4338.206 · July 25, 2018 AD
The Mask and the Water
Luke is crouched in a delivery truck, hands sticky with a dead boy's blood, and someone is calling his name. What follows isn't grief—it's theatre. Every word a calculation. Every tremor reframed. Because the women now standing in his driveway know about the Portal, and the body cooling beside him is Jamie's son. The shower is the only place left where masks can fall. Where water might wash away enough to think again.
"Hey, Luke."
Two words. Innocent in any other context. But Luke is kneeling beside Joel's corpse, blood drying tacky between his fingers, and Gladys Cramer has just announced herself in his driveway.
What follows is survival dressed as shock. Luke's mind splits—one half reeling from horror, the other already calculating angles, already spinning the narrative. Beatrix climbs into the truck with disturbing curiosity. Gladys drinks wine like it's oxygen. And when Luke finally speaks the truth—He's Jamie's son—a bottle shatters against concrete, and silence swallows everything else.
He flees to the shower.
The water is sanctuary. Steam rises, white noise drowns the chaos beyond the door, and Luke finds himself reaching for a ritual as old as his earliest fears. The body knows what the mind cannot accept: sometimes the only way through is surrender to something simpler. Something that bypasses thought entirely.
Release comes silent, stifled, seismic.
And in its aftermath—clarity. The terror doesn't vanish, but it quiets. Problems that seemed apocalyptic become challenges to be addressed. Luke emerges from the steam with wet hair and dry eyes.
He has work to do. Terrible work.
But he can do it now.
