Oceanrest Flash Fiction, World Building Exercise
Oceanrest. There’s something wrong with this place.
Can’t you feel it?
“Something in the water” people might say–but it’s not in the water. It’s in the air. Airborne, like fungal spores taking root in your lungs. Spreading. Turning your insides into a mushroomed jungle. Greasy growing on your skin like milky sweat. The fog around the docks, the leftover factory smell in abandoned warehouses, something not quite smog. Can’t you feel it?
I can. I can feel it inside my lungs, around my innards, on my skin. It’s like a second me growing inside the first one. A second reality waiting under our own, its lungs inside our lungs. We inhale, it exhales. It’s pushing itself through a crack here, something we can’t see but can vaguely feel. Something old and instinctual. We can’t see it, but an unconscious impulse deep in the twitch of our lizard brain tells us it’s here. Tells us we should get away from it.
Can’t you feel it?
Inhale. Exhale. Don’t you feel that shudder? That half-second weakness, shivering in your alveoli, your bronchioles?
There’s a heartbeat behind your heartbeat. Listen to it. No. Listen closer. Listen to the thing behind the thing, inside it. Hear the whispers breathing through the crack. Feel the spores drifting through the fog. Feel the second reality living behind ours. Feel it pulse there, waiting. What is it waiting for?
Something about this place…something really wrong.
Makes people do bad things.
Might make you do bad things. Maybe it’s small. All bad things start small. The spore that grows. Might make you lie about something important, one day. Might make you wait a little too long to hit the brakes. Might make you pick up a gun and put it in an old woman’s gummy mouth.
Do you feel it, yet?
I can feel it. Since the day I got here.
Might make me do something bad, one day. Might make me do something bad to you.
Listen…
The post Oceanrest Flash Fiction, World Building Exercise appeared first on Spencer Rhys Hughes.
