely to examine exactly why. There was nothing she could do to stop It from opening the bathroom door, the last barrier between It and the real world. It was really an obstacle in name only. She had no other choice; she followed It out of the bathroom.

It was unnerving to see her own body run some feet ahead of her. It ran Its ghostly fingers–God she could really use a tan–along the sinusoidal glass formed by the row of coffee carafes. That they didn't blister and burn should've been the first sign. Stella was at the far end of the room with her back turned, wiping down the counters at the drive thru–classic workaholic. Callie didn't want to know what would happen if she turned and saw two of her, one of whom was only pretending to be human. Or, wait, maybe that was her, too…

It opened Its mouth to speak. She braced herself for some hideous utterance in an alien language dredged up from the depths of time, but no sound came. Stella did turn around, though–maybe she'd heard something? Her eyes swept over the counter… past her double, locking onto her. Calliope. The real one. Her hands swept to the green apron over her hips.

"Tsk. Callie, I know there's no way you finished cleaning the bathroom already."

The second and definitive sign: there was no expression of horror on Stella's face: no raised eyebrows, not even a hint of fear on the beginnings of her wrinkles.

"It's rude to stare, Callie. Are you okay?" She scolded.

Huh? What? Now It was looking at her too with a mixture of confusion and interest. Callie shook her head to try and snap out of it all. Or, maybe her neck would snap instead, and she wouldn't have to deal with any of this any longer–she could hope.

"Sorry–think I'm just tired. I'll uh, go back."

"You should get more sleep. Please, get it right this time!" Stella chastised.

She hesitated to turn her back on It even knowing that It wasn't real, at least real in the way that she herself was. With great effort she forced her legs to move: left foot, right foot, until her double was no longer in her field of vision. Even then she could still feel Its presence enveloping her skull like jelly, those bright eyes lasered onto the nape of her neck. She shuddered; she continued forward. Past the row of carafes still too hot to touch, around the corner, she pushed open the door once more and–

Of-fucking-course It was waiting for her in the bathroom mirror again. Why the hell not? The dreaded smile was no longer there at least–it'd been replaced or rather removed for the creepy blank expression she'd come to associate with It. On instinct she moved to fix her hair and found that she could not: her reflection stood there like a lifeless mannequin, no longer giving any attempt to mimic her.

Confrontation evidently hadn't worked; she'd try ignorance this time. Maybe if she just put it out of her mind and got back to cleaning like Stella'd asked, It'd simply go away? Engaging in the plain and ordinary could–she hoped–be a remedy for all things mad. So: she plunged the mop head into the bucket and withdrew it once again. Gray droplets dripped from the curled strands back into the pool–Calliope was thankful she couldn't see her face through all the murk, even if she squinted.

Her heartrate was quickening. Not this again. Was she destined to not have a moment's peace, now? Flashes of color made it hard to see what she was doing. She couldn't even be sure if she was still actually mopping, or only imagining things. Maybe all she had ever done was imagine things. Thoughts and feelings of unknown origin danced across her synapses: shame, embarrassment, self-punishment. Okay, those were very familiar to her. Were these her thoughts? No–

In Its infinite wisdom It'd made an error. It'd mistaken a one-way channel for duplex, tried to send signals using a receiver. How could It have known that reality just wasn't stitched that way, that the ocean couldn't pull back on the moon, no matter how rogue the waves? All it amounted to was spots of salt, pepper and ghosts in her visual field–It wasn't real. It wasn't real! Calliope was a glass bottle through which It could only look outwards, like a captive djinn… or a shipwreck. It strained against the confines of her tiny, wet, simple, pathetic, limited, simian excuse for a mind. She almost felt sorry for It.

Something had been learned, though. Hallucination wasn't mutually exclusive with actual sight; a clean integration was possible. It'd felt real right up until the instant that Stella turned and It had faltered, unable to proceed. Surely that kind of augmented sight was more acceptable than the full-body experiences she'd had at the party?

That last one hung in the air: in her mind's eye, the literal hook of the eroteme rested on a peg. Calliope struggled to unscramble which ideas were hers and which were not, even as she swished the mop back and forth on the same section of tile out of pure habit. Which way, left or right? Whatever the hell It was, It wasn't going either anytime soon, no matter how much she pleaded… they had to learn to coexist. She couldn't do that if her brain felt like it'd been tossed in a blender on the highest speed.

"If you're going to put shit in my head, or whatever, can you at least make it clear that it comes from you?" Her speech was a miracle under the circumstances.

It could–It would. Okay… that was better. Still… confounding. She wondered why It hadn't spoken to her again, in words. In response came that feeling again: humiliation, on a scale she'd never known it. But–she insisted–that was fine, she felt trapped in her own head sometimes too, what was one more? She knew the frustration It was having, on a personal level: the discord between mind and body, the sense of pouring yourself out into the world and meeting resistance from within. It happened every time she tried to do something creative: the translation from thought to pen to page was agonizingly imperfect.

Like trying to force the ocean into a thimble.

In spite of herself she raised an eyebrow. It seemed to love reminding her of how small she was through metaphor–especially of the maritime variety, for some reason. Didn't she know that she was only a teeny-weeny grain of salt in a vast, endless sea? Yeah, of course. She knew. She'd read somewhere once that supposedly elephants thought humans were cute, the way people thought cats or dogs or isopods were cute. She sensed It held a similar sentiment towards her, at least to the extent that It held vaguely comprehensible feelings. If nothing else, It found her interesting, deceptively so despite her miniscule nature. Though, she also doubted that made her very special–if you'd never even heard of a person before, of course the first one you met would be interesting! Duh. As scientists once mapped every neural interaction of some grubby nematode, so It too had mapped the whole of her–it was her interaction with her environment that so perplexed it. That gnawing sense of confinement, of needing to grow and spread into the world beyond her eyes and ears… that was still there. But it could wait. In the meantime, perhaps they had an understanding.

Calliope took a long blink. It was quiet now. The world still looked sharp, and her head was still pulsing in the background, slowly, but: her thoughts were fully her own. If she were more animated she'd have steam pouring from her ears from the intensity of the experience. It'd likely discovered that so much dialogue above her station was slowly cooking her little human brain and so pressed the mute key just before scrambling her like an egg. How nice of It.

She looked down; the mop was nearly dry and the small section of tile she'd been scrubbing appeared squeaky clean. Like new, even. She looked up, this time expecting some third horror in the mirror. She was not disappointed–it stood now completely empty. She couldn't tell how she knew it, whether it was implanted or was simply intuition, but she knew that the lack of a reflection was a signal. We're still here, It reassured her. We'll always be here.

She both missed the sight and welcomed the lack of her reflection in the glass. Love/hate, maybe she'd get used to It.

She clung to the mop handle as her sole lifeline to normalcy and resumed swabbing.