“You’re up with the sun.” Maz, leaning against the flat’s kitchen archway, crosses her arms. She watches Eli’s back while he stays crouched by the bottom drawer, rummaging through scraps of paper.
“Yeah, rough night.” Eli picks out a torn piece of cardboard, a remnant of what used to be the corner of a box lid.
“What are you hunting for?”
“I, uh, couldn’t stop thinking…” He slides the drawer shut and stands, keeping his head down.
“About the darkness. It was… somehow more useful.”
She steps inside.
“What, in the basement?” As she takes her phone out of her pocket, she tilts to one side, resting her hip against the countertop.
“How so? Trying to read labels in the dark isn’t suddenly proven to give you superpowers. It’s probably even why we’re seeing things that aren’t there.”
“No, not exactly that. I mean, yes and no.” He sighs.
“It did feel different down there. Like we were, you know, aware… like we were right on the verge of actually remembering something.”
“And what role is that thing supposed to play?” She nods at the bit of cardboard between his fingers.
He slips the torn scrap into his pocket and lays his hand beside the open mint tin on the countertop.
“Worst case scenario, it’d be a pointless experiment.”
“I still don’t get it. But I hope it’s more exciting than…” She glares at the tin as if she expects one of the last three scales inside to sprout spinach at any moment.
“…what apparently has become our daily ritual.” Her attention drops to her phone, scrolling through the photos of the fridge notes.
Eli plucks a scale out. When he puts it down, it lands on the tiled surface with a solid click.
“Turns out they only needed another day to stiffen up.” He reaches behind it and picks up the largest knife from its block. After a quick look at the scale, he returns the knife.
He brings the scale in his pinch to the centre of his palm and presses his thumb on it, pushing it as it resists bending until it finally splits.
“These look like they’ll reconsider their innocence on their way down.” He holds out the pieces, both perfectly halved, edges sharper than they have ever been.
Maz’s eyes stay fixed on her phone.
“This one’s my handwriting, isn’t it?” She briefly tilts the screen his way, showing the photo of a note that declares, ‘You won’t remember why. Take it anyway. Wait for the hiss.’
Without raising her head or waiting for a response, she reaches for the half that he offers. As her hand nears his, the air between them grows denser, making her fingers tremble and curl.
What the–?
He watches the tiny hairs near their wrists begin to lift as the air vibrates around them. The closer her skin gets to his, the more his hand threatens to slide sideways.
This again.
“Right. Stop.”
She pauses, eyes snapped to his.
“Well, I’m not doing it, am I?” The small papers held under the fridge magnets behind him draw her eye as the letters on them wiggle, slanting into one another, swapping places with the neighbouring notes. She looks back at him.
“Why’s this happening?”
He nods at the phone in her other hand.
“I’d guess that it’s got something to do with the ‘hiss’ thing, which obviously doesn’t seem to be interested in occurring, but–”
His focus wanders past her shoulder onto her shadow that leans on the tiles behind her.
Right, that shouldn’t be possible. The light’s straight above her… unless it has clearly decided to come from somewhere else. Nonsense. Bad sleep and thinking about odd shadows are making me imagine things. Moving on. But…
“Aren’t we taking these to… keep things from getting messy?” His voice quiets before he can finish the question.
“Weren’t we meant to forget that?” Her brows twitch and knot, fighting to balance a twinge of confusion and a grimace.
Unnoticed by Maz, the notes behind Eli move back to their initial spots.
He turns to the fridge. The thickness of the air between their hands loses its grip when he waves a phantom line from the notes to the engraved words on its door.
“We wrote it down. That’s the whole point, isn’t it? Fridge truth. For the times we forget the why, clearly.”
“How reassuring. I just can’t believe we’ve been ignoring all that for who knows how long. They were right there.” She slaps her phone onto the countertop, the screen still displaying the photo of the same note.
“Is this fine? Our former selves telling us to live with bossy logistics?”
He locks his eyes on her phone.
Yeah, the… ‘whatnot’ and logistics. That was–
A short, brittle snigger escapes Maz.
“Well. At least this time it seems we’re following our instructions.”
