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A mere hour ago, Trevor had spooned and cuddled up to his lover, Laura, and firmly encased her in his embrace. She had fallen asleep first; he followed suit shortly afterwards, listening to the sounds of her soft breathing. When he awakened in the moon-lit half-darkness of their bedroom, he saw her shadow cast upon the wall; she was sitting on the corner of the bed, facing towards the window.
"Laura?" He rubbed his eyes. "What are you doing out of bed?" He propped himself up on one elbow and called to her. They had never been on a "babe" or "honeybunch" basis; for each other, their first names worked just fine. "Hey, Laura? Earth to Laura?"
Still dazed from his sudden arousal, he began creeping ever so closer to Laura, reaching for her shoulder. A bright, momentary glare caught his eye and made him flinch. When his vision came back, he saw that Laura was already on her feet. She opened their bedroom door and reached out for a hand whose owner was just out of sight. She left the room.
From the living room, Trevor could hear the front door unlock. The noise jolted him; he was finally wide awake. "Laura!" He leapt out of bed and ran to her, seeing her walk out of the house and closing the door behind her. He rushed outside, a flurry of emotions now filling him; mostly fear, perhaps a tinge of jealousy? Who the hell was she so close to that she would ignore her own husband and just fuck off like that?
When he made it outside, she was out of sight, but far from out of mind. Trevor sped out onto the sidewalk, spinning around, searching desperately for her. Nowhere. Nothing. No mysterious. No nothing.
"Fuck!" He tried to keep himself from shouting. He ran back into the house and looked through her phone. Nothing. Her email. Nothing. Many thoughts raced through his mind. She must have deleted a number of private messages between herself and whoever it was she walked out with.
Guilt then washed over him; had he been a sub-par lover? Had he wronged her in some way or another?
No way that could be the case.
Trevor sat down on his bed. After a myriad of phone calls, one of which involved the police, he felt defeated. He leaned forward and rested his face in his hands. Wherever Laura had gone, he was certain he wouldn't be able to find her.
He laid down in bed, weeping softly. He longingly gazed at their wedding photo, the sight of it blurred by tears. He held it close to his chest and somehow, in some way, found himself in the arms of sleep. As Trevor fell into a deep slumber, he could have sworn he felt the comforting touch of fingers running through his hair.
In the middle of the night, someone knocked on his bedroom window. His eyes snapped open with the audible pop of someone who had slept for an extended period of time. He shot up in bed, every sense on high alert. Whoever it was, they knocked on the window again.
Trevor set the photo down on his bedside table and slowly got up to the window. He parted the blinds a crack and peered through. An arm and a hand readied itself, poised to knock again, their owner just out of sight by the side of the window. As though it could sense Trevor peeking at it, the hand stopped knocking and waved to him.
"What the fuck?" He mouthed to himself.
And then another hand appeared just below this one; they began speaking to him in sign language, as Laura was mute. A soft light emanated from the side where these arms were extending from.
<Trevor.>
He would recognize those hands anywhere; they were Laura's hands. It was the way their paleness glowed in the evening moonlight as well as the obsidian wedding ring she wore. Where the fuck had she gone? And why the hell was she playing this game with him?
"Laura! Where the hell have you been?" Trevor considered himself lucky for knowing sign language. The hands pointed upwards. Trevor leaned sideways to try and see Laura. The hands quickly darted out of sight. Someone—presumably Laura—knocked on the front door. Trevor grunted in a mixture of immense relief and slight irritation as he ran and opened it.
He screamed.
Laura's arms reached down from the skies, inhumanly long and dotted with numerous elbows, extending from what resembled liquid-like ripples hanging above. These arms flattened as they ascended, as though only the flesh had stretched, but the bones stayed the same length.
Trevor rushed to slam the door shut, but a hand caught it and pushed it open. The hand then moved back and continued signing.
<I miss you, Trevor. I'm somewhere else now, somewhere better. Please join me.>
One of the hands rested itself on his shoulder. It was comforting. It was her hand, after all. The other hand slid upwards, retracting back into the mid-air ripples. Moments later, it re-emerged with what resembled a pearl and it offered it to Trevor.
He froze and eyed it warily, feeling his heart pounding in his ears. Tears silently slid down his cheeks as time seemed to slow down to a crawl and stop around him. The hand on his shoulder caressed his neck—the way Laura did—then gently rested on his chest and lifted his head upwards. He felt her lips peck his, though she was nowhere to be seen. He closed his eyes and reached for the pearl.
Everything warped around him, his walls shifted and melted, lights and warm colors dripping down the walls, his front door divided in two, sliding sideways, stretching and clinging to each other before finally separating, like mitosis.
His windows showed the entire world dripping and falling away into a black abyss, everything split in two, first sideways, then upwards, in their own little boxes. Slowly, he ascended from the ground now flailing his feet, as though that would entice gravity to reunite him with the Earth. His arms stretched, and he screamed as he felt the worst growing pains he never could have possibly imagined.
Laura's hand squeezed Trevor's gently but firmly as he drifted upwards and struck an invisible ceiling, which slowly liquified and suctioned him inwards, constricting and contracting like a universal birth canal, rippling lightly and squelching as it took him in—
The black abyss took hold of him and slowly rotated him until he faced directly 'downwards', as much as that word meant here. He saw little boxes in this abyss, little boxes that all held copies of his neighborhood, though they were all slightly different in their own little ways; many were in daylight, many were in darkness, but the one commonality they shared was that they all had their own screaming, flailing, levitating Trevor.
Trevor saw Trevor, who also saw Trevor, and they all screamed into the darkness as they all drifted towards each other. Soon, they bumped into each other, and then Laura's infinite arms quickly descended on them and tethered themselves around the Trevors like knots and held them together tightly, like dolls tied together with twine, and the arms squeezed.
Trevor felt intense, searing, burning heat cook through his flesh; he bubbled and melted into his other selves, and from there, he lived every conceivable lifetime he ever could have possibly lived; he saw glimpses of a life where he was a firefighter, saw flashbacks of a life he never lived.
He saw a kid he had in another universe, now fatherless and motherless, never to know that mommy and daddy would be watching over him for eternity.
Eventually, Trevor stopped screaming; his 'body' stopped bubbling and he—not quite solidified—stablized in a little amorphous mass hovering the abyss. He then saw, as well as felt, his lover drifting through this abyss towards him, floating past the endless black ocean of boxes, oceans of universes, shifting mass and form until she stopped before him.
Her 'body' was covered in little glowing, white pearls, the same that she had offered him. His own body, too, was covered in these pearls. She offered him her hand.
He accepted.