mimic

No one knew its origin. No one knew what made it spread. And no one knew how it chose its host. At first you didn’t realize it was even happening. Something small – almost imperceptible. A hand gesture. A vocal repetition. A facial expression. But then it grew bigger. A crowd moving in tandem with one another. People around you – all behaving the same. But not just the same – identical to you. They began to mimic your own gestures. Like they were possessed. Or their bodies hijacked. As if they had lost control. They devolved into unthinking bodies. Incapable of controlling their own movements. Whatever you did, they did. Whatever you said, they said. Like they had to copy you in order to survive. And if they didn’t, something terrible might happen. They weren’t themselves anymore. They made you the center of their world. Somehow it all revolved around you. And once you were surrounded, it wouldn’t end. It would keep growing – whatever it was, it wanted to spread. So long as you were still alive, so long as you were near other people, it would continue and it would spread. More of them. Until they had everyone. Or until you died.

-----

Sophie could feel herself coming down with something. Three legs and twenty hours of travel had done a number on her. She was looking forward to getting back into her own bed and sleeping for three days straight. Months of on-the-ground research, while exciting, had taken a toll on her body. Exhausted her to the point where she was always sick, fighting off some cough or sore throat that just wouldn’t go away. But she would now return to her small home office where she would finally get to work on her book. Her agent had been checking in on her for the last year, asking when the new manuscript would be ready. After the success of her previous book, the publisher was eager to get the next one to press. But her books were always painstakingly researched, and this time was no different. This meant more months, perhaps years, between books. And that meant less money for everyone involved.

She had spent the last several months in the small town of Valea Lungă, with its single grocery store and one road leading in and out. And it hadn’t been an easy transition from her home in the Pacific Northwest. The locals in Valea Lungă certainly hadn’t warmed to her when she first arrived. But it was all right, she thought. She was there to observe, not to integrate – at least, that’s what she convinced herself. They were known for taking their time with people, so she didn’t take it personally. They were skeptical to start, but then after a month or so, as was expected, they began to open up. 

There weren’t a lot of faces in town. There were maybe a few thousand people in total. But once they had gotten used to her, they actually began to invite her into their customs. Sophie had come specifically because this region was known for its deep and mysterious history, including synchronized dances that were believed to protect the villages from outside invaders. These dances were unlike any Sophie had ever seen before – so mesmerizing that she had become fascinated by them when a video had appeared on her feed one day. Down the rabbit hole she went, and soon she was on a plane to a foreign country for months of research. She felt something deep inside her to go see this in person. The people of the town believed that this act, this tradition, of moving in synchronicity created an invisible life force for them, creating good harvests and times of plenty. She became obsessed with understanding it.

Sophie had researched one particular time – hundreds of years ago – in Valea Lungă’s history when famine had struck. The farmers in the town, in a hapless effort to convince the spirits that work was being done and to return the harvest to their fields, would gather each morning in the church courtyard to move in unison with one another. The townspeople had hoped that they could convince the spirits that all was still in motion. And soon the crops returned and they were saved from famine. Now, each year, the town would gather in the church courtyard to perform the same motions, which had evolved into an eerie dance, that called upon the spirits to send them a good harvest.

And she wasn’t disappointed the day they gathered again to perform the dance. All the townspeople moving in unison in the courtyard. It was like they were not human at all, but a single organism that moved on its own.

-----

When Sophie entered the line for passport control, she felt the sense that something was off. Maybe it was the jetlag. Or maybe it was the shock to her body of landing back home so abruptly. Or maybe it was whatever bug she had picked up along the way. She approached the customs officer, who asked for her passport and proceeded through the series of rote questions for which she had already readied her answers. Length of stay. Purpose of travel. Anything to declare. She stared at him through the glass divider, watching his eyes scan her documents. Then he looked up at her handing back her passport, but when she took it by the hand, his grip tightened, holding onto the book.

She looked up at him, his eyes met hers. But there was something about his gaze – it was distant, shallow, unmoving. But only briefly. Only enough to register before it was gone. And then he snapped back to it: “Welcome home.” But she couldn’t shake the strangeness of it. She proceeded to baggage claim, feeling the lingering sense of unease. The world beat and hummed around her. Percussive. Rhythmic. Purposeful. All the passengers stood around the carousel waiting for the bags to make their way from the airplane. They were tired, withdrawn, their heads down in their phones, earbuds in – still in transit and ready to be on their way home. But they had to wait more. Sophie stood there listening to the mechanical hum of the machine moving the bags around and around. And it seemed that once her bag came out, so did everyone else’s. And quickly a mad rush ensued. Everyone pushing their way to get their bags and leave as quickly as they could. Like they had succumbed to their most base instincts.

