Afterimage

It started with Ms. Winters from the corner store.

I was buying coffee on a Tuesday morning, half-awake and functioning on autopilot. She handed me my change, and when our fingers touched, I blinked. In that millisecond of darkness, something happened to her face.

When my eyes opened, for just a fraction of a second, I saw... something else superimposed over her features. Like an afterimage when you stare at a bright light, but inverse—darker instead of brighter, shifting in places where her face was still. Then it was gone, and she was just Ms. Winters again, smiling as she had for the fifteen years I'd been shopping at her store.

"Everything okay, David?" she asked, head tilting slightly.

I nodded, mumbled something about not enough sleep, and left with my coffee. By the time I reached the office, I'd almost convinced myself it was just a visual migraine. I'd had them before—zigzag patterns at the edges of my vision, strange distortions that came and went.

Except I didn't get the headache that usually followed.

Three days later, it happened again with the new guy in accounting. We were both reaching for the same donut in the break room, and our hands brushed. I blinked, and there it was—that same dark afterimage layered over his face. This time I caught more detail: hollows where his eyes should be, a strange elongation to the jaw, texture that wasn't skin.

He didn't seem to notice my reaction. No one did. I went back to my desk and googled "visual hallucinations without headache." The results were predictably alarming: everything from ocular migraines to brain tumors to early-onset schizophrenia.

I'd always been the type to observe rather than engage. My ex-wife had called it "pathological detachment" during our last argument before the divorce a year ago. "You're more interested in analyzing life than living it," she'd said. Maybe she was right. Since she left, I'd retreated further into myself, finding comfort in routines and patterns rather than human connection.

Perhaps that's why I approached this phenomenon with curiosity instead of fear. It was something to decode, a puzzle that broke the monotony of my carefully ordered existence.

I made an appointment with my doctor, who referred me to a neurologist, who ordered an MRI. The scan showed nothing. "Perfectly normal brain," the neurologist said, sounding almost disappointed. She prescribed a mild anti-anxiety medication and suggested I might be experiencing stress-related visual disturbances.

"The mind plays tricks when we're under pressure," she explained, writing the prescription. "Especially regarding faces, which our brains are specifically wired to recognize. The slightest perceptual glitch gets amplified."

I nodded and took the prescription, though I never filled it.

Because by then, I'd noticed something important: the afterimage only appeared when I made physical contact with certain people. Not everyone—maybe one in fifteen. And always the same people. I could repeatedly brush hands with Ms. Winters and see it every time. But my coworker Michael? Nothing. Just normal Michael.

I started testing my theory. Subtle touches—handing over documents, reaching for the same elevator button, the casual contact of daily life. Most people: nothing. But some, always that same dark afterimage, like something else was wearing their face as a mask.

I began keeping a list. Ms. Winters. The accountant. The barista at the coffee shop near work. The receptionist at my dentist's office. My downstairs neighbor. The list grew to seventeen people within a month.

There was no clear pattern. Different ages, genders, backgrounds. Some I'd known for years, others were relative strangers. Nothing connected them except that strange double-image I saw when we touched.

Then I noticed the secondary effect. If I maintained physical contact for more than a second or two, the afterimage didn't fade away. It stayed, superimposed over their normal appearance, growing more detailed the longer I touched them.

I discovered this by accident with the barista. She was handing me my change when her co-worker called her name. She turned, momentarily distracted, our hands still connected. The afterimage remained, and as one second stretched to five, I saw more clearly what lay beneath her features.

Not a face at all. Something... architectural. Structures that reminded me of scaffolding designed by someone who had only ever seen coral and fractals—all precise angles that shifted in non-Euclidean ways, with hollows and protrusions that existed in spaces a human face couldn't contain. Watching her talk was like watching two different entities occupying the same space—the human mouth moving over something else with too many joints, too many openings.

I pulled my hand away so abruptly that coins scattered across the counter. She looked startled, then concerned.

"Are you okay?" she asked, and her voice sounded perfectly normal, perfectly human.

But her eyes—her normal, human eyes—held a new awareness. Recognition, perhaps. Or wariness.

"I'm fine," I lied. "Just remembered something urgent."

