Hayes stood at the entrance of a room. He knew neither how he arrived at this place nor what lay ahead of him.
Upon entering, Hayes noticed the simplicity of the room. The door he walked through moments before had disappeared. He turned towards a standard dining table, looking down at it. On the table were three place settings, each complete with different meals. He noticed his favorite food, spicy tuna rolls, placed at one end of the table. He sat down in the empty chair that corresponded to it.
After a moment of eyeing the food, he turned his attention to his hands. He noticed the wrinkles and spots littered across them.
“Even after I die, I’m still an old man,” he grumbled to himself.
Hayes considered taking a bite from the dish in front of him, keeping in mind that he was still unsure of his location. He figured that if he had ended up in Hell, the food would likely be poisoned or have a bad taste. He decided not to risk it, although it occurred to him that the mental anguish that came with this debate could also be a hellish trick. He was hungry.
He looked around the room, observing its other features. There wasn’t much, just a standard kitchen and a plain sofa. It looked like the apartment he lived in a long time ago. There was a door, but it was closed. He figured it was a closet or a bedroom. He looked back at his wrinkled hands, sighing at the misfortune he felt for being so old.
After a moment, the mysterious door opened. From it emerged a boy in his late teens, who looked around cluelessly. The boy’s eyes landed on Hayes, who was already staring back at him. A prolonged silence and staring contest commenced for a few moments before either man spoke up.
“What are you doing here?” Hayes asked the kid, who looked away to take in the room that surrounded them.
The teen turned towards the door he came out of, what was once an ambiguous room. The door disappeared, like Hayes’s had previously. The teen’s eyes returned to Hayes, who remained unsure of what to do with the new addition to the room.
“You tell me, old man,” was all the kid responded with. He noticed the food at the table and made his way toward it. His focus was on the plate next to Hayes’s, which held three slices of pizza. “My favorite,” he said, hesitantly taking a seat. His gaze returned to Hayes, whose food remained untouched. About to take a bite into the pizza, he stopped.
“You’re not some kind of an abductor, right? This isn’t some weird ploy to seduce or sedate me?” The teen asked, looking between Hayes and the pizza in his hand.
Just before Hayes could answer, another door opened. A door neither of them had noticed. Nobody walks through. Instead, there stood a silhouette is in the entrance. The unknown figure stared into the room but did not make a move to enter it. The two men locked eyes for a moment cross the table. The figure stepped forward, revealing the presence of a young girl.
She couldn’t have been older than five or six. She noticed the two older men at the table, but seemed unconcerned about their presence. The girl climbed into the remaining chair at the table. Her eyes lit up in excitement when she noticed macaroni and cheese, her favorite food, on the plate before her. Hayes smiled as the child took no hesitation before diving into the food.
“What are you doing here?” The teen asked the child. The child looked at Hayes, then back at the teen,
“You tell me, old man,” she said to the teen. This made Hayes lightly choke on his food, unable to hold back his chuckle.
”We never had good manners, did we? We never really picked up on social queues.”
“Do we at least die in a cool way?”
“Can I have more mac n’ cheese?”
“Get as much as you can, while you can. You build a lactose intolerance around age 20.”
“I hope it wasn’t dementia or cancer. You look old, I’m guessing it was one of those.”
“Dementors?”
“Just be glad we lived this long with all the stupid shit you did.”
“At least it wasn’t some heinous hate-crime.”
“Hate is a bad word!”
“I wonder if she knows yet...”
“She does. Mom tells me stories.”
“Stories? I love stories! Can I hear them?”
“I can tell you the story of how you fall in love…”
“Love is arbitrary, we do not conform to traditionalist society’s concepts of love.”
“Society!”
“You get laid a lot more when you stop saying stuff like that all the time.”
“Are you accusing me of being insincere?”
“Are there any Legos here?”
“I’m saying you’re unhappy. When you’re finally happy, you won’t feel the need to argue about everything.”
“When do I stop being unhappy, then?”
“Hey, we have the same nose freckle!”
A silence fell over the two men at the table, as they looked at the child. The child innocently stared back at them, a big grin plastered across her face. Hayes let out a heavy sigh, picking up the fork placed next to his plate. He took a bite from the meal in front of him. When nothing noticeably horrible occurred, the teen proceeded to take a bite of his pizza. Hayes smiled, looking at the two kids in front of him.
“What a coincidence,” was all he said.