Young Writers Society

Adam looked at the person who had stepped outside to take a phone call and his father lying in the snow.

He could feel his heart pounding, just like when the cops had showed up at that Grateful Dead concert back in '76. Similar circumstances, except it was summer then. Martin Tully had been lying on the ground, the left side of his face already black and blue, when Adam had been arrested.

Jail had been a blur. His mother had refused to bail him out, and then Martin had dropped the charges. He'd been so lucky. It was a sign. To get serious. To change his life.

Mary had been in the backseat when his mother had picked him up. He'd known she was a life partner then. For sticking with him.

That night, they'd gotten rid of all of their drugs.

He couldn't ever be that boy again.

"Nothing," Adam told the party guest. He gave Jay a look, and the two stood up and went back inside.

What was going to happen now? It had to start going dark.

The fantasy was beginning to break.

Kira could tell it from the way that Bobby suddenly left the room. She followed after her, weaving between strangers that were convinced that she was their family. She could think about how that made her feel in the comfort of her own bedroom when they finally got out of this - for now, she needed to focus on who needed the attention the most.

She found Bobby by the Christmas tree, staring at a pile of presents. Even before she saw the tears forming at the corner of Bobby's eyes, Kira was sitting down on the ground next to her - giving her the kind of warm smile Rex had always given her when she had a bad day.

(The kind of warm, comforting smile that Ray gave her now.)

"Hi," she awkwardly said, not quite sure how to start a personal conversation like this with someone who was barely more than a stranger.

Bobby cringed when Kira spoke. She didn't want her there. She didn't want anyone there. She didn't want to be there.

Papa could be seen out the window, pacing, on the phone. The nice smile on his face was faked, Bobby could tell. Papa was angry.

"Hi," she squeaked.



Queenie got up from the cookie table and immediately was almost yanked off her feet by the hair. Turning, her scowl landed on a grubby little toddler with their frosting-coated fingers tangled in her braid.

She tried to soften her expression, but she didn't have the focus to hide her annoyance. She tried to gently tug her braid from the kid's hands, "Hey, would you let go please?"

James waited outside of the bathroom, letting out a sigh. He leaned his head back on the wall as he heard the toilet flush, and the sink run. It wasn't that long really, but a minute was beginning to feel unbearably long with all of this noise, and the knowledge that this was just going to be another dream gone wrong.

A kid finally came out, slowly, like a test of his patience. He watched as the little boy ran out with frosting on his face back to the main room, and James slipped into the bathroom, closing the door behind him. Even the bathroom had Christmas decorations. Red-and-green towels, and a little tree atop the toilet tower. It seemed like a lot, but maybe this was normal. He wouldn't know, and it didn't really matter.

He only gave the decor one passing glance before looking into the big mirror above the sink. His cheeks and nose were still a little red from the cold, and his hair was hidden under a red hat with a pom-pom on it.

He stared at himself intently for a long time, willing for something to change, but he didn't see anything. It was just him, and the cheerily decorated bathroom.

He sighed. With his hands resting on the edge of the sink he let his head fall in defeat.

They were just going to have to wait this one out, weren't they?

She could tell Bobby was uncomfortable, but Kira also didn't want to leave her alone right now. She looked Bobby over for a moment, trying to find the right words to say and to decide what the right thing to do was.

"Are you okay?" she asked - even the answer was clearly written across Bobby's face.

Bobby wanted to lie. Lies made people go away, even if they didn't believe it. But she couldn't. Tears choked the words from her throat, and the lie couldn't make its way out into the world.

So, with great difficulty, Bobby shook her head.

Before Kira could say or do a thing, Bobby's dad came out from the kitchen - he must have come back in through the back door - and loudly announced it was time to open presents.

A sea of excitedly shrieking children flooded into the living room to surround the mountain of presents. One of the cousins forced his way between Bobby and Kira to get a better look at the tag of one of the presents, and then they were all ushered away from the pile by the adults, who started to sort through the colorful boxes into piles in front of the kid they belonged to.

Bobby had somehow ended up squished between two of the cousins her age at the foot of the couch. One of their elbows was digging into her ribcage, but he didn't seem to notice past the pile of shiny packages that got bigger and bigger with every passing moment.

Eventually, the pile beneath the tree dwindled to nothing, and, just as Bobby thought, there wasn't a single package in front of her.