She nodded slowly, gathering the fallen coins. "You know," she said carefully, "some things look different depending on how you observe them. Particles and waves, right?"

I froze. Was she acknowledging what had just happened? Before I could respond, she glanced at something over my shoulder and her expression changed—closing off, becoming professional again.

"Your change, sir," she said, handing me the coins without meeting my eyes. Her fingers barely brushed mine, but it was enough. The afterimage flickered briefly—and this time, I could have sworn it was looking directly at me.

That night, I couldn't sleep. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw those architectural faces, those hollow eyes. Were they wearing human appearances like suits? Were they possessing people somehow? Or was I simply losing my mind?

The rational explanation—that I was experiencing some form of psychosis—seemed increasingly unlikely. The visions were too consistent, too specific to certain individuals, too dependent on physical contact. And now one of them had acknowledged it, however obliquely.

What had once been a curious anomaly was becoming an obsession that filled the emptiness in my life. For the first time since my divorce, I felt truly awake, engaged with something meaningful, even if that something terrified me.

I spent the next day researching folklore, mythology, stories of creatures that disguised themselves as human. Skinwalkers, changelings, doppelgängers. Nothing quite matched what I was seeing.

By evening, I'd made a decision. I needed more information, and there was only one way to get it. I needed to maintain contact long enough to see beyond the afterimage, to understand what these entities truly were.

Ms. Winters seemed the safest choice. I'd known her for years. Her store was usually empty in the evenings. And there was something almost grandmotherly about her that made her less intimidating than, say, the broad-shouldered accountant.

I went to the corner store ten minutes before closing time. As expected, it was empty. Ms. Winters was restocking cigarettes behind the counter. She smiled when she saw me.

"David! Twice in one week—I'm honored."

I smiled back, trying to appear normal despite the hammering of my heart. "Just forgot a few things," I said, grabbing a basket and selecting items at random. Crackers. Canned soup. A magazine I had no interest in reading.

I placed them on the counter, hands shaking slightly. She rang up the items and told me the total. I handed her a twenty, and when she gave me my change, I clasped her hand in both of mine.

"Ms. Winters," I said quickly, before she could pull away, "I need to ask you something important."

The afterimage appeared immediately, dark hollows where her eyes should be, strange angles beneath her cheeks. But I held on, forcing myself to keep looking, to see beyond the initial shock.

"David?" Her voice sounded concerned, but she didn't pull away. "What's wrong, dear?"

The afterimage deepened, details emerging. Not just structure now but movement—things shifting beneath the surface of her skin that didn't correspond to her facial expressions. And color—a deep, bruised purple in the hollows, a greenish phosphorescence along the edges. The scaffolding beneath her face was intricate and perfect, like the interior of a nautilus shell reimagined by a mathematician with too many dimensions to work with.

"What are you?" I whispered.

Ms. Winters went very still. The afterimage stabilized, no longer shifting between human and other but settling into something in between. When she spoke, her lips moved normally, but I could see something else moving behind them, something with many more points of articulation.

"You can see," she said, and it wasn't a question. Her voice had changed—still recognizably hers, but with an undertone like water moving over stones. "How interesting. It's been a very long time since one of you could see."

I should have been terrified. Some distant part of me recognized this. But curiosity overwhelmed fear.

"What are you?" I repeated.

She tilted her head, a gesture I'd seen a hundred times before, but now I could see how it corresponded to a completely different movement in the underlying structure.

"We don't have a name you could pronounce," she said. "We've been here as long as you have. Longer, perhaps."

"Are you... wearing people?" I asked, my voice barely audible.

Ms. Winters—or whatever was using her appearance—made a sound that might have been laughter. "Nothing so crude. We share this space. Symbiosis, you might call it, though that implies a biological relationship that isn't quite accurate."

"How many of you are there?"

"More than you've noticed. Less than you might fear." She studied me with both her human eyes and those other hollows that weren't eyes at all but seemed to perceive me nonetheless. "The better question is: why can you suddenly see us?"

I had no answer for that. The ability had simply... appeared one day.

"It happens occasionally," she continued when I didn't respond. "Usually after trauma or illness. Some rewiring in the brain that lets you perceive frequencies normally filtered out. Your divorce perhaps? Isolation can sometimes thin the perceptual veil."