Sophie finally retrieved her bag and found a taxi. When she got home, she couldn’t even stand. She collapsed into her bed and slept through the afternoon into the next day, not waking until she heard the sound of her phone buzzing beside her. It was a call from her editor Renata.

“You get back all right?” she asked.

“Sleeping off the trip.”

“Good.”

She lingered on the phone. “We just wanted to check in on the book. I talked to the publisher and they’re really looking for a summer read. Something people can latch onto. It has to feel ... viral.”

“Viral?”

“Something that can spread. Something that readers really want to share. A cultural moment. That’s what everyone’s looking for now. I’m not saying you need a TikTok dance. We just need an angle. People want to feel like they’re part of something.”

Sophie knew she was well behind on her manuscript. She had sent a few sample chapters to her editor and could sense the lack of enthusiasm. What often fascinated her – the small idiosyncrasies of life, the strange behaviors of ordinary people – hardly entertained mass audiences. And she found herself struggling to find something that might compel a larger readership to engage with her books.

“We love the world. We just want you to dig in a bit more. Find more of a hook we can market.” Sophie understood the coded language. Get back to work. Come up with something better.

-----

She had spent the first week alone in her house. Not seeing anyone else. Banging her head against the wall. She sat down to write each morning, but couldn’t find a thread to follow. It was infuriating. The pressure to perform. She had so many notes. She had recordings, audio and video, of the townspeople dancing in unison. She had wanted to set the story during the famine they had faced, to follow these characters in their individual lives, each so distinct, and then find them not just co-habitating, but becoming a single, breathing entity together. She had been fascinated by the old communal way of life, those that prided themselves on not the hyper independence which most Americans sought, but on their shared interdependence with one another.

But Sophie understood that this type of story was hard to market. It lacked a high concept, as her publisher once told her. And now that her last book had stopped selling well and her financial obligations were catching up to her, she needed something that could really catch – like a brush fire or the bubonic plague. And it didn’t help that the internet provided her endless distractions. She’d watch the same videos over and over. The same dances. The same dumb boyfriend trends. Women putting on their make-up. Women taking off their make-up. The same viral clips getting consumed and regurgitated time and time again. And somehow it wasn’t frightening, but placating. It made her feel at ease. It seduced her into complacency. It was scary how quickly Sophie could fall into a spiral of doom scrolling, swiping from one video to the next. Like she herself had become possessed in some way. People were so easily influenced nowadays, she thought. They could be convinced of anything. They wanted to told what to believe.

She finally shut her phone off and decided to walk the few blocks to get a coffee nearby. And she was finally feeling back to her old self. It took her a week to find her sea legs again, but whatever bug she had gotten on the plane ride home had dissipated and her jet lag was nearly all gone. The coffee shop was full but not crowded. Scattered tables with customers working on laptops or chatting. Sophie approached the counter. “What can I get for you today?”

“A cappuccino,” she said.

“A cappuccino,” he repeated.

“Two shots.”

“Two shots.”

“Medium.”

“Medium.”

“Extra foam.”

“Extra foam.”

He paused as he wrote it down on the cup. Sophie stood there, like time had stopped. Waiting for him to finish writing the order down, but just like the customs officer, his eyes were distant, empty almost. She stood there for a second, then another, and then ten seconds – which might be no time at all, but felt like an eternity – passed.

“Are you okay?” But he just stood there. Sophie looked around, but everyone had their heads down or were immersed in whatever inane conversation they were having. “Sorry is everything –”

“You can tap to pay,” he said, snapping out of it like no time had passed. A forced smile crossed his face. She stared at him. For a moment she wondered whether she had had a stroke. Whether it was her own brain that was malfunctioning. She placed her credit card down on the machine and walked over to wait for the cup. She noticed a young mother with her infant daughter at a table near the restrooms. The mother looked exhausted as the baby continued crying. Sophie could sense the mother’s frustration and the growing irritation of the patrons around her, who all wore headphones to drown out the noise. She did everything she could to quiet the baby, but without much luck. But no one around her budged. They had all sufficiently distracted themselves.

Sophie took her coffee and headed toward the door but as she stepped outside, she could feel the strange sensation that someone was watching her. Following her even. She started walking down the street and she could’ve sworn that if she had turned around, she would’ve seen someone right behind her, but when she turned to look, there was no one there.

