Confluence
What if you remembered something that never happened?
What if everyone else remembered it differently? It starts with a scar. Not a wound. Not something fresh. A scar that has always been there -- except it hasn’t. He would have noticed. He has noticed everything else his whole life. Except this.
An ordinary man. An ordinary life. A coworker with a mark on her wrist he has never seen before. Conversations that reference events he cannot place. Familiar rooms that feel like they’ve been rebuilt from a description of themselves rather than the real thing.
He blames exhaustion. Then stress. Then he starts entertaining the possibility that his mind is going. That would almost be a relief. Because the discrepancies don’t stop.
Colors bleed past where colors are supposed to stop. Sounds linger after their sources disappear. Photographs are not the same photographs they were yesterday. Recordings catch voices that have no business being there. And nobody seems particularly surprised. An enigmatic nurse leans toward him and asks a question that should be impossible: “Do you remember dying?” A childhood friend mentions, casually, people who sometimes arrive late to reality. And slowly — horribly — he begins to understand that the problem is not that his memory is failing. The problem is that his memory is working perfectly.
CONFLUENCE is psychological horror without a monster in the closet. The monster is uncertainty. The monster is the creeping suspicion that the person you trust most — including yourself — may not be telling you the whole truth. The monster is waking up and finding the world exactly where you left it, except it isn’t the same world anymore and you cannot prove it to anyone.
No haunted houses. No ancient evil waiting under the floorboards. Just an ordinary person and a reality that begins coming apart one small, undeniable detail at a time. Because that is how it would actually happen, isn’t it? You wouldn’t see it all at once. You would explain it away. You would blame the hour, the week, the year. You would tell yourself you must have remembered it wrong. Until the photograph changes. Until the voice appears on the recording. Until someone who should be dead speaks to you like nothing unusual has happened. Until someone asks whether you remember dying. And then you have a choice. Trust your memory. Trust the people around you. Trust the world. Or start asking questions.
Beneath all of it is something quieter and more human than horror. Grief. The desperate need to hold onto people after they are gone. The question of whether identity survives the loss of memory. And maybe the most unsettling question of all: if another version of your life existed just beyond your perception, would you want to meet yourself? I wanted CONFLUENCE to feel intimate before it became frightening. I wanted you to recognize the world before I started pulling pieces of it loose. It is a short book. But I hope it leaves a long shadow.
CONFLUENCE is for readers who like their reality slightly crooked. Literary speculative fiction. Psychological horror. Unreliable reality. Existential dread dressed in ordinary clothes. Maybe reality isn’t a straight line. Maybe it is a meeting place. A convergence. A confluence. Once you start questioning it, I’m not sure you’ll look at your own quite the same way. Read it. Argue about it. Tell me what you think is actually happening. Just be careful. Your version of the story might not be the only one.
-- Anthony Barret Parr
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Sounds intriguing and scary! Reality is in the eye of the beholder! Can't wait to read this!!
Mayme