An alien story for today!
“Biology’s Void” was written after I had an amazing conversation at an academic conference with another grad student who was really, really into aliens. Like really-really. She was doing her entire dissertation on the abduction narrative; she laid out the stages as she saw them, and as she’d built from her research. Meanwhile, I told her about Betty and Barney Hill, the interracial couple from the 1960s who were abducted, and who had just been covered on Last Podcast on the Left.
We talked for hours.
I always think I’m not very into alien stories–and then events like that happen, or I end up getting sucked into X-File marathons, and I remember my absolute love of the horror behind these experiences.
The main character in “Biology’s Void” is directly inspired by Betty and Barney Hill, and the concept of ‘missing time’ as it relates to alien abductions (and also traumatic experiences; see Mysterious Skin for the other major influence here). It’s still one of my favourite stories that I wrote, probably because after that hours-long conversation, it was pretty much a breeze to write.
I hope you enjoy it too! It would be published a few years later in an anthology that now seems to be defunct, but I found here.
Biology’s Void
It is November 12th 2017. 1:05 AM. My name is Barney Addison, and I am missing time.
Barney clutched at his throat. The words echoed in his head, but didn’t come out of his mouth. When he found no wounds on the front of his trachea, he reached behind his ears. Nothing. Next to his pulse and ankles. Nothing. His chest. Only the ruddy scars from his mastectomy six months earlier. They weren’t bleeding, but wetness clung around his dark T-shirt chest that smelled like plant matter or vacuumed space; like an office building basement after the cleaners come. His cargo shorts were singed at the edges. All of this could have been from falling asleep on the building roof with a cigarette in his mouth and a drink in his hand. Or it could be what his father always prepared him for.
Barney stood up from lying down. The glow of the North York hospital and IKEA anchored him. He was the Sheridan building apartment roof, close to the Leslie Street subway station. He only recognized the building’s position from when he’d explored the neighbourhood earlier in the summer when he began delivering mail; he had no recollection of climbing the stairs or taking the back elevator entrance. All he could recall was coming home from work, changing his clothing, and then—three hours were gone.
Barney’s heart rate skyrocketed. It couldn’t be. It just couldn’t be. Alien invasions were something his bipolar father fixated on during his youth. They were something syndicated on the Syfy channel and Space Network, closed inside paperbacks. Not real, not real, not real.
“It is November 12th 2017. My name is Barney Addison,” he said aloud, repeating a drill he hadn’t done in at least ten years. “And I am missing time.”
*
Gordy’s window was open when Barney arrived.
“Welcome,” Gordy said as soon as he saw Barney swing in from the fire escape. “By all means, come right in. Be sure to wipe your feet on the matt I’ve put out just for you.”
Barney’s shoes crunched against newspaper by the window. He’d been coming into Gordy’s bedroom by whatever means necessary since the two were teens and next door neighbours. His window jumping was a hard habit that he’d maintained until this day, even when Gordy lived on the first stop on the Leslie Street subway and in a third floor apartment building.
Barney opened his mouth to tell him about the aliens, but Gordy had turned around and walked into his kitchen. Music played on a speaker in the front area, sending low vibrations through the barely lit apartment. Several people in brightly coloured shirts sat on Gordy’s couch, lost to their own drug-induced world. Gordy’s pill collection was all over his end table, guarded by Chris, Gordy’s long-term boyfriend who also moonlighted as a nurse. Chris didn’t wave or look up. The apartment was already booming with business.
In the kitchen, Gordy took down a bottle of cheap scotch and started to pour it into glasses. He made sure to line up the drinks in front of Barney so he could watch every step of the drink making process. He let Barney choose what glass to take before he took a sip of his own.
“So what’s up? I sense a meeting between us.”
Barney clasped the glass, but didn’t drink until Gordy swallowed his first sip. His hands were shaking. “I’m missing time.”
Gordy furrowed his brows. “Like…a black out? A Rohypnol episode?”
“No.” Barney shook his head. “I know it’s not that. I was on a roof when I woke up.”
“Wait. Back it up. Tell me from the moment you lost time.” Gordy leaned on the counter, sipping his drink. His eyes fixated on Barney, his face marked with concern. In spite of the party going on in his kitchen, it was clear that Gordy this was his first drink of the night.
