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A second-person experiment. Maybe I’m getting out of my rut. Just maybe.

Thanks for reading.

Artwork by Francois Hurtubise

DISCLAIMER: This work has not been edited beyond what was done in the video. The goal is to capture a story in a short amount of time and keep it as raw as possible.

The Story

What have I done? You’re unsure of where this thought comes from, standing in a room doused in ocean hues. Looking into a room smoldering in underworld hues.

This room sits open in front of you, and you wonder if you if you opened the door. Were you returning or leaving? You face the room so think returning. Or is this the first time you’ve been here?

You look for clues to these questions. Nearest you, a chair sits against a wall. A strange place for someone to sit. You look beyond into another space that must lead to a hallway, splitting the distance between where you stand and the room in question.

In that alleged hallway, you see a hutch upon which sits a digital clock glowing with the same tones of the room. It reads 2:30. AM or PM, you wonder. The color temperature where you stand tells you AM, unless its storming outside, which it could be. You listen for rain but hear nothing. Except your breathing, which is comprised of a slow inhale and sharp exhale. You try to remedy this.

A photo sits behind the digital clock, obscured by darkness, distance, and digital interference. That’s when you notice everything shares that feature, as if you’re looking through eyes that can’t capture the resolution you need.

It makes you think of video games. Maybe you played them once. Maybe you didn’t. That dichotomy prompts your mind to dig deeper. You stop it before it delves too far. The puzzle in front of you is what you need to solve at the moment.

The wall opposite the hutch is bare except for a vent near the floor. You’re tempted to walk to it, to touch it, but changing your vantage will change your perspective, and everything in the red room will shift into something else entirely.

So you remain.

A chair, much like the one near you, sits in the room. It faces you, empty. Wooden blocks are strewn around it. Behind it, three are stacked in a pyramid configuration while three under it aren’t stacked at all. You wonder what that could mean? Construction and destruction. Togetherness and separateness. Wholeness and brokenness.

You feel none of those things.

Behind all of this, a curtain drapes from behind a rod. There is no attachment you can see. The curtain is also too long, collecting on the floor behind the chair. It moves slightly. Bulges slightly. You wonder if someone is behind it. Waiting for . . . you?

Who would be waiting for you?

Stranger still is the window behind the curtain, the fraction of it you can see. You think of a cage. Horizontal bars divided by patches of a diamond pattern. Chicken wire, you think. But thicker. To resist things larger than chickens.

The bottom of your left foot feels different. Cooler. You look down and realize you’ve taken a step. Why your left one? You look at your hands, assuming you’re right handed. Like everyone else. You don’t think you’re like everyone else.

Your hands are smooth. Soft. You check for calluses on your palms to see if you’ve lived a life of labor. You check the backs of your hands for scars to see if you’ve lived a life of turbulence.

You find neither.

You decide to move your right foot to join your left. Detaching yourself from the floorboards warm with your body heat is jarring, unsettling. Maybe it’s what you need. Maybe it isn’t.

You look up to make sure things haven’t changed. You haven’t solved the puzzle yet. Things haven’t changed much.

There is something behind the chair, near the curtain. Something you didn’t notice before. A whiteboard? If it is, it’s blank. A canvas? The light in the room isn’t any an artist would paint to. Unless . . .

You almost had it. A trace of something. Then something else catches your attention. Another detail in this room you seem to want to enter, albeit at a crawl. What appears to be another chair peeks around the corner against a wall you cannot see, and in front of it lies a mattress, a pillow, a thing upon which a body might lay.

Could there be a body in that room? Is the light indicating what you might find? You shake your head, wondering why your thoughts immediately went to the macabre. You’re not a person who thinks dark thoughts, are you?

You could be anyone. If there were a mirror, you wouldn’t look. Why are there no mirrors?

You study the carpet in the room from where you stand, looking for dots of blood. It’s clean. Unless the killing happened out of frame.

You rub your eyes, wondering why you’re thinking of yourself as a character in a film, your eyes the camera, directed to create a sense of dread for the viewer, who sees the narrative play out as you see it.

No. You hear that word, your word, your thought. You’re not a proxy. But why are you here?

You step again. Twice again. If you lean over you might be able to touch the chair. Sitting down sounds nice. You imagine it, with your back to the red room, and your skin prickles.

You leap into the hallway, unsure as to why. Like tearing off a bandage, you think. You don’t fall. You land soundly.

The time on the clock hasn’t changed. 2:30. AM, you decide. The photo behind the clock isn’t any clearer, still a digital mosaic.

You don’t bother looking to your right down the hall. That isn’t your destination. If someone is waiting there to get you, then let them have you, you think.

Two more steps bring you to the threshold of the room. The air is warmer here, the floor. You place your hands on the frame that should have hinges and a door open into the room. There are neither.

You look inside.

What have I done? That question is answered.

What do you see?

Another one that didn’t quite pan out the way I’d hoped. Maybe it was too much metaphor. Maybe it was something else. Either way, here it is.

