The World Forgets Devonne

Devonne woke to silence.

Not the ordinary silence of dawn, but a silence so heavy it pressed against his ribs. He rose from bed and stepped into the hallway of his apartment—only to stop short.

The corridor wasn’t his.

Instead of the narrow passage with peeling wallpaper and a single dangling bulb, the hallway stretched endlessly in both directions. And the doors—there were far too many. Identical brown doors lined each side, every one stamped with his apartment number: 24.

He blinked hard, rubbed his eyes, but the numbers didn’t change.

“Yvonne?” he called, his voice too loud in the stillness. His sister had been staying with him for weeks, hiding from something she never named. But the silence only gave his voice back to him in a warped echo: Yvonne? Yvonne? Yvo—nne—nne.

The sound crawled along his skin.

He tried the nearest door. Inside was his bedroom—perfectly replicated. Even the socks he had dropped last night lay on the floor. But when he opened the next door, the socks had shifted. Another door, and they had moved again. A fraction to the left. A fraction to the right. As if his life were being replayed, frame by frame, slightly altered each time.

The hallway bent back on itself, looping into impossible curves. Scuff marks from an old accident appeared again and again, repeating like a scratched record.

His phone was useless. The screen glitched, the numbers of the clock sliding downwards like melting wax.

Then the humming began.

At first faint, like a refrigerator buried in the walls. Then louder. Deeper. It vibrated in his chest, in his bones. It wasn’t mechanical. It was alive.

Devonne swallowed. “What do you want?”

The humming deepened—content, almost amused.

He pressed forward, clinging to the thought of Yvonne: her sharp laugh, the way she drummed her fingers when impatient. He would not—could not—leave her here.

But the hallway wasn’t empty anymore.

People appeared. A woman in a yellow raincoat passed without looking at him. A man carried grocery bags filled not with food but with screws, feathers, teeth. They muttered to themselves in doubled voices, every word repeated a heartbeat later.

Then came familiar faces. His old schoolteacher. A neighbor from childhood. Even his father, who had been dead for years.

Devonne’s chest tightened. “Excuse me—have you seen Yvonne?”

The neighbor smiled politely, but her words cracked and stuttered: “Yv—onne? No one by that—by that—by that…” The syllables fractured and dissolved.

They didn’t see him. Their eyes slid over him, as if he were nothing but a smudge on glass.

By the time he reached a town square—its fountain spilling black ink instead of water—he understood why.

In the ink’s reflection, his face was fading.

Not invisible—blurred. His features were dissolving, outlines smudged into suggestion. He raised a hand to his cheek and felt skin, but in the reflection, there was only a blank patch of air. The world itself was losing him.

“Yvonne…” His voice was almost a prayer.

The ink rippled.

And there she was.

Across the square, Yvonne stood with her hair plastered to her face, her dress dripping black liquid that stained the stones beneath her feet. Her eyes locked on him with recognition—and horror.

“Devonne?” Her voice fractured into echoes. “You shouldn’t have followed. You’ll unravel.”

He stumbled toward her, desperate. But the square stretched as he moved, the distance between them elongating like rubber.

“Stay with me!” he shouted. “I’ll bring you back!”

Yvonne shook her head slowly. “I’m not me anymore. I’m… scattered. Every time I remember you, I lose another piece of myself.” Her image flickered, twisting—child, woman, stranger, all superimposed at once.

The humming swelled into laughter, vast and delighted.

Devonne clutched his head. “Why us? Why here?”

The presence didn’t answer in words. The buildings buckled. The sky cracked like porcelain. Something immense and unseen erased another piece of him. His memories stuttered. His name slipped from his own mind like water through a sieve.

Yvonne stretched out her hand, trembling. But her fingers never reached him. “Go back. Forget me. If you stay, it’ll take all of you.”

“No,” Devonne gasped. “I won’t leave you here.”

Her broken smile cut him to the bone. “You already are leaving me.”

He looked down. His hands were gone. Not invisible, not fading

—gone.

Air where flesh should be.

The last thing he saw was Yvonne unraveling, her form shredding into strands of light that the humming presence devoured.

Then the world blinked.

A town with looping streets went about its ordinary day. People bought groceries, children laughed in the square, a fountain spilled clean water where ink had once poured.

And yet—sometimes, at the corner of vision, a passerby thought they glimpsed a man standing there, half-formed, as though memory itself struggled to hold his shape. A name would almost rise to their lips, but dissolve before it reached sound.

Devonne. Or was it someone else?

And Yvonne—did she ever exist? No one could say for certain.

All that remained was the humming, low and amused, vibrating through the world’s bones. Perhaps it had always been there. Perhaps it was the world itself, rearranging, inventing, forgetting—making and unmaking lives for its own amusement.

Perhaps.

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