Most of the crumbs tumbled down onto her stained hooded jacket. A few stuck at the corner of her mouth. She rolled her eyes upward, searching for a memory of this flavor. It would not be found.
“They’re not cookies, they’re newtons.” Florian sat cross-legged on the fire escape next to her.
“No, I don’t know what a newton is, it’s just… these things. I like to do this.” He held up another treat and made a show of rotating the side toward his mouth. “Eat the stupid bread part off the side first.” His teeth zipped down the side of the thing like a rabbit stripping a leaf. “And then it’s just the sweet part left.”
She did the same. Her lips curled; her senses reeled at the artificially concentrated tangy sweet experience; electricity sparkled down the side of her jaw. An arch formed in her spine; the back of her head bumped against the cold steel railing; taste buds reveled in the glow of a high fructose sun.
A flash of light, a passing shadow, something moved inside the apartment. It interrupted the dance of her mind on the shimmering stage of sugar. She narrowed her eyes.
“What, no? Don’t be weird, it’s just my mom.”
The child’s bedroom window slid open.
“Florian, time to come in.” His mother leaned out into the grit of the unfiltered city air. “I don’t like you spending so much time outside, sweets.”
“I’m just talking with Cybil.”
At her name, Cybil leaned forward and stared at the side of the woman’s head, fig newton temporarily held in stasis between her lips.
“That’s alright, but you can talk to…”
Microexpressions are the fleeting traces that pass across a person’s face before their conscious will takes over and conceals the display of emotion. This is a physical representation of what is happening to the brain itself behind the mask of skin and muscle. Cybil exercised a hold on the woman’s conscious thoughts but there would be the microexpression, the ripple of uncontrollable instinct that rolled across her psyche first.
The woman had looked over to the spot she imagined Cybil to be and locked eyes with a thing that she could not identify; the depths of her autonomic nervous system leapt into action. Where her conscious brain was being told that there was nothing, the darkest parts of her hindbrain composited an image of every predator that every evolutionary stage of humanity had been programmed to run away from. And it wanted her to run. The woman’s cells were awash in a cocktail of neurotransmitters and adrenaline that soaked her mind in fear and surprise. Cybil experienced briefly this bloodline’s genetic history, drinking in the new memories. Almost seven tenths of a second passed before the woman’s brain ceded to Cybil’s will and pushed the seething terror back into the depths of subconsciousness. The instincts faded, the adrenal gland settled, the heart resumed a steady pace. She blinked.
“…your imaginary friend inside.”
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