Chapter 2: Echoes on the Ride Home

Allison rose slowly from the mossy patch where she’d been sitting, leaving behind a small hollow in the damp green where her body had been. Proof that she had been there. Proof, at least, that something had.

The sunlight had shifted while she lingered by the creek, stretching long, wistful shadows across the water. The golden shafts filtering through the canopy had softened, catching dust motes that drifted like tiny ghosts in the late-afternoon air. She hadn’t realized how long she’d been sitting there, wrapped in the gentle forgetfulness this hollow always seemed to offer.

She brushed moss and damp earth from her jeans, packed her things, and carefully zipped her bag. Then she turned for one last look at the spot where Thimble had been.

The raccoon still sat at the creek’s edge. Her paws were tucked neatly together, her head tilted with that same quiet intensity, as if she could see straight through Allison and into whatever lived beneath her skin. Something dignified about her stillness, a calm that suggested she had already seen this movie, knew how it ended, and didn’t have an ounce of worry about it.

“I gotta go. Stuff to do.” Allison said quietly.

Thimble nodded. “I’ll see you soon, Allison.”

Allison blinked at the reply. She tried to hide the apprehension in her voice, but a knot had already formed in her chest.

What did she mean by seeing me soon? Do I want to know? Allison asked herself.

Then a shimmer, and she was gone. No trace of fur. No whiskers. No paw print pressed into the moist soil. It was as if she had never been there.

Allison remained rooted in place, a stinging hollowness spreading through her chest as she stared at the vacant creek bank. The water babbled on, utterly indifferent to what had just happened beside it. A bird trilled sharply overhead, snapping her out of whatever trance had taken hold. The sound was so ordinary, so jarring in its normalcy, that it felt almost violent. 

Didn’t the world care? Didn’t the trees, the creek, the birds care that everything inside her—everything she knew, or thought she knew—was beginning to unravel?

She turned and climbed the steep hill back to the road. Her boots slipped once on the loose earth, but she caught herself. At the top, her bike waited where she’d left it, the kickstand dug into the gravel shoulder. Patient. Sun-warmed. Blissfully incapable of talking. She swung a leg over the seat, slid her pack on her shoulders, and clipped her helmet strap into place.

Then she paused.

One more look back at the woods. Nothing out of the ordinary moved except the creek water, coursing the same path it always had. Not even the leaves. She pushed off. The tires found the asphalt at once, humming their familiar song as the bike rolled forward.

The road rolled beneath her. Its curves and slopes were familiar, but everything felt strange now—altered by what had happened at the creek. It was like looking at a room she knew by heart and suddenly noticing a framed photo she’d never seen before, even though it had always been there.

Allison kept her eyes forward and her legs moving, but her mind looped furiously, unable to escape itself. Every detail replayed with burning clarity: the raccoon’s gaze, the shimmer, the creek falling silent as Thimble touched the water. The voice echoed in her memory, startlingly human.

“That’s not all that I am,” Allison muttered under her breath as she rode, the way she always did when no one was around to hear her. The wind snatched the words from her mouth, bypassing any inhibition. 

“Okay. Did a raccoon talk to me? Thimble, she said. And she’s supposed to be my escort to Dreamspace? My own personal mental playground? I’ve never told anyone about that. How does she even know? It isn’t even a real place. But I’m not running a fever… am I? Unless dehydration counts, which...”

She swerved to avoid a pothole and gripped the handlebars tighter.

“...which it doesn’t. So. Either I hallucinated the whole thing, or I didn’t. Then there was the shimmer. It wasn’t heat. And the robot, or android, or whatever. What the actual fork is going on? Too much alone time. Not enough social interaction. That has to be it.”

She shook her head hard, as if she could rattle the pieces into place, and nearly lost control of the bike.

“It looked like a double exposure. One of those old-timey photographs in town antique shops. That’s what it was like. Sol, I think their name was. Another denizen? Like, are there more? How in the heck is my own imaginary brain-land already populated?”

A breeze carried the scent of wet moss and wildflowers. Her fingers tingled faintly on the handlebars, pins and needles prickling under her skin. She flexed her wrists and elbows, checking for pinched nerves, poor circulation, anything that belonged to the ordinary world. The sensation stopped. 

“That’s it. I’m just seeing things. I work too hard, right?” Her throat tightened around the ache, but she forced the words onto the empty road anyway. “Either that, or I’ve snapped. Lost my ever-loving mind entirely.”

Laughter prickled behind her eyes, unsteady and dangerously close to tears.

“Good. Great. Perfect. Everything is fine. Absolutely, devastatingly fine.”

