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The grease from the fourth cheese danish left a thick, gloppy film on Vance's tongue. He washed the last of the doughy
sweetness down with a huge mug of coffee that was mostly
cream and three heaping spoonfuls of sugar.
He sat in his recliner, watching the
potbelly wood stove.
He had been lazy with the woodpile,
grabbing a few green pieces from the bottom of the stack that
were still weeping with pulp-sap and frozen moisture. As the
fire took hold, the logs began to crackle and protest.
Pop.
Crack-pop.
The sound was sharp, like a cap gun firing.
Vance frowned, his eyes heavy. Outside, the snowfall was so
thick it had created an uncomfortable padding of silence, a
heavy, acoustic insulation that made him feel like he had been
buried alive at the bottom of a deep hole.
Emma was still
asleep upstairs, and Vance took a deep, gluttonous delight in
the quiet.
It meant that the hardware store would be closed.
No
backbreaking work, no dealing with contractors, and no
standing on his feet until his calves felt like lead. It was a
goddamn blizzard, and for once, the world was letting him just
be.
He felt heavy — not just from the breakfast, but with a deep,
lethargic weight that seemed to turn his blood into cold syrup.
He blinked, and the woodstove seemed to stretch, its cast-iron
door elongating into a dark, grinning mouth.
Pop.
The sound triggered it.
The Loading Dock Memory
He was back on the loading dock,
twenty years younger, leaning against a pallet of bubble wrap
insulation.
He'd been drinking with the foreman, Miller, and a few
good ole boys — he was one of them, part of the crew, laughing
and swaying as the rye burned his throat and the cold air bit at
his ears.
"Vance is drifting," Miller had sneered, slyly cutting a
sideways glance at him and grinning.
It started as a joke.
Vance stood there, chuckling, as Miller ran
the roll of industrial packing film around his ankles, then his
knees.
He even helped at first, holding his arms out like a
mannequin. But then Miller started moving faster, his eyes gone
bright and mean.
The plastic hissed as it unspooled, a high
pitched metallic scream.
Miller shoved Vance's arms down
against his ribs, and the next pass of the film pinned them
there.
Miller didn't stop. He went around and around, the film
tightening like the coils of an anaconda. It wasn't just holding
him; it was constricting him, squeezing the air out of his lungs.
Vance started to yell, a clumsy "Hey, knock it off! Get it off! I
can't—"
He tried to scream, but the words became muffled. He
panicked. He began to thrash, his heart hammering in a frantic,
uneven rhythm. Being drunk made the panic worse, turning it
into a hot, hysterical blur.
Every time he tried to draw a breath,
the tighter the coils seemed to feel.
"Jesus, listen to him whine," Miller laughed, poking a finger
into one of the big air-sacs on Vance's chest.
Pop.
"I didn't
know bubble wrap gave men vaginas."
The others roared, pointing and laughing as Vance violently
struggled. After a few seconds, the frantic thrashing slowed.
He
couldn't catch his breath, his lungs straining against the
industrial strength of the wrap. He halucinated, catching amorphous movement in a darkened corner of the loading dock. His eyes rolled back, and he
slumped against the pallet, passing out in a heap of crinkling
plastic.
They didn't care. They left him there in the cold, dimly lit
warehouse, a forgotten parcel.
It was only an hour later, when Miller came back into the deserted loading dock, casually
sipping a Budweiser because the boss was asking where the
hell Vance was.
He thought he heard movement but he only observed Vance slumped against a crate,
gray-faced and immobile.
"Wake up! Boss is looking for you," Miller said, pulling a
utility knife.
He sliced through the layers with a casual zip, the pressure
releasing with a dry hiss. He pressed a cold, condensation
slicked beer into Vance's weakened hand.
"Drink. You look like shit."
The phone on the end table jangled, shattering the memory
and pulling Vance out of his dreamy, sugar-dull mood.
"Yeah," Vance grunted.
Miller was on the line, sounding like he was speaking out of a
potato.
"Get your ass in gear," Miller's voice snarled. "The plows are
behind and the owner wants the lot and the sidewalks
cleared. We're opening the goddamn store at noon. People
are gonna need salt and shovels."
"It's fucking 'Snowpocalypse,' Miller," Vance groaned, rubbing
his temple where a dull pulse was starting to beat.
"I don't give a shit if it's the end of the world. Get moving.
And listen, I need you to go up to 112 Blackwood and pick
up the new guy. He doesn't have a truck that'll make it
through this. You pick him up, you get him here, or don't
bother coming in on Monday."
The line went dead.
Vance sat for a moment.
"Motherfucker," he whispered.
He didn't remember putting on his Canadian parka. He didn't
remember the cold bite of the air, but suddenly he was behind
the wheel of his black Ford Explorer, the engine groaning as it
cut through the drifts. The heater blasted a dry, dusty heat that
smelled of scorched hair. Outside, the world was a featureless
wall of white.
