4338.205 · July 24, 2018 AD
The Shopping List
When politeness becomes complicity, and kindness makes you an accomplice. Gladys returns a cake container and leaves with someone else's credit card, a bizarre shopping list, and the growing certainty that her best friend isn't really sick in bed. Luke smiles, explains, deflects—each word a careful brick in a wall he's building between truth and discovery. In the space between what's said and what's suspected, trust fractures one polite lie at a time.
There's a particular kind of unease that settles in when something feels wrong but you can't quite name it. The closed bedroom door. The too-quick explanation. The shopping list that makes no sense. The credit card that belongs to someone who shouldn't be here.
Gladys knows Jamie. Has known him for decades. Knows his grudges, his projects, his patterns. So when Luke tells her Jamie's sick in bed but won't let her check on him, when he hands her a bizarre list of concrete and shovels and garden sheds, when he slides across a credit card belonging to Luke's estranged brother—a man Jamie supposedly invited to help with a project—every instinct she has starts whispering warnings she's too polite to voice.
Luke, meanwhile, is drowning in his own deceptions. Each lie spawns three more. Jamie isn't sick—he's trapped in another dimension. Paul isn't visiting—he's stranded in Clivilius. The shopping list isn't for a garden project—it's survival equipment for a world that shouldn't exist. And Gladys, with her warm laughter and her willingness to help, is being pulled into a web of secrets she can't begin to imagine.
Two people in the same room. Two completely different realities. One conversation where every word matters and nothing is quite what it seems.
This is the moment before everything unravels. When trust is a currency spent carelessly, and suspicion is a luxury neither can afford.