She passed a wild patch of Queen Anne’s lace blooming along the shoulder. The clustered white flowers bobbed in the breeze atop tall, fuzzy green stalks, each one like a tiny trembling parasol trimmed in lace. 

Normally, she loved this ride home—the wildflowers, birds chirping in the trees, the leaves dancing in the breeze. But today, the silence felt oppressive. She had questions she hadn’t even thought to ask Thimble. Questions clawed at the walls of her mind, desperate to get out. 

Was that raccoon real? And why did it feel like she had stepped into someone else’s story, only to discover it had been hers all along? 

The thought crashed through her. She didn’t know where it had come from. It didn’t sound like her usual ruminations—those relentless loops that gnawed at her every night. This was deeper. Stranger. Haunted. Like a bell tolling in some hidden chamber of her soul, its quiet ache spreading through places she had never touched but suddenly longed for. Whatever it was, it wanted her attention.

Part of her wanted to turn around. Ride back. Find Thimble. Demand answers that actually make sense. The more practical part—the part trained by years of navigating a neurotypical world that did not make room for detours into magical raccoon encounters—said, Nope. 

Get dinner. Go home. Feed the dog. Take a shower. Pretend you’re not losing your mind.

The grocery store was an assault she had learned to endure.

Fans above the entrance blasted cold air down as she stepped through the doors, and the forced chill struck her overheated skin, hard enough to make her gasp. The produce section opened before her, sweet and faintly sour, depending on what had begun to turn. Fluorescent lights buzzed at a frequency she could feel in her temples. Somewhere deeper in the store, a child shrieked.

Normally, she could tune it out. Today, every sound landed like another drop in a glass already full and ready to shatter.

She didn’t linger. She made straight for the deli counter in the back, where they served hot food. She wanted only one thing: the eight-piece fried chicken meal with two sides, macaroni and cheese and mashed potatoes. $17.99. It would last for a few meals if she shredded the breasts and made chicken salad.

It was easy, warm, predictable comfort. Safe food. Food that didn’t ask for decisions, effort, or executive function. She had already spent all of that for the day.

She waited her turn, arms crossed and jaw set, willing the line to move faster. When the deli worker handed her the labeled bag, she clutched it like a life raft. She moved through self-checkout with mechanical efficiency. In under ten minutes, she was back outside. The evening air hit her face. She exhaled for the first time since walking in.

She stashed the food in her rear basket, unlocked the bike, and left the parking lot without looking back. Every minute spent around other people today felt like a loan against a balance she had already overdrawn.

She turned the last corner and glided straight onto her driveway.

Home.

“Thank Cat.” She exclaimed with a deep, stress-relieving sigh the second she put the kickstand down

Allison unlocked the front door, propped the screen open, and wheeled the bike inside to its usual spot behind the sofa. Spud was there before the kickstand was down, trying to be such a good boy and not bolt out the front door. He was a scrambling blur of white fur and frantic tail wags. His whole body vibrated with the joy of a dog who had waited a thousand years for his person, even though it had been maybe two hours.

“Hey, potato,” she said, dropping into a crouch and burying her hands in his scruffy fur.

He licked her chin as she stooped down to his level. She laughed—a real laugh, the first all day—surprised by seventeen pounds of unconditional enthusiasm.

“You hungry? Yeah, me too. Let’s go eat.”

She took the food from the basket, closed and locked the doors before Spud could reconsider staying inside, and headed for the kitchen. He trotted at her heels, nails clicking on the floor, tail wagging like a metronome set too fast.

She scooped his dinner into his bowl, cut it up, and set it on the floor. He attacked it as if he had never eaten a bite in his life.

Then she plated her own meal: macaroni first, then a mound of mashed potatoes, then two pieces of still-steaming chicken. Her mouth watered before she finished plating.

With the plate balanced in one hand and her phone in the other, she made her way to the living room. She flicked on the TV for background noise and sank into the sofa cushions. Spud, having inhaled his dinner in forty-five seconds flat, trotted over and launched himself up beside her. He turned twice before collapsing into a warm, heavy lump against her thigh, one eye still fixed on his mom’s dinner.

She ate slowly, letting the warmth settle through her. The macaroni was exactly right: cheesy, creamy, carb-heavy comfort no artisanal high-end version could replicate. The chicken was crisp and just greasy enough, perfectly seasoned. She hadn’t realized how depleted she was until the first bite hit her stomach, and her whole body seemed to sigh with relief.

Yep, she thought, taking another bite. This was the right answer.

The TV murmured in the background. She had clicked on something without really looking—some train travel video that painted the room in soft blues and greens. She scrolled through her phone with her free hand, sinking into the usual cycle of content that asked nothing of her and gave nothing back except tiny hits of serotonin.

