When Samantha Gregory woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, she found herself buried beneath her own artifacts. Her shelves, during the night, had buckled by the weight of a 10-year Us Weekly subscription, bookended by the complete first, second, and third seasons of The Hills on DVD and a small army of self-portrait headshots secured within bedazzled frames. The toppled bookshelf planks had creased the magazines and snapped the disks. Her portraits suffered glass shrapnel.

“What will happen to me?” Samantha says to herself. From above, a poster of Ashton Kutcher watches.

Worried, she abides by her morning-after impulse and says “you’ll need to leave,” in the direction of her bed. But upon turning back, she finds no sleeping man, she smells no residual Axe. “Something is wrong,” she says.

She opens the bathroom medicine cabinet for Tylenol but discovers only multi-vitamins and empty space once claimed by hair products. She retreats to her television, hoping for news of a serial burglar. Instead, her TiVo offers C-SPAN Senatorial hearing coverage. She knows the name of the British Prime Minister. The Dow numbers affect her. “I don’t have a portfolio,” she says. “Why do I know what a ‘portfolio’ is?” she speculates further.

An ice age has appeared in the Hoffbaugher’s parlor. The entire front room is jagged hoarfrost and brilliant snowy white: several enormous glaciers drift anonymously where the plastic-covered sofas used to stand. From the hallway, Jim Hoffbaugher stares at the immense white icebergs creaking back and forth between an expanse of terrifically gray glacial sheets: he shakes his head as if, all along, this was something he was expecting.

“Hrumph,” is what he mumbles, hands on his hips. “Would you just look at that? Would you just look at that?”

“It’s not very nice to look at,” Margaret, his wife, says from the kitchen.

“I know it. Boy, do I know it,” Jim says.

He sips at his coffee from a cup that reads World’s Best Grandpa. The edge of the coffee cup is chipped on one side and so Jim has to be mindful of where he puts his lips whenever he takes a sip. Like the icebergs newly formed in the front part of his house, like what he reads in the newspaper and what he sees on the TV, Jim does not trust any of it.

Ever since September ‘leventh, we haven’t been taking loud noises lightly ’round here. What some might hear as fireworks, we’re liable to interpret as gunshots. I reckon my thoughts tend to frown as much as anyone’s. Just the other day when my lady and I saw cars lined up and down both sides of my street, she said, “Someone must be having a party,” to which I replied, “Either that or a death in the family.”

So naturally it caused a stir within my own head and all heads neighboring when we heard a plane flying what sounded to be inordinately close to our homes. My mom’s China cabinets began rattling, and I hurried outside, as most of my neighbors were also doing. We all rushed out of our houses worried as could be, all looking up at the afternoon sky. Our alarm was justified when we saw that the noisy plane was a behemoth of military machinery, getting lower and lower, casting a shadow on our street.

But before I could examine this military plane more thoroughly, I noticed that some pinkish white things were falling from the sky. I looked around and found that these little items had been dropped on everyone’s lawn, including my own, and upon closer examination, I saw that they were shrimp.

The man sits sheltered under a blue plastic awning, awakened moments ago by rainfall unlike anything he’d experienced, his breath fogging as it goes.

He sits, ageless chiseled limestone, hands crisscrossed by more scars than are countable, the third and fourth fingers of his right hand missing, the assault of rain on the plastic a metronome, tinny and precise, in rhythm with his heart.

He sits watching raucous white- and brown-skinned children play an unfamiliar sport, giggling as they toss a brown oblong ball wobbly through the air and scrape knees and elbows on oil-slicked asphalt, the ball wet, uncatchable.

He sits, a dozen time zones or more from the village he’d spent his youth and raised and buried his family, beneath this plastic leaf-clogged awning over the second floor balcony of his hosts’ home, ivy growing greener than anything he’d known, the porch larger than the rusted metal container that stowed he and 17 others during their voyage across the seas, away from famine and violence and desert storms, biblical monstrosities.

She has the look upon her face of someone that has something to say but just won’t ever say it. Lips sealed like a vault to truth, while grenades and stars collide and explode behind blue eyes, and then it all fades to white.

And I woke up in an alleyway. I swore I was paralyzed for all that was certain to me was the blurs of lamp posts, and the sounds of a dying city in the distance.

My eyes finally fixed onto the graffiti covered brick wall in front of me, “I can be your heroin” scrawled in yellow and green, followed by a peace symbol written in white.

My back against a dumpster, the air smelt sour and my mouth tasted of a metallic rust. I pulled myself up. My joints ached and stung while my eyes surveyed the area. I ran my hands through my hair in confusion, but I smile a little, because that is all I can do.

