Open Invitation

A Short Story by Kevin Quigley

Say, why not buy me a coffee -> https://account.venmo.com/u/Kevidently

Dan Garrison stood by the bike stand outside Smash Gym, the massive plate-glass front window spilling luster his way. He’d gotten some good shots during his workout and he needed to post them now, before his twenty-minute ride home, so that he’d be able to respond to all the comments when he got there. Dan didn’t think himself narcissistic, but if you’d made the decision to brand yourself as yourself, you had to keep up with what your followers would want. What did four pictures of him with free weights and sweating inside weight machines have to do with his graphic design business? A lot, honestly. People come for the biceps, and they get interested in what else you have to offer. It was like putting on a window display in a department store.

Arm day, out of harm’s way, he typed, smiling a little. People liked rhymes. Another late-nite workout as the night comes down. How’d your Monday pumps go? People also liked old-timey spellings, like “nite,” and they really liked it when you invited them into the conversation. Every post, every missive was an open invitation for dialogue. He copied the text and threw the message to Instagram – which pushed it to Facebook too – then pasted it all to Bluesky, Mastadon, and, after some consideration, X, which used to be called Twitter. Dan had ideological issues with X, but when you worked 100% freelance in a struggling field and a shaky economy, you branched out where you could. He stood next to his bike for at least twenty minutes sending out posts, and wouldn’t have known someone was watching him if you’d told him. The fog of social media clouds even the most alert minds.

Eventually, he popped his Airpods in, selected his Bike Me Home playlist, and started rolling … although not after tapping his watch to make sure his Outdoor Cycle was being recorded. When he got home, the results of this post-workout workout would post automatically all over his social sphere, supporting his picture post with one filled with colorful rings showing how hard he was pushing himself. If someone saw the lengths he went to with his body, maybe they’d see how hard he’d push himself for a design project. Maybe that was shaky logic but Dan used every possible tool in his arsenal.

He cycled away from Smash, down Durham Street, avoiding the heavy traffic before he could get to the bike lanes in the more residential area of town. Trying to tighten his body so he could squeeze between the row of cars and the curb, Dan finally turned onto Quincey Street, where the traffic thinned and you weren’t in a constant state of panic. It was good to have a healthy fear of hurt and death; Dan’s dad had died young and Dan didn’t want to join him. Quincey was the long stretch, and the streetlights didn’t offer that much in the way of illumination. He flicked on his bike’s headlamp, and only then did he notice the other bike next to him.

Reacting in surprise, he nearly twisted his handlebars hard to the right; if that had happened, wouldn’t it be a pretty post from a hospital bed the next day? And hey, what if he crushed his drawing hand? That would kill whatever juice was left in the whole freelance thing. Then he’d have to start looking for a real job somewhere, and that wasn’t…

He glanced toward the bike that had seemingly come out of nowhere. It was very like his, a ten-speed Minford mountain bike that, oddly, made it perfect for city cycling. Even the color looked similar. Trying to keep his attention on the road ahead, his eyes flicked up to the rider’s face, and that was when cold ice swamped through Dan’s body like a wave.

The driver of the other bike was him. Not who he was now, but aged. Old. A him that could exist in thirty, forty, fifty years from now, when he was fifty-three or beyond. Rationally, he might have told himself that you had no way of knowing what you’d look like that far ahead in the future, but rationality didn’t always play into it when it came to intuition. He knew what he knew, and he knew he was staring into his own face from the future.

The man on the other bike widened his eyes as if in shock, his mouth hanging open. He said something, some short something, but the sounds of Olivia Rodrigo in Dan’s ears effectively silenced him.

In the wake of the flood of cold inside, Dan did the only thing he could think of to do. He turned his full attention ahead, and pedaled as fast and hard as he could. Only when he was safely in front of his apartment building, sweating and breathing hard did he dare a look around. No one was there. No one at all.

Sleep had been fitful, and he woke early to start tinkering with the one of the few projects he was working on: a logo for a new hot sauce start-up. For a long time, these startups had been banging on his proverbial door, desperate to own a piece of what Dan Garrison was selling. Now the work came slowly, because AI could generate images that were, to quote one former client, “good enough to work with.” Dan had spent years in art and design school, paid for classes, kept up on trends, spent a bundle on design software and hardware, only to be bested by an online robot plagiarist that was good enough to work with. Wasn’t the future supposed to automate the menial jobs so that the artists could create, not the other way around?

