Seven Days

The House, 5 Guests, and a Strange Horizon

Lori looked down at her coffee cup and tried not to pay attention to the five people in the large, Victorian-styled kitchen with her. Her fingers drummed the ceramic nervously as one of the three women stirred eggs in a frying pan. A rather effeminate man leaned against one counter, sipping coffee. Another sat at the round table with a newspaper up and open.

On the side Lori could see, the writing merely repeated Lorem Ipsum text. She supposed the inside must have had something, as he rarely looked away from the paper.

Two other women sat at the table. One wore a pretty sundress and a pentacle around her neck. The other wore workout pants and a tank. Everyone spoke at random intervals, always in some inane small-talk, except the man with the paper.

Unless someone addressed him directly, he ignored everyone.

I was in a field looking up at the stars. I was completely alone, and the closest house was not large enough to have this kind of kitchen.

Lori had not been outside yet. The kitchen was the first place she had come to – at least, she thought she had come into it. She tried hard not to dwell on the fact that she had no sense of awareness between looking up at the stars and sitting here at the table with a cup of coffee in her hand.

She had the idea of waking up in a bed in a room that was familiar, but not from memory. She had the impression of getting dressed in new clothes, opening the bedroom door, smelling bacon, and walking downstairs.

All these things were ideas in her mind, things that logically should have transpired. She was not wearing her luxury hiking clothes from the night before. She was wearing jeans and a t-shirt with the Vertigo Comics character Death sitting under a parasol. To be dressed differently necessitated waking up and changing clothes.

Waking up in a house, however, necessitated coming to that house in the first place. That, she had no ideas in her mind about. It was as if nothing existed between the stars last night and the house this morning.

Lori’s brow furrowed as she concentrated on time between the field and the house. Her fingers stopped drumming on the cup. When the man leaning on the counter and the workout girl started talking, their voices were just a humming cadence in her ears.

She needed to know what was there.

“I wouldn’t bother.”

Lori looked up. Newspaper man was folding his paper. The Lorem Ipsum text remained in the articles, but the front-page headline now read, END OF THE WORLD BAFFLES EVERYONE.

“What?” Lori was not sure if he had spoken to her. He had not initiated any conversation this morning.

“From the look on your face, I’m guessing that you were trying to remember what happened before you either woke up this morning or found yourself in this kitchen, whichever starting point you have decided is the starting point for your existence.” He shrugged his shoulders in an almost nonchalant gesture. “Don’t bother. There is not a time before. We’re at the beginning of the Universe.”

Lori shook her head. “That’s not right, though. I know it isn’t right. Before I was here, I was in a field in the French Countryside. I was looking up at the stars and just enjoying a night of peace before the world ended.”

Counter boy and workout girl had stopped talking. Everyone looked at her, except Cooking girl, who was listening, but also paying attention to her food.

“What’s a field?” Workout girl asked.

“What’s a French countryside?” Counter boy asked.

“What’s the end of the world?” Pentacle girl asked.

“Who wants bacon?” Cooking girl asked.

“We all want bacon.” Newspaper man folded his hands together and smiled at the others. “A field is a parcel of land usually cordoned off for some purpose, though it may or may not be fenced. The French Countryside is a lovely place full of fields, forests, and mountains, none of which I’m sure you have an inkling about. The End of the World is what Lori here experienced and none of us can remember.”

Everyone else nodded. Lori had no idea where she wanted to begin with that. If they did not know what these things were, then how did he know? Why did none of them remember the end of the world? She decided, though, to start with the largest elephant in the room.

“How do you know my name?”

“I know yours for the same reason you don’t know mine,” Newspaper said. Cooking cooked on and none of the others seemed particularly curious about the things he said – or at least, they were not interested in answering questions. They had not gone back to their conversations either.

“Where are we?” Lori asked.

Newspaper shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know. I haven’t gone outside to look yet. The storm shutters are closed on all the windows, so no one can look outside. I suspect that nothing exists out there. Whatever transpired at the end of the world, it landed us here like the characters of a Sartre play.”

Lori looked around at the others. From the looks on their faces, they had not tried to look outside, and all of them had at least an idea of what a Sartre play was.

They were in Hell.

********

The house was large. The kitchen itself was twice the size of the kitchen Lori’s parents had in the house she grew up in. The round table was in an alcove breakfast nook. Adjacent to the kitchen, through one door, was a large dining room with a China cabinet and serving buffet. Through another door were a hall that led to a back office with a small spare bed in it, the back stairs going up to the second level, and the large family room. A final door from the kitchen led to the mudroom and then outside – where none of them had ventured or looked yet.

Beyond the family room was a living room that connected to the dining room via a hall that led to the front stairs, the foyer, and a bonus room set up as a small library and reading room. Upstairs were seven bedrooms and three bathrooms. Each of them seemed to have a room of their own, suited to them. Lori explored hers and found it familiar and comforting. Each of her housemates expressed something similar about their rooms.

The seventh bedroom was locked. From the back stairway, another set of stairs led up to an attic that was also locked. Lori looked in the kitchen, the buffet drawers, and the back-office room for keys. She found seven house keys, all with tags but no labels. She found no keys to the locked rooms.

Whatever was in them, was not meant for them to find.

The house explored, the six of them adjourned in the family room. Counter man sat on the loveseat. Cooking girl sat beside him. Lori took the large chair. Pentacle girl and Workout girl sat on the couch and Newspaper man stood next to the fireplace. No one spoke and Lori thought to herself that nothing was going to happen unless she took charge.

“I don’t think we’re in Hell,” Lori said. “I mean.” Lori hesitated and looked around at her housemates. They only watched her, except Newspaper man, who nodded encouragingly. “There’s obviously an afterlife, so it might as well be the one I believed in. In that whole system, I don’t go to Hell, so we’re not in Hell.”

Slowly, everyone began to nod in agreement. Newspaper man joined them, but he did not look completely convinced by Lori’s logic.

“If we’re not in Hell,” Lori continued, “then we’re somewhere and should figure out where we are, what’s here, and who else is here with us. So, I’m going to open the front door and see what’s outside. But, just in case opening the door leads to some weird existential crisis, I think it’s a good idea if we all introduce ourselves to each other. That way, we can remind each other of who we are.”

“What kind of existential crisis will opening a door lead to?” Workout girl asked.

You don’t know what a field is, but you know what an existential crisis is?

Lori met Newspaper man’s eyes and it hit her. It was not that Workout girl did not know what a field was. When he explained everything to everyone in the kitchen, he had been rather patronizing. It was that she did not know what a field was in combination with French Countryside. That confusion was something she shared with the others, and they all expressed that confusion in pieces.

“I don’t know,” Lori replied. “But I’d like to be prepared. So, I’ll start. I’m Lori. Since no one knows what France is, except you,” she gestured to Newspaper Man, “I’m going to guess that Atlanta and Georgia are alien to you as well.”