How it works is like this:

When you wake up, you pull the lever and the little door opens. When the little door opens you can leave the room. But when you do, and this part I haven’t quite figured out just yet, the door, the little one, it closes behind you. Not quietly either. It pretty much slams shut. The noise it makes is louder than anything you’ve heard before. It’s someone running a knife across a plate hard, making that screeching sound, only they’re doing it into a microphone, they’re blasting the crashed plane sound of it straight into your head. This sound lasts for days. Reverberating the way it does around the little corridor outside the room, the sound is your new constant companion.

2. The Corridor

Beyond, the passageway, it’s small. Tight is a better word. If you’re claustrophobic I would suggest not pulling the lever, not opening the little door that makes the hideous squealing sound that you will live with pretty much the rest of your life. If you do pull the lever and open the little door -- let’s call it an accident -- you’re not going to want to leave the room. Seriously. Don’t. This duct is so small it’s crazy. Unless . . .

When they found the food cache, stuffed to the brim with bags of peanuts and tuna cans and food brands that would bring back the faded taste of childhood, he went out for a walk under a moon the color of rust and wept for a handful of spastic minutes. The looming shadows of crumbling skyscrapers provided him with plenty of places to hide. It had been a long time coming, this decision, ever since the never-ending days of blinding hunger pain outnumbered the days of restful sleep and vain hope. Ashes floated in a rainwater puddle where he caught a glimpse of the bones lurking beneath his skin. He held up needle-thin fingers and counted the choices available to him. Then he counted the other choices and found that only one finger remained. After dinner, he swore to no one, but knew even that would be too long. So he lost himself in the alleyways where vines ascended the broken ribs of buildings and skeletons crowded the cracked pavement in jumbled mikado piles. A yellowing flower sprouted...

My eyelids drop and open like black velvet curtains. The foamy outline of a dark ghost shifts in a single moment before its comet tail is swept into the shadows. All I can hear are my disparate breaths, each one in tune with the pumping glow of white static a few feet away. The television’s electric blush sparkles with the flutter of a dozen dead flies.

Her scent haunts the dusty pillowcase. I can remember taking the last sip, eager green fluid spilling over the back of my tongue with a playful bounce. Her name was Dinah and she had hair as black as tar. I kissed her once, felt the radiance of cherry lip gloss penetrate my impatient mouth. Hours or days later and I’m tied to a bed that might as well be my coffin. My ears popped while I was dreaming. A thick wall of black noise starts to hit my skull with the force of a rusty hammer, Dinah’s giggle a sullen reminder of my fate. She comes into full view, turns off the television. She flips on the lamp in the corner of the room and immediately removes her tank-top. She tosses it over the lamp and my eyes adjust to the dark light.

What…do…you want?

I feel my lips embrace the words but not a single ounce of sound escapes my throat. Dinah sees the struggle in my eyes, the way pain floats through my temples like a dying snake slithering under the skin. She leans over and kisses me on the forehead, lips leaving a burning trail of imaginary ash and snow.

The old man awakes me. Half lit by a kerosene lamp, his face dived into terror and mystery, his lawn halved by a cold November moon. I stand in my bedroom and watch as he digs the earth with a silver spade; I watch as he opens up a gaping wound in the earth’s skin.

Three weeks ago, he moved boxes into what was the Connors’ house. The Connors’ had a dog named Macy. A six-year-old boy called James. A rope swing and playhouse. The old man has a rusted truck, the grill busted. A dream catcher hanging from the rear-view mirror. He dragged his life into that dead house while Dubussy slowed the world around me to a crawl.

I move the curtain back a little and note a long shadow, warped and twisted, sprawling his garden. Each time he bends to dig, the shadow mutates into a mythological creature: Hydra, Medusa, the Minotaur. When he stands to wipe his brow, out it stretches, reaching out to touch the wooden fence that divides our gardens.

A day after moving in, a dead bolt secured his front door. Around the gate coiled a thick bicycle chain. He erected a sign that said, No Trespassing, and carried into the basement a hammer, a ratchet, a saw, and grinder. For four nights he banged the floors, tightened bolts, sawed wood and grinded doors. I heard him wail and argue, screech and holler. No one returned a word, not one note of reassurance, comfort or annoyance. The room was dead, save for the old man’s footsteps.

The smell of hot pennies, taste of rubber in my mouth. Clammy hands and sweat on my forehead. A light in the corner throws wild shadows over the room. I might be in Purgatory.

I scratch my cheek, run my hand over my face and the thousand hot needles under my nose stab my brain. Softer than a breath, I feel my nose again. It’s swollen, probably broken. My head throbs. On my forearm lays a thread of dried blood.

Floral blanket, heavy drapes, muted paintings and an armoire housing a TV; this must be a hotel room. I heft myself off the bed. Soft carpet under my feet and it has to be a nice place. Definitely not motel carpet. In the armchair across the room are white squares dotted brown, leather straps with grommets and a dildo. I pad my way over, stopping in front of the mirror.

