Dan sat beside Tobias on the crowded bus, morning light slicing the aisle into fractured shadows. "Tobias, you won't believe what happened last week," he murmured, voice trembling. "I got a letter — I've been enlisted."
Tobias groaned, rubbing his temples. "For fuck's sake, me too. Even my cousin — Steve, the pastor at the Jehovah's Witness church — got drafted. What the hell is going on?" Dan stared at his shoes, the weight pressing down.
This isn't fair, he thought — though the phrasing felt… foreign. Like someone else had just whispered it into his mind.
The bus kept rumbling, a minor detail in a story rewritten with every bump in the road.
—until the cursor blinked.
Merlot froze mid‑sentence, fingers hovering over the keys. The wannabe‑author's voice had been loud lately. Too loud. Two weeks ago, a friend had warned him: Your story's too confusing. Kill some of your darlings.
Since then, the voice had stopped whispering. It spoke over him. Sometimes, when he tried to think, he wasn't sure who finished the thought.
He sipped his bitter, lukewarm coffee, his mind drifting back to last night's dream: a yellow brick Victorian house, a crooked doorknob, worn steps, the upstairs window at dusk. Not pictures — impressions, pulsing with someone else's sentiment. His own memories suddenly felt counterfeit.
And then — the family. The girl at the dining table, laptop open, a Persian cat pawing for attention. The father, muttering at a football stream. The mother, stirring chicken, humming as if nothing beyond the kitchen existed.
He missed people who weren't real — especially his own characters. Like Lolita who believed the world evolved around her, unaware that his book the sangria war had a small reader base.
He blinked. The cursor still waited.
How do you tell a family they're fictional when they've set a place for you at the table?
He shrugged, quietly. They were kind. Too kind.
And maybe that was the problem.
*********