Polished Glasses
Wendell is a quiet, soft–spoken bartender who tends an isolated bar in a wasteland where time slips, memories decay, and reality bends at the edges. He does not know how long he has been here. He barely remembers who he is. Each day, more of his mind withers, leaving behind only fragments and rituals, like polishing glasses that reflect things no mirror should ever show.
He only understood one thing.
If he serves someone a second drink, he forgets them completely.
Wendell believes he is trapped within the bar. He believes he is human. He believes the strange distortions around him are simply the nature of this broken world.
But when a woman he almost recognizes stumbles inside, and flees in terror, followed by a quiet young man with a briefcase that should not exist, cracks begin to form in Wendell’s fading identity. The man treats him with an unsettling familiarity. He waits. He watches. And when Wendell finally opens the abandoned briefcase, a vortex erupts and drags him inside.
Only then is the truth revealed.
Wendell is not a forgotten bartender at all.
He is a creature bound to the bar for reasons he can no longer recall. A monster whose memories have been stripped away and sealed inside a device meant to contain him.