“I’ll pick up then,” Newspaper said. “I’m Yancey. I don’t remember where I’m from. I know I existed somewhere, but I don’t remember anything before the kitchen. I suspect it has something to do with the trauma of the world ending. I know that was a thing.”

“I’m Edgar,” Counter said, raising his hand and putting it back down. “I know I’m gay because Yancey is cute and the rest of you have no sense of style.”

Yancey snickered and Lori laughed.

“What?” Edgar looked around at the others, who shrugged.

“I’m Francine,” Workout said. “I don’t remember where I’m from and I don’t know any of you.”

“I’m Margo,” Pentacle said.

“I’m Shae,” Cooking said.

Lori smiled and stood up. “Okay, so I get the feeling that’s probably all we’re going to know about each other right now, so let’s get this over with.”

She walked out of the family room and into the living room. She heard the others slowly get up and by the time she reached the foyer, everyone was behind her, waiting for her to open the door. Lori reached into her pocket and felt the house key there. If she got locked out, she would be able to get back inside.

Lori took a deep breath and opened the door. While she could see clearly ahead of her, no sunlight poured into the house. Lori looked out onto a front porch that led to steps. Beyond was a yard with neatly cut green grass and a white picket fence.

Beyond that was …

Lori’s feet seemed to move on their own. She stepped onto the porch, despite Shae calling after her to stop. She walked to the railing and stopped, looking out beyond the white picket fence.

A sidewalk and road should have been beyond the fence. Instead, a little more grass gave way to nothing. Beyond was just the blackness of space and distant stars. Lori moved to the steps and down onto the walkway that led to the gate. Part of a driveway sat on the other side of the gate and a detached garage stood, sliced open by whatever had left the house and its small yard floating in space. The remaining half of the garage door hung down from its track and Lori caught sight of a car floating off in the distance, its body cut in half.

Other debris trailed off as well, probably tools and other things that had been in the garage.

This house was a real place on Earth once.

“What do you see?” Shae called out.

Lori turned back to the house. “Y'all can come out. It’s safe.” Lori looked up and felt herself try to spin. Stars were above her and she could see the fuzziness of clusters. She was looking into raw space now. She slowly brought her head back down and felt the world steady. “It’s mostly safe but looking up is disorienting.”

Shea stepped out with the others following behind her. One by one, they walked down into the yard, each looking around and peeking up quickly. Everyone except Yancey seemed awestruck.

He just looked as coolly at their surroundings as he looked at everything else. The stars might have been his paper.

Looking at the house now, Lori saw that the porch wrapped around. She stepped back up and followed it to the backyard. It was a larger space with a barbecue and an extended patio that surrounded a pool. The pool, however, was not usable. Where the pool grew deeper, the bottom was cut away, revealing space below them. It was a good thing, Lori thought, that the house did not have a basement. It probably would have lost its bottom as well.

As with the front yard, the back ended in nothingness, though here, the fence was chain link instead of white picket.

“Holy shit.” Francine had joined Lori. “So there’s nothing under us either.”

“Nope.” Lori looked back and craned her neck to see if anyone else was coming back. “Maybe we don’t let Shae see yet. She sounded panicked about me coming outside. I’m not sure how she’d react to the pool.”

Francine nodded. “Good idea.” She turned back and walked toward the front again. “Let’s go inside. I’m getting dizzy out here.”

Lori smiled. She liked Francine. She seemed grounded and together. Lori looked back to the pool one more time. They would find something to just cover it over, that way they would not have to look at the hole to nowhere. That could wait until another day, though. She walked back up the porch steps and used her key to get into the mudroom.

For now, they would get to know each other as best they could. Tomorrow, Lori would tell Shae and the others about the pool, and they would work on getting the storm shutters open.

The Impossible House

Shae discovered the hole at the bottom of the pool for herself the next day. At least, Lori figured it for the next day. There was not a sun rise and sunset per se. Their house on its rock just floated in space with the sun in the distance. It was less bright shining ball of fire in the sky and more source of ambient light that was enough to see comfortably by, but not so bright to make sleep impossible when they got tired.

They opted to leave the storm shutters closed in the bedrooms. It made the rooms a little darker and easier to sleep in. That and working clocks would allow them to keep something like regular sleep schedules. They declared 10 pm bedtime, though Lori thought that was mostly arbitrary. It was less a true 10 pm each night and more the time the microwave declared it to be.

Shae’s response to the pool was to go inside and bake a cake.

She and everyone else in the house just accepted that she could go in, turn on the stove, and start baking.

It was a gas stove.

Only Lori seemed to be bothered by their entire existence. It was not a question of where the food was coming from. She could buy that someone had fully stocked the house for them, though it would logically have to give out soon. Lori could, if she stretched her imagination, pretend that there was enough food in the house for a full week of six people eating full meals.

What bothered Lori was that the gas stove worked. The electricity worked.

The water ran.

The house floated out in space, apart from anything and everything else. It had literally been cut out of the world, as evidenced by the pool and the garage. The house had no generator running things. Their little chunk of Earth was not connected to anything. Lori had crawled to the edges to look.

Everything should have been dead. No gas. No power. No running water.

No working stove or refrigerator.

For that matter, they should not be able to breathe. Lori could not see anything to indicate there was an atmosphere here. She had no idea how gravity was working, but if she jumped up, even outside, she landed on the ground again. It felt as though she were on Earth and when she weighed herself, she was the same weight, minus a few pounds for the two days of hiking.

Nothing about this place made sense, but Lori could not make herself wake up. When she pinched herself, it hurt. If she tried to think about the unreality of the house, nothing changed. She went and found books. In her dreams, she was never able to read. Her eyes would blur when she tried, and she would invariably wake up.

Here, she could read just fine. She recognized some books. Others, she had never heard of, but when she opened them, she found them to be cogent and readable. The only one that was non-sense was a book of poems written by Ogden Nash.

She had a feeling those were supposed to read like nonsense.

No matter what she tried, Lori could not break the illusion of this place. She still did not think it was Hell. It was not Heaven either and while the house’s existence seemed impossible, the debris that had floated off from the garage and lack of water in the pool told her something important: there were rules here.

If she or any of them decided to jump off their little island, they would float off into space. Lori had a feeling that would spell death, or whatever followed when one existed after the world ended.

The cake Shae made was good and Lori decided she was a good stress-cooker. Keeping them fed, it seemed, was the role Shae was taking on. She made sandwiches and soup midday.

Everyone seemed to have their own routines that they fell into. Yancey gave up his Lorem Ipsum newspaper for books in the front library. Francine spent her day exercising in the family room or jogging laps around the yard. Edgar went around the house trying to rearrange furniture and decorations. Margo followed behind them, returning everything carefully to its place, uttering little phrases as she did so.

Lori thought they were tiny prayers, or something similar.

When Margo was not fixing Edgar’s attempts at redecorating, she was meditating. Edgar had found a sewing kit and when he was not trying to move furniture and decorations around, was adjusting his wardrobe.