Thanks for reading.

Artwork by JiHun Lee

DISCLAIMER: This work has not been edited beyond what was done in the video. The goal is to capture a story in a short amount of time and keep it as raw as possible.

The Story

The light. Gray, softly, white, partly. A form pulled from the wall. A bench. The shadow it cast looked inviting, almost enough to crawl into. He wondered what was on the other side of that shadow, inside that shadow. Or did it end with the wall, all an illusion? A cold hard space.

He contemplated that space and who might have used it as shelter, dove into it, existed through it. He thought he would sit, listen to their tales, feel it in the stone, maybe tell some of his own, though his weren’t interesting.

No one answered. He took comfort in what he could, alone. Alone wasn’t comforting. He smiled when he heard it: voices, footsteps, laughing, sighing. He smiled when he saw it: faces to keep him company, to share this spot, for there was plenty of room. Endless room.

They didn’t ask to sit, piling around him, left and right, some even finding their spots on the ground, using the bench as a the back to the chair that was the ground.

“Nice to meet you,” one said.

Then he realized he wasn’t talking to him. His attention was beyond, directed at someone sitting beside him, and he was fine with that. The conversation, the laughter, the breath that smelled of old breakfast and coffee. Quantum particles taking every possible path, colliding with what they sought or didn’t. He was caught in the middle, a screen that they flowed through. All but a few. At least that was the explanation he told himself. Why he felt something at the back of his throat. An itch he tried to reach with his tongue. But it migrated to the back of his skull before he could scratch it, holding there, waiting. For what?

He waited for them. Patiently. The faces that looked everywhere. At the street, at each other, at the sky, at the wall. It was loud, this existence he found himself in. An observer only, and he found himself confronted only with white noise.

“Hello,” he said, thinking if he spoke, maybe they’d hear, and he was sure to enunceate clearly, evenly, and directly. The one closest to him smiled and nodded, almost caught his gaze before it slipped away to somwhere else. Someone else.

He felt the loss in the his teeth, and he thought it was the pain at the back of his skull, leaping out to taunt him, to see if he would chase it. It wasn’t. It was something else. Something new. He clamped his teeth down to catch it. Or to ignite it.

It did have the spirit of flame, writhing, searching for something to help it grow. He felt like he had discovered something. A fact that no one around him knew, and he was happy again in his solitude among the rabble.

“Hello,” he said to his hands, but those immediately went to the back of his head in response, massaging that spot at the base of his skull that suddenly hurt so bad. He closed his eyes to concentrate on it, to visualize its shape, color, size, so that he could grab hold of it. Take control of it. Mold it into what he needed it to be.

“What do I need it to be?” he said.

To his surprise the one to his right looked at him, acknowledged him as if he were more than an smudge on the wall that had been there for years. A stain.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” the Right One said. “Here, let me explain.”

Right One said all manner of thing, until his words divided into letters, then to meaningless sounds, then to nothing at all but white noise.

“It does make sense,” he said, hands at the back of his head again while he worked his jaw to kick the hornet’s nest that grew there beneath the enamel, beneath the gumline.

He thought that would have been enough, to respond, to assert himself, but when he turned to address Right One, he was faced away, spewing his sounds onto someone else, and that someone else appeared pleased with the sounds, open-mouth smiling with attentive fascination.

He felt a bump on his knee, and looked down to see another pushing him aside. “Can you move over a little?” this one asked, but instead of waiting for a response, he turned to someone else, firmly planted in his new spot, which used to belong to him and him alone, back when there was plenty of room, to think, to feel, to exist.

The sensation in his jaw broke through the flesh and met the other at the back of his skull. There they intermingled, and he watched with his eyes closed, because it was the only way he could see.

Others throttled him apolegetically until his seat on the bench had been whittled down to a sliver. He envisioned that sliver as a physical object, sharp and indestructible. It had to be to finish what needed to be done. He drew it back. An arrow, a sword, a bullet. Unleashed it.

Ignition. So quick. So silent. No ringing in his ears. They lay around him. Sat around him. In heaps. He liked that word. It had impact, much like the spears had that drove through the stone wall to find flesh, to find an end. Quantum particles finding every possible path, and every path was right.

The pain was gone. The sounds were gone. The smells. He didn’t mind the one on the ground, lifeless head using his knee as a pillow. He didn’t mind the Right One lounging against him as a friend. It was an illusion, like the space beneath the bench, which he no longer sought, because he had his own space in beautiful solitude, which he had missed.

He didn’t look up to see the others, preferring the view of the ground, the area between his feet, which was vast and calm. Gray, softly. White, partly. So right.

Sometimes stories don’t end up the way you want them. Sometimes you just need to let go. I think there are some interesting ideas in this one, though I would have liked them all to come together in the end.

Thanks for reading.

Artwork by Hetian Duan

DISCLAIMER: This work has not been edited beyond what was done in the video. The goal is to capture a story in a short amount of time and keep it as raw as possible.