I felt a chill that she knew about my personal life, but of course she would—I'd been shopping here for years. She'd seen the wedding ring disappear, heard my occasional tired comments about "living alone now."

"What do you want from us?" I asked.

"Want?" She seemed genuinely puzzled by the question. "That's such a human concept. We don't have wants like you do. We're more like... caretakers. We've been here since before your earliest ancestors figured out how to make fire."

The bell above the door jingled as another customer entered. I released Ms. Winters' hand instinctively, and her face snapped back to normal so abruptly it was like the afterimage had never existed.

"Think about it," she said quietly as she bagged my purchases. "And David? Be careful who you tell about this. Not everyone you see is as... accommodating as I am."

I nodded mutely, took my bag, and left. My mind was racing. They weren't hallucinations. The things were real, and they knew they were being seen.

Over the next few weeks, I became more strategic. I started recording my observations in a notebook, developing a classification system for the entities I encountered. They weren't all the same. Some had the architectural quality I'd first seen in Ms. Winters and the barista. Others were more organic but still wrong—too many joints, textures like chitin or scales beneath the illusion of skin. Some appeared almost crystalline, faceted surfaces catching light that wasn't there.

I mapped their locations, their habits. I started to see patterns. They congregated in certain places—transportation hubs, hospitals, government buildings. Places of transition and authority. They communicated with each other differently than humans did—subtle movements that looked casual but were precisely choreographed.

And they were watching me.

I noticed it gradually. The ones I'd identified would appear in places they shouldn't be. The barista shopping at my grocery store. My neighbor suddenly taking the same bus I did, though I'd never seen him on it before. Ms. Winters walking her dog past my apartment building, six blocks from her store.

They never approached me. Just watched, their human faces pleasant and unremarkable while something else observed from behind those facades.

I became more cautious with my research. Started using public computers instead of my own. Paid for things in cash. Kept my notebook in a lockbox in my apartment.

Then came the night I found the symbol drawn on my door in what looked like graphite but wouldn't smudge when I touched it. A complex sigil, all angles and intersections, not unlike the architectural structures I'd seen beneath their faces.

A warning? A threat? I couldn't tell. But its presence meant they could reach me here, in my home. My sanctuary was compromised.

I packed a bag that night—essentials only, enough for a few days away. I'd go to a hotel, reassess, figure out what to do next. As I was about to leave, my phone pinged with a text message.

Unknown number: It doesn't have to be adversarial, David. We've coexisted for millennia. Your awareness doesn't need to change that.

I stared at the message, a chill running through me. I hadn't given my phone number to any of them. At least, not knowingly. Which meant…

Unknown number: Think about what you've observed. Have we harmed anyone? Have we disrupted human society? We maintain the balance. We always have.

I started typing a response, then stopped. Engaging seemed dangerous. But ignoring them might be worse.

Me: What balance?

Three dots appeared immediately, as if they'd been waiting for my question.

Unknown number: Between your kind's chaos and our kind's order. Between entropy and stasis. You build and destroy in equal measure. We preserve. We maintain. We stabilize the fluctuations.

Me: What are you stabilizing right now?

Unknown number: You, David. You're the fluctuation. A human who can see. It disrupts the balance.

Me: Is that a threat?

Unknown number: An observation. Come to the park. The one where you take your lunch on Thursdays. We should talk properly.

I hesitated, fear warring with curiosity. They clearly knew my routines. If they wanted to harm me, they'd had plenty of opportunities.

Me: Who will be there?

Unknown number: Someone you haven't cataloged yet. Someone who can explain better than the others.

The park was empty at this hour, illuminated only by sparse lampposts that created pools of light amid deeper shadows. I sat on my usual bench, overnight bag at my feet, eyes scanning the darkness.

"Hello, David."

The voice came from behind me. I turned to see a man in his fifties, gray-haired, wearing a tweed jacket with elbow patches. A professor or academic of some kind, by appearance.

"You're one of them," I said. Not a question.

"Yes." He sat beside me, maintaining a respectful distance. "My name is Philip, or that's what this form is called. I'm what you might consider a... specialist in human relations."

"PR for interdimensional entities?"