After a sip, Barney went through the night as he remembered from work to changing clothing to three hours gone. “It’s not a bad date or a dream. I was alone. And nothing in my apartment was tampered, and I wasn’t taking any drugs.”
“But you do go creepy crawling sometimes.” Gordy gestured to his own window and to Barney’s lifetime of climbing buildings or houses. When Barney worked as a maintenance man, he’d explored during his down time and basically had an entire layout of the Toronto apartment building complexes memorized. Once you figure out how to get into one building, you can get into any other. And with Barney’s array of grey uniforms from all his jobs, he could easily pass a worker to gain access on the ground floor before exploring bigger heights. He’d never break into strangers houses–only friends like Gordy who had given baseline consent to creepy crawl inside–but Barney liked roofs and did what he could to find as many as possible. He liked the lights of the city. It was all an escape from the mundane existence of being a teenager in small town Tweed, and then being an adult in a city so big everyone was anonymous.
“Maybe you hit your head,” Gordy suggested. “And this is a concussion.”
Barney bowed his head in front of Gordy so he could examine his crown. “Nothing. Absolutely no marks like that. I know what a concussion feels like–and that is not it. There are no other marks on me except for the singe of my shorts and the smell, Gordy.” Barney bit his lip, utterly terrified. “That means one thing.”
“And it has to be aliens, right?” Gordy took a drink, but didn’t shut Barney down. He let him explain how the smell signalled a particular alien theory popular in the 1990s, and how the singe meant they must be the Grays, not any other species, because of the technology in the spaceship.
In that moment, as Gordy listened and never said a word, Barney knew he could love Gordy–like a boyfriend, more than a friend. He was the only person through Barney’s entire gender transition who heard every last theory about his gender identity as if it was valid, and the only person who had gone through the same nonsense in their teenage years when both of their families realized they had queer kids on their hands and sent them away. Gordy and no one else understood the allure of believing in aliens in order to make sense of a world that seemed cruel, or to stave off the reality that his father was completely losing his mind.
“So, okay. Say you have been abducted,” Gordy said, his voice clear and logical when Barney had talked himself hoarse. “Then what do you do next? Obviously they dropped you back here, so are you done with?”
“Sometimes. I think. I’m not sure. It’s been a long time since I’ve even been into this stuff.”
“Right. And who exactly do you tell about it? Cops and FBI—or the Canadian FBI CSIS—are out. We’re not exactly close to Roswell, either so we can’t go backpacking for answers. I don’t even think Canada has its equivalent.”
It did. Barney could recall the name and the circumstances like an old song he’d listened to on repeat. But he kept his mouth shut–instead he thought of his father, his dark skin and even darker eyes, and how scared he used to look whenever he’d be missing time, too. He couldn’t tell how much of his father’s descent into madness was now actually real or if it was a perfectly valid response to an insane experience like being abducted. Or maybe even a side-effect of being abducted. Did his disorder allow him contact with the aliens, did the aliens cause the disorder, or was there nothing wrong with Jason Addison at all? All outcomes blurred together into the same ending.
“I… I don’t want to end up like my dad.”
Gordy nodded. He remembered Jason being taken away just as clearly as Barney did. “I know. You won’t. You’re long passed the age where hereditary illnesses like that form. Don’t most schizophrenics or bipolar people start in their early teens? We’re nearly thirty, Barney. You’ve long since passed the safety point. You’re fine.”
Barney nodded, but he wasn’t so sure it was that easy. He’d only been Barney for ten years, on testosterone for five or six. It had made his hair thicker and given him a beard, along with giving him thick muscles and a deeper voice–but what if the internal clock on family illnesses started again, and he was a teenager in his body? Or what if it was testosterone in the first place, and being a guy made him more susceptible to his father’s lineage? He wondered what would fill in biology’s void in madness—his synthetic hormones coursing through him or father’s blood that did the same? And all of this was assuming that the mental illness was real, and not an excuse cooked up to cover up the alien’s invasion.
Barney took another drink. His head swam. He didn’t even know where his father was now, so there was no way to ask him. He would probably be just as impossible to find as Barney was now with a new name and new likeness.
“You won’t end up like him,” Gordy said again, rubbing a hand over Barney’s elbow. “You’re not crazy. There is nothing wrong with you. We’re both absolutely, one hundred percent normal.”
