Fjords Reviews

 

 

As they reached out for the man’s body, J and K laughed. Abducting people in their sleep was their favorite lark. Their other favorite activity was trying to get back home. Only the first had yielded success in all of their experience outside of time and space.

They’d experimented with different greetings for their abductees in the void. At first they just fucked with people. They’d dematerialize and whisper weird shit. Neither had much memory left of their lives before lifting off of the plane of existence, but they both liked the surprise and confusion displayed by people they yanked from temporality.

This time, which couldn’t be called today, as time was less of a rolodex and more of a lobster tank, they picked a man named Edward. To ensure they could fuck with him appropriately they of course did the crash course in his life, obtained like Neo in The Matrix without any hardware.

When time is a point instead of a long and looping line, knowledge is relatively quick to come by.

Edward wasn’t their ideal subject. He ticked a number of boxes: rural, troubled, slightly beyond his prime. Of course, J and K couldn’t see into his mind, only watch his interactions with the physical world. They couldn’t know he was a lucid dreamer of epic proportions.

So when they yanked him from his slumber out of his usual plane he yanked back. J and K were stunned in the momentary limbo, which to them passed both in a blink and an eon resulting in no usable information. Of course, the force of time is much weaker than others, and eventually his hold to a timeline lost its luster and he slipped into their realm.

He materialized and hopped into a boxing stance bursting J and K from their startled silence into laughter, ruining their intended creepy whisperings. To be honest, K was tired of just scaring and messing with people’s psyches and could stand a little conversation from someone other than J, and now that their hand was forced by an outburst of absurd proportions, he materialized in the blank white, holding his sides as he thought he remembered them.

“Who are you?” Edward asked exasperatedly.

K just laughed. He wanted to box!

“Now you’ve ruined the surprise,” J whined as he fizzled instantly into form. The two were quite the pair. Though K could form any shape he wanted, he preferred a short, rotund white man, something J would never understand, even if it was as he remembered himself. J usually came into form as a ten-foot-tall komodo dragon, but today he picked an unintimidating slender man in slacks and a turtleneck shirt he thought he remembered picturing in a dream.

“Who are you?” Edward repeated, more firmly this time. What a strange and imperturbable individual, J thought.

“We don’t know,” K said, feeling very honest for some reason he couldn’t pinpoint.

“Where are we?”

“Nowhere.” J replied stoically. He retrieved a toothpick from nonexistence and began picking at his nonexistent plaque.

 “Everywhere is somewhere,” Edward replied. Too aptly for a man immediately pulled from his sleep into a whitewash of light and a duo of strangers, K thought.

 “Everywhere else is somewhere. We are in nowhere at the moment, however, there also aren’t moments here.”

 “No time or space?” Edward queried, fists still raised like a pugilist expecting a blow.

 J and K exchanged confused glances. Only a few people they’d yanked from their existence had done more than yelp or scream or cry. And that was usually when they were trying to be friendly. Before they realized that these abductions were only remembered as dreams at best.

“Not here. Sorry.”

“Then how, when do I get back home? Can I?”

“You just go back. Usually soon. We—” K was interrupted by a hiss from J, but he continued anyway. “We don’t know how it feels to you, to be honest.”

“Why have you brought me here?” Edward asked.

“Why?” K asked. He’d been asked why before, but usually the questions revolved around when and where. Why was a different beast. Was boredom an answer to why? Wasn’t boredom an answer to everything? Had I been in this place outside of time too long?, K thought, then chuckled at the irony of such a thought.

Edward, read the chuckle as a response to his question and not a quickly progressing inner monologue and reclenched his fists. As if the reason why was obvious, but being withheld for some nefarious reason.

“Yes, why am I here?” Edward reiterated.

J’s scowl hardened as he watched this exchange. He’d wanted to lift this man up by his hair and spin him around a bit, to whisper harmful nothings in his ear that would undermine his understanding of existence, to try to ruin his life in the course of a nightmare.

“Because I’m lonely,” K replied, whether instantly or after much thought was what J would oscillate between for what seemed like forever.