by Ann Fox and Sarah Stella
1998
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Part Three
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Caroline didn't answer, she walked forward numbly and pulled the door open. Richard, her Richard, fell out in a tumbled pile of dusty black clothes.
He squinted up at her upside-down face. "I'd better get a raise for this."
Caroline whipped her head around to face the "older version" of Richard. The space he had occupied just a second earlier was now vacant. Caroline was more confused than ever. Slowly turning back to face her Richard, she couldn't mask her surprise.
Richard stood up and dusted off his clothes, letting out a humungous sneeze.
"Gesundheit," said Caroline, her voice trembling just a bit.
Richard ran the back of his hand across his nose a few times. "You really have to dust under there more often. At least once every five years. It's disgusting." He brought his fisted hands up to his eyes and rubbed them gently.
"What...uh...what were you doing down there?" asked Caroline cautiously, just as Richard's older counterpart had done earlier. Older counterpart! she thought. That sounds like something you'd see on "The Outer Limits" or something. She silently chided herself for her obvious insanity.
Richard's brow furled. "What do you mean, 'What was I doing in there'?! You begged me for more than three hours to crawl in there and investigate that 'foul smell' we've had to put up with for the past two days!" Both his tone and his expression conveyed apparent agitation.
Caroline decided to go along with it, even though she was still as confused as ever. "So, what did you find?" she asked.
Richard stared at her intensely for several seconds before retreating back into the closet. Caroline heard a thump-thump-slide-thump-slide-thump noise. Soon a small furry animal--a very limp and clearly dead animal--emerged from the closet with a nudge from Richard's boot.
Caroline let out a short but horrific shriek and clapped her palm over her mouth and nose. "Eeeewwww," she said, the sound greatly muffled beneath her hand.
"What? You never got squirrels in Wisconsin?" asked Richard monotonously.
Caroline lowered her hand. "Oh my God," she breathed disgustedly. "How did that thing get in there?"
"Well, I don't know," replied Richard sourly, "but I think we need to get rid of it now."
"What should we do with it?" Caroline asked.
"What do you normally do with dead animals?"
"I don't know. I don't normally get dead animals in my apartment. Salty gets most of the mice before they have a chance to decompose. I've never had a squirrel before." Caroline was thoughtful for a moment, then shrugged. "Annie throws everything in the incinerator, regardless of what it is. What do you do when you find rotting quadruped corpses in your apartment?"
Richard scrunched up his nose in what seemed to be repulsion, though Caroline knew it was more disgust over the sadness of his life in general than the rodents which frequented his filthy living quarters. She felt a pang of guilt, but sadly, she knew there was nothing she could do about it.
"Truthfully?" he asked.
Caroline nodded, wondering why he would consider not telling the truth.
"Well, I..." Richard began, but paused as if reconsidering. "Oh, who cares what I do? Let's just get rid of this thing before it smells up the whole apartment."
Caroline looked at him exasperatedly as she rubbed her head; the welt was beginning to subside. "Well, what are we going to do with it?" she repeated.
"Oh, I don't know. Why don't you wrap it up in a box and give it to Annie?"
Through narrowed eyes, Caroline glared at him. Wordlessly, she turned from Richard, walking into the kitchen to get a plastic bag from a cupboard. When she turned back around, he was gone. Caroline craned her neck as she surveyed the apartment. "Richard?" she called. No response. When she returned to where she'd been standing before she'd gone for the bag, she immediately noticed the squirrel carcass was also missing. I bet he took it to the incinerator thought Caroline, curling her lip up in disgust. She carried the bag out into the hallway as she made her way to the incinerator.
Caroline did not find Richard by the incinerator. With a sigh, she returned to her apartment and shut the door. This was getting too weird. She hadn't even turned her back on him for five seconds and he'd disappeared without a trace. No, wait--back up a second. First she'd gone in the closet to get a phone book--that she could remember. Then she'd hit her head and she was suddenly married to Richard--in the future. Then...what had happened next? Somehow Richard had tumbled out of the closet, even though he was standing right next to her just a fraction of a second earlier. And now he'd disappeared again.
What on earth was going on? Had the fabric of time suddenly torn and she was somehow living segments of her future and present life? Was this some kind of alternate reality? Or some weird combination of both? The events had seemed real enough, but the reality of those events had not. She couldn't remember smelling anything unpleasant over the past few days, that she was pretty sure of. Not absolutely sure, but pretty sure. She knew she was not married to Richard, at least not in the present reality that she was aware of.
Caroline's mind struggled to make some sense of the strange situation she'd been tossed into. Struggled, fought, and gave up. Caroline sighed in defeat; she simply could not decide what to make of it. She flopped down onto the couch and lay there for several minutes, trying to will all thought to leave her mind, hoping that somehow this would bring her some insight. The closet. The closet. The closet. The closet. The closet. From somewhere inside, the words were suddenly and forcefully thrust into her head, repeated over and over until she was practically forced to sit up and look in its direction.
She stood up carefully and walked over to the small door. There was only one way she was ever going to gain any sort of insight into this matter. Decisively, she opened the door and crept inside.
As before, the door banged shut after her before she had a chance to prop it open. The darkness was primeval and absolute. A swirled, confused feeling of deja vu engulfed her but she continued to make her way resolutely forward, holding her hands out in front of her. At any moment, she expected the floor to give way so she could tumble down the rabbit hole...again. Caroline hummed a few bars of "Yesterday" under her breath to ease her anxiety. The sound twisted and bounced back to her ears with a strange flatness.
Her hands encountered the smooth panels of the far wall and she turned around, sighing heavily. Maybe she was destined to be trapped in this mint-smelling future after all, where everyone thought she was forty-two and married to Richard. As if on cue, the scent of mint, sharp and spicy, reached her nose as she crawled for the door. Her hands tumbled over each other when she undid the latch.
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Continued in Part Four
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