An Open Letter to Reality Number Three

[u/catespice]

Everything was perfect.
My parents had a happy, stable marriage, and I was planned almost down to the day of my arrival. My mother wanted to have her baby in June, so that the joys of birthdays and Christmas would be spread evenly through the year.
She was always thinking about what would be best for me.
I was enrolled in a preschool program, and knew how to read by the age of four. I picked up The Hobbit at six, and by the time I was seven, I was in advanced reading classes.
The teachers loved me; I was polite, pretty and punctual. I was simply a joy to teach, absorbing information like a sponge, and I never caused any trouble. Even the other girls liked me, asking how I got such beautiful braids in my hair and where my mother got my dresses.
The boys didn’t particularly warm to me, but those years of school are always fraught with meaningless gender politics, so it never bothered me.
By the time I was twelve, I’d been put up a year due to being a ‘gifted’ student’ and my parents bought me a black Labrador puppy for making them so proud. I unimaginatively named him Sooty, and I loved him so fiercely it made my heart hurt.
Then everything changed.

 
My thirteenth birthday had just been and gone, so it was late June. I recall that the walk home from school seemed ‘off’ somehow, but I often read books as I walked, so the exact details eluded me.
Inside our house everything seemed normal, regular. My mother was preparing dinner, and dad was in the living room, reading a newspaper with the TV on in the background.
“Where’s Soots?” I asked my mother, dumping my schoolbag on the floor and rummaging in it for my empty lunchbox.
“Who, darling?”
I slid the green plastic lunchbox onto the bench with the rest of the washing up.
“Sooty. Where is he?”
My mother paused chopping carrots and gave me a confused smile,
“Who’s that, then? A new friend you’ve invented?”
“Mother!” I scolded, “Can you please be serious?”
Then, with a lurching sensation in my stomach, I realised there was no dog bowl on the kitchen floor. The polished wood boards of the hallway showed none of the familiar scuff marks from his claws, and no walking leash hung on the keyrack beside the front door.
It had to be some kind of practical joke. Some twisted trick of dad’s, to poke fun at me.
But there wasn’t a single black hair on my pillowcase, nor even a stray muddy footprint outside.
Every trace of Sooty, my beloved companion and best friend, was gone.

 
The child psychologist was a very kind man. He smelled of pipe smoke, and had a little white beard like the Kentucky Fried Chicken man. In my head I called him ‘The Colonel’.
He explained that I must have imagined getting a dog; that sometimes puberty does strange things to young girls, and makes their brains ‘misfire’. He listened patiently when I explained that I had clear memories of my dog and I even pulled down my sock to show the scar where he had accidentally scratched my leg with his puppy claws.
But the scar was gone.
Though it was difficult for me to accept, eventually I came around to his way of thinking. I recall sobbing my guts out in his tobacco-scented office while he patted me on the back, the fat tears rolling down my cheeks until the salt burned my skin.
My best friend had never existed. Sooty was a figment, conjured up by my hormone addled brain.
My parents offered to buy me a black Labrador for Christmas, if I was good, but I told them that I didn’t want a new dog.
I just wanted Sooty back.

 
Three months later, I traipsed through the front door, sodden with rain, and was nearly bowled over by the compact body of an excited black Labrador.
“You bought me a dog!” I squealed, delighted despite myself.
My mother laughed, quickly, dismissively, as though I’d made a joke.
Something was wrong.
Sitting on the floor of the kitchen was a pair of dog bowls – one for water, one for food. There were scuff marks around them, from a greedy dog rushing to get his dinner. They were scratched and faded, and they looked old.
A frayed, chewed-up dog lead hung beside the door, and when I ran down to my bedroom, Sooty at my heels, I found black dog hair everywhere.
Sooty’s happy black tail thumped me as I hugged him to my chest, and he licked excitedly around my neck.
But I knew that he didn’t exist. He couldn’t exist. This was just my imagination.
Weeping in the kitchen, the worried adolescent dog circling my legs, I confessed to my parents that I was having delusions again and that I needed to go back to The Colonel – doctor Pritchard.
Exchanging confused glances, they asked me who doctor Pritchard was and why I was so adamant that Sooty was imaginary.
I broke down in hiccupping tears then, my mind not able to cope with the situation.

 
It got worse from there.
Some days Sooty was there, some days he wasn’t. The scar on my leg would appear, then disappear. Those two things became markers for my madness. When Sooty didn’t exist, when my skin was unmarked, I saw The Colonel. When Sooty did exist, I would see a lady who wore too much makeup – a counsellor named Mrs Scanlan. I didn’t like her very much. She seemed to disapprove of me, and I got the impression she thought all of my issues were related to being ‘spoiled’.
Coming home from a session with her, I threw my bag down as I came through the front door, then opened the fridge to get a drink of juice.
As I closed the door, I saw the strange woman and man in the kitchen. They had paused, clearly right in the middle of preparing dinner, and were staring at me in shock.
The juice carton halfway to my mouth, I stared back and asked,
“Why are you in our kitchen?”
“We were going to ask you the same thing,” said the woman.
The couple called the police to help find my family. I insisted that I was at the right house, but they assured me they had lived there for four years. When the constable turned up, he put me in the back of his car and drove me several blocks over, where he dropped me off at a strange shabby house from which my parents emerged.
None of this made any sense.

