Hey there! The following short story is strange and weird. It's the complete opposite of anything I would usually write, but it was a lot of fun. Your mileage with it may vary.
Contains references to heavy topics. Reader discretion is advised.
The cheap lights flickered above Cassandra’s head. She briefly wondered whether it might be morse code.
Cassandra had always been like this - inquisitive, she called it. Her parents preferred the word “imaginative”. Much like catching a cold, she often caught a hunch. A whiff of air that didn’t quite smell right, or a sentence that perked up her ears for some unplaceable reason; often only getting to the bottom of why after weeks of reflection.
She didn’t believe in many “conventional” ideas. And this was difficult for her, but it was how her brain was wired. Not much point fighting it.
So, right now, she was sitting in a grubby diner, staring at the lights, and wondering whether they were trying to tell her something. On, off, and on again. Was there a pattern?
Perhaps someone had died here and they were haunting the building, trying to warn Cassandra that her next meal would be laced with something foul, placed there by the very same killer. Or maybe it was less intentional than that - a classic case of food poisoning.
That would align with the facts, Cassandra thought. The diner had a reputation for food that wasn’t exactly digestible. It was a big chain diner, owned by the “Ronald’s” company. Between the “Ronald’s” supermarket down the road, the “Ronald’s” hotel across from it, and every “Ronald’s” property inbetween, it only made sense that quality would slip. A man can only juggle so many bags of cash.
If this really was the case, and someone had died of food poisoning, or one of the chefs had accidentally used glue instead of mayonnaise, or the burger patties were made of whatever the broom swept up off the floor, well, Cassandra couldn’t follow through with her plan of eating here.
But she was in a comfortable spot, and her best friend in the whole world had come with her, so she’d just have to forgo eating tonight. There were crisps in the cupboard at home, anyway.
Her friend turned to face her. Her name was Annie, and she had the most vibrant green hair Cassandra had ever seen. She had a round face, much like a penny, framed with an even rounder smile. Her eyes were always sparkling with something just out of reach, sometimes in tandem to her smiling face, and other times in spite of it.
As much as Annie pretended to wear her heart on her sleeve, eyes were the true window to the soul. It’s a shame Cassandra was never that great at looking people in the eyes.
Annie said, “I don’t think anyone actually died here.”
Cassandra responded, “Money can twist perception. You’d be surprised.”
Annie sat back in her chair. She was not surprised. She said, “What are you going to order?”
“Nothing, for now. I can chew on my thoughts.”
“And how are they?”
Cassandra considered this.
“Green,” she answered. “Green and smiling. And asking too many questions.”
She imagined that, if Annie were with her right now, she would reach forwards and flick her nose. But, unfortunately, she was not.
Cassandra wasn’t actually talking to anyone.
“Look at that person,” said Annie. Cassandra did. She looked at the table in front of her and saw a family of three eating dinner. The skeleton of a wild animal sat in the centre of their table, pieces of meat greedily snatched out of its ribcage and plunged into their hungry mouths. Little by little, until nothing would be left. Cassandra heard an alarm go off in the kitchen, and she imagined the animal screaming.
“Which one?”
“Under the table. There’s a kid playing hide-and-seek.”
So there was. The child, barely a toddler, crawled around the family’s ankles, up and around their legs, playing with their shoes. There was no reaction from the family. They didn’t care. Why didn’t they care?
“It’s not their kid,” said Annie. “Doesn’t look anything like them.”
“That doesn’t change anything.”
The ghost haunting the light above Cassandra flickered once more. It might have been Annie, if Cassandra wasn’t so sure she was still alive.
“Maybe you’re missing something,” Annie suggested. “I could have left something for you. At my house. Buried somewhere she won’t find.”
A tempting offer. Her previous search had been anything but thorough.
The family in front of her began tearing off pieces of the skeleton and eating them too. Hard bone splintering in their mouths.
She made her mind up.
A dark road, vacant of streetlights, stretched out in front of her. The silhouettes of trees were barely visible, black branches in front of a black sky. There was no moon. Cassandra figured this was on purpose; the world owed her a favour. She’d be near-invisible.
She’d walked along this street, at this hour, a thousand times in the past. She knew every curb, every pothole. Bullet points of places to avoid. Which floodlights in front of which houses had automatic sensors that would blow her entire operation wide open.
Annie’s house had no such issues. It was painted a dark red - somehow always visible no matter the hour or weather. The house was ominous and foreboding, seeming taller than it really was, but Cassandra wasn’t scared by such a thing anymore.
As she unlocked the gate and made her way into the front garden, she froze.
The sculptures were gone.
Suddenly, it was daytime, and while Cassandra stayed in exactly the same place, she was now someone else entirely. A memory, maybe. Or a story. The sun was bright and there were little red flowers on the grass.
