Flash Fiction: Between Pulses

I was half-awake, shuffling down the hall in my crumpled pajamas, when I noticed the front door was slightly ajar. It wasn’t unusual for my sister to leave early for work, but something was different this time. Standing beside her, as she was putting on her shoes, was a man I had never seen before. His back was to me, and from that angle, his rigid silhouette seemed out of place—too tall, too unfamiliar, like an outdated mannequin stored away and forgotten, a brimmed hat in hand. For some reason, the shadow he cast seemed to stretch unnaturally, pooling into the corners of the hallway. There was something wrong with him. The way he stood there—motionless, frozen in a stance that felt less like a person and more like an object.

My throat tightened, and for a moment, I couldn’t speak. I stood halfway between the bathroom and the living room, hair sticking up in awkward tufts. They didn’t look back. They laced up their sneakers, their movements synchronized, a unit system running parallel. The screen door slapped shut behind them, the air charged metallic, leaving me alone with an odd, empty silence.

For a moment, the empty space between two pulses felt like a corrupted fragment from a dream that makes no sense in the daylight. I lingered in the hall, I tried to shake it off. Maybe I was still half-asleep, my mind filling in gaps where there were none.

That strange, rhythmic clicking from the night before resurfaced to the present—the sound I’d heard leaking from my sister’s room into mine, slow and deliberate, like someone typing a code rather than words. It had bled out from her room while she was supposedly in the shower last night, I in bed trying to sleep. I didn’t think much then. Now, it felt like part of something larger, more insidious.

My mind raced to piece together fragments I had ignored—the second bowls of leftover food she carried to her room, the way she closed her door so quietly but firmly. I had assumed she was going through some private phase, maybe a new project or obsession, but now the image of her sneaking food back there seemed…off. It wasn’t just about her hiding a man; it was as if she were feeding something larger, something growing.

And yet, an uncomfortable truth emerged—my sister I realized had been hiding a man or something in her room.

We live in a small house with walls thin enough to hear the neighbors' arguments and TV shows. Our family isn’t big—just my parents, my sister, and me. If they had any inkling of this, they hadn’t let on. They go to bed early each night, with earplugs and sleep masks, drifting through life in a sedated, perpetual loop.

Other signs confirmed what I hadn’t noticed. I had though the hall had a stale smell of cigarettes the other day, even though my sister had quit months ago. There was something else, something damp and organic, maybe cheap cologne, like mold eating away at forgotten paper. But most of all, there was the clicking I kept thinking about, fingers typing, reconfiguring her world from inside.

I stared at the closed door of her room, almost willing it to open on its own. My chest tightened with a sense of betrayal—she had been hiding all of this from me, her younger sister. How long? Days? Weeks? Months? The timeline was fractured, and I couldn’t tell where the truth ended and my own cluelessness began.

The more I thought about it, the more ridiculous it seemed. This wasn’t some sprawling mansion with endless rooms to hide in. Yet, somehow, she’d managed to pull it off right under our or at least my nose. I pictured her, sneaking him in through the side gate at night, whispering in the dim light of the kitchen, navigating the creaky floorboards with perfect precision.

And then, I felt something else—an odd sort of admiration. To smuggle a whole man, a whole being into the house, in this neighborhood where everyone knows everyone else’s business, where the aunties served as surveillance system of sorts, it was no small feat. How had she done it?

But as soon as the admiration flickered, the unease returned. What kind of man agreed to be hidden like this? And what about her? My sister, the one who once couldn’t even sneak an extra cookie past our mom without getting caught, now playing the role of some secretive host.

I leaned against the hallway wall, still unsure whether I should laugh or confront her next time I wondered if she brought him in.

And then, I heard it again—the faint, rhythmic clicking, like someone typing on a keyboard, but slower this time, almost deliberate coming through again, as if it had become aware. It moved down the hallway, threading through the walls, merging with the whisper of the trade winds coming in through the windows. It felt like the house was breathing with it, vibrating at a frequency just beyond my comprehension.

I stepped forward, my fingers brushing the cold doorknob, and I realized—whatever was behind that door had already found me.

// Zero Strike