The future. The damn future. The face Dan had seen above that other bike’s handlebars haunted him. Gradually in the night, he realized that his recognition hadn’t just been a case of solipsistic surety. He’d actually seen that face before. He sat up in bed, grabbed his phone, and flicked through his Instagram. A few months before, some generative software had come out that took your photo and spat back a quad of what-ifs: what if you were old, what if you were a little kid, what if you were another gender, what if you were really buff. Dan had liked the really buff one; he enjoyed going to the gym, but he mostly did it because the nature of his work kept him on his ass at the drafting table all day. You needed to find excuses to move. The social media had helped with that, kept him accountable. If he didn’t work out a few days in a row, his followers would notice and call him out.

Speaking of his followers: most folks had glommed onto the picture of him as a girl, and him as an old man. One woman from Albuquerque had told him that he made a hideous woman but a not-bad old guy. A man from Orlando had written only two words under the old man picture: “Still would.” Good to know that he still had it in the future.

But that picture wasn’t just a picture of what-if anymore. It was a picture of what was. The man in that post, the future him, was the man he had seen on the bike next to his. Well, okay, not entirely, because while AI could do a lot, it couldn’t do everything. You still saw assets of yourself lurking in the corner of the generated pictures, little ghost images of the original photo. The girl picture and the little-kid picture still showed a bit of his mustache. The buff photo couldn’t entirely bulk out his chest correctly and he looked a little lopsided. And the old-man picture couldn’t get the look entirely right. Dan’s dark hair drifted through the balding, liver-spotted pate like a bad exposure from an analog camera. The man he had seen last night had looked like this old-guy image, but real.

Putting his logo aside for the moment, he scrolled back and found that old-guy picture, cropped it, and put it up on all his socials with the caption, I think I saw this guy last night. My doppelgänger from the future? So weird. PS now I know how to make an umlaut on my phone.

Responses flooded in at once: Bizarre! And Did you talk to him? And Time travel is real! And Still would. Unlike with graphic design, when you had to generate what you thought the client wanted and go back and forth, sometimes for weeks, on tetchy little details before you started getting to the right place, these comments came quickly and easily and usually buoyed him up for a little while. It was cheap serotonin, but it worked. If he wanted to, he could spend all morning responding and keeping the conversation alive, but that soured after a while. Soon enough, his followers would want new content, and he would want to provide it for them. Occasionally, that new content generated tips – every one of his socials offered links allowing people to toss money his way, if they were so inclined. Once, a woman in Alaska sent him $1000 on Venmo just for showing off the new outfit he’d bought from Old Navy. It wasn’t even a sexy post; he’d just liked the new Hawaiian shirts and wanted to tell the world. You couldn’t count on it, but that occasional supplemental income had paid the bills more than once when his design stuff was struggling. The future was rife with possibility. The damn future.

Now he put his phone down and rubbed his eyes. This logo was going to kill him if he worked on it any longer here. A change of scenery, that’s what he needed. Being around real people instead of just the ones in his phone was just what his creativity needed. Shower. Backpack. Bike. And soon enough, he was at the Starbucks on Euclid, huge Beats headphones on his ears, sketchbook and computer and Pumpkin Spice Latte before him like a trio of ambition soldiers. He randomized a playlist and Tom Petty’s “Free Fallin’” came on, a good one to start with.

He fell into his work, and soon everything else faded away.

This is how the days went: you threw yourself into work as hard as you could until your watch buzzed and told you it was time to stand up and move around for a while. Maybe you could get right back into art right after that, but it was diminishing returns. Soon, your watch was complaining that you weren’t getting real exercise and it basically forced you to go find a treadmill or an elliptical. Then lunch somewhere, then back to design until it was time to do your evening strength training session. It didn’t matter if you hated evening strength training, with all the free weights and machines; you did it because if you wanted to really push yourself into the night hours, you needed a whole-body boost, and energy drinks didn’t compensate. Sometimes the gym had the opposite effect and you cycled home, way too tired to think. When it worked right, you found yourself right back where you started from: that same Starbucks, that same seat, that same PSL that would piggyback on your workout to slingshot your alertness into overdrive.