Her insides twisted as papa moved to the center of the semicircle and said, "Let's open them up one present, one person at a time!" it was what they did every year, and it usually took a long time. Not that anyone minded that much when they were just excited to have presents to open.

"Bobby, you want to go first?" he said, looking at her, then the empty space in front of her.

A pause.

"Oh...Right, um, your presents are still in the kitchen," he said with the big smile he only gave when he was lying really hard, "I'll be right back, folks. No one peek at your presents while I'm gone."

With that, he got up and went to the kitchen. Mama followed him.

Idle chatter broke out among the gathered family. Impatient whining from the littles, consoling and gushing from the adults. More than a few pitying looks were cast in Bobby's direction.

Meanwhile, Bobby sat stiffly at the foot of the couch. She knew what came next. She was just counting down the seconds, unable to move. No matter how many times she'd gone through it in her head, now that she was here, she was back, she couldn't do anything.

Bobby listened carefully, flinching at every sudden noise, every slightly raised voice, until, finally, she could hear it.

A whispered fight, rising steadily in volume. It was still disguised by the chatter, for the most part, but Bobby knew papa's voice, and mama's. Louder, louder. She couldn't make out what they were saying, but suddenly it didn't much matter.

Crash!

Thre was a moment of silence. Horrible, eternal silence.

James was about halfway down the hallway when he heard the crash. Things were going wrong, and he knew it was inevitable, but that crash did not sound good.

He pushed past two people in the hall as he hurried to the source of the noise. He heard a door open and shut before he found himself at the entrance of the kitchen.

Bobby’s mother was in the floor, sprawled out with a growing pool of blood around her head. The shattered remains of a pitcher danced around her head on the floor, and the attacker was nowhere to be found. They’d fled, whoever it was.

James hurried to the woman’s side and checked her pulse. She still had one, and she was still living and breathing, but she might not be for very long with how quickly she was losing blood. James didn’t give it much thought as he knelt beside her and lifted up her head, slowly, to get a better look at the wound, and to elevate her.

He grabbed a towel off of the oven handle and pressed it up against the wound.

It was then that he remembered all fo this wasn’t real. It was just a dream. No matter what he did, Bobby’s mother would still die anyway. She was already dead, undoubtedly.

James sat there, looking down at the woman in his lap.

He wanted to go home now.

Adam took one last look at his father, and went inside. He punched a wall and let out a scream. He took a moment to calm down when he realized no one was paying attention.

Then, there was a crash. A crash that led to... no, not a kitchen.

And a woman lying in a pool of blood. The girl's mother. She was bleeding out in James' lap. He wanted to help, but he didn't know. Likely, it was all for naught. He couldn't look any more.

He didn't know the girl's story. Maybe she'd share it. Maybe not. She'd barely said a word before they'd split up. Likely the situations were completely different, but all he could think about was...

Is it so hard for you to just be nice?"

"Apparently! You know, my mother hated you too."

"Your mother was a brat. She had everything and she threw it away."

In the Altman kitchen on that Thanksgiving of 1988, Esther had responded to that comment by lurching forward and shoving her step-grandmother against a wall. And she'd done it hard. From the hallway, Adam had immediately seen the blood pool in the back of Marcia's head.

Luckily, they rushed her to the hospital and she was all right.

But Esther had almost immediately stepped back and realized the horror of what she'd done. She'd gotten her car keys and ran out of the house.

Adam had rushed after her, but it was no use. She never came back.

Adam collapsed onto the floor of the living room and began to cry.

What came next? Everyone had their fantasies now. They'd all gone horribly wrong. What more did whoever was engineering this want with them?

Kira heard the crash that had come from the kitchen. She knew enough about death to put together what had happened - it was something she had seen before, and something she would see again.

And Kira knew this was a fantasy, too. Even if she should have gotten up and checked the kitchen, what mattered most was the girl that was sitting stiffly on the ground beside her. She didn't know if Bobby was comfortable with contact from someone who was essentially a stranger, but she thought the least she could do was try.

She grabbed onto Bobby's hand and gave it a comforting squeeze.

Hopefully, the fantasy would be over soon.

The moment Kira's skin touched hers, Bobby jerked away, panic sending her heart crawling up her throat in a jolt of scrambling terror. She wrapped her arms around her knees and drew into herself, squeezing her eyes shut.

Let it be over.

