[WP] Your friend asks you to pinch him, just to make sure he isn't dreaming. Well, he WAS dreaming and now he woke up, but you stay where you are.

Gone.

Just like that. One pinch when he asked for it and he vanished.. It wasn't some "Poof" or some other dispersion like effect. He just stopped existing. And I remained.

The world he left me...Alone without him. I tried pinching myself til I bled and yet I couldn't join him. Was he asleep and this a dream? Or am I the dreamer? I can't make any sense of it. I went to his house to see if his belongings were still there but the house was gone. All that was left was a plot of land between his neighbors. When I asked they told me it had been that way since they moved in. One of which I KNEW had lived in his home adjacent to his for at least twenty years. I can't deny it anymore. I asked my family and they too don't even remember him.

All the times he came over. All times my family cooked with his. All of it gone. Even the photos are gone without a trace. Each slip inside the photobook was filled with strange grey pictures. Like the kind that come out of a kodak camera before you shake it and it self-develops. Then it began to grow far stranger..

Things began distorting bit by bit. My boss closed shop an hour early. When I asked him why he said "It had always been this way" I went outside to check the hours and sure enough the operating hours had been reset by one hour. I thought.."Maybe I'm losing it." Which isn't that hard to think. I mean my friend and his family just stopped being and now I may be having a breakdown. Then everything started to turn horrifying.

Colors vanished off and on. Flickering like some sporadic glitch in some unseen code on a video game. People were sitting in invisible cars. Babies crying with no sound. The face of a woman missing all of her facial features drinking from a coffee cup and having it pour down her blouse after running down her blank visage. But then all of them seemed to notice me. I had remained unchanged. My family began to suffer as well. Odd that they were the last to change...But then "he" had spent the most time with them outside of his family. I cried for hours looking upon my happy mother singing in the yard..Backwards. And then she too looked at me like all the rest.

Disturbed broken people in a decaying dream within someones head. I was with them and yet I remained unchanged..But I sensed an almost feral hatred towards me. As if they knew they were becoming corrupt and I remained as I was..The buildings had deformed into strange euclidean shapes both spiraling and looping like an Escher painting. People had walked through walls to attend buisness meetings held in an invisible conference room jutting out of a 20th story buildings top floor. They sat there floating and holding a meeting. I couldn't make out what it was they were talking about. But there they sat and debated in the deformed and broken language that only the corrupted know and I had slowly grown unable to decider.

Then everything began to collapse. The world began to grey all color and turn dark. Buildings and people began to be shaved away like they were being erased from the top down. I could only watch in horror as my mother now colorless and missing her head from the nose up sauntered into the kitchen to attempt to eat leftover broccoli and cheese casserole.

Then it grew dark. Color and light had gone. There was nothing by grey and white for as long as I could walk. Food and water no longer required oddly enough and I began to lose all sense of time. I began to sleep periodically to try and dream but it all resulted in dark. Just like the dark here. Finally my time had come. But it didn't. I counted my days by time I needed to sleep. Sixty three. Every "day" i grew more and more angry. "HOW DARE HE LEAVE ME BEHIND! HOW COULD HE HAVE ASKED ME TO DO THIS!? With one pinch he and I ruined this world. A world filled with beautiful people and wonderful songs and sights. Gone. Because he wanted to wake up." I felt myself change. I grew in strange disturbing ways. Equally as distorted as the world that is no longer.

In one of my usual fits of depressed crying I looked and saw a glimmer of light way off in the distance. I had to rub my eyes, which I had once debated clawing out since they no longer served a purpose and I wanted to feel "alive" once again, and saw my friend there. He was frolicking through a wheat field with a strange woman. A field which I could make out sunlight and color shining through..I ran. I ran to him faster than I think I could muster at speeds which made no sense to me. In seconds I was beside him and the girl pointing at me with tears and fear in her eyes choking back a stream. I knew I was corrupted at this point. Everything had gone. Eventually I myself would change...But he remained as he was. I had been growing...Angry.

He whipped around to protect his little "Mademoiselle" and saw me and he too began to cower. I felt my corruption I think.. Never saw it but I felt it and I knew I had changed into something horrifying. I grabbed him by his throat and lifted him in the air while the fair haired woman clambered away screaming. I looked at him struggling in my grasp and smiled.

"Pinch". And I squeezed.

/r/WritingPrompts Thread