Encore Verbatim

Encore Verbatim

When the sun exchanged with the moon was when my mind became racked in a nausea that steadily grew. I lay on the living room floor on my back with only the sounds of the television as a useless distraction. It wasn’t soothing. If anything, I’d say a migraine crept in my head the longer I listened. A robbery happened downtown. Envisioning that, trying to, only made the migraine grow. A nonsense game that gave a nonsense prize.

My sister had a sickness of her. She’d get slower by sunset, and her muscles would ache. Eventually it lead to her collapsing like a ragdoll. Eight-thirty every night.

I mistook my nausea for a headache at first. Laurel thought she was dehydrated and just drank more water. Wasn’t until I was hanging over a toilet bowl and Laurel had hit her on the kitchen counter while falling that we knew something was wrong. Dad didn’t even seem bothered to take us to the hospital. The man had a way with talking around us anytime we tried to bring it up.
The clock rang a second before hitting seven so I forced myself up and made way to Laurel’s room.

She sat on her stomach at the edge of the bed and glared into the television. An array of colors and lines that formed shaped danced around the screen. It was some music only channel playing ambient noise that all sounded alike me. I had to focus my attention on Laurel and put the music out of mind as best as I could. A second later it seemed an epiphany sprung in her and she turned the television off.

“You alright?” I asked.

Laurel craned her neck in my direction and forced a grin. “We never are. But you keep asking that.”

“It could get worse, never know.” I glanced at the clock. “Dad’ll be here soon for the movie.”

She made a shooing gesture at me. “If I could walk without stumbling over myself I’d gladly refuse that. Just know I’m putting it out there I don’t want to go, like always. But have fun having to take my corpse everywhere”

I leaned on the doorframe. “If a corpse could still talk.”

“If I could I’d let myself fall face first into the bathtub and sit there.” Laurel stopped looking at me.

“Not today, not tonight,” I said.

Laurel got up. Her movements reminded me of how a toddler or a drunk would walk. One step she’d lean forward too much, another she’d stumble around. She had to use her dresser near the door to balance herself. Her arms shook just doing that and I went beside her in case she had second thoughts.

“Sometimes I look into the mirror and one of my eyes moves independently from the other.” Laurel tried to pull herself onto it to sit but couldn’t. “It’s a subtle thing. And no it’s not my eye going lazy. I know what that looks like. This looked like something trying to look around and doing its best not to be noticed.”

“You’re sick Laurel, we’re sick.”

“We’re infected by something. Something that’s getting us slowly. Don’t know about you but I don’t plan on being here once it’s done.”
“I’ll get your wheelchair, hold on.”

I got it out the closet near the kitchen and the side of it scrapped the floor. If it scuffed it, oh well. That was Dad’s problem, then it’d be mine. I just needed a breather from Laurel’s tangent.

Laurel gave up on standing and sat with her back to the dresser. She managed to pick herself up off the floor but I still helped her with sitting down in the thing.

We waited in the living room listening to the television’s buzz. Neither of us said a word.
The car roared low coming into the driveway. I didn’t waste time pushing Laurel out the house. That didn’t stop Dad from trying to break the car horn, even when he saw we were outside.

I got Laurel into the car and buckled her in. I had to sit by her, so the wheelchair went into the trunk.
The closest theater to us was in the middle of downtown where all the fast food restaurants and stores were. It was buried deep behind shut down video and hardware stores with some taco restaurant being the only other place with some life beside it.
Dad parked the car far from the theater. “Bring her in.”

I listened, of course. The way he spoke made my head hurt a bit. It felt intentional. Knowing him it was just a general disregard of things.

I gazed at everyone crowded at the entrance, lounging around. The air was tainted with smoke and the noise from all the chatter of the crowd sent my head pounding.

Inside was just as bad. I didn’t know what it was, but the smell of the popcorn made my nausea worse than the smoke outside did. The talking was louder too, enough that my head hurt to the point I focused on making slow breathes rather than anything else.
Laurel said something. I leaned in to hear her repeat it.

“Try counting.”

I took a deep breath and for half a second it was all gone before coming back in full force. “It makes my head hurt worse. Tried it before.”

She let out something that sounded like a laugh. “You’re not that dumb, come on.”
Dad lumbered with three large buckets of popcorn and he put two in Laurel’s lap. All of the movie posters on each side of the wall were alien to me. Some sounded familiar, but I couldn’t recognize most of them.

We took a seat in the middle of the theatre. I helped Laurel in a seat. Pieces of popcorn fell over us as Dad forced his way through.
Everyone was talking, as loud as they could be. Piles of trash thrown between one another while a single pile in the middle of it slowly grew. No one aside from me seemed to care.

I hid my head halfway in my shirt and started to rock myself.

The chatter turned to whispers, or what people thought were them, when the movie began. My head calmed down somewhat. The nausea still lingered.

“Eat that popcorn,” said Dad, “I spent thirty-dollars total for all three of us.”

It shot right back up again.

