Glitching Neurons - A Horror Short Story

by Louise Ember

She walks up the concrete staircase in front of her townhouse, clenching onto the cold, iron railing to keep her steady. To her right, she hears her neighbor open their front door, the hinges screaming for oil. She keeps her head down, pretending she did not hear them and hoping they do not see her. Jess was on her way to work when the bright morning sun reflected off windows and cars, sending hot white light into the back of her skull, and forcing her to turn back to the safety of her home.

“Good morning, Jessica,” her neighbor calls out with her children repeating like an echo. Their high-pitched voices strike Jess’ brain like a flash of lightning leaving a thunderous voice that rumbles around her head saying Go! Get out of here!

Jess gives them a small wave back, trying not to show any interest in conversation. The kids race to the car parked on the street, one claiming “shotgun” and the other whining about it. Her neighbor, Nicole, a single mother of twins, is a sweet woman with a soft southern accent. Years ago, before Jess moved in next door, Nicole quit her teaching job to become a nanny. Eventually turning into the neighborhood babysitter. Jess learned from her realtor that Nicole’s home is a child’s dream: a jungle-gym that takes up the entirety of her small backyard, chalkboard painted walls, an arts and crafts studio on the bottom floor, and a cloud bedroom for nap time.

"Don’t let her southern charm fool you," her realtor said. "Along with being the sweet neighborhood babysitter, she’s also the neighborhood gossip. She knows everyone and everything."

Jess wonders if it’s bad for business. Who would want to send their kid to a babysitter who gets high on drama and spits it out like dip, leaving chunks of secret tobacco everywhere she goes. Then Jess wonders if the mothers love the drama just as much as Nicole. Maybe it helps business rather than hinders.

Nosy Nicole will always stop Jess on the sidewalk in front of their homes and start rambling about the parents she works for. This is how Jess knows that the couple in the house with the yellow door across the street are swingers and how Jess’ neighbors on the left occasionally join them. The rhythmic bumping she hears through the wall feels different now. It’s not a “good for you,” feeling, it’s a “who’s that?” feeling, and Jess hates herself for thinking that way. Nicole tries to counter her shit-talk by saying “Bless her heart,” or “It’s none of my business.”

Because of the gossip, Jess has dodged, jumped, and ran away from every offer to have her over for dinner. How is she supposed to be comfortable in Nicole’s home knowing the only reason why she is there is for Nicole to collect some dirt on her? Jess imagines Nicole has jars of dirt, labeled and organized alphabetically in her closet, directly next to the skeletal remains.

Plus, with all the kids running around all the time, she would have to watch her mouth, and that’s not easy to do when she was raised by her three older brothers. She is fluent in profanity. Might as well be the Harvard professor for Creative Cursing.

She just isn’t built to be around kids. Jess is more built to pour her wine until it damn near overflows the glass, and use “fuck” as a noun, verb, and adjective any chance she gets. Sometimes it’s all in the same sentence.

She knows blowing off her neighbor all the time is wrong of her; she knows she is selfish and disrespectful. She knows telling Nicole how busy she is when she actually means that she’s busy lounging around in her underwear reading mystery novels is kind of fucked up. But Jess is okay with being a little fucked up. As long as she isn’t rude to her, Jess feels like it’s fine.

Jess pulls her keys from the front pocket of her bag, the clinging sends sparks through her ears. The pain makes her lose her grip, dropping the keys on the concrete and wincing from even more.

“Are you okay?” Nicole asks, stopping on the sidewalk in front of Jess’ steps.

“I just have a migraine,” Jess says as nicely as possible.

She has to use both hands to pick up the set of keys on the ground that have now doubled in her vision. “Oh, I’m sorry,” Nicole says, consolingly. “My sister gets those occasionally, too. She says turmeric tea helps.”

Nicole’s voice sounds as if someone has taken her volume bar and is sliding it back and forth. One word being almost silent and the next booming. Jess feels her stomach start to do flips. She uses both hands to shove her key into the lock, wanting to escape this conversation and escape the blinding lights and blaring sounds of the world.

Nicole continues the conversation that Jess is not involved in. “Do you have any? I can drop some off after I take the kids to school.”

