Gloria had come to the conclusion that she was a ghost. That she’d been killed during the shooting seemed, to her, to be the most logical explanation for her current situation.

  Nobody could see or hear her. She could walk right up to a stranger at random, wave her hands in their face, shout in their ear, and elicit no reaction at all. She learned pretty quickly that people could feel her, if she touched them, but she stopped those experiments early after realizing how distressed it seemed to make people to be jostled around by an unseen woman.

  People could see objects she manipulated. She’d tried to take a sandwich from the grocery store, hours after the massacre, once she’d collected herself enough to realize how hungry she was, and the sight of a floating hoagie had caused a mild panic in the deli aisle until she’d dropped it and fled.

  Now, one sleepless night later, she was wandering around a park in downtown Minneapolis, surrounded by joggers and picnics. She felt a growing, maddening sense of immateriality.

  She’d made attempts to get herself some help, but those had proven fruitless. She’d had a plan to write down her situation on a notepad and show it to the front desk at the Emergency Room, but halfway into writing her note (“Hi, sorry for the scare, but I seem to be invisible. I don’t know how to turn myself back. Can you help?”) she’d become convinced that the idea was silly and that of course the doctors wouldn’t know what to do. Then she’d tried to call poison control, for delirious reasons that even now she couldn’t quite parse, and they’d hung up on her once it became clear that they couldn’t hear anything she was saying.

  At first she had tried using her condition to, relatively harmlessly, break a few rules. She’d walked right into a movie theater and enjoyed half of a rom-com for free before her restlessness had driven her back into the lobby. She’d driven -- she assumed driving was fine, her vision wasn’t impaired any -- to the capitol building and wandered around in the back rooms usually barred to visitors, but realized pretty quickly that there wasn’t much of interest to be found there.

  She was crossing the park, on her way to her next plan, which was to go slip into the art museum, fare-free, when the growing itch in her expanded, solidified into a wilder urge.

  Over the course of a few moments, Gloria went from an addled semi-acceptance of her current state to the total conviction that if she didn’t manage to make herself seen and heard as soon as possible that she would go insane. She needed attention, and she needed it now.

  And this impulse happened to coincide with her walking past a pair of police officers, listening with folded arms to a woman reporting some sort of burglary. Her eyes landed, magnetically, on the holster of the nearest cop, and she briefly entertained the idea of snagging the gun from his belt and firing into the air, into the ground, anything to get a rise out of the passerby.

  But then the sounds of the gunfire at the mall echoed in her ears and she felt instantly nauseous, and her hand jerked at the last second, finding purchase on, instead, a lanyard poking out from the cop’s pocket. She jerked it out, revealing a key on the other side.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  Gloria had never wanted to be a police officer, but since she was young she’d occasionally fantasized about driving one of their cars, sirens on, cutting through the traffic she’d always been forced to languish in like everybody else.

  She spotted the car, parked a block away, and was over and fiddling with the lock to its door within a minute. A wave of dread stopped her in her tracks.

  What the hell am I doing? She thought. I could go to prison for this.

  Then: they’d have to notice me to arrest me.

  And she was back to the lock, fiddling with the strange car key, putting it in wrong, upside-down, readjusting when she was startled out of her feverish efforts by a voice.

  “What are you doing?”

  Gloria was so accustomed to being unseen that, at first, she ignored the voice.

  “Gloria? What’re you doing?”

  The sound of her own name jostled her out of her fugue, and she turned to see a total stranger looking at her.

  “You’re stealing a police car?” the man asked, jovial. He was only a little taller than her, much older, bald and weathered and grinning. Deep, well-worn laugh lines framed each eye, dark and sparkling. “That seems out of character for you.”

  “Do you-” Gloria began. “You can see me?”

  The man’s smile widened. “Seeing things is my specialty, dear.”

  “How do you know my name?”

  The man stepped past her and laid a hand on the car’s door. “That’d take some explaining. We’ll do it while we drive.”

  There was an audible click and the door creaked open. The man swept a hand toward the interior, bushy eyebrows waggling. “Ladies first.”

  Gloria, even more shellshocked than she’d already been feeling, slipped wordlessly into the car. The man hustled around to the other side and joined her in the passenger seat.

  Numbly, she reached her key for the ignition. The man stopped her gently, shook his head.

  “You grabbed the wrong key, the one in your hand is for a cruiser down the block. No matter, though.” He tapped the ignition with his finger and the engine roared to life. Gloria felt a little thrill as she rubbed the steering wheel, tested the gas with her foot. Off in the distance, she heard a shout, saw the pair of cops rushing across the park toward her.

  She looked over to the man sitting across from her and he nodded, beaming. “Go on. I’ve been awfully bored all morning and this’ll be good fun.”

  “Is this real?” Gloria asked.

  The man considered the question. “Yes, in the sense that it’s happening in physical reality. No in the sense that there will be any actual consequences. The world’s about to change pretty fast, Gloria. Now take us away before those police ruin the fun.”

  Gloria, in a state of distant disbelief at her actions, revved the engine and squealed out into the road, nearly sideswiping a passing city bus on her way out. The cop car was responsive and agile in a way her series of hand-me-down and secondhand cars had never been. The speed was thrilling.

  The man flicked a hand and the stoplight ahead of them glitched from red to green. She sped through, narrowly missing a pickup that almost failed to brake in time.

  Gloria turned again to goggle at her passenger. “This is going to sound silly, but are you an angel?”

  The man laughed at that, hearty and from the gut. “You know, that’s not the first time I’ve been asked that? No, I’m but an old man. My name is Pema. Would you like to accompany me on some business?”