And through it all, you told the world what you were doing. You could live a mundane life, but the one you showed online could seem thrilling, even if the patterns never really changed. You set your phone’s camera up at different angles with a timer so that it looked like some paparazzo was snapping your picture while you were busily working on a book cover design. You changed up your workouts enough that they didn’t look the same every day. Cooking was an event. Reading a book was participatory. And it never failed to amaze Dan that so many comments said, “I wish I had your energy,” or “I wish my life was as interesting as yours.” It was all in how you framed it, how you presented it. Sometimes, when his phone was face down on his nightstand and that last workout and that last latte were doing their work too well, Dan Garrison stared up at the ceiling and wondered what it might be like to have an actually interesting life. Was this what his future was going to be? Was this really supposed to be his destiny?

The answer – or at least an answer – came through the door of Starbucks that night as he prepared to once again lose himself in his art. Even though the nearly-finished logo sat before him, ready to enthrall him with shape and color and placement, Dan felt his eye drag up past his laptop screen the second the jingle sounded. It was him. Somehow he knew it would be him.

The man who looked like his future self ambled over to Dan’s table and sat across from him. Dan noticed a hitch in the guy’s step, and the way his face twisted a little as he walked. Irrationally, Dan thought: My leg’s been aching a little bit when I get up. Damn Starbucks chairs. Is that where it leads to? Stupid thing to think. Right? I mean, right?

The man settled into the seat across from him with a grunt. “Hi, Dan,” he said, and oh my God, the guy even sounded like him. What the hell was going on. What the hell was this?

His mouth numb, his tongue dry, Dan said, “How do you know my name?”

The man reached out a bony hand and slowly closed Dan’s laptop. Into momentary oblivion went Solomon Spicy’s Ghost Pepper Sauce. Dan barely noticed. His eyes were on this man’s eyes: denim blue, just like the ones that looked back at him in the mirror every morning, and out of every selfie he took throughout the day. “You know how I know your name,” the man said, and offered a weary smile. “It’s my name, too.”

Absurdly, Dan felt an urge to shout out a verse of “John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt,” but managed to keep it in. “It’s a trick. You’re a trick.”

The old man laid his palms on the table. “Born June 20^th, 2001. Favorite color cobalt blue. Favorite movie Kill Bill. Last girlfriend’s name was Braylin. Before that it was Jess, and that was a messy breakup. Did you know Jess and Braylin started seeing each other?”

Electricity sizzled Dan’s brain, along with a crawling, spidery sense of shame. “I did know that.”

“Of course you did. That’s why I know that. My – your – best friend in middle school was named Carl, and he stole the Smash Mouth CD Dad gave you, and even though you couldn’t prove it you stopped being his friend.”

Dan leaned forward. “Wait, did he steal it?”

“I’m not omnipotent, Dan. I only know what you know.” The man paused. “I think he did, though. And Carl didn’t even like Smash Mouth.”

“He didn’t. He—” Dan stopped, surveying this old man, who was now rubbing the surface of the table they sat at. The touch was somehow loving, as if the feel of this exact wood was a long-ago memory. For a moment, Dan watched his hands, mesmerized. Then he met his eyes again – so blue – and said, “You could find all that out about me online. You could be catfishing me right now.”

The man grinned. “Yes, we’re not exactly a closed book,” he said. “That changes later on. That’s one of the good things that come with age. Not as many pointless arguments online. Not as many hours wasted trying to be everything to everyone.”

“This isn’t convincing,” Dan said, although it was wildly convincing. “Tell me something about me that I would never post on social. Something personal. I don’t mean to be rude, but this is insane. I need proof.”

The man took a breath. “I don’t have much in the way of proof. I didn’t have the foresight to bring anything tangible back.” He hesitated. “That scar on your arm.”

The man rolled up his sleeve and there was the same scar, now more twisted and puckered with age. At some point down the line, he’d tried to tattoo over it, to cover it up. Vague blue lines scattered all around it in a pattern he didn’t recognize. Without speaking, Dan rolled up his own sleeve. There was the same scar, this time only seven years old. The wound still looked fresh because it was still fresh.

“We tried to stop him when we saw that shard of the bedroom window in his hand. Blood everywhere. You remember. They never replaced the carpet before you had to move out to live with Aunt Linda. Now she’s dead, too. I don’t think Dad was in his right mind when he struck out at us, Dan. I don’t even think he knew who we were.”

