Leaving the Nest — Part Two
By Robin Pond
And yes, when we step outside everything is different, confusing, disorienting. I’m sure I’ve been outside any number of times, to the park, the playground, school, other friends’ homes. For that matter, I’m sure I live in a well-kept suburban two-story home with my mother and father and brother and sister. But, as sure as I am, there is something fuzzy about all these memories, and they don’t fit with the reality I’m now experiencing. Mr. Wilde is escorting me away from a door with the number 719 on it, leading me down a long hallway in what appears to be a large apartment building, into an elevator. Once outside, I glance back at the cinder-block structure, much larger than any building I’ve ever seen before.
“The conveyance is right this way.” Mr. Wilde places a hand on my back, urging me toward the street. The elongated bus already contains a number of other people roughly my age. I climb aboard and take a seat a few rows down, beside a young woman who greets me with a smile, “Hi, I’m Jennifer.”
“But I’m Jennifer.”
“What a coincidence,” exclaims the other Jennifer. “Are you as excited to be going off to the University as I am?”
I study this other woman and check out my own reflection in the window next to her. We’re not identical but look enough alike to be sisters. All the other men and women around us also look very much alike. Some introduce themselves to me. All the women are called Jennifer. All the young men are called Scott. Several groups around me are chatting, essentially all saying the same things, how they are so excited to be going off to the University, how they can’t wait for the adventure to start, to make new friends, to experience so much more.
A horrifying thought flickers on the edges of my awareness, This isn’t real.
I leap up and charge up the aisle. At the entrance to the conveyance, Mr. Wilde puts a hand up to stop me but I duck under it and run faster. Behind me I hear him announcing, “We’ve got a non-accepter. She’s trying to return.”
A disembodied voice asks, “Do you require an enhanced extraction crew?”
But he declines the assistance. “I think I can handle it. Stand by.”
Robin Pond is a Canadian writer of plays and prose fiction. His mystery novel, Last Voyage, was published in 2018 and in the last several years he has published numerous speculative short stories in various magazines and anthologies, including Ginger which was voted Best Steampunk Short Story in the 2024 Critters Annual Readers Poll. Robin’s sci fi novella, Assimilation, and full-length novel, Canaan Within, are both available through Amazon.
Copyright © 2025 Robin Pond