The woman who lived in apartment 985 had discovered a secret. She’d discovered the secret. Her name was Sunday, and she was a career woman who lived alone. She existed primarily in cashmere and turtlenecks, and worked in a corner office at a literary agency in a major coastal city, reading other people’s words. She drank black coffee and cappuccinos in tiny cups and biked on her Peloton every weekday morning, though she kept the perky instructor on mute. She had a long list of clients, lots of followers online, attended black-tie functions, and had enough income to pay her rent and take occasional vacations. To outsiders, her life seemed golden. On the inside, though, she was feeling more and more like one of those insects preserved in warm yellow amber and hung on museum walls – panicked limbs spread, hairy forelimbs extended, prehistoric wings frozen, mercilessly ensnared, unable to move an inch, doomed to an eternity of room-temperature silence.
In an effort to alleviate this feeling, Sunday had recently started taking deep dives into dark corners of the Internet. It was her guilty pleasure, these night swims, ducking underneath her cool white sheets and disappearing herself through the square of blue light cradled in her hands, like pushing through an attic hatch that led to another dimension. She swam through brackish waters, looking for someone who had the answers. She watched videos of a bearded influencer who drank his own urine and claimed to be a master of sexual kung fu. She tried out life hacks suggested by a productivity guru – she woke up early, took ice baths, increased the speed of her computer mouse, lived at Inbox Zero, and only ate one meal a day. She went to an anti-racism dinner where women of all skin colors yelled at each other. She bought crypto coins and played the digital market. She fell into a brief obsession with an astrologist podcaster who claimed that the future was written in the stars.
Nothing seemed to help. She felt like she was swimming in circles, chasing bioluminescent sea creatures that slipped out of her grasping fingers. She was unfulfilled by the life she’d painstakingly created, the life she’d given up so much for: lost in the fine mesh of routine, scribbling her red pen across sentences that looked increasingly the same. One book on her list was a memoir of a scientist from a war-torn province of South Africa, another was a book of poems penned by a bisexual Irish writer who’d grown up in a broken home, and they were exactly the same. The small talk before business meetings ran on a broken loop – children, dating, traffic, children, dating, traffic, children. There was a scream bubbling up in the back of her throat that pressed on her vocal chords like a living thing.
She strained deeper at night, like those free divers she’d seen on TV, arms tucked into an arrow over her head, blue water tinting darker and darker around her until it was black. She was reaching for the ocean floor, for something new – and then her fingertips brushed sand. She’d found it. She found the woman with the answers.
This woman reached out of Sunday’s phone, scrabbling at the edges of the dark passageway into reality that was Sunday’s mind, whispering to her from a basement recording studio. She told Sunday that the universe was a lie. She told Sunday she’d been to the other side, the true reality, which was more beautiful than she could imagine. She told Sunday that if she was chosen to cross over, she would see signs. When Sunday emerged from beneath the covers, day had broken, orange light slanting across her pillowcase. The room felt different around her. She was brimming with something new, her brain buzzing – she was certain. This was it.
Work that day passed in a warm flash. Sunday went to her weekly yoga class afterwards, in an incense-and-sweat scented studio, and when she bent into Reverse Warrior Pose, one hand resting on her back legging-clad leg, the other stretched to the sky, tilting her head up toward the ceiling, there were four green letters perfectly reflected in the corner of her glasses, like a secret message just for her: E X I T. After the class, she went to the grocery store, and bought ice cream and chocolate and the most expensive cheese she could find. She went through the 10-items-or-less line, and then stood by the front door and watched the young grocer repeat the same script to a revolving door of customers: “Hi, how are you tonight,” “Did you find everything okay?,” and “Would you like a bag for ten cents?” She walked home, feeling the wind on her face, watching the crows hop across telephone wires overhead. She passed by a steepled church, whose sign out front read: “Welcome – Sunday – Join Us.”
When she arrived home, there was an Amazon package at her door. She took it inside and opened it at the kitchen island. Inside was a cool, smooth yellow lump the size of an egg – it was a bug caught in amber, a paperweight she’d ordered months ago. She held it up to the light. She thought if she could look the thing in the eye – really look – it might help ease the knot inside her. Smiling, Sunday set it aside and ate her ice cream and chocolate and cheese. Her phone started to ring, and she dropped it in a flower vase.
Sunday turned off the lights and went upstairs, where she found a door in the middle of her bedroom. It was a stately wooden door with a gold handle, inexplicably held upright by unseen forces, waiting for her. She took a deep breath, and then walked forward, grasped the handle, and stepped through to the other side.
Hello
reader,
Sunday says.
She’s looking at you.