The Town With No Name That Once Had One

Eleanor was silent, silent as she gently moved her covers away and off the bed with a gentle flutter of cloth. Everything was fine, it would seem.

She recognized her home, of course. The faded posters and dusty memories scattered about her room gave her a warm pang of nostalgia as she slowly sat up with a smile. It was the nostalgia of a remembered solidarity with her friends, and the gray tint of the room gave the suggestion of an old black-and-white photograph, capturing the good memories of a time long passed. Every item told a story, and she knew the stories well.

As she clasped her silver necklace around her neck, she decided to indulge in her memories for a bit before getting ready. After all, she didn’t have much to do today anyway, so why not indulge?

Like this snowglobe, for instance. She smiled fondly as she picked it off the shelf, giving a little shake to make the snow swirl around pleasantly. In the middle was a tiny wood cabin surrounded by pine trees, a little plume of fake smoke rising from the chimney. It brought back oh-so-nice memories, of better times when she was still together with her friends. What had happened to those times, and those friends? It almost seemed like it was yesterday.

Well, almost. The long passage of time had left her a bit fuzzy on the details. She wasn’t quite sure where the cabin had been, or where she’d gotten the snow globe. A nearby gift shop maybe? But hadn’t it been her own private cabin, secreted away from the rest of the world? Then again, where would she get one of those? Whatever, it didn’t matter. What mattered was the feelings conjured, not the specifics.

She wiped the dust from the snowglobe before lovingly replacing it to its place on the shelf. She moved on to the small wooden duck beside it. It was a souvenir she picked up after a hunting trip with her father. Or at least, she was pretty sure it was her father she had been with. It was one of the last ones she ever took before moving to…

Wait, had she moved? It was odd. With all of these happy memories out in the country it would seem insane to want to move anywhere else, but for some reason she thought she had done so. Wouldn’t she have to say goodbye to all of her friends? Why would she do that to herself? It didn’t make sense.

A loud crack snapped her out of that thought process. She rolled her eyes, putting the duck back and moving to her nightstand, where what had previously been a large roll of duct tape was now looking a bit bare. She climbed up onto the bed and taped over the new gash that had appeared across the window, layering it over several other strips that were already slicing their way across what had once been a pleasant view. At least, it would have been, if the rain ever let up. It was something with the air pressure, she determined. Nothing to worry about, but she’d have to get the window replaced at some point. Nothing to worry about.

Leaving the memories for now, she made her way out the door and into the hallway, painted in the same relaxing gray as the rest of the house. As much as she would like to reminice all day, unfortunately she had work to do. On the weekend perhaps she’d have the time to do so, but there was just so much to do, and even on those days it seemed like work had a way of creeping its little tendrils into her thoughts, grabbing her and dragging her back into the study to continue its onslaught on her very soul.

Oh well. What was one to do? And besides, she should be grateful for the opportunity to work from the comfort of her home.

She made her way to the office, yawning a bit as she prepared for work, a preparation that consisted solely of putting on a shirt as she walked clumsily. She sat down, rubbing some of the sleep out of her eyes, and began her first task of the day. Picking up the thick stack of paperwork she’d completed yesterday, she scooted her chair over to begin feeding them one by one into a large paper shredder by the desk. It was a relaxing task, cathartic even, as unlike the others it didn’t even pretend to require her attention, leaving her mind free to wander through her other goals for the day besides work.

There weren’t that many, truth be told. She hoped to get outside for a bit, mow the lawn maybe, but that was more of a formality than anything. The grass never seemed to grow on its own, so it was more of a fun chore to get her out of the house. She also had to remember to eat today. The last few days she’d forgotten entirely, leaving her tired and sluggish, though she barely noticed the difference.

In fact, now that she was thinking about it, she should probably go now so she didn’t forget, before she got caught up in her work. She finished up the paper in her hand, some inconsequential application she’d filled out, and made her way to the stairs, holding onto the railing for balance. She’d gotten dizzy and fallen a few times before, and it was an experience she’d decided to learn from. Making her way past the dusty couch in the living room, she ended up in the kitchen, where she poured a bowl of cereal that would likely be all she ate for the next few days. It was an unfortunate reality, as it just got so hard to remember to eat sometimes.

