Eli was breathing heavily as his shoe hit the pavement, the pre-dawn glow of the sunrise lighting the way in front of him. One foot after the other, he continued to run to the beat of the music in his headphones, keeping the steady pace he had held for the last 2 miles. He focused on his breathing – in through his nose, out through his mouth, trying to keep it measured as he ran.

A light layer of sweat covered him, despite the chill of the air that was typical of suburban Toronto in early May. The physical exertion kept him warm, causing the sweat to seep into his light athletic sweater and black basketball shorts. He told himself that early morning was the best time of the day to run because the cool air kept him from overheating. He noted that it was now warm enough that he no longer had to wear a beanie over his buzzed blonde hair while running, meaning he would have to start waking up even earlier to beat the heat. Running in the early morning also held a second benefit, in that he wouldn’t have to dodge around mothers with their strollers or bicycles on the sidewalk.

He checked his watch, noting how his pace had been steadily improving during his runs. He wasn’t in particularly good or bad shape before he started working out, but over the last three months his punishing daily fitness routine had really started to show results. His 6 foot tall frame had filled out, turning into 180 pounds of defined muscle. Getting into shape for the first time in his life at 32 years old was no small feat, but he was a living testament to the fact that it could be done. He slowed the pace slightly for the last segment of the run, mentally reminding himself to save some energy to start his weight routine once he got home. As he continued to run, his thoughts wandered back to last night’s recurring nightmare. He had dreamed of the night he broke up with his ex-girlfriend. As if summoned, the intrusive memory came to him as he ran.

_____________

He was coming home from a conference in New York City a day early to surprise his girlfriend, Katie. It was the Friday before a long weekend, and he was looking forward to spending it with her. He hopped out of the rideshare still dressed in his blue suit and red tie with a duffel bag slung over his shoulder. He crept up to the front door silently, taking care to avoid the windows in case she happened to look out and spoil the surprise.

He reached the door and slowly slipped his key into the slot and turned it silently before pressing himself against the door, opening it gently. He heard the sound of the shower from further down the hall, and looking around he saw that she’d left her phone on the kitchen counter. Loosening his tie slightly, he picked up her phone and started down the hallway, intent on surprising her in the shower.

That’s when her phone started buzzing from texts. He glanced down at the screen in surprise. He wasn’t trying to snoop, but he couldn’t help but see the the messages in front of him.

“Glad your boyfriend was gone.” The first one read with a winking face.

“You’re so fucking hot. I love the way you look naked.” A second message read.

“Think you can come over for some fun again soon?” The third message asked.

He stood in the hallway, shocked at what he saw. The slow-moving realization washed over him - his girlfriend had been cheating on him while he was gone. He dropped the phone to the floor and stared straight ahead as he tried to wrap his mind around it.

The sight of Katie emerging from the bathroom broke him out of his stupor. At 5’6 she was a good 6 inches shorter than Eli, and she had a white towel wrapped around her shoulder-length black hair with a pink one wrapped tightly around her body. She yelped as she saw him, surprised. “You’re home? What the fuck are you doing here?” She asked frantically, before taking a deep breath. “You scared the shit out of me.”

Slowly, Eli found his words. “You’re cheating on me?”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” She responded.

He nodded towards her phone, which was still on the ground. She picked it up, her eyes going wide as she saw the messages. She opened and closed her mouth several times, excuses and denials dying in her throat before they could emerge. Finally, she crossed her arms defiantly. “It’s your own fault, you know.”

Eli’s eyes widened at the statement. “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

She continued. “It’s your fault I had to find another man. You’re never around. You’re always going off to this conference or that meeting, all for your stupid job. I bet you’re even hooking up with girls while you’re there. Well, guess what: I have needs too, and you weren’t here to satisfy them.”

Eli’s rage boiled over. “How fucking dare you. I would never cheat on you. And in case you forgot, you were the one that refused to work or contribute. I got this ‘job’ you hate so much because one of us has to pay for food and rent and groceries, and it sure as shit isn’t going to be you.”

