I noticed it after getting home from work, so it was sometime after five o’clock. Yesterday? Living alone, it happens from time to time that after a hard day of work, I’ll pick a fixed position during decompression and lose total focus. It just so happened that I chose the bay window on the front of my house to stare out of and I saw it. A black van, as innocuous as any other, rolled down the street my house sat on; it moved from left to right. I only had one thought as it passed. Hadn’t I seen it before? I’d seen it only moments before, hadn’t I? Peeling my socks away while I sat in a reading nook by the window, I concentrated. Then it came again. From left to right. Was it surveilling my house?

Of course, I was wrong. I must have been wrong. It was probably two separate vans that looked extremely similar. I paid attention to the manufacturer the next time I saw it roll by; it was a big black blocky Ford model. I scribbled the tag number down on a nearby notepad, watching, waiting for it come by again. It matched. A van, on a schedule of every two and a half minutes passed in front of my house. The van’s windows, as black but shinier than the rest of the vehicle, were blacked so I had absolutely no idea who was driving. I felt a creeping sensation spread up my lower back and squiggle its way into my ears. No. That wasn’t right. That wasn’t possible.

I put on a pot of coffee. Standing in the kitchen, I watched the drip of the brown liquid and focused on the sound. Honestly, I was out of it. I had to be. I must have been really tired or something. After stirring in a bit of milk, I moved back to the living room to stare out of the bay window. Holding my breath over the steam of the cup, I watched. Then it came. Left to right. I shook my head and sat the coffee to the side, going to the window. No fucking way. Using my phone, I took a picture each time it crossed the frame of the window. After an hour or two, and well after the sun had gone out, I scrolled through the photo gallery on my phone. It was the same van in every single picture, without a doubt.

As night went on, it became more difficult to catch a glimpse of the vehicle and it became so that I was squinting at my own half reflection off the glass. After turning the lights of the living room off, I saw moon bars slice across its windows. How many times had it passed in front of my house already? A hundred? How long had it been doing this without me noticing it? For all I knew, it could have been going on for weeks or months. Had my life been under surveillance for years even?

Attempting to calm my nerves, I took off to bed being sure to lock my door. What could I do? The street was public property. If they wanted to drive back and forth, there was nothing I could do. Strange, but maybe it was some kind of government vehicle. Calling the cops on the world’s worst FBI agent wouldn’t get my anywhere.

The following day was much the same; it being my day off, I tried watching some TV shows, but my eyes kept wondering back to the window where I could every so often catch a glimpse of that goddamn van just as it went out of view. After getting fed up with the whole ordeal, I moved into the yard with a six pack; sitting in a plastic chair, I counted the van roll by ten or so times before my first beer was gone. It did not stop. It did not acknowledge my presence. Something was off. So off. Every time it went by, I felt the air grow colder and colder. I couldn’t bring myself to polish of the remaining beers and instead chose to take it inside. It was getting creepy.

Watching the goings-on of my neighborhood, I could see that no one else seemed to take notice of the strange black van. As many times as I saw it, no one else even appeared to know it was there to begin with. The neighbor from down the road walked his dog, the lady who likes to go for runs jogged right by it.

The startling realization that I might be the only one who could see it were confirmed as an orange cat darted across the street just as it drove by my house. I squinted, but kept my eyes open so as to see what might happen if a living thing were to interact with the van. Feeling a twist in my gut, I expected to watch the cat be flattened. But that’s not what happened. The cat clipped straight through the van as though it was not even there. Like it was a hologram or a hallucination. I felt all the warmth sapped from my body. As that cat’s tail disappeared through the front right tire and the rest of it reappeared on the other side of the street, totally unharmed I got the overwhelming feeling that I’d seen something I wasn’t supposed to.

I moved outside.

The cat licked its paw and upon noticing I was staring at it, it ran away till it disappeared around the corner of the house across the street. I heard the familiar thrum of the van as it passed by. I heard something stalk over the grass on my lawn behind me. Turning to examine the thing, I saw that it was the cat. The same orange cat from before. No mistaking it; the thing was either an exact doppelganger of the same cat as before or it had somehow snuck behind me while I wasn’t paying attention.

I watched as the cat ran into the street, clipped through the wheel of the van, and reappeared on the other side of the road without having been injured. This happened four or five more times.

“What the fuck is happening?” I said aloud.

What felt like hot coals in my brain took all control and I blinked through watery eyes. I looked. There was the orange cat. My jaw, as if bound to wires, moved, “What the fuck is happening?” The cat looked at me from the other side of the street, licking its paw. The van passed. “What the fuck is happening?” Like a brain freeze. Like hell. “What the fuck is happening?”

I planted my feet firmly apart, stepped away, and felt the power of the loop loosen. As though I’d ducked out of the reigns of a gravitational force. Again, the cat darted across the street, as I moved towards my front door, I could feel my mouth open. I clapped a hand over it so as to muffle the words and dove inside where all the power of the loop felt gone.

My heart thumped while I locked the door. Massaging my jaw, I moved to the bathroom to examine my sore face. Along my chin was a red mark like something must’ve squeezed the muscles from the inside; I surmised it would soon turn purple. I’m aware of how strange this sounds. How dreamlike it all was. I can totally understand that. Still, I am attempting to transcribe it as well as I’m able.

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A ringing filled the tiled room. After jumping at the noise and accepting that it wasn’t only my imagination, I lifted my telephone. It was my neighbor, the one across the street. It rang and rang and rang and refused to stop. I watched the clock in the corner of the phone. 2:35. Then 2:36. It still rang. Then it was 2:37. In the next blink, the digits read 2:35. I shook my head and the phone continued to ring.

I answered. “Hello.”