This dream faded a little more gently than the others. It was gradual, like the scene around them was being blown away like dust a gentle breeze. When the dust settled, everyone was back in the room of mirrors, where they'd started. The festive clothes were gone, and everyone was back in their original, normal clothes. The music was replaced with silence.

James found himself sitting on the carpet, looking down into his now-empty arms with a sigh. For some reason, he'd hoped things would just end there.

He looked up and around the room, at the wall of mirrors around them, but the moment he looked into the mirrors his heart stopped.

He... he couldn't see his reflection. He couldn't see anyone's reflection. The only thing reflecting in the mirrors was the maze of colors and illusions that mirrors facing each other created and the occasional sliver of the dark black floor.

A low, low laughter rumbled throughout the room like overlapping voices almost perfectly synchronized. It filled the room like a tangible wave of sound. Malicious, and daunting.

"It's so interesting how both the most and the least deserving respond." A pause. "So human. So emotional." Another deep, dark chuckle.

James glared into the room, searching for the source of the voice - but he couldn't see anything. The thundering voice continued in mock pity.

"If your life carried with it less pain, and less sadness. If you had more power, more success. If you only got what you wanted. If only, if only, if only..."

James wanted to get to his feet, but terror glued him to the ground. Something inside him told him this being, this person, whatever it was couldn't be fought or persuaded. He just had to take it.

They were back in the mirror room.

Kira barely noticed that their reflections weren't showing anymore. It wasn't the most pressing thing to think about right now. She gave Bobby a worried glance (she should have known that Bobby wouldn't want her to hold her hand) and listened to the voice echo throughout the chamber. It was disconcerting to hear someone speak and not see where they were, but Kira felt a strange sense of calmness.

It was hard to be afraid of a voice that said everything she had already told herself when she was trying to fall asleep at night. She knew the words would hurt more the next night when she tried to sleep - and for countless nights after that. But right now, in the light of the mirror room?

She wasn't really flustered.

Her hand reached up to grab her necklace again. She ran her fingers across the rough metal of the feather charm and tried to come up with a reply.

She finally settled on one.

"Who are you?" she asked.

Bobby quietly sobbed into her knees. She hated it. She hated the voice, she hated the visions, she hated the mirrors, she hated, hated, hated...



Queenie's chest tightened with rage. The voice had the audacity, the fucking gall, to taunt them, to taunt Bobby, after all that. After everything, all it wanted to do was rub salt in the myriad wounds it's own invisible hands had inflicted.

"Who fucking cares," she snapped at Kira and turned her attention to the voice itself before Kira could give some pitiful response. "Get the fuck out here and show yourself," she demanded.

They were back in the room they'd started in. Back in their clothes.

Adam had almost forgotten about the room with the mirrors. Except this time, no one could see anyone's reflection.

The mechanical voice boomed. There were few things in life that truly scared Adam, and this was one of them. For the first time, he considered the possibility that he was dead, that his father was too, and everyone else he was with dead. That was explain why they were all from such radically different time periods.

But his father hadn't died in his thirties. His father was still alive.

"What do you want with us?" Adam screamed into the void, hoping the voice would hear.


*

Jay came into the room of mirrors thinking about his mother. He realized he hadn't seen his son's fantasy and he found himself curious to know what it would be. For someone that put on such a tough act, he sure seemed to be very vulnerable.

"What did you dream of?" Jay asked Adam while they waited for the voice to respond. The voice was vaguely familiar, but Jay couldn't place him.

"Don't worry about it," Adam replied without looking at him.

Okay, son. Complain and complain that your father is never there for you. Brush off your father when he tries to connect.

So like his mother.

James was glad for the others. He was tired of being brave, and, of course, he didn't think his manner of bravery was bravery much at all. It was just stubborn, reluctant compliance and resignation.

There was as small reply to everyone's questions as they shouted into the void, but then the mirrors darkened. Two beady, glowing red eyes could be seen like flickering lights in the distance, blinking out of existence, then closer. Then closer.

A dark mist crept in around them from the corners of the room, and then there it was.

A shadow of a man, with piercing, glowing red eyes, standing face-to-face with Queenie.

"Regret," he said, his voice still filling the room. "That is what you can call me, Kira."

His face drew away from Queenie, pulling back in a movement that didn't look natural, his head lagging behind his "body."

"And I've had my fun."

And from the pride and filthy satisfaction in his voice, James believed him.

"One last thing before you go now."