“It’s the other people who are strange,” Barney said, echoing what the two of them had told one another in their youth. Barney was amazed at how many chants he had stored away in his head; his dad’s alien drills and Gordy’s pep statements against homophobia only being a handful. His mind felt like a locked cage of Japanese Koans, or at worst, bumper stickers.
When the music in the other room grew louder, Gordy invited Barney to stay the night. “The party is only beginning, you know.”
“I know. But I should go back home.”
Gordy nodded. He topped up Barney’s glass before leaving to go to his living room. He didn’t bother to tell Barney to use the door to leave; the window was always open.
*
The next day at work, Barney fought a wave of nausea as he held up a package. He thought it was the alcohol coming back to have its revenge, but he was steady on his feet. Every time he looked away from the package, the world righted itself. His body achieved equilibrium. But the name and address on the package made him shudder deep inside.
He knew that building. He swore he did. He closed his eyes to see if he could conjure the place from a deeply held memory. Tables, needles, and doctors with face masks. Black out days and long, long stretches of nothing but beeping. He opened his eyes. The package in front of him was like a bruised aura leading him down a road he wasn’t sure if he wanted to go. Each time he looked away from the package–nothing. Just the sunny day and the streets of Leslie and Shepard, and his post office truck. The other mail for that street was for the North York hospital, yet another place that Barney knew all too well. Those memories weren’t pleasant either. The therapy program he and Gordy had gone to for being troubled kids (the code word for being queer) had been in one of the hospital’s basement rooms, too close for comfort to the other address that made his head spin. But maybe he was mixing and matching his memories, still in a hungover state, and merely poking an old wound when he was too sensitive.
Yes. That had to be it. He was just in a bad place, so everything became The Singular Bad Place in his mind. He loaded the hospital letters into his mail bag before he touched the package. The back of his eyes felt heavy.
“Fuck.”
Barney heaved at the side of the truck. No one was walking by, but he was sure he was going to arouse suspicion. And he couldn’t just forget his mail route. He had to deliver the package. Since it was so close to the hospital anyway, if he couldn’t take it and passed out, someone could deliver him to the ER.
On shaky legs, Barney made it to the front wing of the hospital. Though he looked nothing like the fourteen-year-old girl who had once been admitted to the psych ward, the front area made him weary. He was not going to be put away; not again–and not even for the same reason. There was no more conversion therapy in the Toronto wing of this hospital. People still had a hard time configuring trans identity, but at least people didn’t think they were possessed or troubled anymore. A lot had changed in those fifteen years since he was put into a room and told to confess all his secret sexual deviant thoughts, and then given proper sexual object choices and roles he was told to perfect like a marionette.
By the time he finished the mail route for the hospital, Barney felt as if he had walked through the fire and come out on the other side. People called him sir. Barney. Even Mr. Addison if they knew him.
He was a guy. Not a sad, afraid girl. But by the time he wandered around to the wooded area close to the hospital, in search of the package address, the sinking feeling came back. He meandered through the path, a parking lot, and more wooded area. He expected to find nothing but a dead end, but right there, on a street that seemed to come out of nowhere, was another steel building. Down the alleyway was a door and a dumpster. A red doorbell taunted him; he could ring it and know exactly what this place was beyond his nightmares–but his feet were lead.
He flung the package to the ground and ran away, through the woods and the parking lot and right by North York Hospital. He got into his post office truck and floored it, nearly crashing into a dark sedan. The horn blared and anchored him to this world.
“Mr. Addison,” he said to himself. “You are one hundred and ten percent normal.”
He merged onto the road and went home, humming a tune he didn’t know.
*
“Do you remember North York?”
“Of course I do,” Gordy said, bitterness in his tone. “I was there for three weeks before you. And even when you got to leave, I was still stuck there.”
“Right. Of course. I just… Do you remember where our therapy was located?”
Gordy scoffed on the other end of the phone. Barney had his headphones in with the mic pressed close to his face. He’d gone to the gym after work, but the strange alleyway in the middle of the hospital’s grounds had frustrated him. Familiar, yet strange. And the song in his head now had lyrics—there is no self in cell division / all we know is human prisons / join biology’s void / and say hello to millions—ones that he couldn’t feed into Google to find an answer. The mystery package that had once made his knees weak seemed to be a blurry recollection as the song took dominance in his mind. It wasn’t quite like losing time, but it had been reshaped and remodelled in a way he didn’t like. So he’d called Gordy, the only other person he knew who had shared his therapy experience at North York when they were teens.