Lori for her part remained curious and confused.

Her explorations of the outside done that morning; she turned her attention to the inside of the house. She wondered about the locked bedroom and the locked attic. She went through every place in the house that she thought a key might hide but found nothing. She found one of her credit cards, but when she tried to slip it between the frame and the door of the bedroom, she could not get it to bend enough to catch the latch.

Unless she could figure out how to pick a lock, they were not going to discover what was in the bedroom. Opening the storm shutters from the outside was impossible. The house had a ladder, but it was floating loose in space like other debris from the garage. The closest window to the locked bedroom’s window was a small window in the attic above.

If they could get into the attic, then maybe they would be able to get down to the storm shutters and at least investigate the room.

Lori walked up the stairs to the attic door and tried it again, just on the off chance that the mystery house decided to let her in.

It did not. She knelt and examined the lock more closely. The doorknob on the bedroom was a modern nob with a modern lock. This was an older latch, with its keyhole below. Lori tried to peer inside but saw only darkness that made her pull back quickly, as though something might be on the other side waiting to peek back at her.

This lock, Lori thought she might be able to pick. She would wait until tomorrow, though, when she could approach it with a fresh mind and not that feeling like something was on the other side.

The Attic, a Telescope, and the Moon Is Still Not Made of Cheese

“Do you know how to pick locks?” Yancey sounded especially smug this morning.

Lori wondered if she would be able to put up with him.

“I suppose you know how?” Francine countered. “Instructions are in one of your books maybe.”

Yancey said nothing. Even if his books had instructions, Lori doubted reading a book would be enough to do it. It seemed like picking locks was something one just had to do. It was like riding a bike or kissing or having sex. You could read information about it, but until you went and did it, there was no way to know if what you did worked or not.

She gently pushed a bobby pin into the keyhole and twisted it around gently. She caught on something and felt a click, but the latch remained still. Lori twisted up her lip and brought the other bobby pin to the hole.

Of all her housemates, only Yancey and Francine had volunteered to come up for the unlocking of the attic. Shae refused to come out of the kitchen and the smell of her stress-cooking filled the back hallway. She was making brownies now.

Edgar and Margo both remained silent on the endeavor and were arguing over what movie to watch. Lori no longer heard their voices, so she assumed they finally reached an agreement.

Lori slipped the second bobby pin into the hole and fiddle around with it. She found something else inside that seemed to move. She pressed, but nothing seemed to change. She wiggled both a bit against their respective parts and finally heard the click that she hoped indicated the door was unlocked.

It would be nice to show up Yancey.

Lori placed her hand on the door knob and Shae let out a sudden cry. Lori turned her head as Francine moved toward the stairs.

“I’m okay,” Shae called up. “I just burned my hand on a pan.”

“Be more careful,” Francine called down and rolled her eyes as she turned back to Lori and Yancey. “Well, let’s see what’s up here.”

Lori nodded. She turned back to the door and pushed down on the latch. It moved and the door fell ajar with a loud, mid-range creak. Inside was only darkness and Lori strained to see into it and make out some shape or even a floor beyond the little bit of floor where the room met the door.

“Is there a light switch?” Yancey asked. “There’s probably a single bulb in the middle of the room. It’s an old house.”

Lori wanted to reach into the room and check the wall but felt fear paralyze her. What if there was something in there? What if it grabbed her and pulled her inside? She was living in an impossible house on an impossible piece of land. The gas stove, electricity, and water all functioned normally.

It was completely logical at this point that a monster could be in the darkness.

“I have a flashlight.” Francine stepped up, held up a black cylinder, and clicked the end of it, producing a yellow beam. She pushed the door open, and the beam illuminated the attic’s existence, including a thin cord that hung from the ceiling rafters.

With Francine holding the light, Lori stepped inside. She made her way quickly to the string and pulled it. Light erupted into the room, brighter than she thought it should be. When Lori’s eyes adjusted, she looked around at an attic that was, mysteriously, devoid of any monsters attempting to devour her.

It was a large room, most of it open with a wooden, unvarnished floor. Boxes lined the walls, all of them marked with rooms and names – their names. Lori Bedroom. Yancey Library. Edgar Livingroom. All of them seemed to have a box for each room of the house.

The boxes cleared again next to the window, where a table with five chairs was set up as well as a blackboard and white board, three filing cabinets, plastic bin drawers full of something Lori could not quite make out from here, and a large telescope at the window, with an armchair beside it.

Lori was sure that the shutters had been closed on the window yesterday, and that the window itself was smaller. This window was large, almost her height in diameter, and looked out onto the starry night sky. She supposed that the small window could have been on another part of the house, but she had never seen a window like this along the attic level.

No, the house had changed.

“I don’t remember the window being that large,” Yancey said.

“It wasn’t,” Francine said. “This house is weird.”

It was nice to hear someone else finally acknowledge the strangeness of this place, and Lori was no longer annoyed by Yancey. He walked over to the filing cabinets and the bins above them and began examining them. Francine ignored the whole, obvious, setup and instead pulled down one of her boxes and started opening it.

Lori turned her attention to the telescope. She walked over to it and peered out the window, trying to determine what it might already be trained on. For the first time since waking up in this house, Lori saw the moon. She looked down at the telescope with its perpendicular eye piece and peered through, moving it until she found the moon.

It was still a distant object. Lori played with the nobs on the telescope, making it appear sharper and blurrier. Another knob helped it grow closer and Lori continued to twist and turn them, drawing it closer and sharper into view. It loomed nearer and nearer, then Lori pulled back with a gasp, unsure what she had just seen.

Yancey and Francine both stopped in their investigative activities. Francine held a small dumbbell in her hand. Yancey was holding a cord of twine. Lori blinked her eyes and looked into the eyepiece again. She must have knocked it when she moved, as the image was blurry now. Bulbous shapes writhed, making the surface of the moon look alive.

Slowly, Lori adjusted them again until the surface came into focus. The blobs became less chaotic and formed into the shapes of rodents. She was not sure if they were rats or mice. Lori never understood the difference between them. They were all white, with fat bodies and long snouts. They moved into and out of holes on the surface of the moon, creating constant activity.

Lori stepped away from the telescope and rubbed her arms. Watching the rats move made her skin crawl and she felt as though they were moving into and out of her skin.

“What did you see?” Yancey asked.

“Just look.” Lori pointed at the telescope and shook her head.

“I’ve got this.” Francine walked over and peered into the telescope. She gasped and pulled back. “The moon is made of cheese!”

Lori held back a snicker. That was an incredible leap of logic, even for their circumstances. Yancey rolled his eyes and walked over. He pushed Francine away gently and peered into the eyepiece. He did not pull away, not immediately. When he finally did, he smiled at Francine with the patient, patronizing smile of someone smarter than she was.

