The Parasociopath
and the Long-Distance Runner

by Jules

Part 1 appears in this issue.

conclusion

The suspense is dreadful and seductive. It gives Hulls a charge, even when he is at his City Light job. It keeps him awake at night. Finally, weeks later, a late-night downpour sends the neighbors inside and turns the street into a series of dimly lit yellow pools surrounded by silver-streaked blackness. Hulls leaves his truck and forces the gate open.

Once inside the line of hedges, beneath the big trees, Hulls is certain no one can see him. The leaves are so dense that barely any rain even gets through. He takes advantage of the sheltering branches to stroll around the place, taking his time. So far, he has always been able to find a way in. There is a stained-glass circle window over the door, but it is too small and too high. He cannot get in that way.

It is easy to kick in a basement window and wriggle through feet-first.

Colin isn’t in the basement, of course. Why would he be, at this hour? In the beam of Hulls’ flashlight, the place seems like a cave littered with detritus from an obsolete era too recent for nostalgia. The books and heavy pens and thick square glasses seem very close when the flashlight picks them out against the background of uniform darkness, as if they swam into existence only at that moment. Hulls dismisses them just as quickly. They spark no curiosity in him, not with Colin so nearby.

Hulls climbs stairs and pushes open the basement door. Colin is not in the living room either.

There is an invisible line connecting the two of them. Rather than slackening as Hulls gets closer to his goal, the line winds tighter. He can practically feel invisible hooks through his ribs and eye sockets. They pull him down the hallway, past long, low bookcases and walls dotted with murky picture frames that reflect his own face and form.

Maybe if Colin invited Hulls and were guiding him around the house on a green, shady afternoon this would be different. Hulls is jealous again. He should have that experience. He should be excited and curious seeing these things for the first time. They should be folded into his life as he borrows that book or drinks from this mug or makes a call from the landline. Hulls yanks the phone line free. The snapping plastic as he rips the cord out of the wall makes him feel powerful. He is in command of this situation.

Then he pushes open a door to find Colin, and all other thoughts leave his mind. Hulls feels Colin’s nearness as a shock across his skin, tingling from the backs of his knees up his spine and the way to his fingertips. He hasn’t experienced euphoria this pure since the star-crossed reply to his comment.

Colin is sprawled across a low-backed chair, knees wide, feet bare, eyes closed, head tipped back so the V of his throat is visible. A guitar leans against one side of the chair. A yellow pad of paper rests on the arm of the chair, under one ink-smeared hand. The pen has rolled away somewhere.

No one sees him like this, Hulls thinks. He’s asleep. Even he isn’t aware of this. Only me.

Hulls’ fascination is short-lived. Colin suddenly brings his feet under him and reaches for the neck of the guitar, twisting his body like a coiled spring. He is fast, but Hulls is faster. He brings the utility flashlight across Colin’s wrist. There is a snap. Colin screams, and the guitar falls sideways to the floor. The whites of his eyes gleam.

“Stop,” says Hulls. “I’m not going to do anything you don’t want me to do.”

“I want you to get out of my house,” Colin snaps. The authoritative tone is ridiculous coming from someone a head and a half shorter than Hulls, with arms like matchsticks.

“No,” Hulls replies, smiling, “this is going to happen. You broke the rules.”

Colin glares at him, but he isn’t trying to fight. This is good. Nothing makes Hulls want to keep hurting someone more than resistance. There is joy in that, but he doesn’t want this one to be over so soon. He won’t get anywhere that way.

“If you do what I tell you, you won’t get hurt,” says Hulls.

He sees that Colin wants to believe it, despite the broken wrist. They always want to believe it. They always allow hope to override the evidence of their own senses.

“Ask me what I want,” Hulls prompts.

Colin’s eyes are narrow.

“I want to talk to you, of course,” Hulls answers himself.

There is an outburst from Colin that is quickly silenced with the threat of the flashlight.

“You can be very dense. Ask me about what I think of ‘Suntime Hours.’” Without waiting, Hulls outlines his thoughts. This is right. They have a chance now. Despite the rough beginning, surely this version of Colin will see that they are destined to be partners for life... or at least until one of them dies.

The yellow pad of paper catches Hulls’ eye. The words written on the page are simple and evocative and annoy Hulls because he should have been the one to write them.

“We’re going to work on music together. I’ve heard you playing sometimes when it’s early, and cool enough to have the windows open. Keyboards and guitar and all that. I want to work on them. After all, we’re both travelers, even if you are only an outlier. I already know most of what you’ve written about in your songs, and I can help you make them better. I know what you can never tell those mannequins at Old King.”