“I don’t understand why we’re walking down memory lane,” Gordy said. “It was not exactly a pleasant experience.”
“I know. I’m sorry. It’s just…I had to deliver the mail there today.”
“Right. You’ve done that before. And they don’t do conversion therapy anymore, thank fucking God. They still have a psych ward, obviously, but sometimes those are needed.”
“Sure,” Barney said, not wanting to argue the point. “But do you remember another building?”
“Like the cafeteria?”
“No. Another building, like close to North York but maybe on the other side of it. Near the woods. Do you, did we… ever get therapy there, too?”
“I don’t know if what they did could be called therapy but…” Gordy seemed to think a long time. Barney wondered if his memories were coming back to him in the same way as his did earlier in the day. If so, he didn’t sound nearly as pained as Barney felt. “I don’t think so. I mean… No. I don’t exactly like to dwell on the many and varied treatments, but I remember most of it occurring in the main hospital.”
“So no blinking lights or sleeping for days?”
“Barney,” Gordy said, carefully. “What happened today? Did you lose time again?”
Barney pushed up a barbell, attempting to work out instead of answering. Gordy was always a stoic, though, and waited patiently until the silence became too much for Barney. “Not exactly. I didn’t lose time… more like retrieved a memory I thought I had forgotten and then promptly lost all form and shape of it.”
“About our conversion therapy?”
“I think so, but I don’t know. It seemed more medical than psychological.” Barney put the barbell up and sat on the bench. His story sounded so ludicrous, but he was sure that these two random events were tied. That the pieces of this puzzle were adding up. When he tried to explain the doctor masks and needles to Gordy, though, his voice was thin and angry.
“No.”
“No?”
“No,” Gordy repeated. “This isn’t some MK-Ultra bullshit. Or some alien conspiracy to steal memories. The people who told us we were sick when we were kids were not some masterminds. They were just working with faulty psychology. This isn’t anything bigger than gigantic stupidity and shame about sexuality and gender identity. And no one in conversion therapy prodded us with needles. They didn’t need to in order to make our lives fucking shitty.”
“Right,” Barney said. He nodded. Sweat fell from his brow onto his gym shorts. He’d been working out far too hard before he’d even called Gordy. He was just low on electrolytes after drinking. That was the only explanation for his random fuzzy memory because Gordy was always right. The people who fucked them up as kids were never the monsters they wanted to believe. They were just stupid and following orders. Most people who commit horrible mistakes usually are.
And the other stuff with aliens? Well, maybe it was time to see a therapist about grief over his father. Even if he didn’t exactly trust the profession. Things had changed a lot in the last fifteen years. Maybe therapy was a good thing again. “You are totally, one hundred percent right, Gordy. I’m just… having a rough week.”
“I know. It’s okay. I think we all deserve a little break from reality every so often. It’s why Chris and I do what I do. You can come over tonight, you know. If you want. No charge.”
Barney genuinely considered the offer. He’d gotten high at their place before, but the weightless feeling of being on opioids didn’t resonate with him. It was too much like slinking off the first veil of reality; like falling so deeply into a sunken place he couldn’t emerge from. It was, to put it bluntly, like the Rohypnol incident in his first early college years, when he’d been raped and woken up the next morning with the definitive idea that he wasn’t LeeAnne anymore, but Barney.
“You there?” Gordy asked. “You got really quiet.”
“Yeah. I’m fine. Just at the gym and thinking of heading home.”
“And then to our place?”
“Maybe. I’ll see where I end up.”
“Okay, Barney. Take care of yourself.”
Barney followed up with some pleasantries before ending the phone conversation. He headed into the male locker room and waited for a stall to change in. As he waited, he removed his tank top to ring it out, allowing his scars to become visible. A man across the area seemed to gasp. Barney’s body went rigid, worrying for a moment if he had been outed as trans.
“Sorry, bro,” the guy at the other end said. “I didn’t mean to gawk. Looks like a nasty accident.”
“Sort of,” Barney said.
“You mind if I ask what happened, man?”
Barney paused for only a minute. He’d long ago cooked up a dozen stories to explain away his mastectomy scars, years before he could even afford the surgery. I’ve been shot. Super bad piercing experience. And he’d even considered covering the scars with tattoos. But now, a more delightful excuse came through his head. “I’m an alien with two hearts. You know, a timelord.”
“Oh, shit man. You can just say you don’t wanna say.”