-----

Sophie had been having trouble sleeping on account of the jetlag. When she was asleep, she was half asleep. And when she was awake, she was half awake. And she was having a hard time telling the difference between the two anymore. Part of her body and her mind were still in Valea Lungă – as if all of her hadn’t returned. She walked around the house like a zombie. She found herself in places not remembering how she got there. Like she had lost control of herself. Sleepwalking or states of catatonia. She once found herself standing on the front porch, only awoken by the sound of bees buzzing in the backyard. They must’ve built a hive while she was gone. She didn’t know how to handle it, so she called a specialist to come and inspect it. She watched them buzz in the air, meticulously building more comb, more honey. That was how all other creatures were – they moved together to accomplish a shared task. Not like humans. Sophie, like everyone else, had her own world, her own life, her own drive to succeed. That was the world nowadays. Everyone completely separate from each other. But not here. Not in this tiny ecosystem where every organism worked simultaneously, following the lead of the queen bee.

She called a specialist to come by and have it removed. But he couldn’t come for another three days. But the bees weren’t hurting anyone. She wouldn’t have entertained the idea of killing them. She would leave them unbothered until they could be transported somewhere else.

-----

The goal of the internet was always to be everywhere all the time. That was the beauty and flatness of the digital world – to exist in perpetuity for anyone to find. And the goal was always to exploit that, to find a way to infiltrate the collective psyche. To find a way to latch onto the minds of those who stumbled across the webpages and the videos and the posts. If you could create something that people wanted, across the vastness of the internet, it was as if you could live forever. It was the same thing with authors, with anyone who wanted their words to spread, Sophie had thought, they simply wanted to find a way to get inside people’s brains, to co-exist with them, to plant an idea that would have a life of its own, even without knowing its point of origin.

But everything she came across – every video, every meme, every quote – seemed so inane, so simplistic that they could be repeated over and over by design. The brain rot of the internet. Girlfriends playing pranks on their boyfriends and vice versa. Peter Explains the Joke. Choreographed dances to the most basic pop songs. Garbage upon more garbage. The internet was just a series of downcycled content. Sophie didn’t understand how people could stand it, let alone how they couldn’t get enough of it. Why did people participate in these internet challenges? Why would they not even bother to stop to question them? They were so often cruel and unsophisticated and – worst –they lacked any originality. And yet what did it say about her that she wanted to create something as popular as anything out there? Something that would get people excited or motivated or anything to break the monotony of their boredom?

Sophie sat back down to write, but she felt this sense that nothing she came up with – no matter how intelligent or relevant – would ever come close to the impact that the dumbest internet shit could. And anyway she couldn’t seem to find the words to convey what she had experienced in Valea Lungă. Living there had to be experienced – it couldn’t only be read about. There was a certain ethereal quality to living in the town. Mystical or vibrational. Like all the clocks ticked exactly in sync. Like everyone in the town moved together. It had an almost invisible muscle fiber that connected the people of the town. Something that had been built over generations. Something modern society had lost.

But how could she turn that into something marketable? Something exciting for readers? She needed to find some kind of entry point into the story. A hook that could grab their attention, so her editors and agents wouldn’t drop her and so she could keep buying food and paying rent. It wasn’t just that she couldn’t find words to express what she loved so much about the town – it was that she couldn’t imagine it appealing broadly to her readership. They would most certainly get bored.

She had remembered a story that a local woman had told her. She said that long ago in the area there had been a witch who liked to trick the local townspeople who strayed too far from the town. And this witch had decided to curse this town by allowing their shadows to follow them wherever they went, mocking them behind their backs. Always following. Always repeating their gestures. But then the curse transformed. Soon, the shadows lagged. They started moving on their own. They wanted to break free. But they couldn’t. They would forever be attached to their dark sides, and worse, their dark selves would taunt them and copy them in the daylight, but the witch cast a spell that would let the shadows break free from their hosts at nighttime. A person had to stay right with their shadows. Or else risk letting them attack when they weren’t looking, always needing to watch their backs.

The doorbell rang. And then a knock followed. Sophie opened the door to find her neighbor Daniel standing there holding a box. “You made it back,” he said.

“Oh my god, I’m sorry. I meant to come by,” Sophie told him. “The jet lag. I’ve basically been a mindless drone since I landed.”

“Got your mail.”

“Thank you so much. I owe you.” Daniel handed over the box, which was full of mostly junk mail and advertisements.

“I tried to separate out the important stuff.” He had neatly stacked the important letters and tied them with a rubber band.

“You want to come in?” Sophie asked.

-----

Daniel was the best type of guy. He was smart, but not overly intellectual that he lost any sense of playfulness. He was funny, but also always seemed to have the most nuanced opinions of anyone Sophie had ever met. And he always knew exactly when he needed to leave – which was a very important trait in a friend. He was basically the perfect guest. The only flaw Daniel had was his boyfriend Charles, who was basically no fun to be around but insisted on coming to everything and ruining a good time. He even wore Daniel’s clothes and made the same jokes Daniel made. It was like watching a sadder, less fun version of Daniel. Thankfully, Charles was away on business for the next week, so Sophie had Daniel all to himself. 

