Short Stories 2020 (Prompts/Contest Entries)

Mysterious Ways

It is barely light when I open my eyes, a pale greyness around the edges of the curtains suggesting it is about an hour before dawn. The bedside clock says 5:24. It is my room, but it is different – things are in different positions on the walls, the atmosphere is unusual. I can't pin down why, exactly, but although I know I'm not where I should be, it still feels like home. The covers feel different as well, more constricted, as I turn to look at the clock. Not my clock, I realise.

My breath catches in my throat as I lie back and become more aware, still for a moment – I am not alone in the bed.

I don't panic. Which is curious, because I think I should panic. After all, there shouldn't be anyone in my bed with me, and it is my bed. It is where my bed should be: in the middle, halfway between window on the left and door on the right, head to the internal wall. Wardrobe to the left at the bottom; chest-of-drawers to the right near the door. My bed in my bedroom, although not my bed covers and not my hangings on the walls and that strange feeling of not myself being in the right place.

And someone else in bed with me.

She is remarkably beautiful. She is lying mostly on her front, her face turned towards me and half-hidden under a disarrayed mess of dark, curly hair; her full lips are slightly apart and the light breath of her sleep disturbs strands of the hair. Her cheeks are well-defined but not sharp, and she has a gentle nose and chin. Her bare arm is in the middle of the bed, atop the covers, and it was this, I realise, which had constricted them as I'd moved to look at the clock. She looks familiar, like a face half-remembered from a decade ago; somehow I know she is called Katie, that she is Katie – but I know I have never seen her before.

At least, the "I" who knows this is someone else's room imposed on my own, who recognises where she is but doesn't know why that place is not where it should be, who would never wake up with another woman...this "I" knows she has never seen Katie before. The other "I", who does know this room and doesn't feel out of place in it...she obviously does know who Katie is. Although I am not sure who that other girl is, this other I.

Yet I still don't feel alarmed, let alone panicked. In fact, I feel comfortable. But still different. Like I am not in my own life, but it is all right. As if I can live with it, until I can explain it.

Very gently, so as not to wake Katie, I lift the covers and slide out of the bed. I notice I am naked, with detached surprise because I never sleep naked, although it doesn't actually feel very surprising here. To make certain, I lift the covers again and satisfy my curiosity for something I already know: Katie is also naked. For a moment, I consider that this Katie is beautiful in many ways.

I look around for my nightgown, and of course fail to see anything like it, so take an oversize t-shirt from the pile of clothes spilling from the chair near the door and cover myself. The t-shirt smells of Katie. I make my way confidently along the landing and downstairs to the kitchen – and notice that this unfamiliar new reality is certainly my house, because I can not only find my way in the pre-dawn gloom without thinking, but even instinctively avoid the creaky floorboard on the landing and the creaky step near the bottom of the stairs. The kitchen is of course not mine, although the fittings are all where they normally are.

I pour a glass of water and drink it slowly, wandering around the kitchen and living room. My guitar is on the sofa, a pad of manuscript paper under the neck – I pick the pad up, dislodging a pencil, and hum through the melody, which is transcribed in my hand: it is new but familiar, and the words underlying it are a love song, also in my handwriting. It's a nice tune, and its familiarity is mysterious – like everything in this house which is mine but not mine. I put the pad and pencil back, and assume I wrote the song, although I have no idea when or why.