In the Blink of an Eye

A serial novella available exclusively in Forever Nocturne E-zine!

by Sharon Gerlach

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You knew you were really wasted when you couldn’t figure out how to open a door.

Ren Leonard watched the odd dude through the window of the first floor break room, the strangeness of the man’s behavior not enough to ruin his enjoyment of this fine example of what happens when you drink too much on a chilly October night and go wandering about the city.

Probably just a homeless guy, one of the many who hung about down at the river, which the campus unfortunately bordered. His disheveled hair gave refuge to a collection of debris – oak, maple, and locust leaves; dry grass; acorn shell fragments – and the tail of his shirt was ripped. The backpack that hung off one shoulder did so because a strap had broken.

No, Ren saw as he moved closer to the window and peered out. Not broken. It looked chewed.

He backed away from the window, suddenly uneasy and glad he was in a locked building. Kitchen duty was his this week, and he had a lot of it to do this Monday night. His coworkers were slobs. He turned away from the window and loaded the dishwasher, then wiped down the four round tables, scrubbed the counters, and rooted out the decaying vegetables in one of the refrigerators that was making the whole room – and truth be told, the hallway outside – stink to high heaven.

Once he applied himself to a task, no matter how noxious the chore or how reluctant he was to begin, he applied himself to it wholeheartedly and lost track of all else. The homeless trespasser faded from his mind completely as darkness crept over the campus and the break room was slowly restored to order.

The sudden shattering of glass stopped his heart for a terrible second. He stood frozen, holding a soapy sponge against the side of the stainless steel sink, his heart lodged somewhere in his throat. Then the paralysis passed, and he dropped the sponge and lunged toward the window.

Sure enough, the homeless dude had shattered the glass door with a rock he’d scrounged from somewhere on the grounds and was crawling through the empty steel frame. Something about him looked wrong, but Ren chalked it up to a trick of the light. Darkness had fallen in earnest, and the orange security lights outside the building bathed everything in a strange glow.

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