“I want to set you up with someone,” Daniel said. 

“No, I don’t want to be set up.”

“Come on. This time will be better. I swear. This new guy just started at work. He’s nice. He’s funny. He’s good looking.”

“I’m supposed to be writing my book.”

“And how’s that going?” He was right. It wouldn’t kill Sophie to take one date. There weren’t exactly a lot of eligible guys knocking on her door. And she’d pretty much fallen off the face of the earth. Daniel pulled out his phone and showed her a picture of the guy. “His name’s Michael.” He was better looking than she had even imagined. Most of the time when a friend offered up a romantic prospect to her, they were never quite up to par with what she might’ve hoped for. But Michael was actually very good looking. And he looked normal too. “He has a good job too. I know because I hired him.”

Daniel flashed her a look that meant it was already set. And Sophie didn’t protest. But Sophie began hearing a strange noise – like clawing against the window. But she couldn’t exactly tell where it was coming from. “Everything all right?” Daniel asked. She stared at the window pane but there was nothing there.

“Do you ever have that feeling you’re not completely awake? Like you’re still dreaming?”

“Sure,” he said. “Lots of times. Mostly it’s the drugs.” He laughed to himself. “Why? Are you feeling that right now?”

“I don’t know.” She scratched her forearm absentmindedly. And she noticed Daniel doing the same. She looked at him. He looked at her. They stared at each other. Not sure what to do next.

“What?” they said at the same time. It was as if they were matching each other. Sophie stared at him like he was part of a dream. Unreactive. Immobile. Unusual.

“Sorry, I just spaced,” he said. “What were you saying?”

-----

Some people said it started with the people closest to you. Some said it passed through a look. Some said your mind had to be completely blank for it to pass. Some said whatever entity it was, it just wanted to grow. To become. What exactly? All of it was impossible to say. No one had ever studied it. Anyone infected had long ago died. It seemed older than time. And yet here it was. Never left. Always remaining. Waiting.

-----

They met for drinks at a bar not too far from Sophie’s place. Sophie didn’t want Michael to pick her up in case things went south and she needed to end the date and race home. But he was immediately funny and they decided to order food.

“Isn’t it wild nowadays,” Michael said, “how people behave? Like how the internet has just let them go around doing and saying whatever they want, doing things no one would ever do, but because they’re filming it and putting it on TikTok, it’s normal.” He complained that everyone had become parasites to the internet, latching on where they could, hoping to get satiation – satisfaction – from whatever scraps they could find.

Exactly, she thought. It was like he was already reading her mind. There were people around the room swiping through feeds, Facetiming, sending videos to their friends or uploading directly as they sat and drank a cocktail. It wasn’t reality anymore. It was some kind of bastardized version of reality. “It’s like they’ve lost all the volition of their bodies. They’re not even fully awake, on full auto-pilot.”

“The people of Valea Lungă believed that if they became too distracted, too disconnected, they were susceptible to something, a presence they called it urmă. Like a trace left behind, or a footprint that keeps walking after the foot is gone.”

“That’s creepy,” Michael said.

“So they did this dance every year, to feed the presence. They would dance in sync, purposely, over and over again, moving in motion together, as a way to give the presence what it needed to survive. They believe it allowed the presence to move on. Or at least keep it at bay.” Sophie leaned back into her seat and realized she was already on her third drink and the alcohol was really hitting her now. Everything started getting a little fuzzy, the sounds a little more blended together. 

“Feeling all right?” Michael asked. She nodded, but he flagged the waitress down and ordered a glass of water for her. “Normally, I can handle my liquor better than this,” she said. “It’s the trip probably. I’m just gonna use the bathroom.”

She walked to the women’s room and washed her hands. In the mirror she could see her sleeplessness starting to show. She should’ve done a better job with her concealer, but in the dark of the bar, it probably wasn’t as noticeable as she thought. Her own reflection seemed to mask something from her, something she couldn’t quite see underneath her skin. At first she thought she was seeing herself not in reflection, but in parallel. She looked beside herself until she realized there was someone else standing next to her. The woman was probably around Sophie’s age, similar stature, similar hair color.

She looked tired too. Or if not tired, then out of sorts in some way. She stared straight ahead, almost through the mirror, past even her own reflection. And it was as if she hadn’t even noticed Sophie was standing there. Sophie reached for the soap and the woman did the same. She rinsed her hands under the faucet. The woman did the same. When she grabbed a paper towel, the woman reached to grab her own. Sophie turned and stared at the woman, and she stared back. The woman's expression wasn't vacant. It wasn't the hollowed blankness of the customs officer or the barista. It was the expression of someone trying very hard to communicate something without being able to make a sound. Someone trapped.

