Eyes Shut

The first thing anyone on Elm Street knew about Agatha Holloway was that she was nosey. The second thing was that she was proud of it. She considered it her civic duty, a neighborhood watch of one, perpetually stationed behind her lace curtains with a glass of sweet tea sweating in her hand.

The house across the street had been a problem for weeks. A rotating cast of people, all of them brown, coming and going at all hours. She’d seen them carrying in strange foods, heard the faint, rapid-fire music of a language that was decidedly not English. It was an infestation. An insult to the tidy, beige order of her street.

Her call to ICE was a masterpiece of self-righteous suspicion. “I’m not a racist,” she whispered into the phone, “but something isn’t right. There must be a dozen of them in there. They just… don’t belong.”

When the black SUVs arrived, sleek and ominous, Agatha felt a thrill of vindication. She scurried out onto her manicured lawn, clutching her housecoat. The lead agent, a grim-faced man with a jaw like a cinder block, approached her.

“Ma’am, are you the one who made the call?”

“I am,” she said, puffing out her chest. “Agatha Holloway. And I want to be on record—my name only sounds Hispanic. It’s English. Very old English.” She said it with the air of someone presenting a royal pedigree.

The agent, Ramirez, didn’t react. He just took notes as she prattled on about the “suspicious activity,” the “overcrowding,” the “refusal to assimilate.” Her testimony, layered with her desperate need to establish her own ethnic purity, was all the justification they needed. The decision was made. They would raid the house.

The breach was swift and violent. A synchronized smash of the front and rear doors, the shouted commands, the rush of armored bodies. Agatha watched, breathless, from her porch. She saw the agents pour into the dim hallway, their weapons trained on a huddled group of figures who cried out in fear.

Then, silence.

The moment the last agent crossed the threshold, the world dissolved.

One second, Agent Ramirez was shouting, “ICE! Get on the ground!” The next, every sound was swallowed by an impossible, blinding whiteness. The floor, the walls, the ceiling, the huddled immigrants—everything vanished. They were floating in a featureless, silent void. The only things that remained were the twelve agents and their equipment.

“What the hell?” one agent muttered, his voice small and flat in the infinite space.

“Stay calm!” Ramirez barked, his own heart hammering against his ribs. “Sound off!”

As the agents called out their names, a new sound reached them. A soft, rhythmic squeaking. They turned as one, weapons raised.

Behind them, in the midst of the nothingness, sat a teenage girl on an old, scarred wooden school desk. She swung her legs, making the squeaking sound with her sneakers. She wore ripped jeans and a faded band t-shirt. She looked bored.

“Who are you?” Ramirez aimed his service pistol at her center mass. “Identify yourself!”

The girl stopped swinging her legs. “Those are a bad idea here,” she said, her voice calm, nodding toward the weapons.

“This is Homeland Security! We are armed federal agents! Explain this place, now!”

She just stared at him, her expression unreadable.

“I won’t ask again!” Ramirez screamed, the vast whiteness absorbing his fury. “Tell me what this is or I will put a bullet in your face!”

The girl sighed, a sound of profound disappointment. She hopped off the desk and walked around to sit in the teacher’s chair behind it. She laced her fingers together on the desktop.

Enraged by her silence, by the surreal mockery of it all, Ramirez made a decision. He tightened his finger on the trigger. Crack.

The gunshot was deafeningly loud yet somehow muffled. The bullet left the barrel and then… veered. It didn’t travel in a straight line. It wobbled, then shot downward at an impossible angle, piercing straight through the boot heel of Agent Carson, who was bringing up the rear.

Carson screamed and collapsed, clutching his foot. The other agents stared, horrified.

The girl giggled. It wasn’t a cruel sound, but it was utterly chilling. “I tried to tell you,” she said. “The physics in this place are… subjective.”

She stood and walked around the desk again, coming to stand before the stunned Ramirez. All pretense of boredom was gone from her face, replaced by a cold, ancient anger.

“You took a job,” she began, her voice low and clear, “where you hunt people. You persecute them for the crime of wanting a better life. For trying to escape hunger, violence, and despair. You tear families apart in the name of a line on a map.”

“They broke the law!” Ramirez argued, his voice shaking. “We are upholding the law! This is a nation of laws!”

“Is it?” she asked, tilting her head. “Or is it a nation of people? You followed a woman so terrified of being associated with the people she hates that she gave you her pedigree like a show dog. You based a raid on her bigotry. Where is the law in that?”

They argued for what felt like an hour. He spoke of borders and sovereignty; she spoke of compassion and humanity. He yelled about procedure; she asked about the children in cages. It was a fundamental, irreconcilable clash of worlds, playing out in a void that belonged to neither.

Finally, the girl stopped. She walked back around the desk and sat in the chair. She looked tired.

“Your arguments are empty echoes,” she said, her voice now carrying a tone of finality. “You have already been judged. Not by me. By the consequences of your own choices. The punishment will be swift.”

Before Ramirez could shout another protest, before any of them could move, the white space simply… folded in on them. They were gone.

—

Back on Elm Street, Agatha Holloway checked her watch for the tenth time. It had been hours. The sun was beginning to set. There had been no sound, no movement from the house. The SUVs sat silent and empty.

Her curiosity finally overpowering her fear, she crept across the street, her slippers whispering on the asphalt. The front door was still hanging open, revealing a perfectly normal, empty living room inside.

Clink.

Clink, clink.

She jumped at the sound. It was like keys falling on the road. She looked around, seeing nothing.

Then, a wet thump directly behind her.

She spun around. Agent Ramirez lay sprawled on the pavement, his eyes wide and unseeing, his body broken as if from a great fall.

THUMP. THUMP. CRUMP.

The bodies began to rain from the clear evening sky. They landed on the street, on the roofs of the SUVs, with sickening, bone-shattering impacts. One after the other, the twelve agents returned to the world they had sworn to protect, delivered by a judgment they could never comprehend.

Agatha Holloway’s scream was a short, sharp thing, ripped from her throat before the world went black and she collapsed onto the pristine sidewalk, the sound of falling bodies echoing in the empty street around her. The lace curtains in the windows across the street remained still. Nobody was watching anymore.