“The moon is not made of cheese. The rats have merely burrowed into the surface.” He looked at Lori as she rubbed her arms again. “You don’t like rats?”

“They’re creepy,” she said.

Yancey nodded. “They are. They’re also resilient. I suspect they evacuated there from other properties, maybe when their nests were exposed. I don’t remember anything about rats being sent to the moon.”

“How are they breathing?” Francine asked.

“The same way we are?” Lori offered.

Yancey’s eyes brightened. “I think you’re correct. Whatever had preserved breathable air for us has probably made the surface of the moon habitable to them. The whole thing is amazing, and I think we’re meant to study all of it. The bins are full of things to make notes on the whiteboard and blackboard. The filing cabinets have empty hanging files in them. I would be willing to bet one of the drawers has manila folders and maybe paper.”

“Why wouldn’t it?” Lori felt exasperated, but Yancey seemed to read it as another statement of logic. Her leap had impressed him, and he seemed to have decided she was another intelligent person.

Whatever. Maybe he would be less insufferable to her.

Routines, Catalogues, and Distant Horizons

The next day, Edgar and Margo were willing to join the three of them up in the attic. Only Shae stayed behind, busying herself in the kitchen after breakfast. While Yancey showed off the different items for marking and cataloging sights, Lori peered into the telescope, wondering what else she would be able to see.

The moon was still creepy, with the rats moving into and out of the surface. Edgar and Margo had both taken turns looking, and both agreed that they did not want to look again, and no one should show Shae.

Moving away from it, Lori tried to examine distant stars, hoping to find other familiar celestial bodies. She still did not know her constellations. She suspected Yancey would, but he was engrossed with creating the organizing system they would use as they explored with the telescope.

At lunchtime, Shae finally appeared with soup and sandwiches for everyone. She stayed, just observing people as they did their thing. Yancey set up their method for recording information. Francine figured out she had more than enough room to exercise. Edgar opened a box of decorations that were perfect for an attic and Margo had found in one of her boxes a detailed astrology book.

The opening of the attic had given them a new routine and something that felt like a focus.

Throughout the afternoon, Edgar turned a large room lined in boxes into something that felt homely and warm. Lori thought the transformation itself was amazing. He turned random fabrics and cords into rustic streamers that he ran along the rafters. There was nothing to do with the boxes; no one wanted to carry them down into the house and have it become cluttered, so instead, he let drapes fall from rafter joints and along support posts to distract from them.

Francine set up a workout studio at one end of the wide, open space, with a rack of weights, exercise mat, and yoga ball. Edgar had added to it by finding and setting up large standing mirrors so that she could look at herself as she worked out. Lori supposed that was important to exercise because every time she had gone to the gym, she noticed everyone seemed to do that.

Francine’s routine was a rotation of aerobic exercises, weight training, and strangely, dance. Specifically, she practiced ballet moves. She moved gracefully around the area she had made hers, and Lori was tempted to ask her for lessons. She had not practiced ballet since she was a small child, but from what she could remember of it, Francine was talented.

Yancey found graph paper in the filing cabinet that was perfect for charting stars. Lori seemed to be the one to man the telescope, so he wrote inside the cover of a notebook how to measure distance in the telescope and properly record it on the chart. That, he had said, would allow her to create star charts that would help them figure out exactly where they were.

Lori had no idea what they would do with that information, but it would be something to do. She liked that Yancey had confidence in her intelligence. When she started to observe, measure, and chart, she found it easy to remember and apply everything the instructions.

When Lori finished her first page of numbers and charts, Margo came over with one of her astrology books and started comparing Lori’s notes to what she was studying. When she finished, she simply nodded, and Yancey took over examining it. He then returned to his corner and began writing a formula on the chalkboard.

This became their routine the next day as well. Shae stayed behind in the kitchen in the morning but joined them in the afternoon when she brought up lunch. Edgar spotted for Francine when she needed it and she helped him with more decorating after. Shae sat at the table, watching everyone do their things.

While observing and charting stars kept Lori busy, it did not distract her from the strangeness of their existence. As evening time approached, took one of Yancey’s notepads and went downstairs to begin her cataloging. She was not marking stars or patterns. Instead, she was noting how much was left of different items in the refrigerator and pantry.

To her surprise, nothing looked touched. The pantry was full of home-canned vegetables and boxed rice and pasta. The food in the refrigerator was in sealed containers and the egg carton was full, even though they had eaten eggs that morning.

When Shae checked for trash, the can was empty. No egg carton. No empty food packaging. Lori wondered if Shae was using the hole at the bottom of the pool to get rid of the trash but doubted it. She barely went outside at all and had been troubled enough by the pool to bake.

Shae came into the kitchen and began pulling out pots and pans to cook. It seemed Lori was done with her investigation. She closed her notepad and made her way back up to the attic.

Shae …

Whatever had brought them together, Shae was the heart of them. She was the one whose anxiety and feelings everyone considered first. She was also the one who took care of them. Lori realized that if Shae were not bringing her food for lunch, she would probably skip it. She would probably skip any meal that Shae had not cooked.

Unless a meal was ready, food was just not something that she thought about.

“I need you to look at one of the stars you charted again,” Yancey said as Lori walked back into the attic. “I can’t make sense of it.”

“Let me know the coordinates and I’ll see what I can find. Maybe I actually found us a planet or something.”

“That would be neat,” Francine smiled as she sat down with Edgar and Margo at the table. “Do you think we’d be able to go to it?”

Edgar snickered and Yancey shook his head patiently. “I don’t think so. We don’t have a vehicle that we could use.”

Francine frowned.

“A planet would be very useful for my work,” Margo said. “If I can figure out where the planets are in relation to the stars, I should be able to start making astrological charts for everyone.”

Lori waited for Yancey to mock Margo. Astrology was not exactly an academic pursuit.

“That would be nice,” he said. “I don’t remember, but I have the feeling I never found astrology useful before. I wonder if given the new state of reality if we might find it to be helpful to us.”

“That’s my hope.” Margo’s face beamed and Lori smiled. It was nice to see Yancey not be an insufferable prick.

Yancey brought notes over to Lori and she looked at the coordinates and began adjusting the telescope.

She did not find what she had noted at first and panicked, afraid she had marked glare or a speck of dust like a fool. Then she spotted it, moved slightly from its position. She tried to zoom in but found she could only get so close visually. When she finally got a large and clear image, she gasped.

The star was neither a star nor a planet.

It was another house on another plot of land.

Lori backed away from the telescope and gestured for Yancey to look through.

She had found another horizon.

No Focus

While Yancey worked on the charts, Lori used the telescope to examine other stars more closely. If he found an error, he had Lori search for the location again, but otherwise left her to her searching.

She found other things floating about in space. One was a large bus. Another was an oil tanker. Sometime before lunch, she found another house on another floating plot of land. She found another around the time Shae brought up lunch. Today, Shae did not stay, and she found a third just after Shae left. By then, Yancey managed to figure out a pattern and he predicted where they should be able to find the next.