The bathroom door swung open and two twenty-somethings entered mid-conversation and the woman blinked, looked at Sophie the way you look at a stranger who has been staring, then tossed her paper towel in the trash bin. Almost waking from whatever trance she had been in. She smiled at Sophie, briefly, barely clocking her, then exited back into the crowded bar.

-----

Michael asked Sophie more about her time in Valea Lungă. She told him about the people there and her time wandering through the nearby forest trails and how she felt a kinship with the place. He had once traveled to Eastern China for seven months to do a work-study program. He said the experience had been life changing. “The Chinese,” he said. “They operate in a different way. They see the world through the lens of the collective, not the individual.” It was a little trite, she had thought. But he wasn’t wrong. And at least he had spent the time there getting to know the people. Part of her could’ve been annoyed with the comment, but she had found it endearing coming from Michael.

The waitress returned and asked if they wanted another drink. They looked at each other, trying to read the subtle cues that might tell them to continue the date or to end it right here and now. 

“Another round,” Michael said. The room was filled with locals in all states of inebriation. Some slightly buzzed, others about to fall over. And then Sophie spotted the woman from the bathroom, gently swaying to the music in the middle of the room. Her eyes were open, glazed over though. Not fully aware of her surroundings. No one seemed to pay any attention though. She continued swaying alone as people moved around her, buying drinks at the counter or finding seats at tables. It was like she was stranded in the middle of the bar, invisible to everyone else. And then in a flash, she was still.

Sophie looked more closely. She found herself staring at this woman. The whole room seemed to quiet. Time seemed to slow down almost to a crawl. As if everyone in the bar was suddenly hushed, fixed on the same frequency. Suddenly, the woman turned to Sophie, locking her gaze. Had she seen Sophie watching? Or had she just felt something strange? But Sophie realized it wasn’t just the woman. Everyone in the bar had fixed their gaze on her. The entire bar was silent. Not a clink of a glass. Not a murmur.

“Are you okay?” Michael asked.

She turned back to Michael and suddenly the room seemed back to normal. “Did you see that?” she asked him.

“What?” he looked off toward the other side of the bar, then turned back.

“I must be more buzzed than I thought.”

“Should we order some fries?”

-----

They went home together, but Sophie couldn’t quite shake the strange feeling. It hadn’t gone away. And as she walked back with Michael, she began to question her own perception of reality. After all, perception of reality – as she had discovered during her time in Valea Lungă – was intimately tied to a person’s cultural background and the environment to which they belonged. In Valea Lungă people still found value in communal living. They saw the hyper-independence of capitalist nations as a disease – a delusion that was there only to cover up the downfalls of free markets and over-consumption. The people of Valea Lungă considered the newly-prosperous nations to have succumbed to the perils of consumerism, technology, and efficiency. They hadn’t solved anything – on the contrary, they had become infected with an insatiable desire for never-ending growth. Every problem they had created themselves. In the end – they believed – these nations would consume themselves. And they weren’t wrong.

Sophie and Michael arrived at her place after a twenty-minute walk from the bar to her small section of town, a row of craftsmen homes built almost a hundred years ago. Michael seemed completely normal, but Sophie had met men who upon first inspection seemed completely normal. And they had turned out to be jerks or worse than jerks. But as they approached her door, Sophie didn’t feel any reason to stop him from coming inside. He hadn’t been pushy – he’d simply waited by the steps.

“Do you feel like coming in?” she asked him. Sophie wasn’t accustomed to inviting strange men into her home, but Michael hadn’t given her any reason for any real pause. And after all, it’s not like they were strangers – they were connected through Daniel, who in Sophie’s opinion, was the best, and most critical, judge of character. If anything were wrong with Michael, Daniel would’ve said it already. And the fact that he hadn’t meant a lot.

Michael nodded and followed her inside.

-----

They had been on the couch and lost track of time when Sophie felt her skin flush with blood. It wasn’t all the physical contact – which there was extensive – but something that made her feel out of her body. She had gotten lost in the moment with Michael. She hadn’t dated anyone since she’d left for Valea Lungă and her last boyfriend Joe ended things with little warning. He packed his things in a day and she hadn’t seen him since. She stayed in the house because even though she could hardly afford it anymore, rents had risen so astronomically that if she moved, she would be paying more to rent a smaller space. But in the end, the space felt excessive. It was just her in the house. She had begun to feel all the voids, and at least  partially, it’s why she had to leave town. It’s why she traveled to Valea Lungă in the first place.

When she looked up at the clock, it was nearly midnight. “Maybe we should,” she started.

“Getting late,” he said, picking up on her cue.

