Fourteen
Suburb. Fluorescent ceiling. No shadows.
You notice it bending to tie your shoe.
The lace has come loose again — the left one, always the left — and when you crouch on the sidewalk the concrete is warm in a way concrete shouldn’t be at this hour. There is no hour. The panels above hum their low panel hum. You pull the lace tight and see that your hand is resting on nothing. No dark shape beneath it. No shoe-shadow. No you.
You stand up slowly, the way you’d stand up from a body.
Mrs. Sanxis is watering her hydrangeas three houses down. The water falls and the hydrangeas receive it and neither the woman nor the hose nor the arcing water casts anything onto the lawn. The lawn is lit from above in the same flat way the street is lit, in the same flat way the inside of your mouth would be lit if you opened it.
You open it. You close it.
You walk back toward your house — the one with the brass 14 on the door, the one whose porch light has been on since you moved in, since before you moved in — and you try to remember moving in. You remember a truck. You remember signing. You remember the realtor’s hand extended and you remember shaking it and you do not remember whether her hand had a shadow.
The panels hum.
Inside, you go to the bathroom and turn on every light and stand in front of the mirror and wait for the reflection to do something the reflection shouldn’t. It doesn’t. It is you, perfectly, to the millimetre. You lift your right hand. It lifts its right hand. You smile. It smiles. You say please out loud and the reflection’s mouth makes the shape please and nothing is wrong except that on the tiled floor beneath your feet there is only tile.
You go back outside.
Mr. Ferrandis from 16 is walking his dog. The dog sniffs at the hedge. You raise your hand to wave and Mr. Ferrandis raises his hand to wave and you hold your hand up a second longer than you need to, up toward the panels, and you watch your palm, and you watch the sidewalk beneath your palm, and you keep watching.
Mr. Ferrandis is still waving.
He has been waving for some time now.
Written for Labyrinthia Mythweaver’s Salon.
If you want more like this, there's a subscribe button below. No newsletter, no schedule — just stories when they come.
Creepy I was picturing someone living inside a model like a train set or developer’s model of a neighborhood.
Most people don’t notice absence as a signal.
But when something fundamental like grounding, reflection, or consequence disappears, reality doesn’t announce it, it just quietly stops behaving like a system you can validate, and starts behaving like one you can only observe.