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Entering the Twilight Zone
#1
I am at my friend's house and we're chilling in his front yard. He is a skinny white male, slightly taller than me, with dark hair. He is pretty average. The small white or light tan house is in a standard suburb and is just as average as my friend is. The driveway is on the left, with a little-used front door and a high-traffic side door which leads to the kitchen. The back of the house has an addition to it with it's own side door. The addition looks like a porch conversion and contains some couches and recliners. My friend's father, an older man with a gray beard, a weathered face, and salt and pepper hair lays asleep in the recliner furthest from the door, like he does every day after work. They have a detached garage to match the house capping the back end of the driveway. We are chilling in the front yard and we're talking about what's about to happen. My character understands what's happening, but the conversation lacks context clues which allow me to pick up on what's going on. There is an object in the driveway, the front of which is parallel with the front of his house. I cannot describe this object much because I only see it from the inside. It is open in the front and is a dull red or maroon box, almost like the inside of a shipping container, but flat, matte, and nondescript. I step in, observe, and step back out. Nothing has changed, but my friend isn't there anymore. I walk along the side of the house and quietly enter the door to the add on. My friend's father is sleeping in the exact same position in the exact same recliner, recovering from work. His hair and facial hair are pure black, and his skin looks moisturized, rejuvenated, and free of imperfections such as wrinkles. I take an imperfect step and he stirs. "Whaa-
Whose there?" He looks at me though grog and I freeze in anticipation of his startled reaction. He won't recognize me because he hasn't met me yet. He does seem to recognize me though, at least somewhat. He isn't startled at all. Hmm, interesting.
"It's okay, you can go back to sleep." I move back towards the door just as quietly in an attempt to get out before he gains more consciousness. He lays his head back down and drifts right into stage 2 sleep. I walk outside along the driveway to the front of the house. There is a kid my age in the front yard, who looks remarkably like my friend, but far younger. He greets me excitedly!
"Welcome! Come on inside, my Mom is making dinner."
"What are we going to tell her? I mean, I just kinda appeared out of nowhere."
"You're a friend I met at school." Despite the distinct lack of detail, this satisfies me and I follow him in the side door to the kitchen. A wooden table reaches out from the left wall, with the appliances along the right wall. Counters link the appliances and circle around the back wall, stopping at the door into the next room, presumably where his father is asleep. Windows above the counter let daylight and some green from the trees into the room. His mother, a beautiful blond woman, is boiling something or other on the stove for dinner. His (younger?) sister sits across the table awaiting a meal. I sit on the side closest to the door with my friend to my right. He tells his mother that he met me at school, and his mother makes conversation with me and asks me the standard Mom questions. Parents always love me, and I converse with her and the family. Soon dinner is served and we share a meal.
...
That evening my friend takes me to a hotel in town where he has made the necessary arrangements for me to stay. He speaks with the ladies at the front desk and we proceed upstairs to the room. He tells me to settle in and that he will be back later. The room is decent. It has two twin beds to the left and an old tube TV on the right. The bathroom is to the left of a covered window and a wall AC unit at the end of the room. I plop my stuff down on the bed closest to the window and turn around. My friend disappears down the hallway and the door closes behind him. I am alone.
Some time passes and I decide I better jerk off before anyone gets back. I pick up my Sony Xperia Tablet Z and set it back down, knowing full well there are no wifi networks. I pick up my phone, which has the body of an HTC Rezound with the UI of a Samsung Galaxy S5. I unlock it to see if it is able to connect to the analog cellular networks of the mid eighties, or if the local cellular companies have started experimenting with digital networks yet. Nope, absolutely no signal. This is an example of why you should keep a stash of downloaded porn instead of streaming it all. I open Chrome and try to load a website anyways. To my surprise, I am able to load an old website at extremely slow speeds. This is some really old porn. Its black and white and fuzzy, and looks like it was loaded from a 5.25" floppy disk. I stare at it and try to make out the image. I can see three naked women in the foreground. They are gorgeous! My eyes discern a fourth...and a fifth. By the time I finish studying the still frame, I make out eight naked women. I wrap up, and my friend doesn't return before I go to bed.
...