Colin sighs. “My family and friends have known for years. I don’t talk about it with everybody, but it’s not exactly a secret.”

“What do you mean, it isn’t a secret?” Hulls feels like the outlier has yanked the floor from under him. Or like they’d been communicating for years, just the two of them, and then Colin just pointed to a fourth wall where a crowd sits goggling.

“They know why I get spacey. Why I get names and places wrong. Why my shadow sometimes falls differently than theirs do. They’re just happy I wasn’t putting the money from ‘Suntime Hours’ into my arm. Took a while to find a range of outlier possibilities where they believe me, but being able to talk to them is worth the effort.”

There is more to the story. It is written across Colin’s face like scribbles across the yellow pad. It is a code Hulls cannot decipher, and that makes him angry. It mocks Hulls’ desire to rewrite Colin’s life into his own, their own. He is seized with the familiar desire to scribble out what does not align with the future he imagines for them both.

“You’re lying,” says Hulls. “You always tell interviewers that everything in your songs is all made up. Of course it’s a secret!”

“I tell that to interviewers because they’re posting it on the internet for any rando to read.” Colin’s voice is surprisingly, alarmingly loud.

Hulls does not like the sharp edges he is discovering. Before, he was always able to assume that Colin was shy, reserved and lonely. Hulls needs to be the stronger personality in this duo, but he is confused. Being confused makes him angrier. “You want to keep me happy, Colin.”

Colin’s eyes are narrow and glittery. “Don’t tell me what I want, you match-stain.”

“Enough. I am going to do whatever I want to you until your body gives out. I’ll know what you’ll want, alright. We’ve done this already. Many times.”

“You’ve killed me before.” Colin finally looks shaken. He has grasped the full breadth of Hulls’ genius, even if it is too late for him to appreciate it. He rolls off the chair. Hulls raises the flashlight, but Colin has fallen through the possibility of this world in a skein of reddish light the same color as his hair.

* * *

Hulls follows him, raising the flashlight in one version of the world and bringing it down in the next. In this version of the world — not future, just sideways — they stand in a burned-out husk of a building open to the stars above. Masses of tiny, glowing purple worms cluster in the corners.

There is a struggle, brief and intense. Then Hulls’ flashlight connects with Colin’s skull. Power surges through him at the feeling of impact. He is the one in control here. He is done leaving room for doubt. A grin stretches across Hulls’ face. This is right. Colin leans back against the burned-out wall, looking up at him through a mask of blood.

“I could have done you so right,” says Hulls. “We could have been everything. But you chose to debase yourself with others who can’t possibly understand. You’ve made yourself nothing in my eyes.”

If they cannot be equals, then Colin’s story will be subordinate to Hulls’. If Colin won’t follow the script in life, he will in death. Rather than just taking Polaroids of the body where it lands, as Hulls has done before, he will arrange it and pose with it. He will give the outlier’s life meaning by taking it from him and photographing it as it should have been.

Then Hulls will try again in the nearest possible world where Colin hasn’t broken the rules. Surely that one will work.

Most people — ones who are invested in a project to the extent that Hulls is — would fail to notice the footfalls behind them. Hulls isn’t most people. Colin’s eyes shift past him to whatever interfering bystander approaches in this strange variation of possibility. Hulls turns, swinging the flashlight at full force along Colin’s line of sight.

The flashlight stops, caught by someone as strong as he is. The contact is so abrupt that Hulls nearly lets go.

“Still with the flashlight? You really are a one-trick pony.”

Hulls finds himself looking into a distorted mirror. The intruder looks like him, right down to the green flecks in his eyes. The aesthetic is completely different from Hulls’ own: flannel shirt, thick sandy hair cut short, a beard and mustache. He looks at ease in his own skin. Hulls hates him instantly.

“Who—?”

This abomination speaks in an echo of Hulls’ own voice. “I’m what happened when there was an effective intervention for people like me — like us — in a possibility-range far, far from here.”

“You aren’t wanted,” Hulls snaps. “Get out of here.”

“Not going to happen,” the abomination says. It shakes its head, but its green-flecked eyes never leave Hulls’ face. “I can’t let you keep creating swaths of possibilities where Colin dies. Besides, whatever happens won’t be enough. It never is, for versions of me like you.”

“I am not a version of you,” Hulls’ voice rises and cracks. “You’re a version of me.”

“Ye gods,” Colin mutters. He leans back against the blood-flecked wall.

“How can you even be here?” Hulls demands. “I’ve never met another of myself, no matter where or when I go.”