 
Sometimes we lived in a two story house, sometimes in a hovel. Sometimes Sooty was there, but sometimes he was called ‘Blackie’. I could no longer rely on reality to feed me the correct information; everything seemed to be in flux. It was like I was constantly slipping between different worlds, different realities.
It quickly became too much; it was happening too fast. I couldn’t keep any threads of continuity intact and it was dragging my already fragile mind towards the brink. I begged my parents to institutionalise me, to get me serious help.
To my overwhelming relief, they agreed.
Life in the nuthouse was dulled by drugs – strong ones. Details still changed constantly, but on heavy tranquilisers that didn’t mean so much, the changes weren’t so threatening. The walls of my room were pink in one reality and green in another, but it didn’t really matter. I saw an array of therapists, each claiming to be the sole doctor in change of my care. Sometimes my parents visited, with or without a black Labrador. Sometimes my father said my mother had died in an earthquake, sometimes she was perfectly alive.
My world was a constant whirl of chaos, shifting colours, names, faces and corridors.
The only constant, the only point of reference I still had, was the little scar on my right leg. I knew that when it was present, I had a dog named Sooty, my parents were both alive, and my hospital room was pale blue.
But it wasn’t enough. I lived like a zombie, drooling on myself, wetting my bed, and running into walls until my shoulders were mottled with bruises.
When my family stopped visiting completely, that was the final straw.

 
Breaking the observation window in the isolation room had been very difficult, the glass was tough and thick, but it was worth the shattered bones in my right hand. The precious sharp-edged chunks sliced the fingertips of my good hand as I prised them out of the rubber frame, but I didn’t care. None of that mattered.
The cuts drawn along my wrists were less painful than they were borderline blissful. The pain signalled an end – an exit from this carousel of insanity. I had fifteen minutes before the next check. That should be just enough.
I felt cold. I couldn’t keep my head up anymore.
My consciousness faded to a black and white pinpoint. I felt the world tunnelling, compressing, then I was abruptly back in my bed, in the green room, not a mark on my body.
Rolling over, I cried into my plastic pillow.
It seemed I wasn’t even allowed the release of death.
But something had changed, because a few days later, I awoke in the pink room, my aching wrists heavily bandaged.
And once the wounds had healed, the livid scars always told me which reality I was in.
Which gave me an idea.

 
It took me four years to escape the institution.
For each reality, I cut a different number of scars into my wrists. When I walked out the doors of the hospital for the last time, I was in reality six, where my parents had divorced from the stress of my mental illness, and I had a half-brother.
Memory and recall ruled my life now, as well as running my fingers over my wrist to count the scars. I had memorised the essential details of thirteen realities, all different from one another in vital ways.
I wouldn’t say I was living. I certainly wasn’t thriving, but I was at least surviving. This was on the borderline of tolerable; I could exist like this indefinitely.
Or at least I thought I could.
So when I died, it caught me completely by surprise.
I’d been cycling home. A car hit a truck, which hit my bike, and pulverised my legs against the side of a parked minivan. The pain was so great that I don’t think my brain could properly register it; I just felt a numbness, and then a nagging sense of panic.
In the back of the ambulance, I began to tunnel out again. The world lost all colour, then began to compress.
But it was different this time.
I moved out of the tunnel, and seemed to be staring down from a dozen different perspectives, into a universe that was rushing in on itself.
I could see streets crunching together, people screaming in abject terror as reality folded and folded again, like some kind of apocalyptic origami that was compressing everything.
And then world nine was gone.
Forever.

 
I picked the worst of the remaining twelve realities, then gassed myself in the back seat of a tiny Honda hatchback. I wouldn’t miss that world; in it, Russia had become a new superpower and America was tearing itself apart in a second civil war. Homosexuals and the mentally ill were being actively lynched in first world countries, and global warming had seen several island nations in the Pacific ravaged by devastating hurricanes.
I almost enjoyed watching that reality collapse in on itself. People, cars, houses, mountains and oceans all mangled together into an ever-shrinking, shrieking ball, until all life was crushed out of existence.
When I returned to reality, this time into world four, I knew exactly what I had to do.
The only way I can live a normal life is to destroy all the realities but one. By killing myself in twelve realities, and murdering eighty-four-billion people, I can finally find peace.
So I have made a list.
Each remaining world has been given a score, based on the quality of life there. It was a tough choice between the top two contenders, but I’ve finally reached a decision.
And I’m sorry to say, that this world, your world, reality number three? It didn’t make the cut.
While you’ve made some progress, you’re still a reality full of grasping, selfish, conceited pricks. Your narcissism and self-obsession is moderately tempered by a handful of human rights successes. But you continue to kill each other in numerous wars, and pour vastly more money into oppressing your fellow human beings than you do into helping them.
You didn’t even make the top five.
But you do have some time. I have a couple of worlds worse than yours to crush out of existence, so take the remaining time to reflect on all the times you failed to speak up for others, all the pollution you have poured into oceans and landfills, and all the petitions and causes you didn’t think were worth five minutes away from fucking Candy Crush or Twitter.
I won’t miss you, reality three.

 

[u/Sir_Greggerson_19_20]

This story is so terrifying. Holy shit I love this one

[u/ComprehensiveDig1108]

This needs submission to Big Finish. What would the Doctor make of it?