Reality felt thin. Not broken, not warped, not torn. Thin, as though something had pressed its fingers against the world and rubbed until the surface wore down to a translucent membrane. Wendell often wondered if he had simply lived long enough to see the edges fray, or if the fraying had begun inside his own mind. It was difficult to tell nowadays. Memory was an unreliable companion. Sometimes he remembered being young. Sometimes he remembered being old. Once, he thought he remembered dying.
But he was here. In the bar. Always in the bar.
The counter stretched before him, covered in faint scratches and stains he no longer bothered trying to scrub out. The shelves behind him displayed bottles half filled with liquids of dubious origin. A single light hung overhead and flickered with the little remaining light it had. Wendell had stopped wondering long ago whether the light was malfunctioning or simply nearing its end.
He polished a glass…. polishing a glass felt right, and because the gentle, circular motion kept the pressure in his skull at bay. Whenever he tried thinking too deeply, a stabbing ache blossomed behind his eye. Polishing held it back. Breathing stale air helped too. He had developed habits, even if he could not remember learning them.
His name was Wendell. That he remembered. He was the bartender. That was another truth. And he was not allowed to serve someone a second drink. That rule lived in him with an iron weight, though he could not recall who had carved it there or why.
The rest of his memories drifted like smoke.
He paused his polishing as something tugged at the base of his mind. A memory rising from the dark. Its shape felt familiar. Its importance radiated through him like warmth.
Then the pressure surged.
The memory vanished.
A voice slipped through the buzzing of the light.
"Hey. Can I order a drink? Hey, bartender. A second one."
Wendell blinked and returned to the present. His voice emerged rougher than he meant. "You have had enough."
The man at the counter recoiled. He looked to be in his late twenties, though the dust coating his clothes and hair made him appear older. He frowned, confused. "I only had one."
Wendell knew that too, but the rule was absolute. He turned the rim of the glass with slow precision. The man lifted a hand in protest, but his arm faltered halfway. It thinned for a heartbeat, as though it had never existed. His face rippled strangely, like a reflection distorted by an unseen presence.
"Hey… what's happening to me?" His voice cracked with sudden fear.
He stood from the stool, stumbled backward, and collapsed. The thud echoed through the bar with hollow finality. Wendell watched him for a moment, ensuring the rule had still existed.
Then he resumed polishing the glass.
A dark stain grew across the floor. But the stain did not come from the man's body. His corpse was bloodless, hollow, an emptied shell. The stain dripped instead from above. Something thick and blackish tapped steadily onto the floorboards.
Wendell looked up. The light fixture swayed without wind. Its flickering grew erratic, each pulse stretching the shadows across the counter. The world felt misaligned.
He attempted to study the strange, dark substance dripping from the bulb, but the pressure behind his eye intensified. He flinched and looked away, allowing the memory of it to fade.
The bell at the door chimed.
A sharp scream followed.
Wendell turned with slow, mechanical effort. His gaze passed briefly over the fallen man's empty drink. The liquid inside had changed. Not the cloudy, bitter spirit he remembered pouring, but something thicker, darker, as though reflecting a sky that did not belong to this world.
A woman stood in the doorway. Her expression was horrified, her breath frantic. She stared at him first, then at the corpse, then back again. Something in her face tugged at him sharply, painfully.
Recognition.
A memory tried to surface.
The pressure crushed it instantly.
He winced and whispered the only thought left in the aftermath. "What was I thinking about?"
He let the question dissolve alongside everything else.
"Oh well."
The woman backed away, her vivid eyes wide with terror. She fled into the wasteland outside.
Wendell watched her silhouette vanish into the storm-lit horizon. Something deep in him urged him to follow her, as though her presence tied a thread directly to the part of himself that still had shape. But he could not step outside. He had tried before. The doorway might as well have been a wall. The bar was not his prison so much as it was his master. He could only exist within its boundaries.
He returned to his glass.
He polished, and the world eased its pressure on him. The reflections shifting on the glass's surface deepened unnaturally. He glimpsed ruined buildings. Canyons of collapsed concrete. The outline of a sun that flared brighter one moment and dimmer the next, as if confused about its own existence.
