It had been a good day. Marcus walked home in the afternoon sun, jacket over his shoulder, feeling lighter than usual. Things went well.
As he entered his apartment, and the golden light of late afternoon spilled through the windows, he felt a rare sense of peace.
The kind that made the usual background noise of anxiety fade into silence. He made himself a cup of tea, sat on his bed, and opened a book he’d been meaning to read for weeks.
His phone buzzed. Then again. Then twice more in quick succession.
Marcus picked it up, thumb already moving to swipe open the messages. Three texts. He read them once, then again, watching the words rearrange themselves into something sharper each time they passed through his mind. The messages weren’t cruel really. Just… different.
The golden light didn’t change, but somehow the room felt darker.
He knew this feeling. It had a familiar weight, like a coat he’d forgotten he was wearing until it became too heavy to ignore. The monsters—his therapist called them intrusive thoughts, but Marcus had long ago stopped using clinical terms for things that felt so viscerally real—crept in around the edges of his mind, whispering their poisonous suggestions.
Sleep, he thought. Sleep will help. Tomorrow will be better.
The dream began in a hallway he’d never seen before but somehow recognized. Gray walls, fluorescent lights. Somewhere distant, a phone was ringing.
Marcus walked toward the sound. The hallway stretched, each step he took adding another dozen feet between him and the sound. The ringing grew more insistent, more accusatory. He began to run, his footsteps making no sound whatsoever, and still the phone retreated from him.
When he finally reached it—an old rotary phone sitting on a metal desk—his hand passed through the receiver like smoke. He tried again. And again. Each attempt more desperate, more frantic. The phone rang on, indifferent to his existence.
“Can someone—” he started, turning to find the hallway now filled with people.
But they walked past him. Through him, sometimes. Their conversations continued uninterrupted, eyes sliding past where he stood as if he were negative space, a void their minds automatically edited out. He reached for a woman’s shoulder—someone he thought he recognized from high school—but his hand found nothing. She laughed at something her companion said, and the sound felt like violence.
“I’m right here,” Marcus said. Then shouted. Then screamed.
The hallway didn’t echo. The people didn’t pause. The phone kept ringing.
The scene shifted with dream-logic. He was at a dinner table now, the kind from his childhood home.
They sat around him: his father. His first girlfriend, who’d left without explanation. His best friend from high school, who’d slowly stopped returning calls until the friendship dissolved into mutual pretense.
“We’ve been talking,” his father said, folding his hands on the table with that particular gesture Marcus had forgotten until this moment. “And we thought you should know.”
“Know what?” Marcus asked, though part of him already understood.
“How little you mattered.” His ex-girlfriend said it kindly, as if she were commenting on the weather. “I mean, we all tried to make you feel like you did, but…”
“But it was exhausting,” his old friend finished. “God, it was exhausting.”
His father stood, Marcus realized with dream-clarity. “We kept waiting for you to become someone worth remembering. But people get tired of waiting, son.”
They began to leave, filing out one by one. Marcus tried to stand but found himself rooted to the chair. “Wait,” he said. “Please, I can—”
But they were already gone, he was all alone.
The dream shifted again. And again.
In one, he stood before a mirror that showed everyone but him—the room reflected perfectly, but where he should be, there was simply wall.
In another, he was reading his own obituary, but the text was just a blank space with his dates of birth and death, and the word: second.
The worst one was simplest: He stood at a bus stop while bus after bus passed by. Each driver looked directly at him, then accelerated. The other people waiting boarded effortlessly. But the buses wouldn’t stop for him. He stood there for what felt like years, watching everyone else get where they needed to go.
Marcus woke to darkness.
Not the darkness of closed eyes or deep night, but the specific darkness of a room he knew by heart made unfamiliar by consciousness. His phone was ringing.
He didn’t reach for it.
He stared at the ceiling he couldn’t see, feeling the weight of his body against the bed, the stale taste in his mouth, the ache in his neck from sleeping at an awkward angle. The phone rang on. Four times. Five. Then stopped.
The silence felt louder than the ringing.
Through his window, he could see the city lights, each one marking a place where someone was awake, alive, connected. The distance between him and those lights felt astronomical.
Marcus understood then, with a clarity that felt almost physical: The dreams were just rehearsals. This was the show.
His phone buzzed once—a voicemail—then went silent.
The darkness pressed against his open eyes.
The phone did not ring again that night.