Over the rest of the afternoon, Lori managed to find eight more houses. Each seemed to be a similar house, a Victorian. Some had the small window their house had when they first looked at it from the outside. Others had a large window like this one now had. Lori theorized that the small windows had not yet found their attic and Yancey thought, all things considered, that was logical enough.

“When you can leap into space, logical leaps are small,” he said when Lori tried to doubt her own intuition.

Finding the houses turned out to be the easy part. Getting a better look at them seemed impossible. Lori could bring them into sharp focus, but they were too small and far away to make sense of the sharp detail. When she enlarged the imagines to bring them closer, she could not sharpen them to make sense of the blurs and blobs.

Even though Yancey’s math indicated they should be relatively close, nothing Lori tried could bring them into focus. It was as though they were a planetary distance away, even though by Yancey’s estimation they should not have been farther away than the Earth’s diameter in distance from them.

Lori had no idea how sound of an estimation that was, but it made no less sense than anything else here.

What was important was that she should be able to observe the houses more closely and she could not. She could, however, discern flickers about the house. She suspected these were people and brought up the houses to everyone at dinner.

Her housemates listened quietly, doing their best to take in the information.

“So, if there are people at the other houses,” Francine asked, “what do we do about it?”

“We try to reach out to them, obviously,” Edgar said. “Maybe they’ve seen more of what’s around. Maybe there’s a bigger place we can go to.”

“How do we go?” Margo asked. “We don’t have any way to travel, and we don’t know if we can breathe off the property.”

Only Shae was silent in the exchange. Yancey interjected with information from time to time as everyone else weighed the pros and cons of trying to reach one of the other houses.

“What if we get to a house and it's empty?” Shae finally spoke up.

Lori looked around at everyone else. No one seemed to have an answer and she realized it was going to be up to her to provide one. She needed to. She did not want to discourage Shae from speaking up about her concerns or worries.

“Well, if Yancey’s right, the houses are not as far away as they seem. So, if we can figure out how to get to one, and we discover it’s empty, it’s potentially a place some of us could live. It would mean being able to spread out instead of being cramped in one place.”

Shae frowned. “I can’t cook for everyone if we’re not all together.”

Margo patted Shae’s hand reassuringly and Lori laughed gently. Yancey seemed either unmoved or – suspicious. She was not sure which. She pushed the thoughts aside to enjoy her dinner and continue speculating with everyone about the houses and what they could mean.

After dinner, everyone except Shae returned to the attic. Yancey continued his calculations, trying to determine with certainty the exact distance to the closest houses. Meanwhile, Lori showed the others the houses and the ways she could not quite focus on them enough to get details.

“I have good news,” Yancey said after Margo finally got her turn to look at the houses. Everyone turned their attention to him. “The houses we’ve discovered so far should be close enough for us to reach them.”

“No one says ‘good news’ without there being a catch,” Edgar said. He leaned against the wall next to the giant window.

Yancey nodded. “We don’t have a vehicle or any way to propel ourselves through space to reach them. Even if we made something makeshift and had a way to propel ourselves off this property, we would still have the problem of stopping before we crashed into the next one.”

Francine nodded at that, “I can see that being a problem.”

“I think,” Margo said, “there are other people in the houses. The flickering Lori showed me can only be the movement of people. I can sense the energy in the motion.”

“Maybe we could signal them,” Francine suggested.

Edgar looked hopeful at the idea, but Lori shook her head. “The other houses probably have the same limitations we have. If they have a telescope, they won’t be able to see detail here. So they won’t be able to make out signs.”

“What about Morse code?” Francine asked. “We could blink lights. They’d be able to see that.”

Everyone looked to Yancey, who leaned back against his filing cabinet and looked up. Lori could almost hear the cogs working in his head.

“I don’t know Morse code,” he said at last. “I haven’t seen one on it here either.”

Francine slumped down, but Margo put a hand on her shoulder. “It’s okay. It was an insightful idea.”

Lori smiled. They were all working together on this. “It’s just a setback. We’ll figure out a way to get to one of the houses or communicate with them. Or something.”

One by one, the others left the attic until only Lori and Yancey remained. They continued to discuss the other houses and wondered what they meant. They could breathe here. They had food that seemed to replenish itself and no trash that built up. Did the other houses sustain themselves the same way?

How?

Why?

“It’s possible,” Yancey said, “that we’re not in space at all.”

That thought gave Lori a curious chill. The feeling would not leave her, a strange, dreamlike sense of unease. It seemed to permeate the house itself because Shae began cooking brownies and cake again.

Replenishment

Lori popped up in bed and froze. Someone was in the room with her. She slowly looked around. Thanks to the closed shutters and the curtains that Edgar had made for her, the room was dark. Everything was only the faintest outline, and nothing seemed to be a person. She started to relax until she saw that her door was open.

I closed it last night. She held her breath and listened, but heard no movement. She lay back down, making sure that she made that noise, and brought her eyelids down enough that they should look closed, but she could still see.

She waited, but there was still no sound. Finally, she got up, walked to the door, and flicked the light switch next to it. Light flooded the room and out into the hallway. When she peered out, she saw that all of the bedrooms were open except for Shae’s bedroom and the locked one.

“What are you doing, girl?” Lori looked at Shae’s door.

She was not going to get any more sleep. The idea that Shae was coming out of her room to watch them all sleep was just a little too creepy for her. She closed her door, slipped out of her pajamas and into jeans and a t-shirt. She might as well do some extra searching with the few hours she had.

When she made it up to the attic, Yancey was already there, at his filing cabinet and boards, working on calculations.

“What are you doing up?” Lori already knew the answer but needed to hear someone else say it.

“Someone was watching me sleep.”

“Shae?” Lori felt confident, but Yancey shook his head.

“No. I check on her. She was asleep. So was everyone else.”

Lori tilted her head to one side. “Why did you shut Shae’s door and no one else’s then?”

Yancey’s hand stopped mid-calculation. “I did shut everyone’s door after I check on them.” He put down his chalk and sighed.

“I felt someone in my room, but no one was there. I didn’t hear anyone moving around. What’s going on?” Lori walked over to her telescope and looked out the window.

“Nothing about this house makes sense,” Yancey said. “It’s like.”

“We’re in a museum or something,” Lori said. She walked over to Yancey. “I want to show you something.”

He nodded and she led him downstairs and into the kitchen. There, she opened up the refrigerator to show him the unopened containers and packages. Nothing had been used – not the eggs, not the bacon, not the milk, not the juice. Everything could have just been bought from the store.

When he said nothing she led him to the pantry and showed him how it was perfectly stocked. Then she showed him the empty trashcan with its fresh bag.

“Shae probably dumps the trash in the pool,” Yancey said.

“Shae is terrified of everything outside of the house.” Lori sat down at the breakfast nook table. Yancey joined her.

