White Space Season 2

between Sarah and the fresh door that had appeared from nowhere, sat a small pile of gelatinous creatures: three total, with nine eyes between them, four closed. The three globs were stuck together, just enough to make it clear the goopy blob was truly a trio. Though there were three, it was difficult — and probably impossible — to tell where one stopped and the other started. The oozing pustule at the top, constantly swelling until it reached the size of an infant, had its mouth open wide in what seemed like a yawn. A scream seemed certain to Sarah, but the creature was mute. The two blobs just below began blinking, opening their mouths wider and stretching their gelatinous mass into a writhing taffy of agony.
    Her heart pounded, edging eruption as she forced herself into a half frantic, almost calm. As Sarah self-soothed, the blobs shifted faster. It might have been a minute, it could have been an hour, and three blobs were gone, along with their extra eyes and taffy mouths. In their place chirped a trio of birds — loud and beautiful. Pure white, with stripes of bright green, all three birds stared up to the ceiling — now a perfect blue; cerulean but for the puffy clouds swirling like teased cotton.
    The birds, each the size of a handbag, exploded into tufts of feathered anger as a giant beak — about the size of a bus — crashed down from the ceiling to greet the baby birds.
    Sarah screamed.
    Like the space around her, the birds disappeared.
    Sarah closed her eyes and kept breathing.
    It’s not real, it’s not real, it’s not real …
    Though she had no idea how many times something like this had already happened, Sarah somehow knew, or perhaps remembered, that each time it happened, someone always came in to ask her questions at the end.
    They want to know what I see. But why?
    Sarah saw clean, white walls and a long and maybe endless hallway, lined as far as her vision with row upon row of neatly hung pictures. The first showed Sarah, or perhaps Cassidy, wearing a blush-colored prom dress that neither had ever worn. The girl in the picture, 25 or so, with Sarah’s freckled shoulder and Cassidy’s scarred bracelets, had her arm linked through Jon’s.
    The second picture showed Emma sitting at Vivian’s kitchen table, reaching for a ripe banana from a bowl of rotting fruit. Fruit flies colonized the bowl, gathering in armies above the festering. Mold, fuzzed with something black and horrible, sprouted out from a kiwi, swelling from the bowl’s center to swallow the rest of the fruit.
    Like all the pictures, from the first two then all the way down the long aisle, the frame’s glass wore a thin sweater of dust. Sarah ran her digit across the glass, then stared at her stained fingertip, sticky with fresh blood.
    Sarah screamed, then stepped back and screamed again. Pictures fell to the floor, starting beside her then dropping one-by-one down the hallway, crashing and shattering along the liquid floor, taking pieces and turning them to space and stars as they went.
    Soon, Sarah was floating as she screamed, unable to stop. She grew louder and louder until the door exploded open and a tall doctor in a white coat rushed inside. Sarah had seen him before, many times it seemed, though who knew how far an echo traveled.
    The tall man was suddenly standing beside her, calm, setting a gentle hand on her shoulder. His free hand held a glass of water, half full.
    “Thank you,” Sarah said, taking the glass and gulping.
    “Wait,” the doctor said, his smile warm as he handed her a tiny paper cup with three pills inside it.
    Where did the pills come from?
    “Take these,” he said. “To kill the terrors.”
    Killing terrors sounded nice, exactly what Sarah needed. And the doctor was right, the pills seemed to murder her terrors in seconds.
    Sarah sank into her chair and stared up at the ceiling, smiling at the burning orange from an overdue sunset.
    She held her smile through a battery of questions, though she lost each as it went by. Sarah would answer, but then forget the question once the next one was asked.
    The man was asking her about the blobs, and seemed surprised when she reported that they had turned into giant baby birds.
    The man asked something else and made Sarah forget what she was thinking.
    She was so, so tired.
    The man in the white coat said it was important for her to rest, then he smiled and left.
    Walls and door disappeared.
    The world turned to black space and white stars.
    She