The next day my friend and I are walking around a K-mart or really old Wal-Mart (basically a dumpy 80s-era store). He is shopping for whatever it is that he needs, and I am just enjoying my time here. We split up briefly so he can go look for his items, and I walk towards the back of the store into the electronics area. There are no sales associates, no locked glass cabinets, no walls of TVs, and no colorful easy to understand 'tech specs' signs. The aisle I choose happens to be the cell phone aisle. They look much like my Mom's old red Nokia brick phone, but larger and heavier. I don't recognize any of the brands. So they do have cellular networks here. They must all be analog. I wonder how extensive they are. I pick one of the phones up. It is red and has nothing but a numeric keypad and the simplest of black and green screens. I hold it against the right side of my face and quietly speak random sentences into the transceiver. My friend walks into the other end of the aisle holding bags of stuff and asks if I am ready to go. "Yes." I set the phone back down.
...
My friend and I are walking around down town with a group of his friends. We are on a main street with two lanes in each direction and sidewalks. The street is lined on all sides with tightly packed two to five story buildings. Power lines suspended in the center between poles on either side of the road run over our heads. About 50 meters ahead of us there is an intersection created by a road terminating from the left. Power lines from all three directions converge on a white cylindrical transformer above the intersection. As we approach the intersection, I feel the tension in the air like something is about to happen. I turn left down the new road to walk out from under the power lines, but they cover all three roads. I walk down the road anyways. I am so sure something is about to happen that I decide to use my tablet to take a picture. As I am pulling the black piece of glass out, the transformer at the intersection explodes into sparks, flaming oil, and ceramic. I open the camera from the lock screen and begin recording video. I point the tablet at the transformer and look into the screen. The scene my tablet computer is recording is different than what I can see- people are still running and jumping over cars, but the power lines are gone and they're running through a field.
...
I am standing in a high school hallway with the same group of people. Students are opening and closing lockers to retrieve books. It is the afternoon, but I'm not sure if school is over yet or not. The principal walks up. He is a white, middle aged man with a receding hairline. He is dressed in a full suit colored eighties style, somewhere between light brown, tan, and puke green. His left hand holds a clear plastic Ziploc container with a blue lid. He addresses my friend as he approaches us, and I can see the container has some ground up weed and several pre-rolled blunts of various lengths. He takes the lid off and claims to have found this in my friend's locker. I lack that feeling of dread that accompanies someone getting in trouble at school. I realize that's because I'm from a different time zone and I don't have anything to loose. I inspect the Ziploc for the longest blunt and snatch it from the container. I light it up in the middle of the hallway, waiting for the principal to ask my name. He watches me but doesn't say anything. I take a few puffs and pass it to my left. The blunt makes three or four rotations through our group. I begin to get pretty high and at some point in there we aren't at school anymore. We sit on a couch and just talk and get to know each other. One of the kids in the group, in a conversation to which I am not a part, mentions something about .
Me: "What about number-number-number?"
Him: "If that's a regional code, I didn't mean it like that."
Me: "It is, yeah, that's the zip code for the area I am from."
Him: "Oh, cool."
...
Our group is walking down a long hallway. There are many doors on both sides, and far at the end I can see a large pane of glass opening to an overcast city view. As we're walking, somehow dubstep starts playing on my tablet. When I woke up I wrote that the song was Hashtag, but I feel like it was a more upbeat song. Forest me begins to come out. I raise my heels off the ground and begin moving with the music. The drop comes and I kick out my feet and jump around in time with the music, still moving forward down the hallway. Some of my friends begin dancing and copying in a simplistic way. Another group exits a door in front of us and to the left and files past us one by one. They look at us and I begin to think about the clothes I'm wearing and how out of place they are. I mean, it's not like I'm in pilgrim days and my clothes simply do not exist, but Electric Forest hasn't happened yet so my hoodie is out of place, and I am dressed pretty differently from everyone else in the hallway. Some of the people in the passing group begin to dance along and copy me, and they look like they're really enjoying it. I suspect they know this is music from the future. We dance for the rest of the song and all the way to the end of the hallway.
...
I am in driving back to my house. My surroundings don't feel surreal anymore the way they did before. I watch cars driving in the opposite direction trying to figure out if everything is back to normal or not.
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