Katie began to cry, but Eli held onto his rage. While he had never caught her cheating before, this is how their fights always went – they would get angry, she would cry, and guilt him into giving up and apologizing. He had quickly learned that she could cry on command, but somehow he always fell for it – consistently giving up things he loved, just to make her happy. His friends had pointed out for years that he was being taken advantage of, but he ignored them, saying that they ‘just didn’t understand their relationship’. Now though, he was finally seeing what they meant. As if on cue, she looked up at him through bleary eyes. “Look at what you did! This is all your fault!”

He raised his voice. “My fault? If you had needs, you should have talked to me! Instead, you decided you wanted to go fuck someone else.”

Normally at this point in the argument, his anger would begin to fade. He was the first to admit that for most relationship problems, both parties shared the blame, and he was always willing to accept some of the responsibility if it meant they could move forward. This time though, she had gone too far. His anger surged, as if he could see all the injustices of their relationship clearly for the first time. His shoulders hunched, and his eyes narrowed. Through gritted teeth, he growled the words softly. “We’re done.”

She stopped suddenly, eyes wide. Her mouth opened and closed several times, finally managing to speak. “What?”

Normally he wasn’t impulsive like this, but if he was being honest their relationship was already on the rocks. This was just the final straw. More and more sure of his decision, he unclenched his jaw enough to say it louder. “I said, we’re done. It's over, Katie.”

She gaped. “You can’t just leave me! You can’t break up with me. We live together!”

Ignoring her, Eli picked his duffel bag up off the floor and carried it to the bedroom. He unzipped it and started unceremoniously throwing in whatever he needed. It wasn’t much – a laptop, a few days of clothes. He still had his toiletries packed from his trip, which was good because in his fury he would have forgotten to pack them. He noted how much space her things took up in the bedroom, with his tucked into a small corner. He had always justified it as “not needing much to survive”, and he was suddenly thankful for it.

Katie entered the bedroom behind him. “What the fuck are you doing?”

He zipped up his duffel bag again and turned to her. “Exactly what it looks like. We’re done. I’m leaving.”

She crossed her arms in front of her, smirking. “You can’t. You’ve got nowhere to go. We live together, remember? Both our names are on the lease.”

He narrowed his eyes. “Fuck the lease. I’m calling our landlord and breaking the contract in the morning. Rent is paid until the end of the month. I’ll be back tomorrow night to get the rest of my shit. I don’t give a flying fuck what you do after that.”

She stood defiantly in the doorway, trying to think of other ways to make her meal ticket stay. He didn’t give her much time to think as he pushed past her, back to the door. He grabbed the keys to his beat-up Japanese import car from the early 2000s, and took mental stock of his situation as the garage opened. She followed him, yelling “You can’t take the car! That’s mine!”

He turned on his heel, staring back at her. “No, it’s not. It’s in my fucking name, and I bought it before we met. I let you use it this whole time, and now I’m taking it with me. If you’re so fucking determined to keep it, call the police and tell them I’m stealing it. I’d be happy to show them whose name is on the ownership papers.”

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

She stopped dead in her tracks. She knew he was right, and he knew she’d never call the police. He opened the driver side door and tossed the bag onto the seat beside him before starting the car, throwing it in drive, and peeling off into the night, driving aimlessly without thinking. Half an hour later he saw a motel, and decided to pull in for the night to plan his next steps.

The memory of that night scarred him. He stayed up all night in that crappy motel, searching for apartments to live in. The next morning he called his landlord and paid the cancellation penalties to get out of the lease on the house, grateful that he had stashed away some money for what was supposed to be an ‘engagement ring’ fund. By midday, he signed a lease on a new one-bedroom apartment in a large apartment building in the suburbs. The landlord was surprised by his desire to move in so quickly, but didn’t ask too many questions – he was happy just to have the space rented. That night, he returned to the house for the final time. Eli packed whatever possessions he couldn’t bear to part with into the car, ignoring Katie’s manipulative tears and screaming. He didn’t take much, deciding that it would be better to start fresh than to take anything with him that would remind him of her. His clothes, his shoes, his guitar, his books – all of it went into garbage bags and was packed away into the car.

