“...And there it is,” I whispered to myself, looking out the back window of my bedroom, as I see my mom’s car roll down the street, making it’s way into our driveway. Finally, I can get started on dinner.
I jumped up from my bed, which was situated right underneath the open window, and trample my way through my somewhat messy room. Our place wasn’t the largest, just some small house on an average street.
As I make my way down the stairs to the first floor, I see the front door next to the base of the stairs open, and my mom come in with a handful of some grocery bags. One thing I couldn’t help but notice too was the addition of what looks to be some kind of old cell phone. The kind you’d see people use in maybe the mid 2000s, with all those buttons on the front.
“Hey, mom!” I greet her, happy to get started on cooking something up for the family. She didn’t respond, which is a little odd, but I figured maybe she just didn’t hear me.
I knew dad would be home in a couple hours, so unfortunately he’ll have to do with the leftovers from dinner.
I stepped into the kitchen, which wasn’t all too far from the front door and the stairs--again, a small house. I took out a large metal pot, and opened up some cupboards to look for a box of noodles as I filled the pot with water.
For a brief moment, I felt a little something odd, however. My brain felt kind of... Fuzzy, like when an old TV is nothing but static. I looked closer into the cupboards and realized that for just a brief moment, it was almost as if I was unable to read, well, anything. All of the words on every box and can in there was just jumbled, made to look like some kind of chicken scratch, at least until the sensation of hot tap water pouring over my hands snapped me out of this odd trance. I looked down and saw the pot overflowing with water. Kind of weird, since I swore I just started filling it up not two seconds ago.
I dumped some of the water out, and set the pot onto the stove, ready to make up some classic spaghetti and meatballs. Things went pretty normally for the rest of the night. At least, until a few hours later.
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I sat on the living room couch, flipping through the few channels we get on TV. Something nice about living in the modern age is being able to just find channels on the internet to watch right from the living room TV. Nothing really seemed to catch my attention, however.
I noticed a bit of a weird sound coming from the dining room, and looked back to see something a little odd. My mom, scrubbing the floor, with a sponge and a bucket of soapy water. She wore rubber gloves and had her hair up in a weird way. Actually, her entire outfit was all flowery and strange. This is especially weird considering the fact that my mom’s the kind of person to wear something black and spiky, and her arms absolutely covered with tattoos of various things.
I cautiously got up from the couch, wondering if maybe this was like some kind of weird joke or something. Mom, hand scrubbing the floor? We’ve got a perfectly fine mop in the closet for that.
“Mom?” I call out. No response. I call her name again.
Just then, mom looks straight at me and smiles a strangely warm smile. “Hey, honey!”
Honey? Really? She’s never called anyone that in her entire life. And she doesn’t smile over cleaning, she hates cleaning.
Suddenly, the strange brain fuzziness came back to me. It wasn’t just that, either, I noticed the lights in the room become more dim. Not really flickering or anything, just lowering in brightness. Anything that wasn’t a light seemed to just shut down completely, finding this out when I noticed the sound of the TV suddenly cut out behind me.
Yeah, something’s not right. I need to see if my brother’s okay.
Through the fuzzy strange feeling, I was still coherent enough to swiftly walk past “mom”, and jog up the stairs, up to my brother’s room. Spencer and I have a pretty good sibling relationship, though we still usually tend to stick to our own rooms and might often send memes over texts to one another.
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I opened Spencer’s bedroom door and noticed him slumped down on his bed. He was awake, but not moving. I went over to him and grabbed his shoulders.
“Hey, hey, you awake?”
He looked up at me, and muttered a noise. He seems to be fine, thankfully.
He got up from the bed and coughed a little. “Hey,” he started, “do you feel all weird and stuff too?”
I nodded my head. “Mom’s acting weird, come on.”
We both went down the stairs and noticed the pristine white floors. We’ve never seen these floors so clean in our entire lives, and it was all done by this weird version of mom.
Suddenly, as we stood in front of mom in the dining room, we hear a noise behind us. Looking back, we see the front door open up, and from the other side was Dad... But much like Mom, dad wore things that just isn’t normal for him.
He stepped into the house with a big grin, wearing some kind of old fashioned suit and a fedora, and dropping a suitcase next to him. “Honey, I’m home!”
Spencer tapped me on the arm. “Hey, I kinda like, feel something,” he casually mentions.
“What do you mean?” I ask, concerned.
He points over somewhere. I follow his finger to see the dining room table, and on top of it is one tiny little strange object, a thing that wasn’t here before all this nonsense started. That old cell phone mom brought home earlier. I slowly approached it, and started to know what Spencer meant by “feeling something”. As I approached, the weird fuzziness in my head got more and more intense. I tried to reach out to it, but was stopped by a startling shout from across the room, “STOP!”
Quickly looking over, I notice mom staring at me with a very serious face.
“Listen to me, son,” she commanded in a stern tone, “don’t you dare touch that object.”
Object? Just call it a cell phone.
So clearly, this cell phone must be tied to whatever in the world is going on here. I look at my brother for a moment, before attempting to reach for the phone again. This time, mom immediately took action, sprinting full force across our small dining room in an attempt to grab the phone away from me, but luckily, I snatched it quick enough and got out of the way.
Dad joins in on the action, picking up his suitcase and chucking it straight at me, but misses. My brother jumps around the parents and follows me out the back door, just as a hammer came flying through the glass of the door, just missing my head by mere inches. I look at the phone for a moment, and realize the only thing I can do at this moment.
I raise my hand up and then proceed to throw the phone down onto the concrete below my feet, absolutely shattering the case, and revealing the inside. It was here that I understood something was truly wrong here.
I motioned for my brother to grab the hammer nearby just in case, as I was given a moment to really squat down and inspect what I was seeing.
On the inside of this phone was some kind of “technology” I’ve never seen before. Connected directly to the phone’s battery was a small black device, wired into the phone’s internal structure with these weird, vein-like black, rubbery wires of it’s own.
The device itself was around an inch and a half in length and width, and looked like some kind of square with tube-like bumps attached to it, almost like tiny pipes. I could feel the full blast of whatever is coming off of this thing, as sitting so close to it made my mind feel unbearably fuzzy.
Spencer passed me the hammer, and, just as my parents came out through the back door to attack us, I struck the black device with all my might. It exploded in a sort of flash of blinding white energy, and from the inside of it, a bunch of weird, gray glittery sand plumed out and fell around like dust.
I could feel the fuzziness in my head subside, and I saw the lights inside return to their normal brightness. Mom and dad seemed to have fainted as well. What the hell just happened?