Weinmann said Tim showed up every day, with the same card around his neck. Four sentences that hung from a lanyard and rested on his big belly. He did it to himself, that’s essentially what the card said.

Damage to hippocampus.

Lambdin did it. Find him. Kill him.

Plastic cut to three inches by two didn’t leave much room for explanation.

His name was Tim, that’s what Weimann said. Weimann managed Hill’s Auto Body like his own personal kingdom. Make it my business to know the customers, that kind of stuff. Even the crazies, he’d said.

Tim walked to the glass doors and spat on his thumb and smeared a track through the grime. He couldn’t see any better, but Lambdin was still out there. Every day he came looking for Lambdin with little in his head but the message on that card. Kill him, kill him, kill him.

On the 49th day, I woke to the hawk glare of the sun. I crawled from the bag and meandered the platform without aim or purpose. I updated the blackboard, but had I missed a day? Was it 48? Was it 50? I stared at the city as if at an immense blinding TV screen. Exhausted from sleep, unable to focus, I achieved, like a horse, a standing slumber, eyes open and unseeing.

An angry violent banging below brought me to. I looked over the banister upon a red-faced man in dark glasses pounding his fist on a newspaper machine in front of Cool Hand Laundry. He might as well have been pounding directly on my cotton-filled head. “Hey!” I called, jarred by own bark. “Buddy! Knock it off!” The man looked around. “Up here,” I said. “How’s about vandalizing something a little farther away?”

The fellow held up a red-and-white cane and swept it back and forth in the air in my direction. “What say little who?”

“Oh,” I said. “Never mind.”

A hand lies on my stomach.

I open my eyes. The room is dark and shadowed with the first glimmer of sunshine hidden behind a curtain. A face is beside me under hair the color of a starless night—short and messy—her eyes closed, her breath uneven. Sweat and smoke linger in the bed and mingle with the scent of flowers in the rain. Lifting the blanket, she’s all ribs and sharp hipbones, but delicate like wilting petals. She stirs and opens her eyes. I drop the blanket, embarrassed.

“What’re you doing?” She curls up and pulls the blanket tight. Her eyes open wide and she smiles.

“Looking for my clothes.”

The shock of salt and copper running down his cracked lips, his swollen tongue, like Ben had been sucking on a penny, that old method to try to trick the breathalizer, it brought him back from the nothing of forced unconsciousness. Ben was a few meters from the skeleton of the jeep, the rubber of the tires melted on the tarmac, the engine smoking, the windshield shattered, pieces of it in his scalp.

Dragging himself to his feet, he shuddered from side to side and realized the pain in his head, the droning, high pitched silence was from the busted eardrum, a tone he’d never hear again giving way to the wind softly through the burning tree he stood under. He’d driven the jeep over an IED. They’d planted them throughout the city once it was apparent they were losing, a mildly efficient defense. The Guard had fallen back to the warehouse district, where all they had to do was set up barbwire along the fences and Legends on the roofs to keep an eye on the Filth in the streets.

A hundred swinging lights each as bright as a lighthouse is what I wake up to, and a beast shoulder-charging the inside of my skull.

Shit. My eyes begin to focus on all the bodies around me, some obese, some skinny, some twisted like aborted monsters, every one of them lifting their bloodied hands to shield their eyes at exactly the same moment as I do.

I scream in confusion, but then it hits me. I’m looking at myself. I’m everywhere. On the ceiling, on the walls, even the fucking floor. What the fuck? Warped mirrors everywhere and oh shit - I’m stark naked. I cup a hand over my genitals, notice drops of blood seeping from beneath my nails to drip on the mirrors beneath my dirty feet. One of them is cracked – probably where I was thrown down. It’s quiet in here too; the squeak of my clammy feet slipping on the glass as I stand seems louder than it should be.

There are always clues.

Sometimes it’s a simple as a new sound. It’s the clicking fingernails of a small dog scurrying against hardwood floors, when you have neither. It’s the way the air tastes. It could be that the pillows are too thin, or the texture of unfamiliar sheets against your skin. But it’s always something, and you know immediately. Without realizing how you got there, or even opening your eyes, you know that you are in a strange bed, and it is unsettling.

What clued me in was the arm draped over the small of my back. In my bed, in my room, I sleep alone, and therefore free myself from the search of wandering limbs.

My eyes open, and I am mercifully facing a wall. Above my head is a window, partially covered by drab soiled curtains that look like they were used to wrap a wound. Rays of sunlight stream in, thick and unapologetic. They canvas the sheets and uncovered flesh, eager to illuminate how the decisions of the night have carried over. The light shines on the dust, floating around the room like a miniature snowstorm. And as I lay there watching it fall, thoughts cross my mind.

80% of dust is human skin.

And. Where. The. Fuck. Am. I?