Slip by Michael Pogach

Author:Michael Pogach [Pogach, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: science fiction, thriller
Publisher: Crossroad Press
Published: 2022-06-18T00:00:00+00:00

Twenty-Two

* * *

As Byron’s hand slid into safe deposit box eighty-eight, she thought of the box of pain in Dune. Ridiculous, of course, on so many levels.

Then why is my heart redlining?

For a moment, she wondered if finding nothing would be worse than finding something. The fear fled, however, as she watched her hand disappear into the box, the office’s fluorescent lights giving her wrist and forearm an odd, almost reflective sheen, as if the lights were getting brighter and brighter. She had a thought. Maybe this wasn’t a good idea. What if putting her hand in there wasn’t—

safe?”

“He’ll never know,” the other woman says. The one with the familiar green eyes.

Byron wants to look at her. She wants to call her mom, and hug her.

Instead, she asks, “But will she find it?”

Only it’s not Byron’s voice asking. It’s the girl with the bracelet. Byron is just hitching a ride in her mind for this slip. This memory. She’s a hanger on. A trespasser.

The green-eyed woman doesn’t answer. Bracelet Girl doesn’t need her to. The question is for herself. Rhetorical. She closes her eyes, and everything flips. Byron is back in Banker Boy’s office, but she’s looking at herself the way she was just seeing the other woman. She’s hearing her own thoughts the way she was just hearing Bracelet Girl’s. All of which makes an echo effect that twists the world into fractals, like being trapped between funhouse mirrors. It takes a second for her to separate her now thoughts from those she is hearing Bracelet Girl listen to.

She’s having a slip, Byron understands. It’s an Inception moment. A double slip. Byron is having a memory-slip of Bracelet Girl having a future slip of Byron at this very moment. It’s enough to dump Byron right out of the moment, maybe to break her mind, but she somehow hangs on.

The first-person shooter view glitches and disappears. Byron is now seeing double. Her hand and Bracelet Girl’s hand superimposed over each other, both in the box as if they are one. Except, Byron is taking out what Bracelet Girl is putting in.

And then everything twists, and Byron and Bracelet Girl are now facing each other, their fingertips touching, the object they both hold—twenty-five years apart—acting like a fulcrum between them. She’s young, maybe only seventeen. Pretty, yet generic. Like all the girls Byron’s father employs. She smiles. Her fingers let go as Byron’s find

…an envelope.

Byron fell back in her chair as if she’d dropped from the ceiling, the office spinning around her, twirling her down a drain, threatening to drown her. She gasped for air. For clarity. For the other mind. Bracelet Girl. For that briefest moment in the slip, Byron was both of them. For that briefest moment, there was a warmth she’d never felt before. All that was being ripped away now, leaving her cold and so much lonelier than she’d ever been.

There was a knock on the door. Byron blinked and shook her head. The room was no longer spinning.

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