He stopped at the doorway on his way out, dropping his house keys into a dish they had kept by the door. He turned back to her, his light brown eyes meeting her green ones. “Keep the rest.” He said. “I don’t want it. I never want to see you again. Goodbye, Katie.”

She sneered. “Fuck you. I never really loved you anyways.” She seemed determined to get the last word in.

Before she could say anything else, he was back in the car. He made a series of pit stops: the local department store to pick up an air mattress and some bedding, the grocery store to buy some food and cleaning supplies, and the liquor store to drown his sorrows. When he eventually reached his new apartment, he carried all the items in, dumping them onto the floor. An empty apartment greeted him. It was a far cry from the home he had just moved out of. To his right was the kitchen, with cheap vinyl floors, an old electric stove, an empty refrigerator, and a small countertop with drawers below and cabinets above. To his left was a simple bathroom with the same cheap flooring as the kitchen. Just beyond the door to the bathroom was a bedroom, with a small closet and enough room for a double bed. The floors outside of the kitchen and bathroom were carpeted grey, and when Eli flicked the light switch a set of pot lights cast the apartment in a yellowish glow.

He willed himself to hold it together for just a bit longer while he blew up the air mattress and put away the food. After that, he turned off the lights, pulled his bottle of cheap whiskey close to him, crawled into bed, and cried.

The anger had faded by that point, and his soul was left as barren as the room around him. As much as she was terrible to him, he had loved her deeply. He drank himself to sleep that night, waking up with the worst hangover he’d had since he was in university. Some part of him wished he’d never woken up at all. Shaking away his dark thoughts, he promised himself he was going to take control of his life and get better. He forced himself to go out for a walk to clear his head.

He aimlessly wandered around his new neighborhood, buying a cup of coffee and a breakfast sandwich from a local coffee shop, then walking down a street of small stores. He eyed a big advertisement at a fitness store, reading “Don’t let winter get you down! Our winter running gear is now 50% off!” The advertisement triggered a memory of a half-read article about exercise releasing dopamine and serotonin, the ‘feel good’ hormones in the brain. Realizing that he could probably use some ‘feel good’ hormones, he went into the store and the shop assistant sold him a pair of new running shoes with a winter running outfit. The next morning, he discovered that exercising helped him work through the immediate pain of the breakup, and he made it part of his daily routine.

_____________

In the 3 months following that night, he gradually began to piece his life back together. He bought some basic furniture for his apartment, gradually turning it from an empty room into something that resembled more ‘lived-in’. He restarted the hobbies Katie had hated, like practicing martial arts, playing guitar, and video games. He even quit his soul-destroying corporate job as a consultant – after all, now that he was only supporting himself instead of Katie’s expensive shopping habits, he didn’t need as much income. Instead, he started his dream business of building AI applications and selling them online. He still regularly had intrusive memories of that night, but as long as he kept busy he could survive from day to day. Although he would never admit it, he carefully avoided areas of the city where she might be so he wouldn’t have to see her again. He deleted his social media accounts and blocked her number on his phone so that he wouldn’t be tempted to reconnect with her.

Eli stumbled slightly, drawing him out of his thoughts and back to his early morning run. His feet had been moving on automatic while he dwelled on the memory and everything that had happened since. He looked down to see that his shoelace was untied, and he stopped to avoid tripping.

Kneeling, he tied his shoe. The sun was peeking over the horizon now, casting the neighborhood in a warm orange glow. One of his headphones fell from his ear as he knelt, and he could hear birds chirping around him. The air smelled like fresh buds on flowers. Eli’s eyes wandered to the grass next to the sidewalk, and he could see the morning dew on the individual blades of grass. The season of rebirth was here, and he smiled at the thought that in a way his life was also starting anew. He took a moment to breathe in the scene around him, flushing the last vestiges of his nightmare away and focusing on the day ahead.

