She had always thought that guy to be strange. He was short in stature, and quite thin, and tended to walk with a bit of a hunch – even though he seemed to be quite young. But what really struck her as odd in him was the way he behaved when they met on the hallways. He would smile to her, and appeared to be a nice guy, even offering to help her with groceries. But he had an odd way to talk. He would stutter sometimes to say simple things like “How are you doing?” or “Good afternoon”, in weird, seemlingly involuntary pauses, and other times speaking so fast she had to take a couple of seconds to understand the words. 

Even his hair sometimes had a weird reflection on it. It was a pitch black hair, that reflected blue when hit by light – she never really looked at it much, but now that she thought about it, that blue was of a weird tone. Sometimes going to greenish, it looked almost unnatural. Or was it really her memories playing tricks? 

And the twitches. They were almost unnoticeable, but after a while seeing him around she started to see it. They were small, very fast, and random – sometimes his head, or hands, or a shoulder. He must have some kind of disorder, she always thought. Something subtle, but she was pretty sure she had seen an episode of some medical series with a case like that. But now… now she wondered.

With the events of yesterday, I can’t be sure of anything anymore, she thought to herself. Scratching her hair under the bandages, she questioned her memories of what happened for the twentieth time. Laying at the hospital bed for a whole day now, she couldn’t sleep, and couldn’t really stop thinking. 

He was a really nice guy. He appeared to help so fast after her fall, and the first thing she remembered coming slightly into focus after the searing pain was his look of concern. But what she had seen… The head is a strange thing, the doctor had said. We can never know the effects after a knock like that. Our mind plays tricks. But she could swear – she could SWEAR – her vision went quite clear for a couple of minutes while waiting for the ambulance, and what she was seeing hadn’t changed. 

The guy had freaking antennas, for god’s sake. His pitch black hair shone in strange colors. His eyes were odd in a way she couldn’t describe, and his limbs had weird protruding black things that made the whole arm look like a black saw. His hunch was bigger than ever and there seemed to be something in his back, althought she hadn’t seen it properly. While he talked to her, his weird speech and twitches seemed to be tuned up to twenty times the usual, and his voice sounded different. At those couple of minutes before being taken away, she was sure he had turned into something else. But how could he? The doctors talked to him while taking her to the ambulance. No one acted like had noticed anything strange about him at all. How could that be?

The thought of maybe going mad stirred her, and the involuntary twitch she had because of the sudden headache was almost ironic. She decided to lay down and try to sleep again, maybe hear some music. 

Our mind plays tricks, indeed.