Barney nodded. A stall opened up and he went inside to change out of the rest of his gym clothing. He ran his hands over his scars, remembering the same feeling of weightlessness as the surgeon gave him anesthesia. You won’t remember a thing, she’d said. And she was right. For a long time afterwards in his drug haze, everything was gone. LeeAnne. His mother who disowned him. His sister who was fine to think he was a lesbian, but thought this ‘trans business’ was too strange and who had moved to California anyway. He forgot his father being taken away when he was twelve and the criminal record that soon followed his father. Breaking and entering, carrying a weapon, trespassing. His father had gone from a youthful Jamaican immigrant to a paranoid gun-toting alien contact survivor. And Barney had just forgotten it all.
Now though, he ran his fingers along his scars. He remembered the steel building next to North York, and the doctors who stood over him with needles and machines. They were just like the ones telling him he was a criminal for liking women, except that they were silent with darker eyes and longer fingers on their hands. Except that they were aliens. And they had a message for him. There is no self in cell division / all we know is human prisons / join biology’s void / and say hello to millions.
Now, Barney remembered everything.
*
The next time a package from the steel building came in on his post office run, he wrote down the address. When his hand shook too much, he snapped a photo with his phone instead. He typed out a text to Gordy about the place—but soon decided to save it as a draft for later. Gordy had already gone through enough. He’d been in the psych ward much longer since the therapists never really believed him when he tried to convince them he was cured. In retrospect, Barney’s queerness had been easier to hide because he hadn’t even known what it was like to be a trans man fully. He was just a tomboy, and saying that he liked men got them off his case, and easier for him to do since it was half true. So Barney’s conversion therapy had only been a fraction by comparison to Gordy.
And maybe, because Gordy was cis and Barney turned out to be trans, there was another line dividing their experiences. Barney didn’t like to think that way, but he knew it was true. Cis people engaged with the world in a different way; their bodies were never quite marvels in the same way that trans bodies were. Trans bodies morphed and changed; obtained a second puberty and new facets of physicality. Maybe because of this morphing and changing, Barney was somehow more susceptible to whatever was going on in the steel building.
Maybe. He didn’t know for sure. But he was determined to find out more than before.
As soon as Barney reached the door down the alleyway, he rang the red bell. He’d conned his way inside of enough apartment buildings as a maintenance man, he was sure he could get inside here if he had a package that he said needed signing. To his surprise, though, he didn’t need to con. As soon as he rang the doorbell, it opened.
“Hello?” Barney pushed his way inside. “Anyone here?”
Silent. Pure silence, the kind where Barney heard his own blood in his ear. He put down the package between the door so it didn’t close. The package was heavy–like several phone books all bound together–so it worked as the perfect door stop.
“Hello?” Barney asked again. He’d gone down a long corridor with numbers, rather than names, on each one. He tried each door knob, but nothing worked until the very end. Door 725 opened easily. A light flickered above a filing cabinet and next to a chalkboard that had the same number written on it.
A chill passed through Barney. He opened his mouth to speak but nothing came out. He touched his throat, behind his ears. His arms, his ankles, and his chest. Nothing. He wasn’t being abducted or missing time, but an electrical charge in the air made his coarse hair stand on end.
He opened the first drawer in the filing cabinet. It was easy enough to find the name Addison, and it was no shock that his old name LeeAnne was there next. With trembling fingers, he pulled out the file that was at least three CMs thick. The first page was the hospital intake form from the exact date he entered conversion therapy at North York’s psych ward. Nothing was amiss in the subsequent pages; everything was familiar and had checked out.
Perhaps this place was just an old filing centre, a storage area to keep things that they had to legally keep for a certain amount of time. He wasn’t that keen to keep on reading how “LeeAnne displays a preference for the same sex, but has spoken about dating boys if she can also become one” and wanted to put the file away. His creepy crawly mission seemed like a wasted afternoon until he came upon the last page of the file. A body chart had been laid out and marked off with round hollow dots, like crop circles on the elbows and viridians of a human body. Underneath were times and dates, along with injections.
“What kind of MK-Ultra bullshit is this?” he asked aloud. Seeing nothing else other than the cryptic writing that seemed to trigger long buried memoires, Barney put down his file and searched for Gordy in the large stack. Gordon Zednichek was the last file in the drawer and less thick than Barney’s. The last page bore the same chart with a body, crop circles on elbows, and the injections. The final words made Barney bit on his lip so hard he drew blood: Subject incompatible with desires. He will be sent back to the conversion centre.
