Glow

Chapter One

 I have a horrible problem and it's keeping me up at night. Even though I'm an ordinary nobody, I have recently been developing super powers. Not cool ones. Useless ones. And there was no spider bite, no lightning, no aliens. Nothing happened. Just one day I didn't have anything weird and the next day I did.

Now I have to have white noise just to stay sane because one of my new super powers is incredible hearing. There are three large box fans squashed into my tiny bedroom. It worked at first but now things have been getting worse so the fans aren't enough. By 'getting worse' I mean I keep hearing more and more things, impossible things, far away and quiet things that no one should be able to hear. Yeah it was actually kind of cool in the beginning. But I live in a rundown apartment in a bad side of town and I have two words for you: mice and roaches. No, three words: plumbing. No, that isn't enough. There are too many words. Babies. Crying. Leaks. Rusted springs.

This has to end.

When I was a kid my brother and I would stick a sheet around a big box fan like the ones I have now and we'd spend hours playing in an air fort. He was my one hope to get through this but I hadn't heard from him since this whole thing started. I'd left him so many voicemails that now when I called his number I just got a message that his message box was full. I wasn't too worried about him yet--he's disappeared before--but I needed to talk to someone about what was happening and I trusted him to at least hear me out before locking me away.

There was no easy way to explain my problem. Not even to him. I'd imagined the conversation a lot and it never went well:
"Hey, Brandon! My skin is so sensitive I can't wear most of my clothes any more without feeling like they're burning me!" No. "Hey Brandon I can smell all the people in my building—all the cooking, all the showers, all the body oder." No. "Brandon can smell a litterbox from three floors away." Definitely not. He'd want to know what I meant and if I was on drugs. He'd ask questions I didn't want to answer.

I know what he'd think. At best he'll think I'm pranking him and at worst he might think I need psychiatric help. Which, frankly, could be true.

Besides my sudden development of super senses I had other problems. My bank account was hanging by a thread. A very red thread. I botched my last temp job interview because I kept hearing a whispered conversation from the next room over. I hadn't realized I had super hearing yet so I kept reacting to it. I hadn't gotten another call about a job since and I could imagine what the HR lady had written on my file. Since I didn't have work, I had no way to pay my bills and rent and student loans and I was on the brink of default, disconnection, and eviction. Not necessarily in that order.

It was 3AM and I had foolishly tried to sleep. I knew I'd just spend the next few hours worrying and staring off into the dark, hearing things beyond the wall of white noise I'd erected, and feeling progressively crazier.

If only I had an adult to call. A real adult. I'm twenty-six so I am theoretically an adult but I need someone with experience and gravitas. Someone that feels like an adult. And not my mother. I'd rather get a root canal than call her.

I could not keep going like this. I disentangled myself from my damp sweaty sheets—sheets that had recently begun to feel like a fine grade of sandpaper--and forced myself to head to the kitchen.

Just that simple act had become a crazy adventure. Not only was the old laminate floor under my feet cold, it also sort of stuck to the soles of my feet. I kept sticking and peeling with every step. My old cotton t-shirt rubbed against my skin like wool. The tips of my hair brushed my shoulders and it was like being lightly scraped by several hundred pins.

Everything competed for my attention. I felt every heartbeat and breath. I saw the bleached taupe of my raggedy loveseat where before I would have seen only shadow. I heard mice and roaches in the walls. I heard traffic from blocks away and just outside my window. I could hear people sleeping and snoring and clicking on keyboards and I heard a thousand other things I didn't even know how to identify. It would not stop. I had one thing left that might help. I told myself not to do it but I had to sleep. I just had to.

I navigated my shoebox apartment and cramped kitchen in the dark. It was never really totally dark for me now which was possibly the only perk so far. On the other hand, daylight had become blinding so it wasn't stacking up to be worth it.

An embarrassingly ludicrous thought hit me: was I becoming a vampire? I mean that's crazy—vampires aren't real, obviously. Right? I felt heat creep up my face and neck and I was suddenly glad to be alone. I wouldn't want anyone to know that I was so desperate for any explanation other than insanity that I was willing to invoke the supernatural. I would literally rather believe in vampires than believe all of this was me hallucinating. When I stopped to think about it, that was kind of messed up.

I headed straight to the chipped kitchen counter where a pink plastic Hello Kitty cup and a bottle of brandy would be waiting courtesy of Earlier Me. I didn't want to rely on alcohol because only madness lies down that road but drinking was the only thing left that dulled my senses enough to let me sleep.

The moment I reached the counter, I knew something was wrong. A whisper of sound had me frozen in my tracks, my hand on the cup. I'd been working so hard to ignore a thousand tiny sensations—even now the tick of my kitchen clock, the water in the pipes upstairs—that I hadn't been listening for anything out of place.

Someone else was here with me. A malevolent presence descended on me and I reached for the jar of cooking implements I kept around in case I ever decided to learn how to cook. I grabbed what I thought was a knife and whirled around to face whatever was in the kitchen with me. There was a man sitting at my tiny rusted table-for-two. I couldn't see his face, just the looking and vaguely darker man-shape against the familiar backdrop of my apartment. He blurred and stretched around the edges and I blinked rapidly trying to clear my vision.

He held up a bottle. "Looking for this?"

I heard the swish of liquid. It was my brandy. Then he flicked on the light filling the space between us with blinding hot white that pierced my eyes straight into my brain. I forced myself to keep my eyes open although they were squinted as much as possible and that's when I noticed that the 'knife' I had tried to grab turned out to be a rubber spatula. If he could be defeated with the careful application of frosting, I might have a chance.

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