The first message arrived while I was brushing my teeth. I know this only because afterward I found myself staring into the sink with the tap running and a taste in my mouth like pennies soaked in plum juice.
Nothing appeared on my phone. The screen hadn’t lit up. I simply possessed the unmistakable sensation that something had contacted me and was waiting for a response, the mental equivalent of a notification hovering just beyond sight.
For the first week, the messages were advertisements. They appeared as cravings with unusually precise edges: a particular mattress, shoes displayed in a shop I had passed months earlier, tea packaged in a yellow tin. Sometimes a slogan surfaced in my thoughts complete with a melody.
I bought what was suggested and felt pleased afterward, as though I had completed errands assigned by someone who understood my needs better than I did.
The purchases became stranger. A roll of copper wire. Three kilograms of hot foot powder. A doorstop heavy enough to bruise the bare wood floor. None of it seemed unreasonable while I was buying them.
Then the messages became questions.
Was I sleeping well?
Did I lock the door?
How many windows were in the apartment before I moved in?
Had I ever counted the stairs between floors in both directions?
I tried the last one and found seventeen steps going down, eighteen coming back. I repeated the experiment until midnight. The extra step never appeared beneath my foot, yet my body continued climbing it, rising briefly through a distance the staircase did not contain.
After that, the messages grew intimate. They asked which memories I would miss least. They asked whether I considered a thought private simply because nobody else admitted hearing it.
One morning I woke with six hours missing and discovered the copper wire threaded neatly around every window frame. The hot foot powder formed an unbroken line beneath the door. The heavy doorstop had been placed outside.
Last night I finally answered. I formed three words silently and directed them toward whatever part of my mind had become an inbox.
A response arrived before I finished thinking them, spoken internally in my own voice with the patient amusement of someone correcting a misunderstanding.
The conversation, it explained, had been going on for months; I had merely become conscious of receiving my half.
Since then, other messages have begun surfacing beneath ordinary thoughts, faint at first and multiplying rapidly.
Some are clearly mine. Others contain memories of rooms I have never entered and instructions addressed to people I have never been.
The unsettling part is how many of those strangers seem to be answering, and how often their replies arrive carrying my voice.
©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys
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