“No, no. Thank you, Nicole. Don’t worry about it,” Jess says while stepping into her home. She hears Nicole yell “I hope you feel better,” before the door closes behind her.

Jess mumbles as she kicks her shoes off and lays her things on the foyer floor, “I just said I have a fucking migraine, you dumb fuck!”

Daisy slowly walks into the foyer to meet her, feeling the anger in the air. “Not you, baby,” she says, holding her hands out and crouching to her knees to hug her golden furred best friend. Jess adopted the fluffy retriever puppy the first month she moved to the city. She hadn’t made any friends at the marketing company she works for yet and she bought this townhouse with four bedrooms and no one to share it with. She was having a blast decorating and designing the interior of her new home, but every time she finished a project, the rooms felt like they contained a different type of oxygen. She can breathe it in, but her chest tightens and her eyes water, like there’s poison in the air called “homesickness.”

That’s when Daisy came into the picture. She doesn’t cure the feeling, but she helps it tremendously. The way she can’t control her tail when she’s happy, knocking over anything that stands in its way. The way she shoves into Jess’ legs and pushes her like she just can’t get close enough to her. The way she taps her back paws, swaying side to side, dancing from pure joy. Jess can’t get enough of Daisy’s personality. If she was a human, she’d be a cross between Jim Carrey and Theo Von. She would have Jim Carrey’s sporadic gestures and movements and Theo Von’s off-the-wall conversations. Her pup’s wacky and loving personality has been the greatest gift a lonely girl in a big city could have ever asked for.

After face kisses and belly scratches have reached a limit, Daisy runs to get one of her toys from the other room. She drops it in front of Jess, inviting her to try to grab it. When she does, Daisy pounces on it, grabbing it first and chomping down on the squeaker over and over.

Jess covers her ears, but the damage is already done. Her head throbs from the loud toy, making her clench her jaw and squeeze her eyes shut. “No, no, no,” Jess says. Daisy keeps chewing. When Jess reaches for it, Daisy thinks it’s a game, running across the room and squeaking it more. Jess’ vision becomes grainy and sharp lines dart from side to side. Pops, like gun shots, ring inside her head. Drop your weapon!

Jess yells, “Drop it!” and Daisy drops it in front of her and lies down, her whines tickling Jess’ heart, making her immediately regret her outrage. “I’m sorry, girl. Come here,” she says. Daisy obeys and Jess touches their foreheads together, giving Daisy scratches behind the ears. “Mommy has a headache, girl. We have to stay quiet.”

Jess gets up off her knees and makes her way to the couch. A couple steps in, the gravity shifts, and her head feels heavy. Jess has to catch herself by placing both hands on the wall and continues to walk cautiously to the couch. She falls back on her couch like she just did a trust fall on a cloud. The pressure inside of her head, thumps and pulses her vision. The walls of her boho decorated home look as if they’re breathing.

Daisy knows the drill. She jumps on the couch next to her, giving her a soft, cuddly pillow to wrap her arms around as she drifts off to sleep.

When Jess wakes up, the room is filled with shadows from the streetlights that leak in and Daisy is laying on the floor beside her, whining with her chin rested on the rug. Jess’ headache seems to have subsided. When she sits up, Daisy perks up and takes off running for the kitchen. She shoves around her food bowl, it clanging while it flips on the kitchen tile. A true test of if her headache is gone and it succeeds.

She rubs the sand from her eyes when trudging into the dark kitchen, socked feet sliding across the hardwood floor. “What’s for dinner, girl?” She asks Daisy. Daisy knowing exactly what’s for dinner and wondering what the holdup is.

Jess spoons a serving of Daisy’s food into her bowl and pops a couple frozen corndogs into the microwave for her own dinner. While the buzzing from the microwave plays as soft white noise, Jess opens the curtains of her back door, looking through the glass into the dark sky.

She misses the stars from the country. The light pollution here in the city fades the stars, taking the magic away, making the dark sky more of a depressing blanket rather than the mesmerizing, mental adventure full of excitement and hope.

