The night passed quickly. The next day saw mom back at the hospital as soon as she could. She probably wouldn't be able to go to work until she made sure I was back home safe and sound. I guess that's how every mother would react.
When she entered the room where I was staying, I have to confess—the first thing I noticed was the transparent plastic bowl she brought with her. Actual, home-cooked breakfast. You don't know how much you miss your mom's cooking until you lose consciousness and wake up to hospital's bland food. I devoured the whole breakfast in under three minutes like a hungry alligator.
She also brought a fresh change of clothes, my only pair of decent sneakers, cologne, toothpaste and a brush, and even some shampoo. She probably could have brought our whole trailer if she deemed it necessary.
After another round of quick check-ups, I was deemed healthy enough to be discharged by the doctor. Then I was directed by Nurse Johnson to the public bathrooms of the hospital. Mom insisted on coming with me to help me shower. I had to spend an entire minute convincing her that I was healthy enough to do it on my own.
She reluctantly agreed thanks to Miss Johnson chiming in with a helpful comment. After a refreshing shower, I put on fresh clothes and laced up the sneakers mom brought. We were ready to leave the hospital.
I thanked Miss Johnson, who told me her name was Maya Johnson. She accompanied us to the lobby where mom paid the bill: $235. It was kinda expensive, to be honest. But what can you do? Bargain? Or maybe argue with the hospital staff? You'd quickly be branded as the bad guy who refused to pay his hospital bills.
We finally exited the hospital. I took in a deep lungful of fresh air. Honestly, this little episode of my life felt too long, even if I spent more than half of it unconscious.
"So, ready to go home?" Mom shifted in front of me as she adjusted my white polo shirt's collar.
I looked at her. For the first time in a while, I got to look closely at mom. I noticed the fine lines under her eyes. Some strands of grey in her hair. She's only thirty-seven, yet she seems older. The result of a life lived between worries and juggling multiple jobs. Right at that moment, I felt an unpleasant ache in my chest. Did I ever tell her I loved her? How long has it been since I last said to her 'I love you'? Probably when I was a kid. I'm not the best when it comes to showing affection. The result of my dad's upbringing, I guess. When I was a kid, we used to be like any other father and son duo. He would play with me, take me to and from school, teach me how to ride a bicycle and even a motorcycle once. But as I got older, it felt like it became much harder for him to show his love. It wasn't that he didn't love me—I could feel his love. But he was just bad at showing it. I guess when I was a kid, things were much simpler for him.
I extended my arms and hugged my mom. At first, she seemed surprised and unsure as her hands froze at my sides.
"I love you, mom," I whispered softly. I could feel her relax entirely as she wrapped her arms around my waist and squeezed gently.
"I love you too, honey," she whispered as she stroked my back.
We held each other for what felt like forever but was probably only thirty seconds. When we separated, her eyes were a little glassy, and she quickly wiped at them with the back of her hand.
"Come on," she said, clearing her throat. "Let's get you home."
The hospital's automatic doors slid open with a soft whoosh, and we stepped out into the afternoon sun. The parking lot stretched before us, cars glinting under the harsh light. Mom fumbled in her purse for her phone.
"I'll call us a cab," she said, scrolling through her contacts. "Should be here in ten minutes."
We found a bench near the hospital entrance and sat down to wait. The warmth of the concrete felt good after the sterile chill of the hospital. Mom kept glancing at me every few seconds, like she expected me to collapse again at any moment.
"Mom, I'm fine," I said, catching her worried look for the fifth time.
"I know, I know." She patted my knee. "It's just... when I got that call from the hospital, I thought..." She trailed off, shaking her head.
A yellow taxi pulled up to the curb, its engine rumbling idle. The driver, a middle-aged man with a thick mustache, rolled down his window.
"You folks call for a ride?"
"That's us," Mom said, standing and brushing off her jeans.
I slid into the back seat first, the vinyl warm from sitting in the sun. Mom gave the driver our address—Sunny Acres Trailer Park, lot 47—and settled in beside me. The taxi smelled like coffee and cigarettes, and the radio was tuned to some oldies station playing music from before I was born.
As we pulled away from the hospital, I watched the building shrink in the side mirror. The whole experience felt surreal now, like something that had happened to someone else. The taxi's air conditioning kicked on with a rattle, and I leaned back against the seat, suddenly exhausted despite having spent most of the past day unconscious.