They stepped outside to say goodbye, only they weren’t alone. There heard the low thud of a garbage bin knocking against the next door garage. It was Daniel. Only he wasn’t awake. His eyes were open, but he wasn’t conscious exactly. He was pushing the bin against the garage wall over and over again. He might’ve been sleepwalking.

Sophie walked across the driveway to meet him. She looked at his face – absent of any expression. His pupils dilated. His breath slow, nearly unnoticeable. “Daniel?” she said. But he didn’t shake from his state. She looked back to Michael, who shrugged. “Daniel,” she said louder. But still he didn’t budge. She reached her hand forward, toward his shoulder to wake him, but before she could get to him, his gaze met hers. It was like a predator had been awaken from inside him. Not Daniel, but something more primal. And suddenly, he lunged at her, knocking her to the ground.

Michael immediately ran across the lawn and ripped Daniel, who had his hands around Sophie’s neck. Sophie had never seen anyone move so quickly. She barely even had a chance to register the attack. Michael pulled Daniel off her with such a force that Daniel immediately came to. He gasped for breath, as if he had been holding it the entire time, as if he had just been transported back from somewhere else. Sophie too had to regain herself, allowing oxygen to flow back into her lungs.

Michael stepped over to pick Sophie off the ground. “Are you hurt? Are you all right?” he asked.

She nodded, though she couldn’t yet speak.

“What happened?” Daniel asked.

Michael and Sophie looked at each other – they didn’t know what to say. It hadn’t made any sense at all.

-----

“Has it ever happened before? The sleepwalking?” Sophie asked.

Daniel sat across from her, Michael to her right. Daniel shook his head.

“I’ve been feeling,” Daniel said, “strange lately.”

“Strange how?”

He didn’t know how to describe it. It was like he had been losing time. On and off. Sophie nervously tapped the table in front of him. And she noticed Daniel doing the same. She looked across. He did the same. And then she stopped. And he did too. 

“When did it start?” she asked?

“A few days ago,” he said.

She looked up to Daniel, who had been staring down at the table the entire time, and their eyes met once again. But there was something burdened about the way he looked at her. Asking for some kind of release from it. 

Sophie started tapping again, only this time Daniel wasn’t the only one tapping alongside her. There was a tapping on the window. They all turned to the window where the woman from the bar was now standing, a glazed look on her face, mindlessly tapping on the window.

Sophie let out a guttural yell, nearly stumbling out of her seat. She and Michael jolted up.

“What the fuck?” Michael said.

They realized the woman wasn’t exactly peering into the window. It was more like she was magnetized by whatever was inside. Drawn to Sophie. She had stopped tapping and so had Daniel, who was now standing and facing them both. Both he and the woman now seemed almost catatonic.

“Should we call someone?” Michael asked.

“Call who?” 

“I don’t know. A fucking exorcist.”

Suddenly, they heard the glass shatter and watched the woman throw her hand through the window. Her fist gushing blood as she began crawling inside.

-----

Sophie heard a scream from beside her: “Sophie!” And when she turned all she saw was Michael, standing beside her. They were outside in the driveway, Sophie’s feet naked. She shook herself back awake. She didn’t even remember stepping outside. 

“What happened?” she asked.

“You just got up and walked outside. It was like you were possessed.”

“You didn’t see?”

“See what?”

Sophie could tell by the look in his eyes that Michael had no idea what she was talking about. He hadn’t seen Daniel or the woman or any of it. Had she imagined it? When exactly had she started hallucinating the whole thing? She looked around her. Only a quiet street. An eerie fog rolling in.

-----

Back inside, Michael made her a cup of tea while she rinsed her feet in the bathtub. She couldn't make sense of what had happened – this feeling of displacement from herself. She had only ever felt it once when she was in Valea Lungă. And now in the days since she’d been home.

“Has this happened to you before?" Michael asked, handing her a mug.

“Nothing like this before. But something ... else.”

“What?” Michael asked.

Sophie told him about the time she visited the woman on the outskirts of the village. “Her name was Mara. She was one of the oldest members of the village, but no longer lived with the others.” Sophie told Michael that Mara had for some time taken up residence in a small cottage far outside the town’s center. And now only her daughter ever saw her when she would bring groceries over and take walks with her around their garden. The villagers treated Mara differently – not with animosity exactly, but hesitation.

She was not the oldest person in the village – that was a man named Gheorghe who still walked to the market every Thursday – but when Sophie got to town, she felt a pull toward Mara. She somehow felt she needed to interview her only based on the way the villagers spoke about her. Not with the warmth they reserved for their elders, but with something more careful than that. A particular quality of deference that Sophie had learned to recognize in her fieldwork – a kind of resistance to engage with even the idea of her because of what might happen if they did.