Barney swallowed the blood in his mouth. He checked the last words of his file again. It was a date and a time and an injection rate, followed by the words “Pending…” It seemed like a lack lustre ending, nothing as definitive as Gordy. Barney tore through random files now, comparing the charts and the results. When he found another file that also bore the “Pending…” final words, he memorized the name: Casey Thompson. Age twenty-six now. The address was out of date–a parents’ place that Barney knew was now a vacant lot since he had delivered mail to that address years ago–but the name itself was familiar. He knew he had seen it before.
He took another photo with his phone and closed the filing area. A creak down the hall made his heart catch in his throat, but no one was there. The steel building really did seem like a storage area–but for what, Barney still wasn’t sure.
When he got back to his post office truck, his heart was pounding. His hands were shaking. But the elation that came over him once he found Casey Thompson’s name was worth it. He delivered mail to that address in the past–the Sheridan Apartment Building over by Leslie and Shepard.
The same one he’d woken up on two weeks ago, when he’d lost time. Barney let out a deep, low breath, knowing that for once, he was onto something.
*
He didn’t call Gordy, or even wander up to Casey Thompson’s apartment and ask them what had gone on years ago, and what was going on now. Hearing the answers from someone else didn’t seem to ease the itch that Barney had inside of him–and had had inside of him for a long time. Instead, as soon as it got dark, he put on one of his old maintenance uniforms and left his cell phone behind in his apartment. There was no note, but the phone itself and the last images he’d taken should be good enough.
He conned his way into the Sheridan apartment building and went right up to the roof. The familiar scent of plant matter and vacuumed air greeting him, but it had faded significantly since his last lost time episode. There was a shed filled with tools for the building, along with a folding chair in the back. He took it out and put it in the centre of the roof. The North York Hospital insignia glowed blue like a beacon, along with IKEA and a McDonalds in the distance.
He waited. And he waited.
He thought of the first time his father had woken him up from sleeping in the back of his van. He’d told the then LeeAnne the ways to make sure you knew who and what you were when you lost time. He’d told the then LeeAnne that he’d had to pull the car off into the corn fields because a bright light had come over the car and tried to lift it up.
“But we’re here again. Everything is fine. It’s just like Betty and Barney Hill,” he said. “They were abducted in 1961–but they came back. They always come back. And once you do come back, you have to keep talking about it and keep telling people about it in order for the experience to become real. When you lose time, you lose a piece of yourself. So you have to keep talking. You have to keep remembering.”
Barney knew he had been scared as a kid. His father had nearly totalled the car and then ranted in a near-yelling voice about identity and invasion. But now Barney thought of the coalescence around his own naming; how he’d woken up from a date-rape stupor and realized that his body had been taken from him the night before. How the experience bore so much similarity to conversion therapy, where he’d been brought into different buildings and made to feel and say and think things that weren’t true. Barney had been born out of LeeAnne in those moments, when his body and biology had been taken from him, and he’d fused his identity with his father’s alien conspiracies. It was why the name Barney, in a baby name book, seemed like the perfect fit when he’d skimmed over it.
But Barney also thought of the feeling of having no body, of having no self as he was put under for his surgery. The weightlessness that came from drugs he controlled. His surgery was the last shed of LeeAnne being removed from himself, but Barney had also been removed in that black-out waiting period. You won’t remember a thing—and he hadn’t. He was a void then. A perfect and nothing void; no self to worry about, no memories to hold him down. Good or bad. Boy or girl. Right or wrong, under the knife he was cosmic. He was everywhere. He was alien.
There is no self in cell division. He went through the song until it abruptly ended. Across the street, the lights started to shift and change form. Barney braced himself. Pending… Pending. The blue turned to a gauzy green and violet as it was removed from the hospital. It swirled around in the air and then fixated over the apartment complex. It hovered there, seeming to check out Barney in the same glance that Barney checked it out. His heart beat very fast. He put a hand over his chest and his scars and felt the beats course through him like an electrical jolt.
He was afraid. He was relieved.
The lights lowered over him, embracing him like a hug.
“It is November 24 2017 4:25 AM,” Barney said. “My name is Barney Addison, and I have found my lost time.”
END
Eve Morton 
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