Philip laughed, the sound surprisingly genuine. "Something like that." He held out his hand. "Would you like to see?"

I hesitated, then reached out and took his hand. The afterimage appeared immediately, but it was unlike any I'd seen before. Where the others had architectural or chitinous structures, Philip's underlying form was... radiant. Light arranged in geometric patterns, constantly shifting but maintaining perfect symmetry, like a stained glass cathedral window designed by someone who understood geometries that human minds couldn't grasp. Not organic, not mechanical, but something else entirely.

"You're different," I said, unable to hide my fascination.

"Older," he corrected. "What you're seeing—what you call the afterimage—is a projection of our true nature into dimensions you can perceive. The longer we exist in this shared space, the more complex that projection becomes."

"How long have you been here?"

"This form has existed for approximately seventy years. I have existed for... considerably longer."

I released his hand, and his appearance returned to the unremarkable academic. "Why are you here? What do you want?"

Philip sighed, a surprisingly human gesture. "We don't 'want' in the way you understand wanting. We exist. We maintain. We've evolved alongside humanity since before you had names for yourselves."

"Evolved from what?"

"Not from. With. We aren't separate from this reality—we're part of its underlying structure. Think of us as living embodiments of physical constants. Gravity doesn't want anything. Electromagnetism doesn't have an agenda. It simply is, and matter behaves accordingly."

I tried to process this. "But you're conscious. You make choices."

"Within parameters," Philip agreed. "Just as you do. Your consciousness arose from complex biological systems responding to evolutionary pressures. Ours arose from the interaction of fundamental forces as the universe complexified. Different origins, similar results."

"And you... what? Just decided to disguise yourselves as humans?"

Philip shook his head. "We didn't disguise ourselves as anything. We've always been here, in the spaces between your perception. Humans who could see us created myths—angels, demons, fae folk, spirits. Stories to explain glimpses of something beyond ordinary perception."

"Then why can I see you now?"

"That," Philip said, "is the question that brought me here. You shouldn't be able to. The ability typically manifests after near-death experiences or profound psychological breaks. Your brain rewires, filters fall away. But you've experienced neither."

"Maybe it's the isolation," I said quietly, thinking of my life since the divorce. The empty apartment. The carefully maintained routines that filled the void where human connection should be. "Maybe loneliness changes perception too."

Philip studied me with an expression I couldn't quite read. "Perhaps. Or perhaps you were always meant to see."

He reached into his jacket pocket and removed something that looked like a business card. He placed it on the bench between us.

"This is happening more frequently. People who can see without trauma. It's a trend we've observed over the past decade. Increasing numbers, accelerating recently."

I picked up the card. It wasn't paper but some thin, slightly flexible material that felt almost alive between my fingers. On it was an address and what looked like the same sigil that had been drawn on my door.

"What is this?"

"A location where others like you gather. People who can see. They've formed a community of sorts. Seeking answers, just as you are."

I stared at the card, suspicion rising. "Why would you tell me about this? If I'm a 'fluctuation' that disrupts your balance, why help me find others?"

Philip's expression remained neutral, but something shifted in his posture—a subtle tension that hadn't been there before.

"Because the alternative is worse," he said quietly. "If left isolated, humans who can see typically experience psychological breakdown within six to eight months. Paranoia. Delusions. Often violence—against themselves or others. The community provides stability, context."

"You're monitoring them," I realized. "Keeping potential threats contained in one location."

Philip didn't deny it. "We prefer 'observing' to 'monitoring.' And 'protected' to 'contained.' The world can be... challenging for those with your perception."

I slipped the card into my pocket, not yet committed to visiting but unwilling to reject the option entirely.

"What happens now?" I asked.

"That depends on you. You can continue your solitary investigation, though I'd advise against it. You can join the community and learn from those with more experience. Or..."

"Or?"

"Or we can help you stop seeing."

I stared at him. "You can do that?"

Philip nodded. "A minor adjustment. Painless. You'd return to perceiving the world as you always did before. Live a normal life."

The offer was tempting. To unsee what I'd seen, to return to blissful ignorance. But something held me back. For all its terrors, this new perception had awakened me from the numb routine my life had become. I felt alive again, engaged with something larger than myself.