The drive home took about twenty minutes through the city's sprawling suburbs. We passed strip malls and fast-food joints, apartment complexes with names like "Garden View" and "Sunset Manor" that had probably never seen a garden or a sunset worth mentioning. Eventually, the buildings gave way to the familiar sight of our neighborhood—if you could call it that.
Sunny Acres Trailer Park wasn't much to look at. Rows of single and double-wide trailers arranged in neat lines, each with a small patch of yard that most residents had given up trying to maintain. Our trailer was toward the back, a faded blue single-wide that Dad had bought used about ten years ago. It wasn't much, but it was home.
The taxi crunched to a stop on the gravel drive. Mom paid the fare—probably more than she wanted to spend—and we climbed out into the familiar sounds of our neighborhood. Mrs. Patterson's dog was barking at something in the next lot over, and somewhere a radio was playing country music a little too loud.
Our trailer looked smaller than I remembered, maybe because I'd been away for less than two days but it felt longer. The small wooden steps creaked under our feet as we climbed to the front door. Mom fumbled with her keys for a moment before the lock clicked open.
_____________________________________________________
The trailer felt different somehow. Maybe it was just being away, or maybe nearly dying changes how you see familiar places. The living room was exactly as I'd left it—Mom's romance novels stacked on the coffee table, the TV remote wedged between couch cushions, a half-empty coffee mug on the side table that had probably been there since before my accident.
"Girls are at school," Mom said, hanging her purse on the hook by the door. She glanced at the clock on the microwave. "Won't be back till after three."
Sarah and Emma. My twin sisters, thirteen years old and probably eager to see their big brother.
"You hungry?" Mom asked, already moving toward the kitchen. "I could make you something."
"Not yet," I said, sinking onto the couch. The familiar sag of the cushions felt oddly comforting.
Mom settled into the chair across from me, her hands folded in her lap. For a moment, we just sat in silence, the only sound the hum of the refrigerator and the distant noise of traffic on the main road.
"Tell me what you remember," she said finally. "About yesterday."
I'd been dreading this conversation. How do you explain something that doesn't make sense even to yourself? "I was at Murphy's Market," I started slowly. "Just working like usual. Then..." I paused, trying to find words that wouldn't make me sound completely insane. "I don't know. I felt dizzy, and then I was waking up in the hospital."
It wasn't exactly a lie. I did feel dizzy. I just left out the part about the strange man and the impossible things I'd seen.
Mom nodded, but I could see the worry lines deepening around her eyes. "The doctor said it was probably dehydration. Heat exhaustion, maybe. But you've never had problems with that before."
"Yeah, I don't know." I shrugged, trying to look as confused as she was. "Maybe I just didn't drink enough water that day."
She studied my face for a long moment, like she was trying to read something there. "You'd tell me if something else happened, right? If someone... if someone hurt you or something?"
The concern in her voice made my chest tight. "Mom, no. Nothing like that. I promise."
She nodded slowly, but I could tell she wasn't entirely convinced. "Okay. Well, the important thing is you're home and you're okay." She stood up, smoothing down her jeans. "I think I'll call work, let them know I won't be in today."
"Mom, you don't have to—"
"Yes, I do." Her tone left no room for argument. "I'm not leaving you alone today. Doctor said to watch for any symptoms."
I knew better than to argue when she got that look. Instead, I nodded and stood up too. "I think I'm gonna go lie down for a bit. Still feeling pretty tired."
"Good idea. I'll wake you up when the girls get home."
My room was at the back of the trailer, barely big enough for a twin bed, a desk, and a small dresser. The walls were covered with posters I'd put up years ago—mostly superheroes and video game characters that seemed kind of childish now. My laptop sat closed on the desk, a secondhand Dell that Dad had gotten me for my sixteenth birthday. It wasn't pretty, with scratches on the lid and a battery that barely held a charge, but it worked.
I closed the door and sat on the edge of my bed, staring at the laptop. My mind kept circling back to the events at the market, playing them over and over like a movie I couldn't turn off. The man with the colorful outfit. The way he'd dissapeared after everything. The strange feeling that had washed over me just before I collapsed.
After about ten minutes of trying and failing to fall asleep, I gave up and reached for the laptop. It took forever to boot up, the fan whirring to life with a sound like a small airplane taking off. While I waited, I stared at the ceiling, counting the water stains from the leak we'd had last winter.
Finally, the desktop loaded. I opened the web browser and sat there for a moment, cursor blinking in the search bar. Where do you even start looking for answers to questions you can't properly ask?
