By Sean Marmon
For weeks, the restless energy had undulated upon the Sea of Tranquility. It violently writhed in its desperate search for stability, pulsing with colors and cycling through countless shapes and structures, evaluating and rejecting them all until, finally, the erratic bounding slowed. Edges began to establish a foundation in the dust and regolith, settling into definition.
Fifty meters across the gray desert, the ever-watchful outpost came alive with long-awaited alerts. Consoles erupted in a cascade of flashing indicator lights and swaying needles finding equilibrium in their gauges.
The anomaly was no longer an ambivalent, shapeless figment but a tangible form demanding investigation.
* * *
I woke up this morning choking and sweating, trying to cough out the memory of smoke from my lungs. I sat in bed for what seemed like ages, just breathing, assuring myself I was safe, waiting for the phantom flames to fade away. I hadn’t had an attack like that in a long time, not since I was younger when the trauma of that last night in the old house was still fresh.
It started as a grease fire in the kitchen. Our lives were changed forever by one pan of bacon. Daddy never forgave himself. He hardly ever cooked after that. We all loved that house, and I know he and Mama wanted to grow their young family there. But the curtains caught fire, and that was that. All gone in an instant.
I consider texting my baby sister, but I’m not ready to have a conversation about this. She’s probably still in bed, anyway. I ain’t gonna wake her up over a bad dream. Besides, it can be awkward talking to her about this stuff. She was too young to remember much about that house. Daddy dragging the two of us through the front door blanketed in black smoke is one of her earliest memories. That house is just a distant swirl of fear, escape, and heartbreak for her now. I’ve tried to tell her about the good things, like how the sun would shine through the living room window, sinking its warmth into the fuzzy shag carpet. The heady smell of old books, pinewood paneling, our freshly shaved crayons. I’ve described Mama’s many collections—miscellaneous figurines on the mantle, stacks of CDs by the stereo, and framed family photos on the walls. So many pictures, and I never got to learn the faces before they were gone. But my sister will never really know any of this the way I do, and that is a blunt reminder of our family’s ultimate loss.
This unexpected revisit to that lost moment of my life has shaken my entire morning. It took so much effort just to get dressed, pull on a cardigan, and shuffle out the door. I’ve been lumbering down the street in a fog, trying to shake it off and find a foothold in the sounds and smells of the city. I’m so wrapped up in myself I almost leave the bodega without paying for my coffee.
* * *
A familiar hum filled the spacesuit as Hernandez exited the outpost airlock, the anomaly’s vibrations palpable in the vacuum around him. He looked to the large caution light above the observatory window. It was a brilliant green, signaling nominal conditions for approaching the manifestation.
He followed a length of cables leading to the anomaly zone. He stopped at the Westinghouse camera mounted on a tripod twenty meters from his destination, confirming it to be properly framed and in focus. Within the viewfinder, he spied the newly generated construct shimmering upon the lunar surface.
It was a small house. A starter home, no more than 800 square feet, light blue siding faded by the sun, charming and quaintly suburban. It would be unremarkable if not for its appearance in this desolate location.
Hernandez cursed the familiarity. Over the long course of investigating and studying these lunar apparitions, he had come to prefer when they were utterly alien, their architecture or furnishings so bizarre and beyond human experience that he could only document them in awe and wonder. But when the anomaly generated features that were so easily recognizable, the suppressed loneliness of working at the silent outpost always needled its way to the surface of his mind. He cauterized the emotion and continued his approach, following his old boot prints to the ring of sensors and spectrometers that formed the perimeter around the anomaly.
Standing before the entrance of the ethereal, blue house, he found its door half open in invitation. He held his breath and stepped through. A light, fizzling sensation passed over him as his dusty pullover boots fell upon the soft carpet on the other side.
* * *
The streets are busy today. Hot coffee sloshes in my cup as I’m herded down the crowded sidewalk. My head is full of cotton, and an increasing disconnect from my surroundings weighs down every step. It finally forces me to break from the flow of pedestrians and take a breath. I stop at the edge of an intersection crosswalk, the green of the traffic signal seeming more brilliant to me than I’ve ever noticed before.
A sudden absolute silence envelops me. Time slows and falls over me like a curtain of honey. The cup slips from my hand. Something pulls at my chest, and the city slides away.
* * *
Hernandez was in a simple wood-paneled living room. It presented all of the expected features, furnishings and possessions of a small family den waiting for its inhabitants to return. Like the previous manifestations he had documented, there was an eerie stillness occasionally peppered with flashes of life. The headset buzzed with the same interference he’d always encountered in these explorations, but sometimes he could make out the distant, muffled sounds of children laughing, or a man and woman arguing.