I got handfuls and scooped them into my mouth. Holding my breath was the only way I could eat it. Laurel’s arm tried to get her popcorn but her arm only twitched. I tried feeding her and she just groaned each time. Eventually Dad got fed up. The bucket slipped from his grip and a shower of popcorn fell over everyone near us.

Some large sounding woman stood up and started to shout at Dad. The anger in me boiled and simmered when the pain shot through my head.
The woman calmed down and immediately began clapping when a famous actor came on screen. She laughed at every joke, wouldn’t shut up, and no one seemed bothered by it all. People started to get up from their seats, shouting and laughing.
I tried to pay attention to the movie amid it all. The pain in my head rose to a level I never felt before. Every second my head was splitting apart. Turning to mush that overflowed with the rest making my head expand and split apart even more.
A joke must’ve happened in the movie because everyone laughed louder than before. The camera did a slow close-up of some guy’s face then cut to others with the cuts getting a little quicker than the last. All the actor’s faces were a blurred into one mass. I tried to pick apart one from the other and started to sweat. The pain got so bad it became hard for me to process my surroundings.
I held my head, tried to get up and move around based on memory and the few things I could still see. Every step was like being on the edge of a cliff.

Someone grabbed me by the back of the shirt and forced me onto the ground. I flailed around and somehow managed to kick the person behind me. The popcorn must’ve went too, because tiny things pelted me all at once. Moments later some of my vision came back. The foggy haze was gone, but things were still blurred.

A blur of the large woman reached out to grab a blur of Dad. She shouted at him for not being able to control his son and for bringing his braindead daughter to a movie just to block her son’s view. I crawled until I could feel Laurel’s wheelchair. There was a slap, a second of silence, and an uproar I could feel through the floor.

Fights broke out all around. Dad called for me to help him, couldn’t if I wanted to.

Laurel screamed and I heard her hit the ground along with her wheelchair. I tried getting up but the person running down the aisle leapt over her and landed on my arm. They collided with Dad and hit the floor.

My vision started to clear some and I forced myself up and hurried to get Laurel’s wheelchair. The pain in my shoulder made me drag Laurel and put her in the wheelchair with a slumped posture.

There was a horde of people at the back and front. Most of them were gathered around and encouraged a horde of people fighting in the middle of them.

I weaved through the crowd with Laurel and we managed to make it out. The sound of battle waned in the distance as I hurried the two of us down the hall.

There wasn’t a single person in the lobby, even the faint noise from the theater was gone. The pain in my head had left.
A black fog flooded in through the entrance door. Staring at it, for the first time in my life, the nausea was gone. Laurel left her wheelchair and almost fell moving around.

Something hit the floor behind us. Fog came out from the hallway and started to fill the entrance. I didn’t feel scared. The closer it got only filled me with relief somehow.

Laurel and I waited. The fog filled the room from the floor and rose around us like a cage. There was a slight hum coming from it that sounded more like speech the longer I focused.

The fog eventually reached the ceiling and started to close in around us. I closed my eyes as it enveloped me from the shoulders up and opened them to find myself in a black void falling. There was no air, no sound. I fell, with no end in sight.


I woke up looking at Dad’s house. My body moved of no will of my own. Confusion overtook me until I realized the hand opening the door was feminine. Then it came back when I saw the several unconscious bodies lying around the living room. At least I thought they were unconscious, none of them seemed to be breathing.

They, Laurel it sounded, shouted for me. At least the me who existed here.
One side of the hall was smeared with blood. Dad’s skull was cleaved halfway down the middle and his body lay out across the hall. Laurel didn’t move any further from there.

I thought “I” was dead. He sat at the side of the bed slumped over and breathed so slow he might as well had not been doing it at all.
Remus mumbled something and I didn’t hear, neither did Laurel it seemed. He repeated it over and over, Laurel had no choice but to get closer.

He stopped. There was a book at his side. Thick and embroidered with grey markings.  Laurel went for it. Remus tried to keep it away from her but seemed so weak Laurel was able to step on his arm and he slumped over even more.
Laurel walked back into the hall hugging the book against her chest. The stairs were gone, replaced by a red void that crept upwards. She hurried back into the hall and all of the rooms were gone, replaced by a staircase leading up with no end in sight.
After a point she stopped and sat down on a step. She closed her eyes and darkness was all I could see.


The cycle was unending. Another Laurel, another Remus. After a while the pattern collapsed on itself. Several Remuses were added to our collective with the occasional Laurel, then the opposite. The space we occupied became a buzz of indiscernible noise that could’ve driven me insane had I not gotten used to it over the last several millennia.
For the first time in the cycle, instead of jumping to the mind of Remus or Laurel we occupied an ever-stretching land of absolute nothing.  Something rose from the depths of it like an ocean. It appeared in front of me, us, like a black smoke with “hands” that reached in every direction.

It floated towards, like a stroke a paint freely moving across a canvas. The being put us inside of its body and one by one I could feel the presence of the many Remuses and Laurels going away. For once they were all quiet, and not a single one spoke in fear or questioned what was going on.

We all had enough time to reflect on why our existences had led to this. A definitive end was better than what could’ve been. When it came to me, the last of my existential line, I embraced the plunge into nothing. A shame for everyone still trapped.