“Have you noticed things are weird on our street? I keep trying to leave, but every time I do, I end up right back where I started. Does that make sense?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Hey, have you noticed this black van that just keeps driving down the street? It does it like every two or three minutes or something.”

“You see it too?” I gasped out the words, feeling less alone.

“What’s up with that, huh? It’s weird.”

I nodded before remembering I was talking on the phone. “Yes.”

There was a long pause on the line, and I waited with bated breath for it.

I flinched as the phone rang. The clock read 2:35. Without my permission, my finger answered it. I saw my own face in the bathroom mirror say, “Hello.” My skin ached and pangs caught in my throat as I fought the loop.

“Have you noticed things are weird on our street?”

Before they could continue, I fought the phone away from my face and slammed it into the bathroom mirror. Glass shattered as I squeezed the phone and the screen cracked. I chucked it into the toilet and shut the seat down with my foot; my whole body shook. The phone, even though I was certain it was too damaged to do so, continued to echo hollow with its rings from within the toilet bowl. My shoulders felt like they carried cinderblocks and my knees wavered beneath me. Without wanting to, I shuffled along the wall in the hallway for support.

I had to get out. There was an unnerving blanket over everything like I was moving through water at the bottom of the deep end of a pool. Every breath was arduous and twisting.

I went out front; there was the orange cat. It darted from my yard, through the van’s wheel, out of sight as I turned my attention to my car. I stumbled towards it, took one last look over my shoulder. Every movement was misery. Catching a glimpse of the black van rolling down the street, I put up a middle finger. What a mistake. I sat in the car with the door open, attempting to catch my bearings. The van came again, I could see it in the rearview; without provocation, my body lifted itself up and my hand formed itself to put up a middle finger. I fought against the loop and jerked myself away, scraping my knee against the driveway gravel as I went down. A fiery pain erupted from the middle finger on my right hand. I held it, letting out a yelp. Examining the finger, I could see it had been bent all the way backwards. The skin held but thinly and I could just barely see the faintest hint of protruding bone under there.

Pulling myself into the driver seat, I cried the car alive and whipped out of the driveway. I slammed on the gas and propelled forward. Barely taking in my surrounding, I prayed to get out. I passed the van. I passed the van again. And again. The street repeated. There was my house. There was the cat. There to my right, the man that lived a few houses down watched his dog shit on the grass then hunkered down to lift it with a plastic bag. There he was again. The dog shat, the man picked it up. Catching the man’s eyes on perhaps the tenth or eleventh pass on my street, blood pooled in his eyes and trickled down each of his cheeks. The blood twinkled in the afternoon glow of the sun. He was crying.

I drove and drove, and the dash clock repeated. The sinking feeling that I might never be in control of my life ever again creeped in; I ignored the swollen purple reflection in the rearview mirror as best I could, but eventually curiosity got the better of me and I glanced at my face in the glass, I needed to see my face and pulled myself from the loop’s grasp to do so only for this action to be incorporated. My neck muscles stood out in wretched detail as bruised backdrops to swollen red veins. It was only a second, but I did it. There I was, each trip down the street, I glanced at my reflection and it got worse and worse, and my swollen face reached the point that it became difficult to see through the slits the bruises left me with; not that that mattered much anyway, my body took complete control or lack thereof. It might have been years.

I saw the black van. It passed and I still could not make out the driver. Was that the cause of the loop? Was the van causing it? I passed it again as it went the opposite direction as me. There it went again. A thought occurred to me. What if I were to crash into the thing? The grill of the van came into view once more, the cat dart through our wheels, glanced at my face that was no longer recognizably human. If it came that I passed, I would have preferred a face down burial.

Time went on and the idea that I needed to slam into the van in a head on collision became the only thought in my head, but I’d long since passed the threshold to slip out of the loop so easily; I had been driving for ages with the time ticking forward then back again. It felt that my limbs began to atrophy in the position they’d been all that time. Surely, there wasn’t a chance in hell that I’d be able to break free from its grasp.

Again, the dog shat on the lawn and the man craned down to pick it up. The man wasn’t exactly himself anymore. He’d long since twisted and mangled into a primordial creature during his own fight against the loop. Again, the dog shat on the lawn, the man craned down; his immaculate white vertebras sat lodged in his tender swollen muscles exposed.

I pushed against the steering wheel, hoping to swerve in front of the black van, feeling time threaten to tear me to pieces; at several points, I was certain my eyes might explode from my head like I’d experienced a sudden burst of atmospheric pressure. Quite literally, there was the sensation of something inside my own head urging them from my skull. Closing my eyes took unimaginable effort so as to shield them from falling out of my face, I jerked my muscles, knowing that the loop would keep me on the road for the most part.

Beneath my fingers, the steering wheel moved as I fought again against the loop to open eyes. I screamed as my eyelids tore clean off my face from the force attempting to keep them in place. The black van hurtled directly in line with my own car. I wanted to close my eyes on impact but could not. My ears filled with ringing.

“Have you noticed things are weird on our street?”

I stood in the bathroom with the phone pressed to my ear, frozen in terror as I caught sight of my own face. The loop was getting larger.

“Have you noticed things are weird on our street?”

Prying the phone from my face, I threw it and ran through sinking sand.

It was too late, I moved through the hallway and as I entered the living room, the scene changed again. I entered through the front door, I was wearing my work attire, I felt every single fiber of my muscles burn. I’d just arrive home from work. Feeling tired, I decided to sit in the chair in the reading nook. But not really; I didn’t feel tired at all. I felt petrified and stuck. All the while that my feet pulled me forward, I fought against it.

A black van, as innocuous as any other, rolled down the street my house sat on; it moved from left to right.

I felt my heart pound.

I’m uncertain if this will get through to anyone. Fighting against the loop to write this is causing me immeasurable pain so I have to stop here.