I started with the obvious: "unexplained fainting episodes." That led me down a rabbit hole of medical websites describing everything from heart conditions to seizure disorders. None of it seemed to fit what I'd experienced.
Next, I tried "strange people at grocery stores." That was a mistake. The results were mostly news articles about shoplifters and the occasional odd human interest story about people doing weird things in public.
Getting more desperate, I typed in "hallucinations before fainting." This brought up pages about migraines, brain tumors, and psychiatric conditions. My stomach started to knot up as I read through descriptions of visual and auditory hallucinations. Was that what had happened to me? Had I just imagined the whole thing?
But it had felt so real. The way the man moved, the things he'd said, the strange sensation that had come over me—none of it felt like a hallucination.
I tried a different approach: "unusual people with strange abilities." This led me into the weird corners of the internet I'd never explored before. Forums dedicated to conspiracy theories, websites about alien abductions, pages discussing government experiments on humans. Most of it was obvious nonsense, but some of the stories were eerily similar to what I'd experienced.
On one forum, a user claimed to have met someone who could "move in ways that defied physics." Another described an encounter with a person who "seemed to know things they shouldn't have been able to know." The details were different, but the feeling the writers described—that sense of encountering something beyond normal human experience—matched what I'd felt.
I spent the next hour diving deeper, following links from forum to forum, website to website. I found stories about "enhanced humans," government programs dating back to the Cold War, theories about genetic experiments and technological augmentation. Most of it read like science fiction, but buried in the speculation were occasional firsthand accounts that made me pause.
One Reddit thread was particularly interesting. It was mostly dead, with only a handful of posts from over a year ago, but the original poster described meeting someone who "moved like they were operating under different laws of physics." The responses were mostly jokes and accusations of drug use, but one comment caught my attention.
A user named 'TruthSeeker91' had posted: "I've heard similar stories from other parts of the country. Always the same description—people who seem human but move wrong somehow. There's a pattern if you know where to look."
I clicked on TruthSeeker91's profile, but it had been deleted. Another dead end.
Hours passed without me realizing it. I followed link after link, diving deeper into increasingly obscure corners of the internet. I found YouTube videos with fewer than a hundred views, blog posts on websites that looked like they'd been abandoned for years, forum threads in languages I couldn't read.
Most of it was garbage, but occasionally I'd find something that made me sit up straighter. A grainy cell phone video from Atlanta. A news article from Seattle about a man who disappeared after witnesses claimed he'd done "impossible things" in public. Small stories, easily dismissed, but they were out there.
Then, buried in a forum thread that required three different translation programs to read, I found something that made my blood run cold.
The post was in Russian, on a forum dedicated to "unexplained phenomena." Most of the thread was the usual internet nonsense, but one post included a description that was unmistakably familiar. The translator was rough, but I could make out enough: "Short man, colorfully attired. Eyes that see too much. Appears in different cities, always watching."
The post was from 12 years ago, and it was describing someone matching the exact appearance of the man I'd seen at Murphy's Market.
I wasn't hallucinating. I wasn't having some kind of medical episode. Whatever had happened to me, whatever that man was, it was real. And apparently, I wasn't the first person to encounter him.
But knowing that didn't make me feel better. If anything, it made everything worse. Because if the man was real, then what did that make the strange hallucination I'd experienced right before I collapsed? What did that make whatever was happening to me now?
I leaned back in my chair, my head spinning with questions I couldn't answer. The laptop's fan hummed loudly, working overtime to keep the old machine from overheating. Outside my window, I could hear the sounds of normal life continuing—cars driving by, neighbors talking, the world moving on like nothing had changed.
But something had changed. I could feel it, like a low-frequency vibration just below the threshold of hearing. Something was different about me, about my life, about everything.
I was about to close the laptop and try to get some sleep when the screen flickered.
For a moment, I thought it was just the old machine acting up again. But the same blue window I had seen back then appeared, hovering in the air right in front of my eyes.
Then, text began to appear, glowing blue against the darkness.
"NEURAL RECONSTRUCTION COMPLETE.
_____________________________________________________
I nearly fell out of my chair.
The blue text hung there on the blue screen, pulsing gently like it had a heartbeat. I stared at it, my mouth dy.
More text appeared.
"BRAIN ARCHITECTURE MODIFIED TO SATISFACTORY PARAMETERS."
"INTEGRATION 100% SUCCESSFUL."
"SYSTEM ACTIVATION PROTOCOL INITIATED."