It was exactly what she needed. Something to look at that didn’t sparkle, didn’t talk, and didn’t claim to be a guide to anywhere.

On the TV, the travel video flickered. Just once. A brief stutter in the image. The colors shifted. The frame warped for a split second, as if it had caught interference. Or something else. It happened so quickly that she did not consciously register it. But somewhere in the back of her mind, she noticed. Filed it away.

She kept scrolling.

She didn’t know what made her open the app.

It wasn’t intentional. Her thumb moved on autopilot, as it always did when she doom-scrolled until her attention span ran out. One moment, she was watching a fifteen-second video of someone's cat falling off a counter, and the next, she was staring at the soft, familiar interface of Yarns.

Her thumb found her long-running DM with Lyra, and she opened it.

“Dude, Lyra, you won’t believe the day I had. You around?” she typed.

Lyra answered almost immediately.

“yup. here. jus scrollin'. sup, alleycat.”

Allison smiled despite herself. Lyra had been calling her that since middle school, across state lines, through bad breakups, worse jobs, and stretches of silence when neither of them needed to explain themselves. She had always been a calming influence on Allison, asking for no more than Allison could give. No judgment. No subtext. No emotional labor. Just a relaxed, gentle presence that let her think out loud without consequences.

“So, yeah, Allison typed. It was a really weird day, to say the least. There isn’t much that actually made any sense, and I’m not sure how to explain it, but I must tell you.”

“uh-oh,” Lyra replied. “weird? how? r u ok? tell me all the things”

Allison picked at a piece of chicken with her fork.

“It started off normal. I went for a bike ride to Culp’s Hill this afternoon, right? Nothing unusual about that. I went to park my butt under the big tree I love and write for a while. The neighbors were driving my batty. So, there I was, doing my thing, and...”

Allison sent what she’d written so far and paused, trying to figure out how to explain the whole talking raccoon thing.

“u there allie tell me what happened”

“L. I don’t know how to explain it. It’s completely whackadoodle.”

“try just me; u can tell me anything”

Allison did her best to tell Lyra about her time by the creek and Thimble, including the rippling-atmosphere situation with the Android in another realm. Like a good friend, Lyra didn’t interrupt and waited til her friend was done. But after Allison finished, she said nothing for a good five minutes.

Allison put her phone down to pick at her chicken, leaving the screen on and glancing over every now and then to see if Lyra had written anything. She wiped her hands on a napkin, took a bite of mashed potato, and glanced over to her phone again. This time, the typing dots appeared and lingered considerably longer than Lyra would ever allow.
(...)

Paused.

Disappeared.

Appeared again.

(...)

Allison rolled her eyes as she peeled a strip of crispy skin from the chicken, waiting impatiently for the familiar ding.

“Fine, be that way,” she sighed, bringing a torn-off piece of chicken to her mouth.

Then, mid-chew, she heard the ding she’d been waiting for. She immediately wiped the chicken grease from her hands and picked up her phone 

“Do you believe what you saw?” Lyra asked.

Allison started to type her reply, but paused, wondering whether anyone would ever believe the afternoon’s incident outside some weird fantasy novel. “I don’t know, L. It was all so extraordinary, so fantastical, that it couldn’t possibly be real, right? Why would it matter, anyway?”

The reply came a few minutes later, after she put her phone down and went back to her dinner.

DING

Allison looked over, not even putting her chicken down this time.

“That... is a very good question.”

Allison’s hand froze, a piece of chicken suspended halfway to her mouth.

“And that, right there, is the most unhelpful thing you’ve ever said. Lyra.” Allison yelled frustratingly into her phone, then let the screen go dark.

She picked up her phone again, looked over Lyra’s messages, and nodded. The messages didn’t look like Lyra’s usual writing, which made it seem like she never left high school and only brought out her formal writing skills for business.

“Hmm. That’s so weird.” Allison said, looking over to Spud. “Your auntie Lyra doesn’t ever write like that. I question whether she even knows what a period is. And complete sentences? Forgetaboutit,” Allison said jokingly in an exaggerated New York tough guy accent. “What in the ever-living fork is going on?”

The chat still looked like Lyra’s. Same profile picture. Same thread. The same dumb little inside jokes were buried higher up the screen. But something had shifted within the last couple of replies.

Allison stared at the phone. She scrolled back through the conversation again. Her thumb hovered over the screen. Her pulse ticked faster.

“Hey Lyra, you ok? You don’t sound like yourself. Are you playing a joke? I know the whole raccoon thing was so out there it couldn’t possibly be real, but really? This is no time for jokes,” she typed.

