Shadow Slave - Time Dilation

A lone house.

On a lone street.

In a place God hadn't blinked at in years.

The only sound was the slicing of wings—

bats tearing through the bruised sky like old regrets—

and a single porch light, flickering, buzzing.

It blinked like a faulty memory.

Or a warning ignored too long.

Inside the house, a woman sat.

On a rocking chair that creaked with the weight of more than her body.

It moaned like it remembered what she wouldn't.

Eve.

Skin like wax peeled too thin.

Bones like wires pulled taut beneath fabric.

A frame so fragile the shadows dared not lean on her.

She didn't blink.

Her eyes had dried.

Even tears had abandoned her.

In front of her, a warped wooden table, water stains shaped like halos and question marks.

Above it, a static-filled television buzzed softly—its screen a frozen snowfall of white noise.

The remote lay untouched. Its buttons worn by fingers that no longer moved.

Time had no structure here.

It melted.

Like a body left in the sun.

Like memory left to rot.

Her daughter, Moon, had died.

How?

No one knew.

What they found was suggestion—not remains.

DNA scraped from the curve of a drain.

A tooth lodged in sidewalk concrete.

The grief was an animal.

It clawed from the inside.

It bled inside her ears.

It fed on silence.

Then came the fizz.

That soft hiss of a dissolving tablet—

like bones melting in a baptismal.

Like lungs collapsing underwater.

Like the dying breath of a joke no one finished.

Eve drank Alka-Seltzer for the pain in her stomach.

But the ache lived deeper.

Nestled in the marrow.

In the empty seat at the table.

In the laugh she hadn't heard in 74 days and 19 hours.

Not that she was counting.

But she did hear it again.

Once.

A whisper.

Not through air—but through water.

Filtered through the fizz. Distorted. Wrong.

But hers.

Moon.

Each bubble seemed to speak.

Each pop a syllable.

A syntax of spirits.

A grammar of grief.

She visited the website.

Alka-Seltzer.com

At first it was innocent.

She read about acid. About reflux.

The body rebels, they said, in strange ways.

But the site began to change.

Not in form.

In feeling.

A presence lingered behind the code.

It hovered behind the cursor.

It watched.

Then came the message.

Fact: 1913 is prime. It contains the same digits as the next prime.

She read it aloud.

Once.

Twice.

The numbers hung in her teeth like plaque.

They appeared again.

In different fonts.

In different places.

But always when she wasn't looking.

Until she was.

She told her husband.

Adam.

He used to fix radios.

Could pull music from the sky with nothing but wire and want.

Back when he believed everything broken could be tuned,

repaired,

made to sing again.

He believed her.

Not because of evidence.

Because he loved her.

Because he feared the day he'd have to stop.

She showed him the message.

He stared.

Not at the screen—

at her face, hollow and burning.

He didn't ask what she wanted.

He went to the garage.

He built something.

Wires. Copper. Diodes. A hiss of ozone.

A breadboard of grief and guilt.

Something between science and séance.

A machine tuned not to channels—but to pain.

He worked in silence, for days.

Didn't sleep.

Didn't speak.

Only soldered, breath shallow and thoughts heavy.

Once, Eve watched him from the door.

He had drawn something in chalk around the table—

an old radio dial, etched with numbers he wouldn't explain.

In the center: a glass of water. Already fizzing. Already whispering.

His notes had changed.

No schematics. No equations.

Only phrases repeating down the page:

Prime reflections.

Moon = Δλ

Modulate the inductance non-linear.

Modulate the inductance non-linear.

Modulate the inductance—

He said it like scripture.

When he finally spoke, his voice was sanded raw.

"Electromagnetic fields can linger. Like echoes.

If she screamed hard enough… maybe something listened."

They waited until midnight.

Dropped the tablet.

Watched the bubbles rise like souls with no heaven to reach.

The machine hummed.

The walls leaned in.

Static.

Then—

Signal.

A voice.

But not Moon's. Not entirely.