The Story

Andre saw red. A figure peeled away from the color but colored the same. It rounded a column of fire that underlit its faces like an imp, a fiend, a devil.

“Play me a song,” it said.

Andre’s ears rang, so he couldn’t hear Dubois while he choked on his own blood. The dying soldier’s eyes looked in Andre’s direction, then narrowed, frustrated that his brother in arms wasn’t hearing his dying words.

But I am not your brother, Andre thought.

Then he realized Dubois wasn’t upset. His mouth opened a crack to show white teeth. Not a smile or frown.

Then Dubois’s face creased into a map of lines, which served as troughs for the blood to catch and flow into, spreading across his entire face in ribbons.

Fractured glass, Andre thought. That’s what it looked like. And it helped him separate himself from the sight of a man he knew well, dying slowly and miserably. Something within Andre wouldn’t allow him to let Dubois go, put him on the ground, in the ground, where he should be.

Andre looked away to see if that would pass the time. Morning crept down the hillside at a glacial pace. Distant buildings, ruined but likely teeming with the enemy looked like tombstones.

Fists pummeled Andre’s chest. Weak, but there. As if Andre held an upset child who had freed his arms from his swaddling clothes.

“You are a child,” Andre said. He felt the words, distant. Four dull notes. He tried to place them, and when he couldn’t, he repeated the words. Still nothing.

Dubois did hear, however, because his face pinched more severely, flattening all the creases that had been river beds, which now flooded. His face was a crimson mask. Dubois thought keeping his mouth closed would prolong his life, but he soon discovered that was folly. He let his last breath out with a word or two, or maybe just a moan–Andre’s ears still held that solitary note that had been plucked by his sidearm, which acted as a pillow for poor Dubois, twisted in Andre’s fingers.

Andre lay Dubois down, his elbows locked from holding him for so long. His pistol fell free and lodged in the mud beside Dubois’s head.

“You are a child,” Andre said again. A hint of something there, bending with that persistent ringing. He would find it eventually.

Andre set off, keeping to the morning shadows, crawling when he had to, and that was fine with him because he was tired of carrying Dubois’s remains along with him.

He rested near some rubble piled high enough so he could sit up. The mud and grass hadn’t completely washed Dubois off him. He took off his coat and tossed it aside. Still some of Dubois on his undershirt, he stripped that off too.

“You are a child,” he said to his pale, concave chest.

“What’s that?”

Startled, Andre threw his head back against the rubble. The figure in front of him, whom he could hear so clearly, leaned over with a rifle anchored to his shoulder.

Recognizing some of his own by their dress, Andre scrambled to his discarded coat to provide evidence that he was one of them. A swift kick to the ribs foiled that plan, and Andre curled into a ball.

“Found his handiwork yonder,” one said.

“Sick bastard,” said another.

“Trying to get rid of the evidence are we?” The man with the rifle asked, closer now, the barrel of the gun pressed above the ear than rang most. “What makes a man turn on his own, eh?”

Andre was transfixed, not afraid. How could he hear them? He couldn’t hear his own voice, and he hadn’t been able to hear Dubois’s. Maybe he had died on the short journey, and these were angels or devils, permitted to speak in this afterlife he found himself in, which disappointingly looked just like real life. Andre pushed his hand into the mud. Felt like real life.

He looked up to the man and said, “You are a child.”

Andre heard nothing but dull tones. He punched the mud, which dirtied the rifleman’s boots.

The rifleman checked his boot, then tsked. He brought his rifle to Andre’s forehead, pushed it until Andre’s head met cold stone. His finger moved to the trigger. He closed one eye.

Andre threw up his muddied hand, batting away the rifle, which went off right above his ear. That single dull note wailed louder than ever, and the two men above him moved in slow motion, their contours expanding into sound waves that distorted the sky.

Andre raised his other hand from the mud to fend off the rifleman who fell toward him. In that hand was his pistol, and, timed perfectly, as if fate, it tunneled into the rifleman’s open mouth. The barrel’s impact at the back of his throat and the subsequent recoil, pulled the trigger.

Andre saw red. His ears rang. Figures peeled away from the color. He lay there like the dead for some time. And perhaps he was.

“You are a child,” he said. White noise pervaded.

Andre stumbled to one of the ruined buildings back the way he had come. He couldn’t face the light any longer.

Inside had been ransacked. Bullet holes dressing the walls as much as the crumbling plaster, pictures of framed people he greeted as he entered their home. He stepped onto a rug, which led to a piano, keys exposed, like teeth. Not a smile or frown.

He lay his hands on them, noticing unsoiled sleeves. His coat as well. When had he put on a coat? Then he felt a weight on his head, on which he found a helmet. He placed it atop the piano next to a frame of the two men who had been devils. They didn’t speak, but Andre supposed he owed them a song.

He only knew four notes, but he was sure they would help him find the others.