“Maybe we’re in some kind of weird museum and something is watching us, studying us, and keeping us fed.”

“When everyone is up,” Yancey said, “We’ll have them help us look around the house. We’ll see if everything is restocking itself.”

Lori looked at the microwave. It declared the time to be 5:45 AM. She smiled, stood, and walked to the refrigerator. As she pulled items out, she could feel Yancey watching her.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m going to try a different kind of experiment.” She pulled a bowl down from the cabinet and began cracking eggs into it. Her memory flashed to looking outside and seeing the number 7 in the trees. She decided not to look out the window over the sink. Even though there were no trees, it didn’t mean that she wouldn’t still see something weird.

Like this whole place.

Lori wanted to see how Shae would react to someone else cooking. She also wanted to see if everything would refill itself, and how quickly. She took her time preparing eggs, pancakes, bacon, sausage, and other breakfast items. She wanted to use as many things as she could.

Margo was the first down. She joined Yancey at the table wordlessly. Francine and Edgar were next. Shae was the last joining them, breathing heavily as she ran into the kitchen and stopped.

“What are you doing?” Her voice sounded panicky.

Lori turned to look at her. “I thought I’d give you a break from breakfast.”

Shae closed her mouth and walked to the table, joining the others. Lori brought food over and set it out, then brought plates, silverware, and orange juice, and coffee. When she sat down, everyone began eating.

Lori realized it immediately when she put the bacon into her mouth. She pulled it out to smell it. It smelled like bacon.

Everything had smelled normal while she ate.

Slowly around the table, everyone began putting their forks and food down. Shae looked troubled. Margo flushed. Francine frowned and Edgar shook his head. Only Yancey looked stoic and calm, but Lori could tell he was thinking about what had happened with the food.

“Why doesn’t the food have flavor?” Francine broke the silence and mouthed I’m sorry to Lori.

Lori wasn’t hurt. She was confused. It did not taste plain. It had no taste at all. She could have been eating air except that she felt something solid on her tongue.

“I’m sorry guys.” Lori sighed. “I thought it would be nice if someone else took cooking duties sometimes.”

“We all have roles,” Shae whispered.

We all have roles. You don’t seem surprised by this. Why?

“Would you be willing to make new breakfast?” Lori asked.

“We shouldn’t waste food like that.” Margo picked up her fork again. “We can eat this. It won’t hurt us.”

“It won’t do us any good either,” Yancey said. “We’ll still be hungry after I suspect.”

“Besides.” Lori stood up and began taking plates over to dump them into the trashcan – a trashcan that she noted was empty even though she had been using it. “There’s plenty of food.”

She scraped off her plate and set it down before walking to the fridge. She opened it to reveal the items inside, full and unopened. “Why, it’s like I never even cooked anything.”

Only Yancey and Shae were unsurprised by what they saw. Edgar, Margo, and Francine got up from their chairs to come and examine the refrigerator more closely. Yancey looked at Shae, who slumped down in her seat.

“Well, get up girl. We’re hungry and you’re the best cook in the house.” Lori shooed the gawkers away from the fridge and had them help her clear the tables. They put dishes into the dishwasher and sat down as Shae stood up and began cooking. When she pulled dishes and pots out of full cabinets, Lori silently pointed for everyone to notice.

“What’s going on?” Francine whispered across the table.

“I don’t know.” Lori sat back and watched her housemates and Shae. If they were in a museum of some kind, how did things restock on their own?

After breakfast, everyone but Shae went around the house, examining items that should be used up. Toilet paper packages were full. The rolls next to the toilet were fresh. Towels were neatly folded in the cabinets. The hamper where Francine tossed her towels daily so far was empty. Lori checked her hamper in her room, where she discarded dirty clothes. It was empty too.

How had they not noticed that?

“What’s going on?” Francine asked as they made their way up to the attic.

“I’m not sure,” Lori said. “I kind of don’t care. I think we can use this to our advantage.”

Everyone looked at her. Lori felt nervous, but this had to happen. They had to figure out what was going on and make contact with other people.

“Edgar,” Lori looked at him. “I need you to use your sewing talents to turn every bit of linen in this house into a rope. I don’t care if you use curtains from our rooms and our blankets.”

“Maybe not our blankets,” Yancey said. Everyone looked at him and he smiled. “I like to be warm when I sleep.”

“Not the blankets on our beds,” Lori said.

“Why a rope?” Margo asked.

“Because nothing makes sense here, so I’m going to jump for the next house and see if I make it.”

Stakes, Curtains, and Islands

No one liked Lori’s idea, except for Yancey. Everyone thought she would die, suffocate out in space once she was off their little island. Lori doubted it, though. Yancey thought they were still in Earth’s diameter. He explained how gravity and atmospheres worked and that they should not be able to maintain one here.

That meant that there was still some kind of gravity well where Earth had been that was maintaining an atmosphere. It was not strong, and it did not explain why gravity worked on the plot of land but not off, but it was something to go with.

Lori thought that it was even simpler and worse than Yancey supposed. She thought that the houses she had found were closer than they seemed, but were obscured by whatever was supplying them with food, linens, and other goods. That could explain why she could never focus properly on the houses, but that was not an easy theory to explain to Yancey and not something testable.

Not without just going.

Edgar spent all of that day and the next cutting up linens. As she had suspected, the next morning more had appeared in the cabinets he had taken them out of. He cut them into several long, thin strips that he sewed together into strong, thick hems. Lori took the makeshift rope of cut curtains and attached them to a stake she dug out of the back of a cabinet in the mudroom, the kind that once would have tethered a large dog. This she took outside and planted into the earth on the side of their island, pounding it into place with a hammer as Francine held her steady.

The stake in place and the curtains attached, Lori tossed the curtain-rope out into space, watching it float off in a long line that could not escape.

The work done, they went inside to have lunch. Shae had cooked up a buffet in her stress. Lori thought that she was worried about the plan, even though she had not been present for any of it.

After lunch, the curtain-rope remained. It was long but did not reach nearly as far as the houses seemed to be. That did not matter to Lori. Her gut told her it would not need to.

“You know,” Yancey said. “The Earth could not have exploded. If it did, there would be no houses. If it simply fell apart, however.”

It clicked in Lori’s brain. The thing she had seen but not noticed. The houses were all like this one. Which meant that they had been in the same neighborhood.

“The houses are probably a little more than an across-the-street distance from us,” Lori said. She looked at Yancey and smiled. “I’ve been thinking that but couldn’t think of a good explanation to mention it.”

“So if we’re still in the same neighborhood, you might survive jumping to another house,” Margo said. “But if it’s not there, then what?”

“If I don’t see it when I jump off the island, I’ll tug the rope.” Lori looked to Francine. “I’ll need you to pull me back.”

“Will do.”

Lori pulled in the curtain-rope and stood patiently as Francine used it to tie a harness around her chest and torso. The harness, she explained, would be safer and more secure if they needed to pull her in quickly.

