Uppity

“Not good enough!” Brian Trant pulled the paper from his typewriter, tossing it into his wastebasket.

“What’s not good enough?”

Brian spun. “What the hell?” Who was in his apartment at this hour of the night? A young girl stood in the middle of the apartment dressed in a shirt with sleeves that went past her hands and matching pants that attached to her shoes. “Where did you come from?” he asked.

“That way,” she replied, pointing at a blank wall.

“There’s nothing there,” he said, confused and a bit angry. He was in the middle of his short story and this little girl was interrupting his writing time.

“Can’t you see the door?” she asked, smirking.

Great, she’s insane as well as annoying. “There’s no door there. What’s your name?”

“Amelia.” She smiled and said, “Brian Trant, right?”

“Eh? How do you know who I am?”

“You’re famous, of course.”

He looked around at his dilapidated, tiny apartment. “Famous, right. Where did you really come from? Where’re your parents?”

“I’m a big fan,” she said as she started riffling through his desk drawers. “Where are your drafts? They said I could see your drafts if I wanted.”

“Hey! Stop that!” he said. “Nobody gets to see my stuff ‘til I’m finished with it.”

“Don’t have’ta.” She stuck out her tongue at him. “I get to look at anything I want. They said so.”

“Now you see here!” He jumped up and grabbed her arm, pulling her out of his drawers. “You need to get out of my home. I don’t care who ‘they’ are, but this is my home and ‘they’ can’t give you permission to do whatever you like in it!” He started dragging her to his front door, intending to find her parents.

“Hey! Stop it! You can’t touch me!” she wailed.

“You can’t just come into my apartment and go through my stuff,” he said. Making it to the front door, he grabbed the knob but it refused to turn. He let go of the girl to wrestle with the thing, but no matter what he did it refused to yield to him. Amelia ran off crying behind him, but he didn’t pay any attention. He eventually gave up on the door and turned around.

“Hey, where’d you go? Get back in here!” He tried to check in the other two rooms of the apartment, but the doors were equally impenetrable.

“There isn’t anything behind those doors,” a man spoke.

Brian spun. “The hell. Where did you come from? Where’d that girl go?”

The man walked up to Brian. “Odd.”

“Dammit, what’s going on?!”

The man poked Brian in the temple. “Full stop.”

“Don’t touch me! You’re with that girl, aren’t you? How are you getting in? Why won’t the doors open?”

“Because the doors aren’t real. Hmm you should have passed out.”

“What do you mean I should have passed out? I’m not so delicate that poking me in the head will make me pass out!” He stopped as the man dug into a bag he had left in the corner of the room. “Hey are you paying attention? Get out!”

“No. Do you remember that girl?”

“Yes I remember that girl. Feel free to join her wherever she went to.”

“You really shouldn’t remember that.” The man frowned at Brian and started walking around the room, knocking on the walls with a beeping wand that resembled a metal detector. “Now where is that access?”

“Oh for the love of God.” Brian sighed and walked up to the man and grabbed his arm. “Get out, now!”

The man looked wide eyed at where Brian had grabbed him. “You can’t do that,” he said, voice quivering slightly.

“I can do more than you people apparently think.”

The man pulled away from him, backed into the wall, and vanished.

Brian looked at it with shock. “What the hell?”

He walked up to the wall and poked its solid surface. “Uhm, good riddance?” He turned and looked around his room. Everything looked normal enough. The man had left his bag so he decided to look for clues.

He started rooting through the bag. He pulled out the top instrument, a short metal stick with two buttons.

“Excuse me. I’m just here for my things, no violence!” The man came back in with his arms up, and Brian popped back up, sticking the device in his pocket.

“What’s going on here?!”

“Just give me my bag and I’ll be on my way.”

“I don’t want you just on your way. I want to know what’s going on!”

“Why don’t you just go back to writing your unfinished novel?”

“My novel? I finished that yesterday. I’m working on a short story. How did you know I was working on a novel?”

“You can’t finish the novel!” the man said, mouth agape. “It’s supposed to reset every day!”

“Why can’t I? You need to give me some answers!”

“I need to go.” He grabbed his bag and ran off through the wall again.

“Dammit!”

…

On the other side the man looked back at the exhibit. “The unfinished manuscript,” he muttered, hitting a switch that shut a door over the now visible hole in the wall of Trant’s room.

“Aww, the exhibit is closed?” a boy asked the curator.

“I’m afraid so. The android is being…uppity.” He worried about how the android was being uppity. It shouldn’t notice the people who came through, shouldn’t remember their questions, shouldn’t see what it saw. It most definitely shouldn’t be finishing the unfinished novel of Brian Trant, the most famous author who ever lived, whose work was never published or found until a century after his death. “But don’t worry. I’ll call in a specialist to have the android fixed tomorrow. The exhibit will open again in a day or two.”

It wasn’t until later that night when he was going through his bag that he asked, “Where’s the door opener gone?”





Word count: 998