That’s when he heard it. A faint pounding from one of the cul-de-sacs ahead. He jogged cautiously closer, and the pounding grew louder. It wasn’t the gentle knocking on a door of someone asking politely to enter the house. This was the determined sound of someone pounding on a door, demanding to be let in. It was constant and angry. Eli knew it was odd immediately – who would be angrily pounding on a door this early in the morning?

He rounded a corner to see a tall man in front of a nice two-story house. The front door was a bright blue, and around the house was a perfectly manicured lawn with neatly trimmed hedges and a tree out front which was just starting to flower. The rest of the house was gray stucco, and the large windows on both floors were positioned to catch the maximum amount of sunlight. All in all, it was one of the nicer houses in what was already a nice neighborhood of the city.

The strange man was oblivious to Eli staring, and continued to pound on the door with his fist. He looked quite skinny, wearing a long black coat, black pants, and a fedora. Eli could see his hooked nose and defined chin as he grinned. “Come on out princess!” He shouted.

Suddenly, the door opened. Eli couldn’t see the woman from the angle he was standing, but he could hear her voice. “Fuck off, asshole!” She said clearly.

He smirked, shoving her backwards. “They asked me to do this, but never specified how. I’m going to enjoy hurting you. By the end, you’ll be begging me to finish it.”

Eli crept closer, taking out his phone. He was unsure of what to do – clearly this mystery woman didn’t want this man in her house, and he was entering anyway. The way he was talking made it sound like he was going to torture her to death. Surely, that couldn’t be the case though. People just didn’t do those sorts of things.

Suddenly, the air around the man rippled. The blue door was blown off its hinges along with bits of siding from the house, flying several feet out into the street. The sound of the blast boomed, making Eli flinch. Amazingly, the man stood in the doorway, unharmed. His fedora had been blown off his apparently pale bald head, but otherwise the blast had no effect on him. Eli was dumbfounded – where did the blast come from? Why didn’t it hurt him, when it clearly had the power to destroy the doorway around him?

As if that wasn’t strange enough, snakes began to criss-cross in front of the doorway, blocking the strange man’s path. “No, not snakes.” Eli mentally corrected himself as the snakes grew leaves. “Roots. They’re fucking tree roots.”

The roots seemed to emerge from beneath the house, bursting upwards through the floor before turning from the green shoots of new growth to the more grey-brown of hardened wood. The man held his hand up to the roots and yelled something in some foreign language, tracing his hands in complex patterns. The roots instantly caught fire, falling away to the ground. He stepped over the embers, grinning wider. Eli had so many questions. Where did these roots come from? Where did the fire come from? This whole situation was bizzare.

He had unconsciously moved closer to the confrontation, standing on the driveway behind the man. Having seen enough to be concerned he started to pull out his phone and call 9-1-1. Another blast rippled outwards, widening the space where the doorway used to be making him stumble backwards in surprise, dropping the phone as he did. He could now see there were three women in the house, each standing in a hallway. One of them stood in front of the other two, arms spread as if to protect the others.

Eli’s brain was having difficulty understanding what he was seeing. He was transfixed, terrified, and confused all at once. Roots just didn’t appear out of the ground like that, it wasn’t something that happened. Neither did fire, nor whatever had blasted the doorway backwards.

The man reached into his jacket with his right hand, and pulled out a knife. From this angle, he wasn’t sure if the women would be able to see the wickedly curved blade, but he certainly could. It was the sort of knife someone would use to skin an animal. The sight of the cold metal broke Eli out of his stupor. These women were in trouble, and this man obviously meant to do exactly what he promised earlier. Decision made, he threw caution to the wind and ran towards the house. He was no hero, but he wasn’t about to be a bystander to a murder. He could sort out whatever weird things he saw later – right now, he needed to act.