Evan Receives An Invitation

The attack came—of all fucking places—at the coffee shop.

Evan’s morning started off much like any other. He woke up to the sound of his phone alarm, grimaced, stretched, and stumbled out of bed and into the bathroom, splashed some water on his face and slapped his cheeks a few times, and made a cursory attempt at taming his masses of thick curly hair. He brushed his teeth for exactly two minutes. Then he threw on some pants and his favorite green button-down shirt—the one with thin white stripes—and walked down the street a few blocks to his favorite coffee shop, Yellow Dog Coffee, with his laptop in tow.

It was a bright sunny autumn morning, and warm enough that Evan worked up a sweat on his walk. When he arrived at the coffee shop, he was pleased to see that his favorite table in the corner was unoccupied. The barista glanced up at the sound of the chimes above the door  jangling as Evan entered, and, upon seeing him, gave a curt but friendly nod and began making his regular drink order. Evan took a seat at his table. He retrieved his laptop from his satchel and opened it up, but then just sat for a while, taking in the sights and sounds. 

Golden morning sunlight, bright as lemon, poured in through the many windows, no doubt delighting the dozens of plants lining the walls and draping across the shelves and displays. Ivy, cacti, peace lilies, philodendrons: they all looked fat and green and glossy. The table where Evan sat was almost totally surrounded by plant-covered shelves, which always made him feel like he was in his own special private little corner. He liked the plants. His eyes felt rested looking at all the green. 

There were a few customers scattered throughout the shop today, lounging on beat-up old sofas or murmuring to each other while perched on the high back bar stools at the counter, but Evan couldn’t really make out what anyone was saying. Seemed to be a slower morning, he thought. Sometimes it was a madhouse in here, and the baristas would be dashing around with trays of drinks like their lives depended on it. Not today, though. If anything, it felt a little sleepy. The warm sunlight, the smell of hot coffee, the quiet drone of conversation: Evan felt his eyelids start to droop.

“Here’s your latte, boss,” came a gruff, low voice. 

Evan, startled out of his drowsiness, glanced up to see the barista standing there, holding his iced almond milk vanilla latte. The barista was probably his age or maybe younger, with tattoos covering almost every inch of her thick body. Her apron was adorned with buttons and pins and badges that said things like “FUCK THE PATRIARCHY” and “BUTCH AND PROUD.” She had been slow to warm up to Evan when he first started coming in, but over the months she had begun to soften. And, regardless of her aloofness, she had his order memorized and made it perfectly every single time.

“Thanks, boss,” he replied. She didn’t quite smile, but the corner of her mouth quirked up a bit. He fished around in his pocket and retrieved a handful of crumpled dollar bills. She gave him the latte and he gave her the money and with a goofy little salute she walked back to the counter.

Evan had just lifted his drink to his mouth to take a sip when he noticed the envelope laying there on the floor. It was bright blue—robin’s egg blue—and it stood out sharply against the dark wooden floorboards. 

“Hey, I think you dropped this,” he started to say as he bent down to pick up the envelope, but the sentence died in his mouth the moment his fingers grazed the paper. A feeling like an electric jolt rocked his whole body. Somehow he set the drink down without dropping it. In slow motion, Evan pulled his hand back from the envelope. He saw that his fingers were bleeding. The blood gleamed like garnets on his shaking brown hand. His stomach clenched up. Tight. Hot. Anxious. Why was everything suddenly happening so…slowly? He looked away from his hand, moving as though in a trance, and glanced back at the bright blue envelope.

There was a soft sound—soft as cotton—and he glanced over to his left and saw another envelope on the floor, this one a cheeky pink. Dread twisted inside his gut.

“Not here,” he breathed. His words sounded muffled. Evan lifted his fingers to his mouth, slowly, dreamily, and nursed the wounds like a cat. It couldn’t be. Here? Was there nowhere safe?

Another soft little sound, another envelope appeared. It was apple red. It floated lazily through the air and landed on the floor near the blue one. Still sucking on his fingers, Evan took a step back. He felt something cool and smooth on his neck. Glancing behind him, he saw that he was backed up against the leaves of a golden pothos. 

The plants. The blood. The coffee. The envelopes. Was it a dream? A nightmare? 

But, actually, Evan knew what it was—knew without a doubt, now. He couldn’t believe it, though. Didn’t want to believe it. 

Not that his beliefs or lack thereof seemed to matter much lately. He tried to stay calm. Breathe in through your nose, he instructed himself. Out through your mouth. Fuck, his fingers stung.

Envelopes were everywhere now. He couldn’t tell where they came from. They just sort of appeared, fluttering through the air like outsized confetti. Not a single color was repeated: lilac, cranberry, goldenrod, lavender. They began to stack up over each other. The floor around him was disappearing underneath them. Glancing around slowly, Evan noticed that the coffee shop was empty now. No barista. No customers. No sounds, either—that is, except for the susurration of paper envelopes rustling across each other as their stacks continued to grow. 

Another jolt—another electric shock reverberating through his body—and then a searing pain across his left forearm. He yelped. A pretty purple envelope had sliced right through his shirt and then his skin. Still, even with the pain from his fingers and now the pain from his arm, Evan felt…fuzzy, somehow. Foggy. He was moving as if underwater. 

He had to get his shit together. He had to do something. Now. The envelopes were coming in faster and faster, and in greater numbers. Another one nicked his ear and he gasped in pain, jerking his head back. A few envelopes tumbled off his hair. He thought he saw some tightly-curled little locks of hair fall along with the envelopes. Jesus. Were they coming from the ceiling? He looked up, but upon seeing a magenta envelope gliding down towards his face, he instinctively closed his eyes and threw up his arms. A shock—a slice—a sensation of blood dripping from the back of his hand. He noticed crimson spots blooming on his sleeves.