Dan simply gaped at this man for a long while, his mouth open. Tears bubbled up from the wells under his staring eyes, and overspilled. That scene had never left his mind, not entirely. Dad standing in the bedroom, his bedroom, screaming he was sorry, screaming that he was lost and alone and that no one loved him. He’d never gotten over Mom’s death and he had deteriorated fast. One of the few times he’d sought help for what he was feeling, the doctor had prescribed either Zoloft or Prozac, which Dad had tried taking for a while then stopped. “I need to feel my pain,” he’d said at dinner one night, not long before the day of the glass. “It’s the only thing that defines me anymore.”

He’d reached out to wrestle the shard away from his father, and that’s when Dad had jabbed forward, slicing a huge gash in Dan’s forearm, deep and ragged. Blood had gushed from the wound in a crimson torrent, painting his right hand red and making his brain feel muzzy, disconnected. If his phone hadn’t been on his bedside table, both of them would have died right there, a murder-suicide. He dialed 9-1-1 before consciousness danced away from him like a will-o-the-wisp in a foggy swamp. When he came to days later, his father was dead, and he was just barely clinging on to life. Aunt Linda, a distracted woman who had been much older than her brother, had sat by his side most afternoons as he struggled to get back to the world of the living.

For a long while, he hadn’t seen the point of it. Both parents dead. No real friends. Aunt Linda off in her own world most of the time. That’s when he’d discovered drawing. That he was good at it. That he was, in fact, pretty great at it. It was also when he discovered that if you posted it online, people might compliment it. You’d get a fair number of dicks who thought your work was shit, but the praise won out. Something like that got to be addictive. Then it got to be routine. You get better. You keep posting your work. Eventually you start posting yourself, too. And then that got to be routine. You never really stop to wonder if living your life online is as lonely and lost as it was inside Dad’s head. To analyze that too deeply would be to risk going down Dad’s route.

He’d never talked about any of that online, though. The details of his father’s suicide? The way he’d felt after? Some things you kept to yourself.

And this guy at the other side of the table knew all of it. The man unspooled his own story out before him, leaving out no detail. “I’ve never seen so much blood. I never really realized I had so much blood. I—”

“Stop it,” Dan told him, and the man looked up. The faraway Let’s Remember look scurried from his face.

“I’m sorry,” the man said. “If you don’t have proof, you need a little faith. I thought that would give you some.”

“Why are you here?” Dan asked abruptly.

The man glanced around furtively. “Because, Dan,” he whispered. “Dad doesn’t have to die. Not like that.”

Dan’s mouth suddenly went dry. His tongue and inner cheeks felt raw. His throat closed up like it sometimes did when he was cycling hard and it was a little difficult to catch his breath. “What?” he managed. I was all he had in him.

“Look, I can’t tell you how the mechanics of the machine work. Quantum this or atomic that. All I know is that it’s powered somehow on a person’s life energy, and mine was only strong enough to get me here. But if there’s two of us, two Dan Garrisons, I think it would be strong enough to get us there. To stop him before that day. To get him real help.”

For a long while, Dan stared at him over the rim of his laptop. Abruptly, he slammed it shut and stuffed it into his backpack. “No. Fuck you. I don’t know who you are or why you’re here, but fuck you.”

The man sat calmly, as if expecting this. “I’m not here long, Dan. If we don’t do this soon, I need to go back. Maybe it’s okay to leave the past in the past. I just … I don’t want to talk about your future too much, but I think our lives – our life – would be better if we repaired it. It’s up to you now.” He reached into an inner pocket and pulled out a scrap of paper. It had a phone number on it. For an absurd moment, Dan felt as if he was being propositioned. Isn’t this how people used to date when they met out at bars and stuff? When he refused to take the piece of paper, the old man sighed and hefted himself up out of his seat, leaving the paper on the table. “If I were you, and I am, I’d start looking for a new coffee shop to design in. This one’s shifting to a pickup-only store in about six months.”

Numbly, Dan watched him go. He shouldered his backpack and wandered over to the bored barista standing alone at the cash register. “Pumpkin spice latte?” he asked as Dan approached. Nothing like having a routine to feel routine. “No, I just had a question. This store isn’t going away, is it?”

The guy, who had a faraway look and longish hair and hand tattoos, furrowed his brow. “I don’t think so. Hey! Juliet!”

A woman came out of the back looking equally bored. “What is it, Mac?”

“We closing any time soon?”

“Like, for the night? We close at ten, sir.” She cut a sharp look toward Dan, who was probably the dumbest man in the universe.

“No, like for good.”

