By Bill West

A sound like sand dropped sudden from a tipper-truck wakes you in your student room. The glo-clock flicks to 12:15. You switch on the light.

In the corner your computer hums, hard drive flashing. You smile as you think about your hidden cameras activated by movement, anticipating the pictures they will capture; girls undressing, taking showers or making love.

You get up, move your telescope, draw open the curtains. You stare, it makes no sense. You reach out and touch, not glass but the grittiness of a bricked-up window. You close the curtains and open them again as if you can undo this mystery with a conjurer's wave of hands.

Who could have done this? Have vigilante bricklayers broken in while you slept? Staring at that bricked up window you would laugh if you could shrug off doubt. Guilt holds you prisoner.

Perhaps your cameras have been discovered. Had you left evidence to link them to you? Angry students might be crowding the corridor outside your door hefting baseball bats and knives, waiting to rush in.

You feel sick. You are shaking and a chill spreads through your body. Something strange is happening to your skin. Your hands seem to fade until light passes through them. You see glass bones articulate beneath glass skin.

You stumble to the mirror. Eyeballs swivel within a crystal skull. Shadows move across the frosted surface of your brain; images of humped naked bodies writhing. Your liquid heart pulses behind glass ribs while lungs like filament wings flutter.

You howl and scream. Are you dreaming, is this real? What will you do? How will you live now that people can see through you?




Bill West lives in Shropshire, UK. He is a member of a number on-line writing communities and is Group Host for the WriteWords Flash Fiction One Group. His work has appeared AntipodeanSF, Kaleidotrope, Every Day Fiction, The Drabbler, Twisted Tongue, Zygote in My Coffee, FlashQuake, Heavy Glow, Bewildering Stories and other places.www.writewords.org.uk/bill_west