Curiously, as she placed the bowl down, the table seemed to be shifted back a few centimeters from the last time she was here. She cocked her head to the side, moving around to the other side of the table instead of sitting down. Along the edge of the table, interrupting the continuous gray pattern, was a spot of brown caked along the side. She considered the spot for a moment before looking down, jumping back with a start as she saw the much larger pool of brown, with the shine of red speckled into deeper pools on the surface of the dried puddle.

It looked an awful lot like blood, but its origins remained a mystery. Had she gotten a bloody nose yesterday and simply forgotten about it? That did often happen during thunderstorn season. It was something to do with the air pressure, the doctor had told her. No matter the cause, it was a huge inconvenience, as this puddle had clearly proven.

She went to the closet by the door to grab a mop, cursing the foul weather as she did so. If it wasn’t for those annoying clouds she’d be able to just enjoy her breakfast and get back to work. It was a minor inconvenience, to be sure, but such things had a way of getting under her skin in the mornings, despite the fact that the blood itself proved easier to clean than she expected. All except for one spot that simply refused to be cleaned, a particularly annoying spot just next to the table leg. After scrubbing back and forth a few times, she let out a grunt of frustration and decided that it would have to wait for some other time. It was the morning, and she couldn’t be bothered. Replacing the mop to the closet, she wiped the sweat from her forehead and made her way back to the table to finish her “meal”.

As she did so, however, she noticed her hands, covered in a deep red. This red was wet, very wet, in fact. Was she bleeding? She ran her hands along her forehead again and through her hair, and lo and behold, there was even more blood on her hands this time.

She began to panic. It was just an air pressure thing, right? No, that didn’t make any sense. She had to call a doctor, go to the emergency room. She had a medical kit somewhere, right? She couldn’t remember where she put it, which only made her panic even more. Maybe she could just wait for the bleeding to stop? No, that was a terrible idea. This was probably some sort of emergency. She’d have to call in and let the office know why she wasn’t getting as much work done today, or work late into the night to get everything done. That would certainly be a pain.

Speaking of pain, Eleanor suddenly realized she was feeling a distinct lack of pain. If she was injured, surely it would hurt at least a little bit. Was that a bad sign? She wasn’t really sure. She took a deep breath. In, then out. First, she should check to see how bad things were. That was probably a good first step. She began to walk back upstairs to the bathroom mirror, but her face was beginning to feel wet now. That was a bad sign for sure. How exactly did this happen? This sort of thing didn’t just happen on its own. She wondered all of this as she opened the door to the bathroom. She stopped wondering a moment later.

The body in the bathtub was hers, undoubtedly. Even in such a mangled and unrecognizable state, there was no mistaking it. The pallor of the face was terrifying as it stared lifelessly at the ceiling, lips pursed slightly as if an unspoken word had died on her lips just as she did. The unnatural pale of her skin contrasted in a grotesque beauty with the dark crimson of blood splashed about the tub, like an abstract painting of gore and death. There was a perverse tranquility to the scene; the look on the Eleanor’s face was peaceful in contrast to the messy reality of her death, and the room was eerily quiet, like time had frozen to let her savor this very moment.

Maybe it had.

And in that frozen moment, Eleanor remembered. She remembered everything. How she really got here in the town. How she tried and failed to escape. All the other versions of herself, all stuck living out a twisted mockery of a life, stuck here forever, whose only purpose seemed to be her own mental degeneration. All her worst fears had been made manifest by this horrible little town, laying bare all of her insecurities.

But this? This was too much. This was what she had been running from all along, yet here it was, laid out before her in all its glory. She had refused to accept it, but it had always been a possibility.

She was on the floor now, tears mixing with the blood on her face to flow down freely and mix with the red there already. Her own blood was already there on the floor, all over the tub, and in the sink, and all she was doing was adding to the whole mess. Yet hers were the first tears to be added to the mix. The other her didn’t seem to have felt anything, emotionally or physically, simply resigned to her fate, having given up on changing it long ago. Was it really an inevitability? Was this her true destiny? The town had already proven escape impossible, even mocking her for ever thinking it could be any other way, and here it was again, proving once again that she had no power over it. It was a cruel fate indeed that had been chosen for her.