"Why would you offer that? If I'm really a threat to your... balance, why not just eliminate me?"

"Because that's not what we do," Philip said simply. "We maintain, we don't destroy. And because choice is fundamental to consciousness—yours and ours. Forcing compliance creates more instability than it resolves."

He stood, straightening his tweed jacket. "Think about your options, David. Visit the address if you wish. Or contact me if you'd prefer to return to your previous perception." He held out a hand.

After a moment's hesitation, I shook it. The radiant geometries appeared again, more complex than before, extending beyond what seemed possible within the confines of a human form.

"How do I contact you?" I asked as I released his hand.

"You already have my number," he said with a slight smile.

Then he walked away, disappearing into the shadows beyond the lamplight.

I sat on the bench for a long time afterward, turning the card over and over in my fingers. The symbol seemed to shift slightly when I wasn't looking directly at it, angles changing, connections rearranging themselves.

Eventually, I took out my phone and entered the address into my map app. It was across town, in an area I wasn't familiar with. According to the app, it was a community center of some kind.

As I stared at the screen, a text message appeared.

Unknown number: They won't tell you everything. Some truths are reserved for those deeper in the hierarchy.

A different number than Philip's. I didn't recognize it.

Me: Who is this?

Unknown number: Someone who sees more than they do. The "balance" they maintain isn't what they claim. Ask yourself: if they're so benevolent, why do they concentrate in positions of power and influence?

I felt a chill. This person—whoever they were—had valid points. The entities did seem to congregate around centers of authority.

Me: What do they really want?

Unknown number: Come to this address instead. See for yourself.

A different location appeared, somewhere on the outskirts of the city.

I hesitated, uncertain which path to take. The community center with its supervised "seers." The mysterious alternative offered by this unknown contact. Or Philip's offer to return to normal perception, to unsee what couldn't be unseen.

As I contemplated my options, I noticed something strange. A subtle darkening at the edges of my vision, like an afterimage forming without physical contact. I blinked, trying to clear it, but the effect intensified.

I looked down at my hands, and my breath caught in my throat.

There it was—that same architectural patterning I'd seen beneath Ms. Winters' skin, now visible beneath my own. Angles and structures that didn't correspond to human anatomy, shifting subtly with each movement of my fingers. Fractals folding in on themselves in impossible ways, creating depths where no depths should exist.

I hadn't touched anyone. Hadn't done anything to trigger this vision.

Unless…

I pulled the card from my pocket, stared at it in growing horror. The material that had felt almost alive between my fingers. The symbol that seemed to shift when I wasn't looking directly at it.

"No," I whispered.

I dropped the card and frantically wiped my hands on my jeans, as if I could remove whatever had transferred from the card to my skin. But the afterimage remained, growing clearer by the second.

My phone pinged again.

Philip: It was always going to happen, David. The ability to see isn't a malfunction. It's the first stage of integration.

Another message, from the other unknown number:

Unknown number: Don't listen to them. It can be reversed. We can help you. But you need to come NOW.

I stood on shaky legs, looking from the card on the ground to my phone with its conflicting messages. The afterimage continued to spread, moving up my arms now, restructuring me from the outside in—or perhaps from the inside out.

Was this transformation real, or just another layer of perception? Was I becoming like them, or simply seeing what had always been there, hidden beneath human appearance?

I looked up at the night sky, seeking something constant, something unmistakably real. The stars glittered coldly, distant and indifferent.

And as I watched, they too began to change—afterimages forming around them, connecting them in patterns I'd never seen on any star chart. The entire cosmos revealing its underlying structure, its true nature bleeding through the comforting illusion of familiar constellations.

I understood then what Philip had meant. This wasn't something happening to me. It was something being revealed to me. The world as it actually existed, beneath the perceptual filters that made human life comprehensible.

My phone pinged one final time.

Philip: Come home, David. You're not losing your humanity. You're finally seeing it for what it always was.

I took one last look at my hands, at the impossible geometries now fully visible beneath my skin. Then I made my choice and started walking, leaving behind the dropped card, the abandoned bag, and the last remnants of a perception that had always been incomplete.

The afterimage wasn't an illusion.

It was the world coming into focus.