The sculptures were here, too, scattered throughout the garden. Tall, glass cylinders stacked on top of each other, some filled with tiny drops of thick liquid. They were wine bottles.
The first sculpture, consisting of 10 bottles, depicted a telephone. One bottle represented the receiver, the liquid inside reverberating around as the bottle rotated, shaking, twisting. The phone was ringing.
The second sculpture depicted a house. Smoke rose from the bottle representing the chimney. A swingset stood outside the front of the house, the seat made of a cork. A car was parked on the curb outside.
The third sculpture was the strangest. It depicted a woman entering a child's bedroom. Her face was unreadable. The child was crying, because her parents had left, and they had no idea why.
The fourth represented a car. The sculpture moved around the garden, driving in a figure of eight. The child sat in the backseat, uncomfortable at having to sit on a seat made of wine bottles. The woman sighed, loudly, audible even over the rumbling of the engine. The liquid sloshed around manically.
Still within this alternate reality, Cassandra turned away and walked up to the front door, dodging a particularly nasty cherry bush. Her hand - much lighter skinned than she was used to, and wearing colourful pink and green rings - knocked on the door.
No answer.
She looked around. The sun was shining brightly.
She tried again. This time, she heard a shout, and then the door opened.
A girl with bright green hair peered through the crack between the door and the frame. When she saw who it was, she opened the door properly and smiled. This was a friend.
“Brenda!” said Annie. Her eyes sparkled, and after glancing at something behind the door Cassandra couldn’t see, she continued, “I can’t come out right now. I’m really sorry.”
“Oh.” Brenda replied. She lowered her picnic basket. This was not her plan.
“It’s not that I don’t want to spend time with you. In fact, every morning I wake up and I can’t wait to see you. And Cassie, too. But...”
A voice called Annie’s name from the living room, interrupting her. She grimaced.
“You can go,” said Brenda.
Annie paused for a fraction of a second, hesitant. “I’ll call later, I promise,” she said, taking one last look before gingerly closing the door.
Brenda stood still for a moment, and then, processing the information fully, she exited the way she came. Past the tall glass sculptures and through the gate.
She’d never see Annie again.
Cassandra stepped over dozens and dozens of glass shards, seemingly spanning the grass covering the whole front garden. The sculptures, it turned out, had not vanished. They had been smashed into pieces. A few of these pieces shook gently, ringing or turning, not aware that their purpose was obsolete. Moving parts of a broken whole.
The backdoor was easy to lockpick, and soon Cassandra was inside the kitchen. The lights were off. It was midnight, after all - and if Annie’s aunt was actually home, she’d be fast asleep on the sofa by now, Cassandra was sure of it.
Every reflective surface exploded within the otherwise dark room. The oven door. A wine glass, half full, on the counter. A set of sharp knives displayed next to the fridge, the largest one missing. Cassandra caught her reflection, her eyes letterboxed inside a knife. For a brief moment she thought they might be Annie’s. They weren’t sparkling with anything, though.
She spoke to her now. “This way,” she called from far away, guiding Cassandra into the corridor. “Further,” she called again, leading Cassandra to a big, brown door. “In here,” from behind. Cassandra quietly slid inside.
Cassandra had been in here, once, a week before Annie had first gone missing. Her room had been messy, back then, with her sketchbooks and photographs sprawled out over the hardwood floor. Colourful plushes adorned the headboard of her bed, and a daisy chain was draped over a mirror. Now, the room was the opposite; neatly made, any ounce of personality tucked away behind a wardrobe or shoved inside a drawer. It looked like a hotel room.
She propped up a torch on the nightstand and got to work. First, she checked underneath the bed, immediately finding a shoebox. The inside was filled with photos, precious memories attached to strings and dangling in the air in front of her.
She put them to one side - she could look at those later.
As she went to stand up, her foot hitched on the rug, revealing... something. Cassandra moved to one side and lifted it, slowly. The hardwood flooring underneath was stained a deep black. Her first suspicion was dried blood, a rug being tossed over it after deep scrubbing proved to be ineffective - but no, that couldn’t be right. This wasn’t red, nor was it black either. In fact, it was a deep, dark brown.
Cassandra imagined a monster, wearing the wallpaper from the corridor as skin, slipping into Annie’s room through the bedroom door. Annie would wake from her bed, grabbing a knife out of her bedside table and jamming it into its throat. Deep, dark, brown blood gushing out of its wound, the monster might flee. Annie could have followed it. Or maybe she fled, too, afraid to linger in case one day it returned.
The creak of a floorboard made her jump.
Even though the torch propped up on the nightstand was pointed directly at Cassandra’s face, the shadow of Annie’s aunt was unmissable. Tall and thin, her arms crossed. Cassandra couldn’t see her face, but she knew what it would look like. Small, beady eyes. Permanent frown.