A Passenger in the Whiteout
Somehow, he found himself pulling up to a house on a street he
didn't recognize. It sat deep back from the road, and even
buried under snow it had a proportional wrongness to it —
windows placed too high, the roofline pitching at an angle that
refused to resolve into any recognizable shape no matter how
long he stared. He didn't recall this place ever being here.
He honked the horn. The sound was swallowed instantly by the
snow.
Then, the back door of the SUV opened. The interior light
flickered on, and a cold draft of air swirled in. He could see a
shape in the rearview mirror, huddled in the deep shadows of
the backseat. It was a large passenger, wearing what looked like
a black puff parka.
"I'm not a fucking chauffeur dude. Come sit up front."
No response.
"Who the fuck are you?"
Still no response.
"Deal is I give you a free ride to Hell and you show some
manners."
Vance tried to say more, but his tongue began to feel like a
dead fish. He reluctantly pulled off, headed for the center of
town, agitated and confused. He kept snatching glances at his
rearview mirror.
"Weirdo", he thought.
It seemed like an eternity before the passenger slowly leaned
forward. As he moved, the cabin filled with the sound of plastic
rubbing against plastic.
Crinkle.
Sssshhk.
Crinkle.
Vance looked into the mirror and reflexively stomped on the
gas.
The passenger's face wasn't a face. It was a landscape of
translucent, oily nodules. The skin was stretched tight over
hundreds of air-filled pustule sacs, pulsing with a sickly, dark
red and purple light.
The thing reached out of the shadows
toward him. Its fingers were clusters of wet, pressurized pus
colored bubbles. It settled a hand on Vance's shoulder.
Pop.
A corresponding snap echoed inside Vance's skull. The left side
of the windshield went black.
"…the deal…" the creature hissed, its breath smelling of
ozone and musty packing tape. "…the final sale…no returns…
no exchanges…"
Vance tried to scream, but the air in the car was thickening. He
felt the phantom sensation of the loading dock — the pressure,
the heat, the inability to move.
The passenger leaned closer
still, his blistered face inches from Vance's ear.
"Lights out…"
The world tilted.
The SUV drifted into a snowbank.
Vance felt a strip of something cold and adhesive pull tight
across his mind.
Then, the whiteout broke.
The Final Sale
The smell of woodsmoke and fatty
coffee was gone, replaced by the sharp, stinging bite of
ammonia and floor wax.
Vance slowly managed to open his eyes into milky slits. He was
propped up in a hospital bed.
"Vance? Honey, can you hear me?"
It was Emma.
She was a blur of red-rimmed eyes to his right. He
tried to turn toward her, but his body was bubble-wrapped
again.
Thoroughly.
He heard her. But he couldn't speak or move.
"He's still in there," an older male voice said.
"The stroke was
massive. It happened while he was asleep in his chair. He's
locked-in, Emma. Maybe he can hear us, but that's unclear
at the moment."
It wasn't real, Vance told himself, his internal voice a frantic, tiny
spark.
His mind involuntarily rhymmed: "The car, the snow, the house I didn't know… it was just
the stroke. A neurological freak show!"
"I'm in a hospital. I'm safe.
It wasn't real..."
He clung to that thought.
It was a sturdy thought.
It was a rational thought.
He silently laughed into the void.
Hours passed.
He may have soiled himself, he thought. No one came to check on him. The hospital fell into the deep, artificial hush of
the night shift.
Then an orderly stepped into the room, his silhouette
a dark cut-out against the yellow light of the corridor.
"Finally. Someone is going to clean me up..."
But the orderly merely reached for the wall switch and flicked the overhead lights off.
"Sleep tight, big guy," he murmured.
The door began to swing shut. The gash of light from the
hallway projected onto the wall at the end of his bed narrowed further — six feet wide, three feet, one foot, a
sliver.
Then, the door clicked shut and from a window that
seemed several feet away, only blotted moonlight penetrated
the darkness.
Crinkle.
Sssshhhhk.
Crinkle.
Vance's eyes were locked forward, but he saw a shadow detach
itself from the corner of the room.
It wasn't the orderly.
It was
something taller...wider.
Something that moved with a heavy, lurching weight.
Pop.
The shadow leaned into the ambient light.
In a semi-reclining
position, Vance saw the oily, translucent nodules of a hand
gripping the edge of his bed rail to the left.
Then came the voice. A wet,
raspy rattle.
"…the deal…the deal…" it hissed like a deflating tire, moving toward Vance until the smell of stale
air and moldy plastic filled his nostrils.
In the moonlit darkness of Room 412, the only thing left was the
sound of something plastic-wrapped and heavy climbing onto a hospital bed.
Pop...
Pop.
POP!!
❧ ❧ ❧
"Bubble Bro"
Written by Magic Art
Copyright 2026, Magic Art. All rights reserved.
Refer to Terms of Service for further use disclosures.
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