“That’s the thing about cluster probabilities where I’m from,” the abomination says cheerfully. “They understand a lot more about the world than this one does. You’re in a backwater. A far-flung outlier of possibility. In the interior, there’s a whole field of study that understands how to travel and interact with other selves rather than sliding about into their place. I don’t know how it works, but it’s supposed to be therapeutic.”

The voice is Hulls’, the tone is his own, but the vocabulary and mannerisms are so very wrong.

“For me,” the abomination continues, “it’s therapeutic in more ways than one. You’ve been killing the man whose music pulled me up from a dark place and, if that doesn’t happen, there will be more ranges like you and fewer like me. I’m already not very probable.”

“So what?” snaps Hulls.

The abomination smiles. “I’m a musician—”

“So am I,” Hulls breaks in, “but nobody wants to work with me. Nobody understands what I’m about.”

“Plenty of people wanted to work with you,” the abomination says sternly.

“They were all idiots.”

“They weren’t. Trust me. I got a record deal—”

“You sold out!” Hulls is outraged. This cannot be. This absolutely cannot be. Hulls is certain that he is the most successful version of himself.

“And went on tour as an opener for one of my biggest influences: Long-Distance Runner.” The abomination gestures toward Colin. “I saw the whole country, I learned...”

The abomination’s voice fades away like a radio station lost in static. Hulls only hears his own heart drumming in his ears and the whispery grinding of his own teeth. He went as far as anyone could, given the unfairness of all possible worlds. He never had a chance. Everyone was against him. The producers and managers of the world screwed him over. He will never get what he is owed because others always take it from him. Even this other version of himself is taking what he deserves. Hulls hates this interloper with his entire being, not just with the alternating obsession and hatred he reserves for Long-Distance Runner.

* * *

Colin squeezes his eyes shut and opens them, hoping that will clear his head. It doesn’t. He still feels as though the floor is about to tilt, like the walls are about to peel back and reveal the abyssal void beyond the corners of the world.

The two big guys who followed him to this burned-out shell get loud again. Their blurry voices rise, making him wince. At first Colin hopes for rescue from the second guy, but the two start to fight over which version of him they want. Even the new one wants Colin to fill a role for him.

Colin brushes blood away from his eyes and hisses at the bolt of pain in his wrist. The pain is monstrous, but it brings his hazy consciousness back to focus. Neither of these two will help him. They’re fighting past him to one another. He recognizes their tone because he used to be like them, expecting others in far-flung possible worlds to conform to his expectations and history.

When Colin first discovered his ability to travel, he’d changed possible timelines on a whim, casually tearing away the communal threads that connected him to the people around him. Nieces and nephews changed features, changed parents, then in possibilities further away, had never been born at all. Friends never met him. Accents arose that he couldn’t place because the immigrations and emigrations were no longer a part of his history.

The inhabitants of each possible world were a social convoy. Colin was a bandit approaching from the desert horizon, snatching up what aspects of the world he liked best before moving on. After a while, he became lonely. Desperately so. He realized he was leaving little broken pieces of himself behind with every step across possible worlds. By that homesick point he was so far out that even his tears fell the wrong way.

Colin had wanted, needed, to return to the places and people he’d known. He wanted with his whole heart to look at the faces of his family. Yet he found that he couldn’t get back to them. Not really. It was easy to get away, impossible to retrace his steps across the endlessly tossing sea of shadows.

At last, he found a distant range of possibilities where he was accepted by the people who mattered. He relearned this new version of his family. He worked hard to build his life, to weave himself into the threads of his adopted world, to gain a support network.

Even now, possible worlds gather around him and recede from him, dense and sparse, a multilayered susurration that plays against his mind the way leaf-shadows play on a sidewalk.

The two versions of Hulls square up. Colin’s stalker raises his flashlight. The other one pulls a gun. The stalker grabs the other’s arm and the gun fires into the night sky. The noise is concussive. It is huge, in this decimated world. No one will come; there are only pulsing worms here.

Colin wants no part of either Hulls. He doesn’t want the worms, either. He must pull himself together. His adopted world is receding. The two Hulls lurch violently against one another. Colin takes advantage of their self-absorption to edge sideways, back through the last vanishing edge where the last outline of this dying world touches his own.

He stumbles into the wet, swishy grass of his yard, staggering as though he has stepped from a moving boat onto land. He looks up at the circle window above his door. Light shines through stained glass quarters of blue, red, green and gold, with a purple bead in the center. This is Colin’s beacon. He is home. His key fits the lock. When he finds his phone and calls his family, they will come to him. They will believe every word he says.

Maybe Long-Distance Runner’s audience will understand, too, even if they don’t know what they’re hearing.

Copyright © 2026 by Jules