Written for @flashfictionfridayofficial #FFF 338 "No happy endings".
(Apropos of nothing, the sign referenced at the beginning is an actual sign I saw on a massage parlor door in my city.)
Original work
Words: 750
Gen / Gen
No happy endings! Don't even ask! said a faded sign on the door, and Noeve wondered if the new owners kept it there ironically, or if they didn't even know what it meant. Perhaps Spanringers had not yet figured out which of the accoutrements of the former massage parlor they had to preserve to make a stray earthling that wandered over here to believe that this place still served the same function.
As she reached towards the doorknob, her heart pounding, she sifted through all the conversations that she ever had about Spanringers, searching for a reason not to go in.
They do massage in complete darkness, people told her, and you never see them. You don't know what's manipulating your body.
It's not a massage, it's an extra-dimensional transformation, some said.
It's not a massage, it's their way of marking you, some others said.
Marking with what or for what? Noeve had tried to ask them. Marking as one needing to be… punished? Rewarded?
People laughed. Why are you asking it, as if you would actually go in there?
Why not? Did anyone not come out? Noeve asked.
They do come out, said a man she remembered as Vert, but none of them made it to wherever they were going next: work, home, a corner store, you name it.
Hey, but sometimes they give you a gift, said a pale teen named Sarath. Not often, though. And that gift is different for everyone.
No kidding, Vert replied, I had a coworker, Ingar, and he came out of one of these parlors speaking in two voices at the same time. He even called me to ask if I was hearing it too. I freaked out and asked him to come over, not sure why, maybe I thought I'll have to take him to a hospital. And he never showed up. No one found out what happened to him.
Noeve was not concerned about that. She had no one waiting at home, so of course, by laws of irony, she won't go missing. And she never won a prize at any drawing, so for her to worry about a random odd "gift" would be way overblown.
She opened the narrow door, sandwiched between boarded-up windows in the abandoned strip mall, and faced a hallway with a row of dimly-lit rooms. Not a soul inside, and no surprises. She stepped into the first room and followed the instructions posted on the wall, which told her to undress and get under the sterile-looking white cotton sheet on the massage table. As soon as she did so, the room turned pitch-dark. The sheet stiffened around her like a concrete glaze. She could not move a muscle. Remarkably, the immobilization also dampened the fear she thought she should be feeling.
When something descended on her, she could not tell if it touched the sheet or her naked skin, because at that point the two must have merged. At some moments the pressure on her back appeared to come from a smoothly-muscled limb, and at other times from something rigid like bone. It pressed deeply into her flesh, so deeply it had to be going all through her torso and into the massage table, but she felt no pain.
The lights came on slowly, and the room was completely empty and perfectly still. She was intact, with no holes in her flesh. Coming out into the dazzlingly bright midday street felt almost too mundane. Nothing looked diffe…
She had two shadows. Two shadows at right angles to each other.
She stumbled but managed to walk on, blinded by the sun, trying not to panic about the gift she received. She was about to pass the Spanringer embassy on the right, and burst out into a momentary chuckle at the thought that she should stop by and ask them what it meant. The embassy had a giant sculpture on the front lawn: two stars that made up a binary system, the Spanringer home. Two giant brass spheres slowly revolved around each other. Two shadows stretched across the lawn, at a right angle to each other. Noeve's eyes widened.
She stepped into the intersection of the shadows cast by the sculpture, and they aligned perfectly with her own. A central door opened in the building. That which came out was not visible since it carried its own pool of darkness. But even without seeing she knew it beckoned her.
Why did they say 'no happy endings' Noeve wondered, walking towards it.
