Short Story: As Above

The first thing you notice is the conspicuous nature of silence. It dominates your consciousness until your brain replaces it with a humming sound to mimic some normalcy. I listened intently to the quietness, trying to decipher compelling secrets being passed through the air in the monotonous murmur. 

With my parents fast asleep in the room across from mine, the whole house rested after a long day of enduring the weight of our footsteps and our troubles. I was nearing the end of a Kafka novel when the lights flickered with an uneasiness and hinted at the probable arrival of a mysterious entity. I got up to investigate, which is the number one cause of death in horror movies. I knew I should know better, but curiosity got the best of me. There was a tall man standing outside of my window, his electric-blue hair cutting through the darkness and glowing ever so slightly. His face was sallow but well-defined, and he was dressed smartly in a sleek, black three piece suit. I knew that what I was seeing was not real, considering we were on the third floor. But his presence had a calming effect rather than the automatic adrenaline-filled response of fight or flight. 

My room became stretched into a narrow hallway and there were locked doors on each side of me. Somehow, none of these strange happenings caused me to panic or derail, as if I had anticipated this happening. I was lucid dreaming, I had to be. There was no other explanation. The smell of fresh paint lingered in the air, and all of the doors donned primary colors and floral decorations. I walked through the hallway and opened the only plain yellow door at the very end. I found myself in a meadow of buttercups, the pleasant afternoon sun basking me in its warmth. My cool composure that I had maintained so far started to surprise me now, and I wondered whether I was in control of my body after all or if I was just floating along. There were two chairs in the middle of the field - one was already occupied by the tall man, the other empty chair, I assumed, was for me. I took the seat across from him and sat in silence for a while, before finally breaking the ice by asking him if I was dead. Before I could even comprehend what I was saying, this question poured out of my lips in a wisp of honey and traveled through the air and into his right ear. He smiled, revealing a set of crooked teeth, and said, ‘You are neither alive nor dead.’ He had a raspy voice, like that one uncle who smoked too much but cough incessantly like a dying man holding on to his last breath. 

He stared at me, his pitch-black eyes glistening in the sunlight. The darkness started to swallow me, and then I was falling through an endless tunnel. I could feel the wind rush past my ears, as I was being pushed downwards by a vengeful force, not pulled by gravity. I landed on my back, surrounded by a dark abyss, the absence of noise and light overpowering any other sensation. Suddenly, I heard whispers, incoherent at first but gradually becoming organized. I heard my dead grandmother’s voice asking me to stand up straighter, my best friend’s cries in the distance, my father telling me he was disappointed in me. I heard my mother scream my name from above, crying over why God cursed her with a daughter like me, as my brother snickered at my imperfections. Through the darkness, I saw a woman whimpering in the corner. As she came towards me and I recognized who she was, fear gripped me for the first time in this harrowingly absurd journey. I was staring at myself, but older, grayer and broken. I saw visions of a life wasted, amounting to nothing important and I screamed until my lungs came out of my mouth and deflated in defeat on the floor. My head felt heavy, the horrible words spoken by my loved ones stabbing my heart. I was bleeding out, holding my literal heart in my hands and wondering how I was still alive, as a single dominant voice spoke up among the babble, ‘It is time to go back.’

I was standing in the middle of the kitchen, an apple gripped in my right hand instead of my heart. I realized I was trembling, and it was a summer night in Bangladesh so I knew it was not because of the weather. It had felt so real, the sunlight on my skin, the voices ringing in my ears - I just could not shake off this bizarre feeling that I had an otherworldly experience. Was it a vision from God, or just a vivid hallucination induced by my lack of sleep? Maybe I was sleepwalking, but that was something which I had no history of doing before. I know which answer is more probable, but a small part of me wanted to feel special enough to have talked with God while reading Kafka. Maybe my mind had just enough of my poor habits of staying up late and decided to take me on this trip to make me change my ways. Maybe the consciousness did have a separate existence from the body as proposed by Descartes. I went to my room and stood in front of the window for quite some time, just relishing the silence. The grey apartment buildings opposite to ours stood still, and not even the leaves on the mango tree outside rustled in the wind. The eeriness of the night started to settle in my bones. I kept the apple on my study table and got into bed, using the blankets to cover my entire body as a protective measure towards evil beings and tried to shake my mind off of what I had experienced.

The next morning, I went downstairs with the apple, as I did not particularly like them and was hoping that my father would have it instead. My mother had a puzzled look on her face when she saw me with it. She asked me where I got the apple from. I lied to her saying that I got it last night from the kitchen because I was hungry but then changed my mind about eating it. I figured it would be best not to tell them about my dream as they would worry unnecessarily. 

‘That’s strange,’ my mother said. ‘We did not buy any apples from the grocer this month.’   

The walls started to crumble around me and the floor melted away. I closed my eyes and waited for the Devil to carry me away.