Chapter 1: Flashback
The air in the apartment was thick with the kind of heat that only a New York summer could cook up. It clung to skin, made clothes feel heavy, and turned the living room into a sauna. The ancient window unit rattled and wheezed, losing its battle against the afternoon sun.
“It’s not a castle, it’s a spaceship,” Veronica declared, her voice firm. She adjusted a crooked cushion on the pile of chairs and blankets. “And I’m the captain.”
Stephanie, two years younger and perpetually covered in a fine layer of grime from the city playground, scowled. “You were captain last time. It’s my turn. It’s a castle and I’m the queen.”
“Queens don’t have to deal with asteroid fields. Captains do. It’s harder.” Veronica tugged a bedsheet taut, creating a new wall for their fortress. A faint smell of laundry detergent and dust filled the space underneath.
“Being queen is always harder,” Stephanie shot back, planting her fists on her hips. She kicked at a leg of the dining chair that served as the main support beam. The entire structure shuddered.
“Hey! You’ll blow the oxygen seals!” Veronica scrambled to stabilize it, her small frame straining. A lock of dark hair, damp with sweat, stuck to her temple. “If you’re gonna be like that, you can be the… the alien prisoner we found on Zorbon.”
“No way.”
“Fine. Then you can be the co-pilot. But I still get to say when we jump to light speed.”
Stephanie considered this, her lower lip jutting out. The sound of a siren wailed up from the street, four floors below. She finally nodded, a quick, sharp jerk of her chin. “Okay. But I get to press the big red button if we find one.”
“Deal.”
They crawled inside their creation, the world outside reducing to a dim, fabric-filtered glow. The rumble of a truck became the hum of the engines. The shouted argument from a neighbor’s TV was alien communication they had to decipher. They lay on their stomachs on the scratchy wool carpet, peering through a gap in the blankets at the distorted view of the rest of the room—the worn sofa leg, a forgotten sneaker, the dusty path of sunlight across the floorboards.
Veronica found a blue crayon, melted and softened from being left near the radiator. She started drawing controls on the bare wood floor under the blanket roof. “Setting coordinates for the Andromeda Galaxy.”
“We can’t go there. Mom said we have to be back for dinner by six.”
“This is a simulation, dummy. It’s not real time.” Veronica rolled her eyes with the profound exasperation only an eleven-year-old could muster. “It’ll only feel like five minutes.”
Stephanie accepted this logic. She found a red crayon and drew a large, wobbly circle next to her sister’s intricate panels. “That’s my button. The emergency blow-up-everything button.”
“You can’t just have a button that blows up everything. There’s protocols.”
“I do. It’s for if I get bored.”
They fell into a comfortable silence, the kind that only exists between siblings. The city’s noise was the soundtrack to their imaginary voyage. Veronica narrated their journey past Jupiter and through a nebula she called the “Purple Ghost.” Stephanie, tasked with monitoring life signs, reported that all the pretend gerbils in the pretend cargo hold were doing fine.
Then Stephanie pointed to a dark spot on the floorboards near the wall. “What’s that?”
Veronica craned her neck. “A knot in the wood.”
“It looks like a face. A mean one.”
“It’s just a knot, Steph.”
“It’s watching us.” Stephanie’s voice dropped to a whisper. The playful energy shifted, coiling into something tighter. The fortress felt less like a spaceship and more like a hiding place.
Veronica sighed, but she looked at the knot again. And suddenly, it did look like a face—a twisted, scowling face with one long eye. The dust in the air seemed to thicken. The distant wail of another siren sounded more urgent, more personal.
“It’s not,” Veronica said, but her voice lacked its earlier command. She reached out and put her hand on her sister’s arm. Their skin was sticky with heat. “It’s just our apartment.”
The moment stretched, thin and fragile. The mean face in the floorboards seemed to pulse in the dim light. Stephanie shuffled closer until her shoulder was pressed against Veronica’s.
“Captain?” she whispered.
“Yeah?”
“Can we go home now?”
Veronica didn’t answer right away. She looked at the hand-drawn controls, at the red emergency button, at the gap showing their real, mundane world. She squeezed her sister’s arm.
“Yeah,” she said softly. “Initiate landing sequence.”
From the kitchen, their mother’s voice called out, sharp and clear, slicing through the fantasy. “Girls! Five minutes! Wash your hands!”
The spell was broken. They scrambled out from the blanket canopy, blinking in the bright, hot light of the living room. The mean face in the floorboards was just a knot in the wood again. The spaceship was just a pile of chairs and old linens.
But as they ran to the sink, pushing each other to get to the faucet first, Stephanie glanced back over her shoulder at their creation. For a second, it hadn’t just been a game. The fear had been real, and so had the comfort. The blue and red crayon marks were already smearing, becoming just another stain on the floor, a temporary mark of a temporary world, already fading behind them.