She steps forward, standing beside him as she taps a pinned note with the tip of her nail.
“‘Don’t miss a day. Seven in a row…’ That’s a rule with a schedule, fine, I can file rules.”
Since when are you filing anything? Get it together.
Her finger drops to the older scrap below it, and she reads it in a monotone voice.
“‘Don’t listen to yourself when you want to stop.’ What the what now? Who leaves a note like that? Why would we tell ourselves not to trust ourselves and call that helpful?”
Eli presses his tongue to the back of his teeth as the ceiling light flares brighter, making the circles around his eyes look carved.
I don’t know, but freaking out isn’t going to make a difference. I’ll change the subject.
“We don’t want to be late for work. The basement catalogue needs doing. Ron said yesterday the boss wants everything sorted before the harvest finishes. Whatever that means. So we do that. And keep taking the scales. Then worry about it when it’s all done. Simple.”
“Simple?” She barks a laugh.
“We keep spending days in a weird basement where half the shelves are labelled even weirder. What’s ‘Intake’? Oh, I don’t mind it if the ‘Crossing Forms’ made sense to you. All very simple stuff, huh?”
It felt normal, though. You didn’t argue if it was logical at the time.
Her fingers spread out flat on the fridge, and the cool metal gives her merely enough reality to continue.
“Here we are looking at an instruction, which, allegedly, we’ve left ourselves, that might as well be a threat. And the word you choose is ‘simple’.”
The calendar on her phone pings with an alert, flashing ‘V. Day 5’. She whips her hand back and swipes the notification away.
“Why did we set that reminder, Eli? Like we already don’t know it’s Day Five. The scales are definitely proof that we’ve been taking them, no? The nigh empty mint tin is full of proof.”
“Because we kept forgetting that it was the… arrangement. We agreed. A seven-day run, then done. That’s the…” He rubs his forehead, his fingers digging into the flesh above his eyebrows harder with each run.
It’s beyond just that. There’s a part we’re missing… an important one.
He looks at the kitchen’s archway.
“Right, bargain. We talked about that, remember?”
She turns, leans back against the fridge, arms folded tight, voice climbing.
“You told me that. I don’t remember agreeing to any of this. Who’s the bargain with, by the way?”
His shoulders tense as he wraps the scales in his hand in a fist.
“You think I like this? You think I enjoy choking down Ari’s lawn cuttings and pretending it’s mercy?”
Her ears ring, clatters of speech crowding her mind, theirs and not, the hum of the fridge turning into a rattle of an older version of itself. She drags her gaze back onto him.
“What did you just say?”
He tips his chin up.
“What?”
“You said ‘mercy’.” Her voice takes on an edge.
“Did Ari tell you that? Because I thought Ari said it was maintenance, so where’d you pull mercy from?”
The knuckles of his balled hand run over the seam at the side of his jeans. He looks at her, then at the notes again before his eyes unfocus as the light overhead buzzes and dims.
She watches him, softening her tone.
“You remembered something. Please, don’t tell me that it was nothing.”
“Ari. He… called it mercy and mentioned a… queen.”
“You sure he wasn’t just ranting about his bees again?” Her eyes widen.
“Ah, no, we saw that thing with a ‘Queen’ stamp, which, of course, Meg… Oh, I get it now.”
His shaky fist rises, steadies, before he opens it in front of her, offering her half.
“Shall we just…?”
Maz’s hand slowly reaches for the half shard of a scale. When she takes it, her fingertip brushing his palm, a snap shocks them at once and lets the air around them thin.
Eli looks up.
“Maz, it’s clearly–”
“Nothing to do with loose wiring, yep, I gathered as much.” She tips it into her mouth. Wincing as she swallows, she leans over to the side and, after a few swipes and a tap on her phone, ticks off a square on the calendar.
Five down, two still yet to stomach.
He takes his half and coughs before forcing it down. His gaze returns to the note on the fridge, to the ‘You will not remember why.’
“You know, he was right about that one, obviously. We forgot that part first.”
“So why remember now?”
“It must be something more than the scales that have changed.”
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