Daisy steps on her bowl, flipping it on its side and it rolls to Jess’ feet. “Please don’t make a mess,” Jess says, but when she looks back, there’s no mess to clean and Daisy is sitting straight up, whining for her dinner. Daisy struts over to her bowl, nudging it with her nose, this time not asking, demanding for her dinner and making Jess backtrack.

Did she forget to feed Daisy? Did she come in here to feed her but get distracted by the stars?

Remembering the corndogs in the microwave, she thinks they will prove that she’s not going crazy. She walked into the kitchen, fed Daisy and started the microwave. That is a fact.

Jess pops open the microwave door to find…

nothing.

Jess’ eyes dart everywhere trying to read the room, looking around like something will tell her that she’s fine, like there’s going to be a sign that reads “Gotcha!” She scrolls through her memories trying to decipher which ones are real and which ones are fake. Daisy nudges her bowl again and Jess fills her bowl with a serving of food. She thinks about throwing something in the microwave again but doesn’t feel hungry anymore. She rests her hands on the counter, hangs her head and takes a deep breath in and releases it slowly.

She can’t help but think about her grandmother. How grandma Lydia suffered from dementia, not even remembering her own name in the end. She wonders how it started for her. Did she have moments like this where she knew she did something, but everything points in the direction that she, in fact, did not?

Jess looks at the ceiling, soaking the tears back into her eyes and decides she needs some fresh air. She reaches for the back door’s handle and instead of her hand touching the brass knob, it passes straight through like a projection. Her fingertips feel like static. With her hand raised, about to try again, she stares at the doorknob. Willing it to stay put like a training puppy. She lowers her hand, hovers over the handle for a second longer, and reaches for it again. It passes through.

Shock punches her in the gut, releasing all the air from her lungs. She rushes to the foyer, praying for the front door’s handle to turn. With only one try, the door opens. Jess feels the breeze that was pushing up against it, begging to come inside. It crosses her skin like a ghost pronouncing her an uninhabitable host. Goosebumps cover her arms and prickle her shins. Daisy comes sprinting around the corner, thinking it’s time for a walk and Jess thinks that is a great idea. She slips on her shoes, grabs her keys and Daisy’s leash and steps outside onto her stoop.

The initial breeze was deceptive. Jess notices the leaves on the trees lining the street are not shaking and the flags on the houses are hanging straight down without a millimeter of movement. Daisy pulls her along, telling her she’s ready to go.

They begin their usual route, while Jess plays the scene of her grabbing the door handle, over and over in her head, trying to make sense of it. It’s not possible. No, that’s just not possible. It’s not possible for a hand to go through an object. Period.

“Unless…” she says aloud.

When Daisy is busy sniffing around a fire hydrant, Jess finds herself an arm-length away from her neighbor’s wrought iron fence. She has to know. She sticks her hand out and rubs her fingers across the cold metal. A sigh of relief escapes her lungs, and she chuckles at herself.

“There for a second I thought we were in a simulation,” she tells Daisy as she’s currently squatting, adding to all the other scents.

Jess hasn’t looked at the clock since she woke up, but she knows it’s late. Probably around two or three in the morning. She’s never been on a walk this late before, but she expected it to be different, not busy—obviously—but some kind of human activity. In the city she thought all hours of night had noise. Cars driving down the street, sirens from emergency vehicles, something making the “city noise” that they talk about on TV. She didn’t think a Wednesday night would be so… dead, a voice in the back of her mind says. This whole block is dead. She’s the only one left—

NO.

She can’t think like that.

Reaching the end of the block and rounding the corner, Jess notices how dark the shadows look. They’re not a dark opaque, but a black hole. The shadows look like if you step on them, there wouldn’t be any ground to catch your foot. You’d fall into pitch darkness. And they’re everywhere. Every tree, every car, every fence leaves a patch of itself on the ground behind it.

A motion light on one of the townhomes with a garage on the first-floor floods the driveway and the sidewalk that she’s on. If anyone has been watching her, they have a perfect view now. She moves past the light and looks towards the home it came from, wondering if someone turned the light on because they saw her. If they were watching her from the window and used the light as a distraction or used it to blind her for what was about to happen. Like someone hiding around this tree coming up. She slows, almost to a stop. Daisy sniffing the ground, not finding anything fascinating. They pass the tree and no one jumps out from behind it.

