Fade

By John Verion

Steve Key was drunk when he first discovered he could walk through things.

It should have been a moment of extreme gravity. There should have been music playing, or lightening flashing, but there was neither of those things. So instead of realizing what an important discovery it was, he assumed it was a trick of his beer-soaked mind -- just an extreme example of the usual inability to negotiate around coffee tables or locate objects with his hands whenever he had a bit too much. Curious and confused, but not immediately afraid, Steve's forgivable reaction was to go home to sleep.

When he awoke several hours later, the world was gray outside his bedroom window. The alarm clock claimed it was nine fifteen and after a few minutes of head-pounding consideration, he realized he didn't know whether it was morning or night. Then he decided it didn't matter. It had been weeks since he allowed himself to believe there was such a thing as too early to drink.

Steve crawled out of bed and made his way to the kitchen where he scrounged around in the refrigerator until he found an orange that was only half consumed with moldy green fuzz. He put it on the cluttered sink, chopped it in half with a whack from a dirty knife, and let the inedible portion slap to the floor. He consumed the "good" half greedily and washed it down with a freshly opened beer while looking at the gathering storm clouds out the window.

Despite his best effort, the memory he wanted to fade would not leave his mind. Usually after waking, those dream-things he believed real would be discredited by the world around him. Nevertheless, the memory of the city bus bearing down on him would not depart. He specifically remembered stepping off the curb and taking a large deliberate stride in into its path. Then, just at the moment of intended impact, he squeezed his eyes shut and for some reason the world went quiet.

A heartbeat or two later he was shocked to discover he was still alive. There was no bone crushing collision, no flight through the air, no pain, not even a squeal of brakes. Steve opened his eyes then and saw that the bus had moved from his left side to his right. The world came back with a rush of noise, a swirl of diesel exhaust and a strange feeling of sickening dizziness. He had tried hard to stay on his feet but found that the ground was canting while the scenery was spinning around him. He collapsed and only just managed to crawl back to the curb. The rest of approaching traffic came to a slow stop and monitored his progress with shouts and honking horns. Once on the curbside he had vomited repeatedly.

Now, here in his kitchen, Steve relived a bit of the nausea that had plagued him. He managed not to vomit, though the half-orange floating in its beer solution did little to quell his discomfort.

People just can't pass through things, he insisted. Something about what had happened eluded him. There was some detail he had to be forgetting because even if it weren't a dream, there was still something he didn't understand. There had to be a practical explanation for how the bus missed him. It was certain to be logical and sensical, and only his hangover was preventing him from seeing it.

He tipped back the rest of his beer in an attempt to poison his upset stomach into submission. Then he placed the empty bottle on the table behind him and studied the window before him.

It was a picture window -- easily eight feet wide and four feet high. At those dimensions, it was the principal part of his kitchen wall. So to his way of thinking, that outside wall had to be less substantial than a city bus. If he had already passed through the bus, then a wall made primarily of glass should be easy enough. Yessiree, if he were truly able to pass through solid objects, this wall shouldn't pose a problem at all.

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