He moved methodically through the generated house, his modified Hasselblad camera capturing its mundane artifacts; family photos on the wall, decorative plates, sports trophies, a line of odd figurines standing on the mantle. The living room was complete with a recliner and a long sofa, a television and stereo system, side tables with stacks of worn paperback novels, magazines, children’s coloring books. The anomaly’s chosen form was truly nothing special, and yet…
Loneliness twinged within him again. The familiarity and warm comfort of this newborn space, this instance which had constructed itself from seemingly random, unseen parameters, sang a siren song to his heart. The faces of a long family lineage stared out at him from behind the framed glass. He wanted a home, his own living room with a recliner, television, stereo, simple possessions. He wanted to look out the window and see the moon so very far away in the night sky, a distant memory.
In the kitchen, he saw flames flicker in and out of existence, crawling over the walls and vanishing. With each flash of materialization, the flames spread further throughout the house, an intermittent strobing of inferno and peace. The faint smell of woodsmoke rose through the air.
A small, sudden panic began needling him to look outside to the outpost. Despite his uneasiness, the light remained green, the conditions still safe for continued exploration. There was still time before the construct’s eventual collapse.
New sounds began to swell inside his helmet. Vehicles and their churning engines, the cacophony of a bustling city street.
* * *
The city is gone. I’m standing at the front door of the blue house that’s haunted me all morning. It’s exactly as it was before the fire but surrounded by a blinding absence of anything. A white, electric nothingness that hums in my chest.
Why am I here, again, at this instance in my life? I look the house over, and I’m suddenly overwhelmed with the layers and layers of events that have led me here. All of the accomplishments and failures over the twenty-five years since the fire form a collection of weights inside me. Lovers, friendships, decisions and losses… every element of me is pulled in a separate direction, like restless energy seeking a tangible form.
It’s strangely comforting; the house standing unchanged, unburdened of its ultimate fate, in spite of the turmoil inside me. I touch the raised skin of the ancient third degree burn on my left arm. A sort of contentment I have not known in years melts over me. All I want is to remain in this impossible moment. I want to open the door, kick off my shoes, and feel that soft, warm carpet again, then fall into Daddy’s recliner and watch cartoons until everyone comes home.
I reach for the door and find it already open. There’s someone inside.
* * *
There was someone outside. A woman in a brown cardigan, perhaps in her thirties, was standing by the doorway. Her features resembled those of various subjects in the photos on the walls. The anomaly had never generated an actual living creature before, at least not in observable space. Could he communicate with her? He lumbered closer, trying not to alarm her but ultimately failing. Her confusion quickly turned to wide-eyed panic. The color drained from her face, and she stepped back defensively from the doorway. He tried to tell her to stop, but he could not bring the warning to life. She began to flicker. Everything began to flicker.
She stepped back further, her foot sinking into moon dust. Behind her, multiple peripheral sensory units emitted small puffs of smoke. The signal light burned crimson on the outpost.
The woman atomized before him. She came apart in small, pulsing multi-chromatic cubes, bubbling up and away. The construct itself began to vibrate in a blur of instability. Flames erratically flared and vanished around Hernandez. He watched helplessly as the last fragment of the frightened woman, whoever she was, dissipated into the vacuum beyond the doorway. A cascade of chirping alarms flooded his headset. There was a sharp tug of nausea in his abdomen, and his eyes filled with black.
* * *
A paper cup fell to the sidewalk, coffee splashing on the gray-dusted boots of the spaceman. He had appeared suddenly in the very spot where, not a second before, a woman in a brown cardigan was standing. The people nearby stared in confusion at the manifestation of the man in his impressive but comically out of place costume.
The spaceman screamed inside his helmet and ran. He darted into traffic, weaving between cars, taxis, and large trucks. He kept looking up, scanning the sky as though he expected it to fall down upon him. He desperately called into his radio headset, apparently receiving no reply. His unanswered cries for help became increasingly belligerent, devolving into repeatedly bawling the word “collapse” as he ran madly up the street and out of sight.
Puzzled onlookers watched in wonder, waiting for the crossing light to turn green. As they pondered the curiosity of the spaceman and the vanished woman, a barely perceptible flicker began to ripple through the city.
* * *
The collapse of the anomaly took only moments. All form and structure destabilized as the anomaly returned to a state of flux, thrashing about like wild electric waves. It launched itself skyward, high into the perpetual black, and came crashing down to the lunar surface, where it pulsed in exhaustion until ultimately disappearing. The cycle was complete.
The outpost stood silent, watching over the great vacancy that remained in the anomaly zone. For a time, there would be stillness in the Sea of Tranquility, until the next instance of restless energy.
Sean Marmon is a writer and illustrator currently based in Tennessee. His work has previously been featured in Booth, The Weird and Whatnot, and Grim & Gilded. He is passionate about science fiction, horror, ramen, and pie. He can be found on Instagram @semarmon.