“Oh.” Juliet’s expression changed. “Well, not closing, really. But we’re not going to be an in-store Starbucks anymore. They’re changing us to pickup only in the spring.”

“Oh.”

Mac looked around. “I didn’t know that. No one told me that.”

“We told you that in the last store meeting. You were high.”

“Oh.”

“Stop being high during store hours, Mac.”

“Oh.”

Dan interrupted this awkward little tete-a-tete with a distracted thank you and escaped into the cool air outside. He glanced around for the man who had proclaimed them one and the same, but he – he? – was nowhere to be seen. Making his way to his bike, he was about to unbuckle his helmet from his lock, when he realized that he had picked up the scrap of paper from the table and still held it in his hand. Throw it away, his mind commanded. The guy is lying. He has to be lying. Time travel isn’t real, and he isn’t you. It’s some sort of scam.

But the guy had known stuff. Known more than Dan had ever revealed online. And knew about the Starbucks thing. How did you explain all that? Was there another explanation?

Dan stuffed the scrap into his pocket and cycled back toward home. The idea of going to the gym right now seemed like too much effort. It was strange how memory could feel like a physical weight on you, how trauma could act like a tether holding you tight, and how the grip got tighter the more you tried to escape it. Those months after his father’s suicide had been the worst in his life. Aunt Linda had done what she could for him, had listened to him recounting that day with a sympathetic ear over and over. Only later did he realize how much he must have hurt her by talking about it so much; Dad was her brother, after all. And in the end, though, she couldn’t help him out of that pit of despair. Dan had had to crawl out himself. Design. Working out. Routine. And, eventually, social media. It had all saved him.

What if he could go back and change all that? What if the past really wasn’t solid, really wasn’t set? What if his father’s bad death was a malleable event? If he didn’t change that, was it the same as killing Dad again?

The guy’s making it up, Dan, his mind cautioned, but it was a harder voice to listen to now, outside the bright and shiny lights of Starbucks. Out here in the dark, anything seemed possible.

When three in the morning came and he still wasn’t asleep, Dan reached over and snatched up his phone. In the glow from the screen, he tapped the guy’s number in and texted, “Are you for real, man?”

The pulsing three dots appeared, indicating typing. Dan waited, his stomach frothing and burbling. His eyes felt panfried from too much screen time yesterday and not enough sleep. A powerful instinct told him to just block this guy and move on. That same part – a selfish, self-centered part, maybe – reasoned that Dad had been dead for years now, and that moving on had been so hard the first time, so damn hard. He didn’t know if he could face the man again, even if this time travel stuff was even true. Dan hated himself for thoughts like that. Maybe they beat the guilt he’d suffered through, but that was cold comfort. Talk about stuff you could never post online.

A text popped up. “You went to prom with a girl named Molly Duplass. The DJ played a slow dance song even though nobody slow dances anymore. Molly wanted to. She tried to kiss you, too, but you weren’t ready. You were still dealing with Dad stuff and you didn’t want to try caring about anyone else. When she asked you if you were gay, you said you were. It was just easier. And then she relaxed and you relaxed and you told her not to tell anyone and you spent the rest of prom dancing fast and having a good time.”

Dan gaped at the text. He and Molly followed each other on Instagram now. She must have known at some point that he’d lied, or at least been wrong. He’d only ever dated women since high school, even though, he had to admit, getting close remained super difficult. Maybe, he thought vaguely, he should seek out some therapy.

Tentatively, Dan typed, “Are we married? In the future?”

More dots. Then: “No, Dan. We are not. I think that’s part of why I want to do this so badly. But time is, maybe ironically, running out. I either have to do this with you soon or head back. I don’t totally understand it, but the chronoton particles have a way of fizzing out. Will you help me?”

Dan stomach churned. He said, “Let me see the machine.”

Silence for a moment. Two moments. Three. It really was a catfish. You can talk about going on faith as much as you want, but when real proof is required…

Just then, a picture popped up, filling his screen. What looked like an old-fashioned couch was seemingly wired to a huge black box to the side; it shone in some dim light, future mechanics Dan would never understand. Wires spilled everywhere.In the foreground, what looked like a modified PlayStation controller had been connected to an old-school calculator, one with a million buttons. That was where you put the coordinates in, probably, Dan thought, not wanting to believe what he was seeing but feeling somehow powerless not to. It was conceivable that this man, this Old Dan, could know some of these things from online, but could he know all of them? He knew he’d talked about Carl and the Smash Mouth CD, but Molly and the prom? Had he discussed that at all? And how about the day Dad died? He was 100% positive he’d never shared that stuff in any sort of digital realm. The only person he’d ever talked to about it was Aunt Linda, and she’d been dead for a few years herself.