They both said nothing.
Slowly, Cassandra stood. Annie’s aunt, standing in the doorway, stepped ever-so-slightly to the side. The gesture was obvious. Go on. Out you go.
Cassandra grabbed her torch, grabbed the shoebox, and left.
As she walked out - perhaps it was the darkness, or perhaps she felt particularly bold - she dared a glance at where this woman’s face should be.
This close, she could see the pupils of her tiny eyes. She’d never seen them before.
They sparkled, just like Annie’s.
Brenda’s store was a cosy place; pastel pink walls covered in glitter and sparkles, serving as a backdrop to the rows and rows of candy, chocolate, and everything inbetween. Cookie-dough and ice cream and cinnamon blended together into a pleasantly familiar smell, never so bold it was overpowering but always hovering on the sidelines, patiently waiting for you. It was wonderful.
Brenda herself was as if someone had used a giant human-shaped cookie cutter on one of the walls of the store and painted a smiling face onto it. The embodiment of candy - sweet, colourful, and just a little nutty.
It was spring. The three of them were baking cupcakes together.
“No cherries,” said Annie, and Cassandra agreed. Icing and sugar stars were more than enough. Anything more than that would be overkill.
“Business isn’t going well,” said Brenda. They were in her living room now, a plate of cookies between them. “A new shop opened on Crayfish last month. Owned by that big company. They’re selling everything I do, but at half the price.”
Cassandra spoke. “Factory processed rubbish. I bet it’s powered by a huge mechanical engine, funnelling rain into powdered sugar.”
“And it runs on frowns,” Annie added.
She could see it now. Lines and lines of engines, plugged into rainclouds and churning out differently shaped but ultimately grey amorphous blobs. It wasn’t the blobs Cassandra had a problem with, no - it was the fact that they were then dolled up, coated under mountains of pre-processed colouring, made to look like something they weren’t. It made her sick.
They were grey at their core. No amount of dye could change that.
Brenda grabbed a cupcake off of the plate, and then paused, frowning at it. She said, “Weren’t these cookies before?”
Cassandra shrugged. “Maybe. I wasn’t really paying attention. They can be cookies if you want.”
“Oh, no. I don’t mind.”
A pause.
“Well... okay. Now I’m lost,” Brenda said. Both her and Annie turned to look at Cassandra. “What happens next?”
She knew, of course. She’d remembered this a hundred times.
“Annie starts talking about something important. Really important. She’s crying. There are tears streaming down her cheeks because she’s crying. I think about my parents, specifically when my mum made a snide comment at me a few weeks ago. I left the fridge door open overnight and she said something rude about it. My skin starts boiling over like it’s going to explode, because parents should do better than that.”
Brenda frowned. Cassandra continued, despite it, “You start braiding Annie’s hair. I go make hot chocolate.”
A drop of liquid fell from the ceiling. The floor rippled, and then the walls followed suit, and suddenly the whole room was rippling until it wasn’t Brenda’s living room anymore but in fact a hotel lobby. Cassandra was standing behind a desk and watching a receptionist pour hot chocolate powder into a dirty-looking mug. The wall behind them was covered in flashy posters displaying various food and meat.
The scene very suddenly jumped ahead and the receptionist was now standing directly in front of her.
“I’m sorry,” he said, smiling despite his miserable words. “No one has ever booked a room here under that name. Is there anything else I can do for you?”
Cassandra put the lid back onto the shoebox and shook her head.
She should probably call Brenda.
*
“Hello?”
“...”
“Cassandra, is that you? Is it really you?”
“...”
“Listen. Are you listening?
“...I am.”
“Okay. Alright. I won’t pretend to understand what you are thinking and feeling. I never have. You like to take the gnarled, knotted, twisted road, all by yourself. You like stopping and staring at the trees and bushes. I could never do that alone.
“But... I could do it with a friend.
“You don’t need to go alone. I can come with you.
“Cassandra, will you let me come with you?”
”...”
Cassandra turned to Annie.
“What do you think?” Cassandra whispered.
“You two were my best friends,” she responded.
That afternoon, Cassandra returned to the diner and ordered a burger. She noticed that the crawling kid from yesterday was no longer here. She didn’t know what to think about this, so she didn’t.
She held the burger between her fingers and bit into it, ignoring the light flickering above her, warning her. This was a bad idea. Don’t do it, the ghost cried. Electrical tears zapped the circuitry, terrified, knowing what was coming and powerless to stop it.
She paused. There was a hair in her mouth. She fished it out with one hand, then froze.
The pit in her stomach became a black hole and swallowed the entire diner with it.
The hair was green.