"Don't listen to the next one."

They did.

And the house began to bleed.

Not blood.

But meaning.

Cracks smiled.

Mirrors fogged.

Lightbulbs fizzed in tandem with the tablets.

Outlets whispered lullabies in reverse.

Moon's name scratched itself into the condensation.

Again. Again. Again.

The television turned on by itself.

No remote.

Just numbers.

Each one louder. Closer.

Like footsteps in a hallway that didn't exist.

Adam began recording everything.

He kept a journal, but wouldn't let Eve read it.

Once, she glimpsed the cover:

"Moonlight doesn't echo."

He spent nights whispering into the fizzing glass,

asking questions as if Moon might answer.

"What part of you's still here?"

"Can you feel us when we dream?"

"Are you… alone?"

One morning, Eve found a headset plugged into the machine.

He was asleep in the chair, eyes open.

The glass on the table hadn't been touched,

but the water was gone.

He started hallucinating—

but insisted they were premonitions.

"She's not where we left her."

"There's something behind her voice. A carrier wave."

"It's using her like a code."

He stopped shaving.

Wore gloves all the time.

Kept pacing like the walls were watching him.

One night, she woke to static and found him in the living room.

Sitting in front of the TV, crying quietly.

His voice was broken glass:

"If grief's a frequency,

then what have we tuned ourselves to?"

The next day, he began dismantling the machine.

Tears streaked the dust on his face.

His hands moved slow.

Unwilling.

Shaking.

He whispered to her:

"It's not a signal. It's a lock."

Again.

"It's not a signal. It's a lock."

And again.

"It's not a signal. It's a lock."

She tried to stop him.

He looked through her like a stranger.

That night, he vanished.

No door opened. No sound.

Only his coat remained.

Folded neatly on the porch.

Still warm.

Still humming.

The site changed one final time.

All white.

A single sentence:

You visited 999 times. You're ready now.

She didn't hesitate.

Didn't think.

She dropped the last tablet.

Drank.

The fizz howled.

The house twisted inward.

Glass shattered like screams.

The floors folded like origami.

The air grew thick.

Sweet.

Rotting.

And then—

a voice.

Moon's voice.

But wrong.

"You were never supposed to follow me here."

The walls peeled.

Paint wept.

The static became song.

The song became scream.

Moon's laugh echoed again.

But layered.

Like a thousand voices trying to imitate one.

A parody of love.

The fizz didn't stop.

It bubbled louder.

Faster.

Until the entire house foamed at the seams.

Eve smiled.

Her skin bubbled.

Peeled.

Her teeth dropped soft into her lap.

Her voice rasped.

"Moon."

The house answered.

"Moon. Moon. Moon."

The television ruptured.

And something crawled out.

Wet.

Digitized.

Gnashing.

Smiling.

It wore her daughter's eyes—but none of her mercy.

It flickered like a corrupted file.

It dragged behind it a cord of numbers and names.

It stared at Eve.

And Eve wept.

Because she finally understood:

This thing was not her daughter.

It was everything left behind.

Grief given form.

Ache given algorithms.

Loss made flesh.

And still, she reached for it.

Because love is stupid that way.

At 19:13, the fizz stopped.

The house went still.

Eve's pulse unspooled quietly, like thread from a spool too old to hold its own shape.

The room settled.

On the television—long dead—numbers blinked, ghostly white on a black screen:

19:31

Just that.

No sound.

No context.

As if time itself had glitched forward.

As if someone else had arrived.

Or was already waiting.

---

A lone house.

On a lone street.

In a place silence learned to scream.

No sound remains.

Except the fizzing.

Of nothing.

Of memory.

Of grief made audible.

And sometimes—

from beneath the porch—

a laugh.

Too sharp.

Too layered.

Too familiar.

Like a tablet that never finishes dissolving.

---

THIS IS NOT A CHAPTER OF DILATION!!!! JUST SOMETHING WRITTEN FOR FUNSIES!!!