A lot of death. Too much death. Was it possible – just barely possible – that Old Dan was telling the truth?

“What can I do?” Dan asked.

Before he cycled out to the place Old Dan had told him, he made sure to take a selfie and push it out to the world. “Off to meet a guy in the middle of the night about something,” he typed, manufacturing a nervous grin he didn’t have to manufacture, and flashing a thumbs-up in hopefully an ironic way. He didn’t want to flash the address the man had given him on main, but he snuck it into one of the comments under a post, just in case things went sideways. With that, he put on his helmet and cycled through the pre-dawn streets. It was a familiar feeling. Sometimes he did this when he was sleeping badly, which was at least once a week. The streets were gloriously empty. No traffic to contend with. All the streetlights blinked yellow. No stopping. Sometimes you could pedal so fast and so hard that some of the memories faded. Not all. Never all.

Now, absurdly, Dan felt a thin kindle of hope light up within him. He turned down this street and down that street, not listening to music this time. It seemed strange to give this particular night journey a soundtrack.

The house stood on the corner of Shaw Drive and Indigo Street. An old two-story Victorian, one that had probably been cut up into a few units back when his parents were kids and then, at some point, completely abandoned. It wasn’t exactly dilapidated, but it could use a new coat of paint and maybe seven carpenters and a home makeover show. A light shone in the window of the first floor and Dan saw a shadow moving around inside. Was he really doing this? He hadn’t had any time to really think. Was he actually considering going back in time? When you thought about it like that, the idea honestly seemed ludicrous. He—

The front door opened. Old Dan stood before him, and in the presence of this guy, doubt swindled to a mere whisper. He really, really did look just like Dan, only aged up a few decades. If this guy held the secret to saving his father – and, let’s be honest, fixing some of the broken parts of himself – then shouldn’t Dan at least give him a chance?

“Dan. I’m so glad you’re here. I’ll explain everything. Come in.”

Fighting the urge to take another selfie, this one with Old Dan, he swept past the man and into the house.

The room he stood in was completely empty. Seven or eight candles poked out from ornate brass candelabras on the floor, burning meager light across the dusty wooden floor. From somewhere under the floorboards came the shrieking, squeaking of rats. Panic seized Dan and he took a stumbling, terrified step back toward the door. Old Dan was behind him, and he grabbed Dan by the wrist, swinging him around to look into his eyes. They were no longer the eyes of an old man who looked an awful lot like Dad Garrison. They were dark eyes, set into a young, pale face. Hair so brown it was almost black spilled abundantly from the top of his head.

“You make it so easy,” the man said, and when he spoke, Dan couldn’t help but see the fangs. “You gave me a roadmap to what you would look like when you were sixty. You put it all online. You put everything online. We used to have to wait to be invited in, but now you just let us in. It’s almost criminal how simple this is now.”

Dan tried once again to escape, but the man – not a man, not at all – gripped his other wrist and gathered them into one vicelike hand. With the other, he reached into Dan’s pocket and brought out the phone, facing it toward Dan to unlock it. While he held him in place, he tapped a few buttons, then dropped the phone to the floor. “There. No one knows where you went tonight. No one knows that you were missing your Daddy so much that you bought into the stupidest story I could think to come up with. I’m actually stunned that it worked.”

“Dad—” was all Dan could squeak out.

“‘Tell me something I didn’t put online.’ You have no idea how often I’ve heard that. Maybe you didn’t talk about your father’s suicide, but your Aunt Linda was a real chatterbox. Did you know she had something called a LiveJournal? Full scale blog and she would write pages and pages every day. She would not shut up about how guilty you felt about the whole thing. She went into some gruesome detail. I wish I’d been there. It’s all just there, waiting to be found. All public. All out in the open.

“Not this though. Eventually, I get you all into a quiet place. Alone. Somewhere secluded. Somewhere analog. This is where it really happens. Thanks for letting me in, Dan.”

The vampire battened on him, the fangs sinking cruelly, screamingly into his jugular. Right before he lost consciousness, Dan’s eyes flicked to his phone lying lifeless on the floor. Some dim, jumbled part of his brain wished he could take a picture of this. It would make one hell of a post.