My favorite green shirt, he thought with some dismay, and then gave a sort of strangled disbelieving laugh. Right. His favorite shirt. That was his chief concern. 

If he didn’t do something right fucking now, he and his favorite green shirt—the one with thin white stripes—were going to be sliced into ribbons by all these pretty paper envelopes.

Like a blade in his innards, the feeling of dread twisted inside him again. But this dread wasn’t just from the prospect of bleeding to death. Evan knew what he had to do to get out of danger. He shuddered. 

I have to fight back, he thought grimly. I have to summon…him? It? That thing? It didn’t even have a name. He didn’t want to give it a name. He didn’t want to know of its existence in the first place, much less form a relationship with it. But what other choice did he have? Running through the maelstrom of envelopes was a death wish. 

In through your nose. Out through your mouth. In through your nose. Out through your mouth.

A periwinkle envelope sliced into his shoe. Luckily the razor-sharp edge landed perfectly between his toes. 

That was it. Fuck it. No more standing around. Evan held out his hand, fingers burning and bleeding, and mimed the motion of a pair of scissors cutting. Snip snip. 

It was already there before the second snip.

A swelling; a looming; a vastness moved up like a fog behind Evan then. He didn’t want to turn to look, but turn he did. His head swiveled around dreamily and his eyes moved as if compelled over the summoned figure behind him. They came to rest on a figure first recognizable as a horror and then as a humanoid shape: an impossibly tall man, so tall that his face disappeared in the inky depths of the now-cavernous coffee shop ceiling. He was dressed in a smart dark business suit, and carrying huge wicked scissors in his right hand. Just as had happened when he first encountered the figure, Evan found that he could not focus his vision on its face; rather, his eyes were drawn irresistibly to the massive shear-like scissors gleaming there near the black cloth of the creature’s slacks. Each blade was easily a foot long, maybe two. Evan gazed miserably at their curving razor-sharp edges and felt his guts twist up and wince inside him. 

Desperate times, right?

The man—the creature—whatever the scissor-wielding thing was—suddenly swung the scissors up. Fast as a snap, the blades flashed back and forth in the air. The slicing sound they made was sickening/satisfying. 

Lightness returned to Evan then. He took a quick breath, and some of the murk and slowness retreated from his mind. He realized, looking upon the envelopes and noticing them hovering in the air and then glancing over reluctantly at the unnatural stillness of the tall thing with scissors, that time had frozen. The thing’s scissor blades, in the act of halving a lime green envelope, were halted.

Then, all at once, and so fast that Evan’s perception of the entire event seemed to briefly fold in on itself, time unfroze and everything continued on. Just as the blades met each other completely and severed the envelope, there was a swooshing puffing sound and a huge cloud of bright shimmery lime green dust burst out of the envelope and swelled into the air. All the hundreds of other envelopes followed suit and exploded into bursts of sparkling vivid powder. The coffee shop, the plants, the tables, the tall thing with scissors—all were now totally obscured by huge shimmering rainbow dust blooms that lingered and bled into each other and dazzled the eye. Curiously, the explosions of powder seemed measured and sustained. Their undulations resembled the movement of bright anemones more than fireworks. The slowness of the unfurling clouds and the overwhelming myriad colors bursting in all directions imperiled Evan’s sense of time yet again, causing him to lurch and spin. Terrified, he gasped, then immediately started coughing and retching violently. Millions of tiny glass shards sliced up his throat and lungs. The pain forced him to double over. Blood sprayed out of his mouth as he hacked. He couldn’t control his breathing. More and more colored dust shredded his soft tissues, and his stomach cramped horribly from all the coughing.

“You stupid goddamn worthless fuck,” he tried to force out between coughs. “You dumb fuck, these fucking envelopes—obvious—obviously she—“ He couldn’t continue. He collapsed to the floor, coughing. Dust and glitter and blood was everywhere. His eyes stung and burned. The floor was spinning and spinning underneath him. “End this shit,” he whispered. “Get me out of here. Can you at least do that?” Evan closed his eyes. Pain moved throughout his whole body like a heartbeat. It throbbed so mightily it threatened to overwhelm him, then it would retreat for a blessed moment, then it would return in full force and make him cry out. The rhythm of it was as mesmerizing as it was agonizing. Time began to soften and blur again. Maybe I’m bleeding the fuck out, he thought to himself in a removed sort of way. Maybe it’s about to be over.

Evan’s whole body collapsed into sharp spasmodic excruciation as another cough burst out of him. But through this, he heard the sound of the giant scissors, somewhere miles above him, open and shut one more time—snick-snack. Mercifully, oblivion fell upon him.

 ———

Evan came to with a jerk. He was back in the coffee shop. Everything was perfectly normal. HIs body was whole again. There was no blood. No clouds of glittering glass or lethal paper envelopes. The ceiling was the right height and the customers were there in their stools and the thing with scissors was nowhere to be seen. Save for the bit of spilled latte from sloshing his drink as he snapped back into reality, it all looked just as it had before he reached for that robin’s egg blue envelope. 

Almost.

With a creeping dread, Evan realized that a lime green envelope was now resting on the table near his laptop. It had been opened—somehow—and there was a little card peeking out. The card was crisp white in color and speckled all over with sparkly green glitter. Emblazoned in the center were two words in cheery Comic Sans: “You’re Invited!” 

Grimly, Evan closed his laptop. No writing today. There wouldn't be enough time.

He had a party to attend.