Then, softer: “Wait a sec. Just hold the phone a minute, Spud,” she said to her dog, as if he had any idea what was going on. “You know who this sounds like?”

Sensing her shift in mood, Spud lifted his head from her thigh. His ears pricked forward.

Allison shook her head.

“No. No, that’s impossible.”

She sat up straighter, then stood, gripping the phone, and began pacing the living room. Her voice rose, thin with disbelief and something close to panic.

“How did you... nope. No. How can...” She swallowed. “Thimble, is that you? How did you get inside my DMs with Lyra? You possessing people now? I draw the line at possession. I’m not into this whole creepy poltergeist crap.”

The typing dots appeared.

(...)

Paused.

Disappeared.

Then a new message arrived.

“Lyra’s fine. Nobody’s been hurt at all. I’m in Dreamspace, nowhere near her. I promise. I just took over her chat—that’s all. Don’t worry about how. I’ll give it back soon, but that’s not important. I am here because you asked me to.”

Allison stopped pacing.

She typed too fast, thumbs clumsy against the glass.

“Not important? How is this not important? Did I ask you? When? This afternoon? I don’t remember asking you.”

She pressed her free hand to her forehead, as if pressure might shake something loose. She tried to remember. She closed her eyes and reached back through the day, groping through the fog for anything she might have unlocked without realizing it.

There was nothing. Just an empty space where a memory should have been. If she closed her eyes, she could see it: a void of nothingness, with thoughts swirling around in her brain. Someone or something cut a hole in her mind so deftly.

The emptiness scared her more than the talking raccoon did. She should remember. She could feel the edges of the area — the memories — its outline, like pressing your tongue against the gap where a tooth used to be.

“I can’t,” she whispered. “I’m trying. There’s nothing there.”

The next message appeared gently, almost tenderly.

“I see you forgot already. Perhaps you’ll remember later. Get back to me when you do.”

The app went dark.

Allison stared at the phone in her hand. The screen was black and unresponsive. She tapped it. Nothing. Pressed the side button. Nothing. Then, after a long five seconds, the lock screen flickered back to life, cheerful and ordinary, as if nothing had happened.

She stood up, phone in hand, mind racing as she tried to make sense of it. The room felt too quiet. The air felt too still. Everything looked the same as it had five minutes ago, but nothing felt the same.

Spud, who had been watching from the end of the couch with increasing concern, crept toward her. He whined softly, nudged her hand with his cold nose, and licked her fingers once, twice, until she curled them into his fur and held on as if he were the only anchor keeping her from going under.

The TV murmured on in the quiet living room. The video had changed to something else—soft music, a sunset, the kind of ambient content that she put on for Spud when she left the house. The screen light painted the walls in warm golds and deep blues, shifting slowly, like breathing.

Allison sat on the couch for a long time. She didn’t move. She didn’t scroll. She didn’t eat the rest of her chicken. She just sat, Spud’s warm weight pressed against her side, the phantom echo of Thimble's voice still ringing in her ears.

Because you asked me to.

When had she asked? How? The missing memory gnawed at her. It was a neat-edged, deliberate hole in the fabric of her own history, like something had been carefully removed and the seams pressed flat.

She’d felt this before. Patches in her past—whole stretches of her childhood, certain conversations, specific moments—existed only as outlines. Shapes without color. Rooms she knew she’d been in but couldn’t describe. 

Her therapist had terms for it. Dissociation was a trauma response to CPTSD. Her brain protected itself by hiding things she wasn’t ready to look at again. But this didn’t feel like a trauma response. It felt different. This felt like something taken, not just locked away in the abyss of her brain’s forgotten memories.

She looked across the room at her backpack, still sitting where she’d dropped it by the door. Inside were her notebook and pen, pages of scribbled fragments from the creek, written before her world took a tumble and landed upside down. 

For the first time in a long while, she felt the urge to write something that wasn’t for a client. Not an article. Not a deadline piece. Not someone else’s words shaped by someone else’s brief. Something of her own. Something she couldn’t explain yet, but could feel pressing against the inside of her ribs like a second heartbeat, asking to be let out.

She didn’t reach for the notebook. Not yet. She wasn’t ready. But she recognized the feeling—the longing. She didn’t push it away like she usually did, or make excuses about not having time, or about whether it was worth the effort without a paycheck. She put it away for now, hoping it would stay there until she got back to it.

Outside, the last light of the day faded from the windows. Inside, the TV murmured on, Spud snored, and Allison sat in the quiet of her little house, holding so many questions she couldn’t put into words, but she knew she would need an answer soon.