She had asked about Mara early in her stay and been redirected each time. Not rudely. But the way you redirect someone away from something that isn't dangerous so much as delicate. It was only in her third month, when she had been accepted enough to be trusted with the less curated version of things, that one of the younger women in the village – a schoolteacher named Anca – had mentioned Mara in passing and then, reading Sophie's expression, had offered to take her to meet her.

They went on a Tuesday afternoon. The path from the edge of the village into the treeline was well-worn enough to suggest regular use but narrow enough to suggest solitary use. One person, back and forth, over many years. The house was smaller than she expected and much neater. A vegetable garden in precise rows. A woodpile stacked with an almost geometric exactness. And Mara herself sitting outside on a low wooden stool, her fingers moving in a rhythm so steady it seemed almost mechanical. She had looked up before Sophie called out – before there was any reasonable way she could have heard her coming through the trees – and found Sophie's face across the distance with an accuracy that felt less like hearing and more like knowing. She didn't look surprised. She looked like someone who had been expecting a particular visitor for a very long time and had privately hoped it would be someone else.

Their language was partial and improvised. Mara's Romanian was older than the village's, slower, preserved in amber. But she was willing to talk. More than willing. Anca helped translate between the two of them.

“She told me about this witch,” Sophie said. “A witch, of sorts, who cursed the town.” But the story wasn’t folklore. Mara had told it the way you tell something true. Quietly. With the specific economy of someone who had lived inside a thing long enough that they no longer needed the full version because the full version was always running in the background.

“She said that long ago in the area there had been something.” Sophie clarified – there was no direct translation for what Mara called the woman, and she was careful about the word. She used a term Anca didn’t know how to translate. And when Sophie asked Ankca to clarify, she just shook her head slightly, just once, as if repeating it were its own small risk.

It would attach, Sophie told Michael. It would let their shadows follow them wherever they went, mocking them behind their backs. “I didn’t think anything of it. I just thought it would be good material. For the book. The mythology of the town. But I think it was real.”

Sophie had not understood that Mara was describing her own life. She had not understood that the shadows Mara described were not shadows, but something else entirely. Every window was covered – not with curtains but with something darker and heavier, canvas or blanket, nothing coming in and nothing going out. And around each window frame, pressed into the wood in a thin continuous line, something dark and resinous. Pine tar, she thought, or something like it.

“When I got back to my room, I started cleaning up my notes from the conversation and that’s when ...”

“What?”

“One minute I was reading my notes and the next I was standing at the window. And the notes were all missing. Not crossed out. Not incomplete. Just gone. As if the pen had been lifted from the page the moment she arrived at the path and not set down again until she was back in the village. It had been three hours.”

Sophie thought it had just been accumulated fatigue. Being in an unfamiliar town where she barely spoke the language. “I think whatever it was – she had it. And she didn’t want it to spread.” Sophie told Michael now, both hands around the mug. "Living with it for years. Decades maybe." She paused, working it out as she said it. “The covered windows. The sealed frames. The pine tar around every opening. She wasn't a recluse because she was strange. She was isolating herself to protect them.”

“Protect the village,” Michael said.

“Protecting everyone.” She stopped. She thought about Mara's face when she emerged from the trees. The resignation in it. "She took my hand. She tried to tell me. To warn me.”

Michael said nothing.

“She died three weeks ago,” Sophie said. “Two weeks before I left the village. One week after I visited her.” She looked at her hands. “She had been containing it alone for decades. And I think – when she died – I think it needed somewhere to go.”

Michael just shook his head. “It sounds a little ... out there, don’t you think?”

The tea had gone cold. She thought about what Mara had told her just before she left. She couldn’t quite remember it until now, but it arrived with such clarity all of the sudden. “Paper,” she said.

She rifled through the and found a legal pad and pen and began scribbling. Once she was done, she slid the pad to Michael. One the page was written: “Fragmentarea cheamă umbra.”

“Fragmentation calls the shadow,” she translated. “That’s what she said to me.”

“What does it mean?”

Sophie thought about the bar. The crossed legs. The woman at the bar. She thought about the people at the coffee shop, bent over their screens, mindless, their bodies on autopilot, their attention somewhere else entirely. She thought about what it meant to be so fragmented – so routinely, so voluntarily fractured from your own presence – that your shadow had room to move.

The village dances had been the opposite of that. Whole people, choosing together, deliberately present. That was the ritual. That was what kept it fed and contained and eventually satisfied enough to leave. But here – she looked at the dark street outside, at the lit windows of neighbors she had never really met, not on any deep level, at the blue glow of screens in every room – here the fragmentation was all around. Constant. Engineered. Nobody was whole enough to resist it. And nobody was present enough to notice it arriving.

