Phantasmagoria

Phantasmagoria

I didn’t intend to exit the expressway. The steering wheel turned itself, or maybe my hands moved without thinking—it's hard to tell anymore. I’d been driving for hours. Or maybe days. Either way, the car stopped in front of a gate where a single word was etched into brass:

Phantasmagoria.

Beyond the gate: a town that wasn’t on any map. It was quiet, bordered by pale trees that looked as if they'd been sketched in haste. I walked. A single crow followed me overhead, flapping once every ten steps, like punctuation.

The town was populated but still. People moved like marionettes cut loose, walking nowhere with great intention. Every shop was open, but no one made a sound. I stepped into a building marked “Library of Forgotten Things.” A girl at the front desk wore mirrored glasses that reflected back not me, but a version of myself with longer hair and a cigarette I don’t smoke.

“Name?” she asked.

“Marlow.”

She nodded, typed something into a keyboard that wasn’t connected to anything, then handed me a single card. It read:

Show at twilight.
Seat: Memory.
Row: Self.

I wandered until the sun began to hemorrhage over the hills. The theater was carved into the ground like a wound, lined in velvet, and smelled faintly of sandalwood and burnt toast.

The show began with no warning. Scenes unfolded—dreamlike, bleeding into each other. A subway ride with a girl I never met but always knew. My childhood cat speaking perfect French. A house filled with water. A typewriter clicking out letters I hadn’t written yet.

Midway through, a man who looked like my father but younger turned and said, “You are not where you are. You are where you were.”

I didn’t ask what he meant. I just nodded.

Outside, it was snowing. It hadn’t been, before.

The girl with the mirrored glasses met me at the edge of the theater. Her lenses now showed nothing.

“This town only appears when the divide grows too thin,” she said. “You should return now.”

“How?”

“You already are.”

And just like that, I was driving again, rain hitting the windshield in soft rhythmic taps. The radio played a song I’d never heard but remembered somehow. The world looked the same, but off. The crow was gone. The gate was gone.

Only the word remained, echoing somewhere in the folds of my brain:

Phantasmagoria.