Shivangi

The train ride home felt off in a way they couldn’t quite name, because the quiet around them wasn’t calm or comforting but heavy, the kind that pressed against their ears and made everything feel padded and slightly unreal. Outside the window, the scenery seemed to repeat itself in a way that didn’t sit right, with fields, trees, and a crooked signpost passing by and then appearing again, almost as if the train hadn’t moved forward at all. They blinked and looked again, trying to convince themselves they had imagined it.

Coming home was supposed to feel safe and familiar, especially after four years of rushed meals, shared spaces, and always being a little alert, so returning to something softer should have been a relief. Their parents were thrilled to have them back, and the house looked exactly the same, with their room untouched, as if time had paused there while everything else moved on.

The posters were still in place, the faint lavender smell still lingered, and even the bedsheet, worn but freshly washed, was the same one they had left behind, which should have felt comforting but instead felt strangely deliberate, like nothing had been allowed to change.

Everyone in town greeted them as though they had only been gone for a few days, with their best friend laughing the same way and repeating the same jokes, and the shopkeeper remembering their favorite snack without needing to be reminded. It should have felt warm and easy to fall back into, but something about it stayed in their mind, because it was too neat and too exact, as if every detail had been carefully placed.

They began to notice patterns, and once they did, it became difficult to stop.

The mailman passed at 9:15 every morning without fail, the neighbor’s sprinkler turned on at exactly 7, and the birds followed the same path across the sky each day while the clouds seemed to hold their shape for far too long, as if nothing above them was allowed to drift freely.

One night, they decided to go for a walk and took the trail behind their old school, the one that had once helped them feel calm when everything else felt too much, but even that felt different now. The wind moved in a way that didn’t feel natural, and the leaves rustled, stopped, and then repeated the exact same motion, which made them look up without thinking.

The stars were wrong, because they didn’t twinkle or shift in the sky, and instead sat there as sharp white points, fixed in place like they had been pinned there.

Something clicked then, or maybe something came apart in a way that couldn’t be put back together.

They went home, lay down on the bed, and stared at the ceiling where the cracks were exactly where they remembered them, each line in the same place, each detail unchanged. Every part of them wanted to explain it away and pretend it was nothing, but the feeling didn’t go away, because deep down they knew it wasn’t.

This wasn’t real, not the house, not the people, not the routines that ran too smoothly to question, and not the world that seemed to repeat itself without ever slipping.

Somewhere else, far from that room, a man sat in front of a monitor while lines of code moved steadily across the screen and the readings remained stable, showing the subject’s vitals as normal, as if nothing unusual was happening.

“She’s starting to notice,” he said, writing it down in a worn notebook.

Behind him, rows of identical screens flickered in the dim light, and each one showed someone, somewhere, standing by a window, looking out at something that might not be real.