She pulled out her notebook and found the pages from her third month in the village. The days surrounding Mara's visit were full of careful detailed notes. Then she flipped to the date of her meeting with Mara. “Nothing.” She showed Michael the full blank page between two densely written ones.

She understood now that it wasn’t just the fatigue, but the first displacement. The first small evidence of something rearranging itself.

“Maybe you should get some sleep. Things might make more sense in the morning.” Michael said it was such care and caution.

-----

They stepped onto the porch to say goodnight, only Michael paused, noticing something. Sophie saw it too – across the street, under the amber wash of a streetlamp, a woman was standing completely still. Not waiting for a cab. Not looking at her phone. Just standing, face tilted slightly upward, eyes open. Sophie recognized the coat before she recognized the face. The woman from the bar.

"Do you see her?" Sophie said.

"Yes," Michael said. Just that. No qualification.

The woman wasn't looking at them. She was facing the house with the quality of attention that had nothing behind it – not curiosity, not menace, nothing that could be named as an emotion. Just orientation. The way a compass needle orients. As if she had no choice about where she pointed.

Then, Sophie heard a noise from next door. She turned to see Daniel, standing at the edge of his driveway. Still in the same clothes from when she’d last seen him, arms loose at his sides, head tilted at a slight angle. Not looking at Sophie. Facing the front of the house the same way the woman across the street was facing it. The same angle. The same empty attention.

“What’s he doing?” Michael said quietly.

"Nothing."

Neither of them moved. Sophie looked past Daniel. Past the woman across the street. And then she saw what she had missed because she had been looking at the people she recognized instead of the street itself. Every house on the block had someone standing outside it.

Not every house. But enough. She counted twelve. Then fifteen. Spaced unevenly – some on porches, some at the edge of driveways, some on the sidewalk in front of their doors. All of them still. All of them oriented toward her.

None of them looking at each other.

"Tell me you see that," Sophie said.

"I see it. Yeah." He said it the way you confirm something you would very much prefer not to be true. His eyes were moving down the block, still counting. “There's another one. End of the street.” A pause. “And the corner house across.”

Sophie looked. He was right. She had missed those. Eighteen then. Maybe more beyond the reach of the streetlamps.

The night was completely quiet. No one speaking. No traffic. Just eighteen people standing outside their homes in the cold, facing her house, the lights burning behind them in the rooms they had walked out of without knowing why.

“This can’t be real, can it?” Sophie asked. Not just to Michael. But to herself too. To the part of herself that had been reaching for the other explanation since the driveway, since the bar, since the airport. Michael nodded. “You see it. I'm not losing time. I'm standing here. This is happening right now.”

“This is happening right now,” Michael said.

She looked at Daniel. At his loose arms and his tilted head and his absolute stillness. As she watched he turned his head. Not toward her. Toward the woman across the street. The woman turned toward the figure three doors down, who turned toward the next, and the next – a slow chain moving down the block like a current through still water, each figure turning in sequence, soundlessly, until every person on the street had reoriented. Ten seconds. No more.

And then they snapped back toward Sophie.

"Do you have your car keys?" Michael asked.

She pulled them from her pocket and handed them to Michael. She was too jittery to drive. They carefully walked down the steps of the porch together. Sophie kept her eyes forward, titled to the ground, afraid what she might see if she looked out any further. She could see Daniel at the edge of her peripheral vision, standing at the end of the driveway, but she didn’t dare look at him directly.

Michael unlocked the car. They got in. He started the engine before his door was fully closed. Sophie looked straight ahead through the windshield "Don't stop," she said.

He pulled away from the curb. And Sophie watched in the passenger mirror as every single person on the street turned their head to follow the car.

Not quickly. Not urgently. With the same slow unison they had used before – that soundless chain reaction, one figure to the next, each face rotating to track the car as it moved down the block. Daniel. The woman from the bathroom. The fifteen or eighteen others she didn't know, standing outside homes that weren't hers, turning their faces in perfect sequence to watch her leave.

She watched until the car turned the corner and the street disappeared from the mirror.

Neither of them spoke for a long time until Michael got on the highway."Where are we going?" Michael asked.

Sophie looked back once more in the mirror, praying no one had followed them. She thought about Mara in her neat small house at the end of a narrow path. One person, back and forth, over many years. The covered windows. The sealed frames. The vegetable garden in precise rows. A whole life built around a single principle.

“Away,” Sophie said.

Michael nodded. He didn't ask where. He had seen the same street she had seen.

Sophie faced forward and watched the city thin out around them – the bars and the lit windows sliding past the glass like something she was already leaving behind. She didn't look in the mirror again. She only looked down to her feet on the floor of the car. She could only look at exactly what was right in front of her hoping against all hope she might wake up and that somehow she was only just dreaming.