Jess takes a deep breath and decides it’s time to go home. Her anxiety has played with her enough. She tugs Daisy’s leash, leading her to turn around, to go back the way they came instead of doing their usual circle around, but Daisy doesn’t move. She’s staring straight ahead, tail stiff, and softly growling. Jess doesn’t see what Daisy is growling at, her heart beating too loud to see anything in the darkness. Jess starts walking backwards, pulling Daisy with her, not wanting to turn her back on the invisible threat. It’s only when they pass the motion light a second time is when the thing that was hiding in the darkness appears to her. Not enough to make it out but can see it standing just on the edge of the light.

Jess thinks about an exit strategy. She looks around while still walking backwards, only looking away from the thing for a second. The pins in her head from earlier begin to stab her again, but she may see someone who can help. One of her neighbors has their living room light on with their curtains wide open, making their home a gallery for someone to see inside of. Jess can see the TV they’re looking at, staring at, and it’s off, no picture showing at all, just a black screen.

Jess waves her free hand, trying to get their attention, but they don’t see her. Jess looks again at the person in the home. They’re sitting straight up and completely still, like a humanoid robot that has been powered down. The thing in the darkness is moving, tracing the line of the light, going around it like a barrier that cannot be touched.

Her head now throbs to the rhythm of her heartbeat, pounding with every electrical impulse pumping the blood that has run ice cold.

Across the street, she sees someone else walking their dog, heading in the direction of the predator. “Hey!” Jess yells. The woman doesn’t look back. Jess yells louder, this time the woman hesitates. That’s not right. The woman doesn’t hesitate, she glitches. She takes a long step with her left foot, then right, then right again. The dog, a golden retriever like Daisy fades in and out walking beside the woman who is wearing the same color clothes as Jess.

Jess forgot to keep an eye on the thing while watching the woman’s image skip. She lost it. She turns and sprints home, Daisy following right beside her.

They are three houses away, floating past the first. Two houses away, keeping up the pace. One house away, Jess doesn’t even think about slowing down. One house away. One house away. One house away. Jess reaches for the railing of her steps, jumping and hanging on like the house will run if Jess doesn’t stop it.

Jess climbs the steps that look as if they’re made of water instead of concrete, moving in waves, making her seasick. At the top, she has to choose between one of the two doors that stand before her: one looks like it’s made of wood, the other looks like it’s made of red and blue cubes. She opens the wood door, slams it shut, and calls 911.

“911. What’s your emergency?” The dispatcher asks.

“I’m having some kind of reaction. I’m hallucinating.” she spits out, trying to catch her breathe between sentences. The voice on the other side pops and crackles, becoming so distorted she can’t make out anything the dispatcher is saying.

“No, no, no, no, NO!” Jess yells. She hangs up and tries to call back, but her phone becomes pixelated dust in her hands. Wiping her hands, shaking off the bits of metal and glass left over as a result. She can’t handle this. Her heart aches and she can’t catch her breath. Her chest tightens, like her rib cage is caving in on itself, making her double over in pain. Her sternum feeling as pressurized as an over inflated tire about to blow. Her knees give out on her and she falls to the floor, Daisy coming to her rescue with kisses on her face.

Jess rolls to her back, trying to inflate her lungs that refuse to expand and something clicks, audibly and mentally. A flip of a switch that tells Jess to stop. Stop struggling, stop thinking, stop resisting, just let it happen. She watches the walls as the paint peels off in big chunks, leaving a blank white wall behind. Every wall, one by one, section by section, becomes a bright white wall, almost looking as if it’s opaque with a surgical light shining through it.

Daisy lays beside her, whining, upset that Jess won’t get up and play with her.

The popcorn ceiling pops like its name, popping the spots like kernels and they fall to the floor all around her. Behind the ceiling isn’t a white slab like walls, it’s the night sky. The stars shine brightly above her. They rotate like the earth, showing her all the different constellations.

