Note from the author: While many of you will classify this as "sci-fi", I want to make it clear that this story is more than just that. It will span a lot of different categories, with Incest being a major theme. I don't know yet how many chapters this will have or where, exactly, it'll go, but I do believe that it'll go on for quite a while- possibly novel-length. Who knows? For now, just sit back and enjoy the tale as it unfolds. I know I will! And, hey, if you enjoy it enough, please feel free to submit a vote and comment to let me know!
The story I am about to tell you may make some of you uncomfortable. Some of you may become angry or indignant. I want to make something absolutely, crystal clear: while I am guilty of some pretty unethical things, most of which I will recount in this story, I am not really a bad person. I love my wife and daughter both very much, the way any good husband and father ought to. I wouldn't consider myself to be a cold-blooded murderer. I don't hold any real malice towards anyone. But some of the things I've done may lead you to believe otherwise. Most of the things I've done, I did so out of typical human curiosity. Other things... well... some of the things I've done, I hope, will be understandable and forgiveable. If you can't forgive me for my transgressions, or at least simply accept the fact of them, I have only one bit of solace: at least you will not be able to hold me accountable. And so we begin, first with some exposition so that you'll understand the world that I live in (which is and is not the same as yours)...
Have you ever found yourself sitting in a quiet place, alone and with nothing much to do, just taking in the surroundings with only your mind to keep you company? And, in those peaceful times, have you ever noticed something out of the corner of your eye, something that you'd swear was there but, when you looked directly at it, you found yourself looking at... nothing in particular?
Some people theorize that those things just out of your field of vision are ghosts. Or portals to another dimension. Or angels. Something other-worldly. Science might tell you that it's just your imagination. Religionists might say it's God. Pagans may claim that they're spirits. But now I know that they are all wrong.
Those things you catch a glimpse of out of the corner of your eye are real. Every bit as real as you and the chair you're sitting in. It's just that they're out of sync with us, mirages of the things that happen in the space between the seconds. A fly zipping along, twenty feet away from you, and your peripheral vision sees just a fraction of a second where the fly is frozen in time. Or the air molecules stand still. Or a passing vehicle stops inexplicably. It's things that are in motion, everyday things that we ignore because our conscious minds interperet them as being in motion- things don't just freeze in time. But what we see in those brief glimpses are those things indeed sort of "stuck" in time.
Ever since I was a child I noticed those things. At first they were unsettling to my young mind. I couldn't understand what they were or why I could see them more clearly than other people. And my parents, unable to see the things I saw, taught me to ignore them and disbelieve in their existence. "It's nothing, honey," my mom said countless times. "You're just seeing things."
But I knew that I wasn't "just seeing things." I argued the point often as a child, much to the consternation of my parents, until they sent me to a psychologist. After months of sessions with the shrink I came to believe what the head doctor told my parents: that my mind was seeing things just like everyone else, but it was sort of freezing a moment in time within my head- like the pause button on a VCR. He attributed it to a weird manifestation of a photographic memory. "Relatively harmless," he told us. "He'll grow out of it." And with a full year of treatments and appointments, he was right. Well, kind of. He simply convinced me through hypnosis to disregard my "visions" and stop thinking about them. I presume that, with a treatment like this, people call it medical "practice."
Years and years went by with me under that psychologist's spell. The events still occurred, but I had been trained to simply act as though nothing had happened when they did. For brief moments I could be caught "staring into space" and then I'd shake my head like I was trying to loosen some cobwebs and I'd continue with whatever I was doing. Teachers thought I was having problems with daydreaming, but the episodes never lasted longer than a second or two, so they never bothered me much about it, except to call my name a little louder if they were talking to me at the time about something. Girlfriends decided that I was being privately brilliant. Regular friends simply thought that I was weird or "spacing out." And, being under the influence of the psychologist's hypnotic suggestion, I didn't disabuse them of these notions and played along, never arguing or belaboring the point when someone noticed it. "It's nothing," I'd tell them. "Just something I've done since I was a kid. Can't explain it."