Each time he focused, the pressure rose, and the images scattered.
The door creaked again.
Another man stepped inside. Younger than the last. Tall, thin, dressed in battered clothes that bore dust from distant places Wendell had forgotten, if he had ever known them at all. His eyes were calm, but something unsettling stirred behind them, as though he was familiar with the shape of shadows.
He carried a briefcase. He set it gently on the counter and took a seat, but he did not order. He simply looked at Wendell with an unreadable expression, then glanced at the empty bar around them.
"I am waiting for someone," he said quietly. "Would you mind if she joined us?"
Wendell nodded. Polishing the glass occupied his mind. It also kept him from thinking too deeply about the faint unease this man inspired.
Time passed. Minutes that may have been hours. Hours that may have been days. The man waited in silence, unbothered by the emptiness around him.
The woman eventually returned.
Her earlier fear was gone, replaced by a still, tense calm. Her hair was dark and tangled by the wind outside. Her eyes held a faint purple glow, hazy yet somehow sharp.
She sat beside the young man as though she had always known where to place herself. They exchanged no words that Wendell heard.
They ordered drinks.
They drank them with quiet deliberation.
They paid. They actually paid. Wendell accepted the coins mechanically, stunned by the unfamiliar act, and watched them walk back out the door into the vast, broken world.
"How strange," he murmured.
He gathered their glasses, his hands moving automatically. As he polished the first one, the reflections deepened again. This time the images were clearer. The young man traversing barren plains. A silhouette of a towering creature stalking behind him. The woman standing atop a dune, wind whipping around her, something bright and dangerous glowing behind her eyes.
Wendell felt warmth slide from his nose. He touched his upper lip and saw blood on his fingertips.
"I should clean this."
He reached for another rag.
A sudden thump echoed through the room.
The briefcase had fallen.
He stared. Confused. Had the man forgotten it? How could he leave something so deliberate, so weighted with meaning? Wendell tried to step toward the door, thinking perhaps he could call out to him, but the thought evaporated as the pressure behind his eye pulsed again.
He looked down.
A briefcase lay at his feet.
Why was there a briefcase on the floor?
He bent and lifted it. The metal was cold, unnaturally so. The clasps gleamed like polished gold. A faint vibration hummed beneath his fingers.
He shook it.
Nothing.
Silence inside. Heavy, expectant silence.
Wendell opened the clasps.
The bar exploded with motion.
Air roared outward. Every speck of dust, every stray memory, every loose shard of the world seemed to tear free and spiral toward the open case. Bottles rattled violently and fell from their shelves. Glass shattered around him in a chorus of brittle cries. The vortex inside the case expanded, its swirling light fracturing into countless shifting scenes.
Faces flashed through the vortex.
Moments.
Fragments of lives he might have lived.
Fragments of lives he could never have known.
The scar down his body throbbed. He touched the line running from his brow down toward his ribs with unease. He did not know when he had gotten it, but suddenly it felt unbearably hot, branded into him like the memory of something sharp and merciless.
The pull intensified.
He clung to a support beam, trying to resist the force dragging at his chest. His breath caught in his throat. His body felt light, hollow, as though the vortex was sucking the very essences of his soul away from him.
The images inside the spiraling lights sharpened. A girl with purple eyes crying his name. A hand reaching toward him. A bar in flames. A field of glass beneath a colorless sky.
He reached toward the memories instinctively.
The pressure inside his skull shattered every one of them.
Darkness swallowed his thoughts.
His grip slipped.
Wendell felt something tear free inside him. Something essential. Something he had guarded without understanding.
The vortex consumed him.
His body vanished in a streak of pale light, drawn into the impossible space within the briefcase.
The bar fell silent.
Dust settled like slow rain.
A moment later, the door opened again.
The young man stepped inside. Calm. Unbothered by the destruction. He moved as though he had expected this outcome all along. He picked up the one unbroken glass from the counter. The liquid inside had become a dark, heavy swirl. He took a slow drink, the silence wrapping around him like a cloak.
Then he closed the briefcase.
The clasps clicked shut.
He left without paying.
This time, Wendell wasn't there to notice.