Jess begins to laugh. “I’m fucking batshit crazy,” she says aloud in amazement. “HA! I’ve gone completely insane. None of this is real. What I’m seeing isn’t real,” she rambles while staring at the stars, arms sprawled out beside her. A jolt of lightning in her brain feels as if the two halves are being cut apart and all of her pain disappears. She no longer feels the throb in her head or the tightness in her chest. She no longer feels anything, not even the shoes on her feet or the bra leaving marks on her skin.

The floor begins to sink, swallowing Jess up like quicksand and she allows it. She gives up. Whatever trip she’s having is too strong. She has to just let it ride. She lays perfectly still, letting her body sink into the floor. She sinks deeper and deeper until she is no longer laying on a solid floor but is floating beneath the floorboards. She watches as the floor seals itself up above her, stealing the last bit of light until she can no longer see anything. Not even her hand when she brings it to her face. Completely blind and floating down as if gravity was turned down to five percent. She’s falling so slowly that it is as if the air was made of cotton, gently lowering her down to rest on a pad of foam.

Jess’ vision begins to clear like the black tint on her pupils is dissolving. She’s lying on her back looking up at a ceiling that has exposed metal joists. A light flashes around her, creating quick shadows that appear and leave within a second. Above her hangs two bags of liquid on an IV pole. One liquid is clear like water and the other is brown and looks as if it has the texture of sand. The clear liquid runs through a tube connected to her arm and the other tube, the brown sludge runs down and enters her—

Her eyes grow big, her hands reaching for her nose, pulling out the tube. She can feel it inside of her. In her nose and down the back of her throat. She pulls it out, gagging. She tosses it on the ground and pulled the tube that is in her arm down with it. She’s weak but she gets herself to sit up in the hospital bed she’s in and swing her legs off the side. Her legs are pale and thin. They look nothing like she remembers.

She looks around the room she is in. It’s a long room with hospital beds lined up, side by side, in either direction of her. There are people in every one of them. People who are tiny, looking as if they are malnourished and all of them having no hair on top of their head. They look like the same person, copy and paste, one after the other.

She pushes herself off the bed and immediately falls to the ground, her legs not strong enough to hold her. She slides herself along the floor, past all the beds, all the people. She notices the monitors above them are all turned off and she wonders if they’re even alive or if someone put her in a room with a bunch of dead people. She pulls herself up by the railing of one of the beds and looks at the person in front of her. They’re skin and bones with their veins shining bright beneath their thin skin. She places one hand on their chest to try to make out if their breathing. She feels nothing, but she notices her hand is almost skeletal.

A man and a woman in white lab coats come sprinting into the room. Jess’ eyes meet there’s and the man’s mouth drops open.

“Oh my God, she’s alive,” he says astonished.

“We have to go!” The woman yells.

“She’s alive! Do you not see that?” He yells back. “My work,” he says softly, walking toward Jess. “I was right.”

“They’re coming!” The woman yells with a heart that’s breaking.

“Go! Get out of here!” he yells at her.

The woman stares at him for a moment, then takes off running for the door.

The man approaches Jess with his hands up, telling her that it’s okay. “I know this is all very confusing, but you have to trust me,” he says.

Loud, quick pops ring out in the hallway just beyond the door and the man grabs Jess, swings her in front of him and points a gun to her temple.

A team of people in tactical gear rush into the room. Someone yelling “Drop your weapon!”

“I did it!” the man holding her yells. “My name will go in history books! Everything I’ve done here was worth it!”

“Put you’re weapon down, and we’ll make sure of that,” the lead says, still aiming his gun, walking closer, inch by inch.

“HA! No matter what happens here, I’m going to be known as the man who successfully made simulated life. See this woman right here?” The doctor tosses here around, Jess is unable to support her legs anymore. “This woman’s whole life has been a simulation. It’s beautiful!”

The doctor, smiling, raises his gun to his own head and pulls the trigger. The shot sends a ringing in Jess’ ears. As he falls back, limp, she falls with him, and her head bounces off the concrete floor. She sees a man enter her view of the ceiling and as the ringing fades, she hears a woman’s voice say “The whole block is dead. She’s the only one left alive.”

Jess’ vision fades black.