Not Quite Home
The paperclip shouldn't exist.
Triple-looped. Silver coil wrapped around itself like a tiny intestine. Cheryl's thumb runs along its impossible geometry—one loop, two, three—and something electric crawls up her spine. Twenty-three years filing insurance claims. Eight thousand four hundred days of standard office supplies. She knows paperclips. This isn't one.
She flicks it into the trash. The metal hits plastic with a sound like breaking teeth.
Clink.
Wednesday. 4:47 PM. Grocery store fluorescents buzz like dying wasps overhead. The cashier who's scanned Cheryl's almond milk for three years, Teresa with the butterfly tattoo on her wrist, wears a name tag that reads TERRY. Male pronouns. Adam's apple bobbing as he speaks.
"Have a great evening, Mrs. Davidson."
The smile stretches too wide. Wax museum wide. His teeth gleam wet under the lights, perfect white squares like bathroom tiles. The butterfly tattoo writhes when he hands her the receipt. Or maybe it doesn't.
Cheryl's fingers go numb around the plastic bags. The parking lot tastes like hot asphalt and spoiled meat.
Dave sleeps wrong.
For twenty-two years, her husband's snoring carved grooves in the darkness, a diesel engine grinding through third gear. Now: silence. His chest barely lifts the blanket. She watches him in the blue television glow, counting the seconds between breaths. Seventeen. Eighteen. Nineteen.
Nobody breathes that slow unless they're dying.
Or pretending.
"Can't sleep?" His eyes snap open. No transition. Zero to awake like flipping a switch.
"You don't snore anymore."
Dave's hand finds her shoulder. The fingers are ice through her nightgown. "Got those new strips. From the pharmacy. Remember?"
She doesn't remember. But his smile, that trademark crooked grin that hooked left for two decades, now pulls right. Mirror image. Everything backwards.
"Go back to sleep, honey."
His kiss lands cold on her forehead. Like pressing raw chicken to her skin.
Cheryl starts a notebook. Black Moleskine, pages that whisper when she turns them.
Things That Are Wrong:
- Starbucks logo missing her crown
- Dog next door (used to bark/now silent/possibly dead?)
- Office plant was YELLOW. Everyone says purple. Always purple.
- Street signs on Maple reversed
- My wedding ring turns counterclockwise
- Dave's eyes were brown
She stops writing. Stares at that last line until the words blur.
Dave's eyes are green. Have always been green. She has the wedding photos to prove it. Except when she checks, those eyes stare back emerald bright. Like they've been Photoshopped. Like someone reached into the past and edited her memories with a cheap filter.
The Mandela Effect. Mass delusion. Collective false memory.
Berenstein Bears becoming Berenstain.
Nelson Mandela dying in prison, then not.
But this is different. This is personal. This is her life peeling at the edges like old wallpaper, revealing something underneath that shouldn't be there.
Thursday morning. Coffee tastes like copper pennies. Dave reads his phone, thumb scrolling in perfect rhythm. Swipe. Pause. Swipe. Pause. Like a metronome.
"Who was my mother?"
His thumb stops. "What?"
"My mother. Describe her."
Dave's face does something subtle. A micro-adjustment. Features shifting millimeters like tectonic plates. "Cheryl, your mother died when you were twelve. Cancer. We've talked about this."
"What was her name?"
"Margaret."
"Middle name?"
Silence stretches between them like taffy. The refrigerator hums. Outside, a car alarm screams three times and stops.
"Anne," he says finally. "Margaret Anne."
Cheryl has no memory of Margaret Anne. But she has memories of a mother. Lavender perfume, paper skin, warnings about faces freezing mid-frown.
"You're not Dave."
The words hang in the kitchen air with the burnt coffee smell.
Dave sets down his phone. His fingers drum the table; index, middle, ring, pinky. Too precise. Too measured. "You're having an episode. Like before."
"What before?"
"You don't remember the hospital?"
She doesn't. But suddenly images flood in: white walls, restraints, pills in paper cups. Forced memories, inserted like slides into a projector. They feel thin. Theatrical.
"Stop it."
"Stop what, honey?"
"Stop putting things in my head."
Dave's face goes still. Mannequin still. Then it starts to move. Not expressions, the actual architecture. Cheekbones sliding beneath skin like fingers under silk. His nose flattens, reshapes. The mouth stretches horizontal, a gash opening too wide, showing too many teeth. They're not teeth anymore. They're white points of light.
Crack.
The kitchen fractures. A spider web of black spreading across the walls, the ceiling, through the air itself. Reality breaks like a television screen hit with a baseball bat, and behind it—
Cold metal. Recycled air that tastes like disinfectant. Fluorescent strips burning her retinas.
Cheryl is vertical. Suspended. Tubes feed into her arms, her throat. Around her, hundreds of bodies hang in neat rows like meat in a freezer. Their eyes move beneath closed lids, synchronized. Dreaming in unison.
"Habitat 47-B," says the thing wearing Dave's melting face. Its voice is radio static and grinding gears. "We've been perfecting it for six cycles. You humans are... particular. One wrong detail and the whole simulation collapses."
Cheryl tries to scream. Only bubbles escape through the tube.
"Memory is so fragile. So easy to edit. But sometimes..." The creature tilts its head, studying her with eyes that have become geometric patterns. "Sometimes you notice the paperclips."
A button presses. Somewhere, machinery whirs to life.
"We'll refine the parameters. Smooth the edges. You won't remember this conversation."
The world dissolves. Reforms. Pixels reassembling into—
Morning. Cheryl's at her desk, sorting claims. The plant beside her monitor blooms yellow, cheerful in the fluorescent light. Of course it's yellow. It's always been yellow.
Dave calls at lunch. His voice warm, familiar, snoring the right way in the background of her memories.
"Chinese tonight?"
"Sounds perfect."
She hangs up. Notices a paperclip on her desk. Standard. Single loop. Exactly as it should be.
But her fingers shake as she picks it up. And when she catches her reflection in the computer screen, her smile pulls the wrong direction. Just for a second.
Just long enough to remember forgetting something important.
The fluorescents buzz overhead. The sound follows her home, lives in her teeth, hums beneath her skin where the tubes used to be.
Where the tubes are.
Where the tubes will be again.
She laughs. It sounds like breaking glass.
After all, it's probably just stress.