Home Coming

I must have lost track of time. Has it been three months already? It can’t be happening again. Oh God, why does this always happen?

With bony trembling hands and a dry gullet, part-time grocery clerk, Taro tucked an impatient customer’s eggs away into a plastic bag. He could feel the customer’s glare, which was hidden only by his awning of tangled black hair dangling carelessly over his brow. Taro knew he was packing at a snail’s pace; there was a line of irritable customers waiting to buy their groceries. 

In the last few minutes Taro had devolved into a bundle of frayed nerves, staring at something growing out of the bread aisle in the far corner of Dolly’s Grocery Mart. It didn’t belong there.

The customer cleared his throat and Taro blinked back to the present. He looked down and noticed the egg carton had popped open in his hand, and a few of the eggs had tumbled out and splattered on the bags and floor.

“I’m so sorry.” Taro whispered, scrambling to grab a rag to clean the mess.

“This is ridiculous! You’d better not tell me I have to go back there and get another carton for myself!” The man barked.

Taro shook his head, “No, no. That’s alright. I’ll grab it.” He looked up and saw the line behind the angry egg man. Customers were huffing dramatically and furiously peeling out with their carts. Taro’s heart dropped, “I’m sorry everyone.” He announced, but no one seemed to accept his apology. 

Taro rushed down the aisles and uncomfortably acknowledged that the thing in the distant corner of the grocery store was not all that appeared to be intruding on this space. More familiar objects began sprouting amongst the frozen peas and pizzas. Bricks, mold, lead piping, tall grass. Things that never belonged in Dolly’s, and which certainly were not for sale amongst the other frozen foods.

It was happening again. The old Lyndon Industrial building was bursting through his new home. 

Taro wiped the sweat from his brow and paced down the aisle. His thoughts were jumbled, he couldn’t remember where the eggs were. Taro soon found himself panting anxiously amongst the canned food, where sprouts of coal powered machinery were beginning to pop up through the space, consuming everything in sight. Rivets and levers. Gears and furnaces.

Why does this happen to me? Why doesn’t anyone notice?

Taro jumped and shrieked. At the far end of the aisle, where the sausages and cheeses were located, a metal staircase lurched out of the vinyl floor and burrowed up into the ceiling. A young woman and her toddler turned down the aisle at the entrance nearest to him. They didn’t even seem to notice. Taro’s heart battered against his ribcage. He jumped in front of their cart and the woman and her toddler staggered upon the point of collision. At first she blinked in shock but before Taro could find his words her face contorted in rage and glowed red.

“What do you think you’re doing?” She demanded.

“Please, I’m trying to help you.” Taro said, sweat dripping from his cheeks. His skin felt like it was being tugged in every direction by fish hooks buried deep into his muscles, “Do you see the staircase?”

She narrowed her gaze at him and sucked her teeth suspiciously. Taro knew what he must have looked like to her, but it didn’t matter. He needed to save her. He needed to save as many people as he could before the Lyndon Industrial building consumed everything. She couldn’t read his mind though, he knew he wouldn’t have time to explain, he just needed her to know that she was in danger.

“The staircase right there?” She asked, pointing at it. He followed her finger and turned to the direction in which it pointed. He gasped. Not only was the staircase still there, but it was now no longer framed by the cheese and sausage which should have been there, but by a newly erected brick wall backdrop. Layered into the ancient brick were a series of massive square windows made up of concentric rows of smaller square panels. The glass was stained yellow from ages of smoke and soot, and most of them were cracked, some panels were missing entirely. Where the ceiling had once been was now a catwalk connected to the metal spiral staircase. The walls expanded farther and father upwards.

“Listen, you have to run. It’s too late. It’s coming through everything.” Taro spun back around to face her and his heart dropped. Her flesh was bubbling as red and grey splotches of clay brick began to seep out of her pores like a flooding sink. She opened her mouth to speak but a gob of red clay burst from her throat, consuming the lower half of her face. Her eyes showed no comprehension of what was happening to her or her child as they slowly morphed into a dilapidated brick pillar. They never even noticed.

“No, no!” Taro screamed, pounding his temples with open palms. His chest tightened, he gasped to breathe but couldn’t. As his eyes darted to and fro the room morphed around him, he was flooded with memories, but none of them made it any clearer as to why the Lyndon Industrial building followed him wherever he went. He sinched his eyes shut as tears streamed down his cheeks. Like a boiler with a stuck valve, he was sizzling and popping inside, slowly building pressure to a catastrophic point, ready to blow.

“What do you want from me?” Taro screamed and opened his eyes.

His voice echoed through the massive empty building. Above his head a small murder of crows, vexed by his outburst, flapped their wings and disappeared through a broken window. The grocery store was gone. The people were gone. All that remained was the vast and expansive surrounding vacuity of the abandoned building. With it came a creeping loneliness that spread like sickness in his blood. He was alone, surrounded by dilapidated machinery in a crumbling old building that he hadn’t visited since he was a young boy. But it visited him, and often.

“Why are you following me?” Taro sobbed and crumbled into the sooty floor, blanketed with a loose coat of leaves, bugs and brick dust, “Why can’t you just let me settle? I want to live somewhere for more than three months without you barging into my life!”

His voice just echoed back, reminding him that no one was listening, no one cared. There was no rhyme or reason for this to happen, he had to come to terms with that every time the Lyndon factory plunged itself back into his life. 

There was nothing significant about the location. He had visited once, long ago, broken into the condemned building with some long forgotten highschool friends to smoke a jay. They marvelled at the ramshackle building and the tall grass and vines slowly consuming it, they giggled a bit and then left. Taro had never even thought about the old building until he first moved away for college. That was the first time the building followed him, then no matter where he went, given enough time, the Lyndon Building would arrive.

“I’ve missed out on my whole life because of you!” Taro cried, “How am I supposed to find a home? How am I supposed to find love?”

Taro crumbled further onto the cement floor and sobbed uncontrollably into it. All around him, a golden wave of afternoon sunlight swallowed him up. He was warm now and aching for lack of tears. He opened his eyes on the ground and glanced around him. There was a subtle derelict beauty about the place when it was painted gold. Even though it felt like a growing infinite emptiness, that the walls expanded so far beyond reach, something enchanted him about it. He suddenly felt as if he was a saint in the painting of an icon, with their lush golden backdrops that astounded the gaze.

Then Taro noticed something laying in front of him in the dust and grime. He reached out and plucked it out of the ground. It was the crushed out roach that he had shared with his friends on that fateful day. Tears became childish giggles. He couldn’t even remember the last time he had smoked. The notion seemed almost ridiculous in his case. Taro pushed himself up off of the ground and stood, dusting himself off with a sigh. He placed the roach down where he had found it and peered around for the entrance.

A smile tore across Taro’s cheeks as his eyes fell on the broken window, the pile of shattered glass and the loose brick that they had thrown through it, however long ago. Then without any further hesitation he marched over and climbed through. 

Once again, he found himself in the parking lot of the grocery store, but no one seemed to notice that Dolly’s Grocery Mart was a gargantuan crumbling vacant building, littered with ‘No Trespassing’ and ‘condemned’ posters. This was how it always happened. In time the building would slip away and travel across the world to find him, wherever he would be.

He surveyed his surroundings and sighed wistfully, knowing he would miss this place as he had missed all the others, but it was time to go and he had no choice in the manner. As always, he forced himself to accept it and walked away, never looking back.