So, the plan was simple. She would jump off into space. If she convulsed, the others would bring her back as quickly as they could. The harness would limit how much of her body flayed wildly when they pulled. If she did not convulse and could breathe – or did not need to breathe – she would float until she reached an island.

Yancey had left while Francine tied the harness and rejoined them as Lori contemplated where she wanted to jump. He approached with a piece of paper he had drawn on. He looked from it to the house and pointed Lori in a direction at an angle to the white picket fence. “You’ll want to jump in that direction. It’s the best bet for reaching a property.”

“If they’re so close, how come we don’t see them?” Margo asked.

Lori blinked and looked at Yancey. She had only her gut on that one and no confident answer to give.

“Distortion,” was all he said. It seemed to satisfy Margo, but Lori knew there was more to his answer than that. He had worked out something else, but he was not willing to share it with the others.

It made her afraid to jump now, but she was committed. If there were other people, they could start making a society again. They might even be able to work out creating an existence other than this one.

Lori steeled herself and jumped into space.

********

Floating weightless was a strange feeling. She could breathe just as easily as she could when she was on their island, but she no longer felt a pull toward anything. All that moved her now was the momentum of her jump. She looked back and saw the house and her friends recede as the tether slowly unwound out into space.

It was Margo’s expression that told her she needed to turn back around. She pointed, her mouth agape. Even in the growing distance, Lori could see her surprise and alarm.

Lori turned around and saw the island of another house looming close. With effort, she pulled her legs up just in time for her feet to touch down on the side dirt. Her body folded and Lori lost her breath in the effort to not crash face-first. As her momentum changed, she reached out and managed to get hold of the grass on the edge.

With effort, she pulled herself up onto the yard.

Edgar had managed to make just enough rope to get her here.

The house was more than similar to theirs. It was practically identical. The door with its stained-glass window opened and one by one, the inhabitants stepped out. Two men and three women greeted her with wide, surprised eyes that quickly turned to disappointment.

“I’m Lori,” Lori raised a hand to greet them. She hoped they spoke English.

“Where did you come from?” One of the men asked her and gestured to her make-shift harness. “Nice curtains.”

Lori laughed. “Thanks.” She looked at the windows and noticed the pattern of their curtains matched the ones Edgar had cut up for her. “I live in another house that’s floating not too far away.”

She looked back. Her tether seemed to float off forever and she could no longer see her house and her friends.

“Well, it’s out there,” she said. “Things distort here. I don’t know why. Yancey does, but I’m not as smart.”

“I did a test of the air that surrounds the yard,” one of the women said. She was pretty, with a lightly tanned complexion and long, braided black hair. “It has a strange makeup that seems to distort light in strange ways. If you want to take off your harness and come in, I can show you.”

Lori shrugged. “I don’t want to do that. If it slips off, I’ll be stuck here, and my friends will be worried.”

The woman nodded. “I understand.”

“We can still be friendly.” One of the men stepped forward. “I’m Leonard. The smart one here is Yasmine. This is Fred.” Leonard pointed to a young man with a wiry, athletic physique. “This is Ellen and Marcia.”

“It’s a pleasure. Do you have anyone else who lives here?” Lori asked. She looked up at the house. We have six people who live with us.”

“We used to,” Leonard said. “A young woman, but she left a week ago.”

“Shae,” Marcia frowned. “I miss her. She was sweet.”

“A good cook too,” Fred said.

Lori felt her chest grow tight. She did not want to be here anymore. She thought of the excitement when these people had come out, and the disappointment when they saw her. They had hoped she’d be someone else – Shae perhaps.

“I’m going to report back to my friends and come back,” Lori said. “I’ll see you soon.”

She did not wait for any of them to answer. She stepped off the island and pulled on the tether to draw herself back home. Eventually, her house and her island came into view again and she saw looks of relief pass on everyone’s faces.

“You’re okay,” Yancey helped her back onto the island when she reached her stake. “You disappeared and we thought we’d lost you.”

Lori smiled. “Do you think there’s something in the space outside the yard that might distort light?”

The question caught him off guard, but just as she suspected, his mind seemed to quickly start working on her question. “You know, that would explain a lot of what we’ve noticed. It could play into being unable to focus on the other properties. It might not be the telescope at all if light is moving differently. It would also explain your sudden disappearance.”

“Let’s go inside.” Lori felt her stomach sink.

Everyone asked her about what she had found. Lori told them about the identical house, down to the curtains, and the five people who lived there. She wondered if she should tell them about the missing girl and decided that it was best to just lay everything out on the table.

“Shae used to live in that other house,” Lori said. “They must have spotted me when I was climbing up onto their yard. When they came out, they were disappointed to see me. I think they were hoping she had come back.”

“How do you know it was our Shae?” Yancey asked.

“She was a cook there too,” Lori said.

“What were the other’s names?” Yancey asked.

Lori sighed. “Fred, Marcia, Yasmine, Leonard, and Ellen.”

Everyone looked at each other. Margo let out a small yelp.

“Their names are like ours,” she said and sat down on the grass. Lori joined her.

She did not want to go back inside. Not yet.

Existential Tethers

Yoana, Faith, Lance, Edward, and Michael. Yolanda, Mark, Farris, Edna, and Lane. Lori spent the rest of the day going to other islands, taking leaps of faith after Francine tied off the rope to different parts of the fence. With each island that Lori visited, she confirmed the pattern. The names were different. The genders switched from house to house, but everyone had the same starting letters for their names.

“What does it mean?” Lori asked Yancey as she pulled off her harness after what she determined would be her final trip.

Yancey frowned and looked at Lori. Everyone was still there, except one person.

“Where’s Shae?” Lori asked.

“Cooking again,” Edgar said and rolled his eyes. “It’s been constant all day.”

“She’s anxious,” Yancey said. “My guess is, she’s afraid she’ll have to leave again.”

They all looked at each other. Every house had a Shae that had left at some point in the past. The closest had been a week. The longest had been two months.

“What’s going on?” Margo asked.

Yancey cleared his throat and everyone looked at him. He had been scribbling in his book the entire day that Lori had seen him. “We know Shae has been to every one of those houses. We know that every one of those houses had five people now, all with names that begin like ours.”

He looked at everyone. Lori nodded and the others followed her lead.

“We know that this place is impossible. Everything replenishes. We can breathe even though we’re just a house floating in space. We have gravity even though this is not how gravity works.”

Once again he paused and looked at everyone. Lori nodded again.

“We’re with you so far,” she said.

“I don’t think we’re real. I don’t think any of this is real.” Yancey paused and frowned deeply. “Well, that’s not exactly true. I think we’re in a place and I think we have an existence. I just don’t think we would exist if Shae had not created us.”

“We’re bodies,” Francine said.

“We live in a real place,” Edgar said.

Lori looked from Yancey to Margo and saw that she did not look confused. What Yancey was saying, she felt. Lori wondered if she had always felt it.

