Dust flew into his eyes suddenly and his forearm instinctively jerked upward to his face. The sun beat hot on his baseball-capped head and a rush of desert wind kicked up his unzipped track jacket. He took several clumsy steps backward and fell on his bottom. The wind and the heat suddenly snapped away from existence and the air was still again. The air was that faux cold freshness that only a commercial central air system could provide. He looked around, panicked.
He was back in his grandparents’ convenience store, seated on the tile floor and mouth agape at the broom closet in the back which he was tasked to thoroughly declutter and clean. The store was open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. During the day, his father and younger brother would man the store. The overnight shifts were left for him, alone.
“What the hell… just happened…?” He spoke these words out loud, recomposing himself when realizing in afterthought that talking to himself was ridiculous. He shook off his self-judgement and brought himself to his feet. The broom closet was like any other closet. It smelled faintly of mildew, it was poorly lit and there was an array of cleaning supplies and discarded linens that were meant to be washed but were utterly forgotten about. The last thing he recalled before shifting between desert and back to the store was prying the shoddy broom closet door open with an old yardstick standing up beside it against the wall.
He warily approached the three-by-four closet. He poked his head in, tilting his baseball cap upward to look up at the flickering bulb that operated on an on-and-off string that hung limply in the air. Maybe I’m just tired… It’s late, he thought to himself. When he fully stepped into the closet to start reaching for random items strewn every which way, thrown into the closet thoughtlessly, he felt his body being tugged by the chest. The sensation felt as though an invisible force, a giant, grasped him like a doll by his torso and tugged him forward. His vision blacked out and when he came to, unaware of just how much time passed in his moment of unconsciousness, he found himself in outer space.
His body was afloat, and Earth was as small as cat eye marble. He flailed his limbs and panicked silently. He screamed but no sound rang forth in the dead of space. He thrashed as though he were drowning, making the panicked distinction that he was bare and in outer space and that surely this meant he would be dead within seconds. He couldn’t breathe, but at the same time, he could. His body should have frozen, being this far from the sun’s warmth, but he was the same, living temperature he had always been. He stopped flailing when he realized that his lack of breath was from panic. He stared out into the vastness of space. The stars were plenty and endless. He was ripped back into the convenience store, stumbling back onto the floor and before the entrance of the broom closet.
There was clearly something to this broom closet, he decided. He wondered if his family knew about it. Probably not… They neglected it long enough and left me to clean it up. He pondered why it was here. What is it? So many questions and ifs raced through his mind. He’d proven to himself, at least twice, that ‘appearing’ elsewhere and far away wasn’t a danger to him (at least not corporeally). The swell if curiosity began to override his sense of reason. He decided to test the broom closet further. It wasn’t as though any customers came by during this hour anyway, he rationalized to himself before taking another step into the closet, more confidently this time.
The pressure in his chest and the dizziness he felt on the forefront of his brain came forth when he stepped inside the broom closet for a third time. When he opened his eyes, he found himself in a marble city. The sky was peach pink, cloudless. The architecture was other-worldly, buildings and turrets twirling upward endlessly in the sky. The floor was glassy, and he manifested in the middle of foot traffic. The people, or at least humanoid creatures, were also marble in texture, their hair whipping lights of impossible colors. They did not wear clothes but there were distinctions of masculine features and feminine, though in a subtle way, exaggerated. They murmured in their native language amongst each other, taking cautious steps back from the alien. He gasped when he beheld the wonder of the city. He was certain that this place was the stuff of dreams, or at least works of meticulous fiction. The idea that he may not be welcome in this space had not yet registered to him. His head was thrown back, looking upon the impossible buildings and sky, twirling back as if entranced by the ambience of this world. This is amazing…
He was jerked away from his euphoric wonderment when he bumped back against a marbled child. “E-Excuse me!” He apologized fervently, but the child with its set of four sky blue eyes and pink sclera whined. The people around it began to shriek in unison. Where he brushed against the child, it began to dissipate into a fine mist as though a sanding tool met with a block of stone. “W-Wait… Wait!” He realized what was happening then. He was horrified, issuing his own screams of fear and regret as the child before him whisked away into the air along with its screams.
The marble-white people joined the erased child in silence, stopping abruptly. They now stood as statues, glaring with their multi-set eyes. Though their expressions were hard to read as they barely resembled human-like facial features, the young man could feel the hatred focused solely on him searing his skin. “I… I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to!” He babbled a poor apology to the folk, uncertain that they even understood his words.
He was yanked back from this space as though tripping backward on a curb. His chest was pounding, and he could feel pressure through the sides of his head. What did I do… What did I do… That wasn’t real, right? It couldn’t have been. It was an accident… I’m not likely to see them again, yeah. It’s not even real. This is just some weird, mental projection shit or… something. He ran through every possibility, rationale and justification for what just happened on his last trip through the broom closet. None of his conclusions brought him peace. He decided to spend the rest of his graveyard shift boarding up the broom closet. He doubted his family would notice or even care that it wasn’t cleaned, or even attended to. They had gone this long without realizing what it was, anyway.
***
Several years have passed by and his life was stagnantly the same; he still worked at his family’s convenience store. He dated, but never took on a serious relationship. He had not pursued higher education or any other job outside of doing his time at the store. The only difference between now and the time he had with the broom closet was that he was only slightly older.
The ground shook at 4 in the morning and his little brother, who shared a room with him in their parents’ apartment above the convenience store, shook him awake. “Wake up! Something’s happening!” His brother flashed his phone with a news feed. He squinted his barely awake eyes at the bright screen. His eyes widened in horror. He didn’t mean to shove his brother off him, but he was desperate to look out the window, tearing the blinds back.
A white and blue veined craft floated largely in the soft-indigo sky where daylight was beginning to creep in. It hummed and shadowed nearly half the city. It exhaled soft clouds and pulsed pink lights. It looked like it could barely move, so high up and far away from the ground. His stomach dropped, feeling as though it would liquefy and pour out of his anus. He swallowed hard at the reminder of its likeness to the marbled people from across the threshold of the broom closet. It took several years but they had found him. At least, they found approximately where he lived. At first, he feared retaliation like this. Days went by, then weeks. Those weeks turned into months and the months expanded to years. The further away the memory of the broom closet went, the more he convinced himself that the space-traveling he did that one mundane night was a figment of a dream. What the marble people were doing here on Earth, in his plane of existence, remained to be seen. Were they here for closure? Or where they here for revenge?
Fuck me…
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