Yancey shrugged his shoulders and gave a simple nod to Edgar. “You’re right. He looked at Lori. How do people come about on Earth?”

Lori laughed but stopped quickly when she realized that Yancey was serious and everyone else was looking at her with intent curiosity. They had no idea. “Men and women have sex, the man gets the woman pregnant, and she has a baby that grows up into an adult.”

It was simple, but it seemed to suffice. Francine nodded her head as though she completely understood the concept of what Lori had just said.

“Where did the first people come from?” Edgar asked.

“God,” Margo said.

Lori wanted to contradict her but found herself unsure. She did not know what God was or how it worked but she thought Margo was right after a fashion at least. The first people came about because God, whatever it was, made them exist.

“You remember the world ending,” Yancey looked at Lori. “You remember it breaking down and just not working anymore.”

“That had to be dreadful,” Edgar said and sighed. “Such a waste.”

“I don’t know what happened at the very end. I fell asleep. But I remember everything up to it.”

“You remember, though,” Francine said. “That means you were there. But Yancey’s got a point. None of us remember. That means none of us were there.”

“I think,” Yancey picked up, “that Shae has been creating people over and over again, each time she comes to a new house. I don’t know if she’s creating the houses. I don’t think so. I think they just exist in whatever this leftover place is.”

“Purgatory,” Margo said. “It’s most certainly Purgatory.”

That seemed right.

“What makes you think she’s creating us, though?” Edgar asked. “That’s kind of out there.”

“Everyone in the different houses has names that start with the same letter, but S names are missing since Shae was at each house at some point.” Yancey pointed to his chart of names.

Edgar studied the chart and then nodded. “They’re all Victorians.” He looked at Margo. “Is Purgatory a Victorian thing?”

Margo shrugged. “I don’t know.”

Lori laughed. “I love Victorian houses. I always have.” She gasped and grabbed her chest. She felt like the air had been pushed from her lungs, but they worked fine and she continued to breathe steadily, even as her mind ran in a thousand directions.

“I think you figured out the last piece,” Yancey said. “If Shae created us if this place is for her, why would it matter what you thought of Victorian houses?”

Lori nodded. “I think we need to talk to Shae. She can’t just leave. There’s a reason we exist and she needs to face up to it.”

Yancey nodded. “Lead the way.”

Lori led them up the steps of the porch and opened the door. She heard the sound of scraping. Shae was still here and had taken to cleaning again. Did she think she could scrub away their realizations?

Did she do this at the other houses?

The five of them walked to the kitchen, where Shae was on her hands and knees, scrubbing the floor with a brush. She did not look up at them, only pressed and scraped at the tile with the rough brush.

“You need to look at us Shae,” Yancey said.

“I’m cleaning. I’ll make dinner in a little while. Why don’t you go play a game?”

Edgar and Francine started to turn, but Margo caught them. Lori felt the compulsion but was able to fight it. Margo and Yancey must have been able to as well. They had an intuitive idea about all of this, and it was giving them resistance.

“We know,” Lori said. “We know you created us. What are we? Parts of you?”

Edgar began counting on his fingers. “Margo, Yancey, Shae, Edgar, Lori, Francine. Our initials together spell Myself. Everyone has the same starting letters.”

Yancey smiled and nodded and Edgar beamed. It was the first clever thing that was not about decorating or making curtain ropes that he had done and did it perfectly. But then, he was all about being able to arrange things in order.

“We are,” Lori said. She knelt so she was on Shae’s level. “Shae, why do you keep making new people? Why do I have all of your memories?”

Shae stopped scrubbing and looked up at Lori. “Please don’t.”

Lori placed her hand on Shae’s shoulder. “You have to.”

Shae sighed and closed her eyes. She was still for several minutes, and Lori wondered what would happen. When she opened her eyes again, Lori felt strange.

“I didn’t fall asleep the last night,” Shae said. “I tried to. I tried my best, but my brain would not let me. It just spun over everything that I’d seen. Mass shootings. Suicide cults. I realized that my employer really did know what was coming before any of us did. Like, I know direct deposits can happen fast, but it takes time to organize them for the whole company, and we were a large company.”

She shook her head slowly and visibly steadied her breathing as it started to become erratic. “Then the world just started falling apart. The trees unraveled. The house in the distance, the rocks. Everything just fell apart and away and I started floating in nothing. Without an Earth, I couldn’t tell when the sun was rising and setting. I have no idea how long I floated out there, all alone. I tried to see people, but no one was there.

“I had run off to Europe because I wanted to be alone for the end of the World. I’d never been to Europe. I thought about my mom and I wondered what things were like for her at the end. I tried to find my phone, but it was gone.

“Sometime later, I thought to myself that I had always wanted to have a Victorian house. I loved them and my plan had always been to save money so I could buy one. Then, I saw one floating towards me. Eventually, I landed on its yard – or maybe it scooped me up. It was empty until it wasn’t anymore.”

“The Divine is in all of us,” Margo said. “You have a spark of the Devine, so you were able to form the house you wanted.”

“Maybe.” Shae shrugged her shoulders slowly. “I don’t know. The people were interesting and I took care of them, but things began to break down. People were frustrated. So I left. In another house, a couple of people became violent. Another house, they asked me to leave. I don’t even remember how many houses I tried.”

“What are you trying to do?” Edgar asked.

“Isn’t it obvious?” Yancey asked. “She’s trying to find her purpose. The world ended and she doesn’t understand why she still exists.”

“No.” Lori could not remember life on Earth anymore. Shae had taken all of that back. She did understand one thing, though. She understood why Shae had created people around herself. “She’s not looking for why she exists. She’s doing her best not to find it because she’s afraid.”

Shae’s shoulders bounced up and down as she started to sob.

“I couldn’t imagine what the world would be like after it ended,” Shae said as tears fell down her cheeks. “Everything was so surreal to me. It was like a dream and I was afraid of waking up. Now I’m afraid of finding out what’s next. I left everyone behind that I knew. I let my mom die alone. What if she hates me?”

Margo knelt and placed her hand on Shae’s shoulder. “Your mom would not hate you. You going off it’s – it’s not a big deal in the end. Everyone dies alone. That’s the point of death. But you’re not dead. You lingered and you can’t do that anymore. You have a spark of the Divine and you need to do what people who have that spark do.”

“I’m scared I won’t be me anymore.” Shae stopped sobbing and just sat there on her hands and knees.

“You think your mom didn’t feel the same way?” Yancey asked.

“That’s what it is to create,” Edgar said. “You give up something of yourself.”

Shae nodded. “I know.”

She closed her eyes tightly. Lori could feel her concentrating. She gestured for everyone to gather around, taking their hands and placing them on Shae’s head and back. Slowly, painfully slowly, she grew faint until she was gone.

Lori looked up at Yancey, confused. If Shae created them, why were they still here?

“You always leave something of yourself behind,” Margo said.