At a quarter to midnight, Daisy knocked on her brother’s door and waited with her ear against the wood for a response. It’s been a week since she last seen him step out of his room. The last time she did was his shadow as he rushed to the bathroom to remove days of garbage, plates, and urine filled bottles. Since the death of their parents in a car accident two years ago, he’d been hiding himself from the world.
Daisy knocked on the door again. “Mark.” She called out. “I was thinking we’d watch the fireworks together since we have a good view from the balcony.”
No response.
“I have champagne and cheese balls.” She then sang. “Not that sparkling shit mom used to give us. But I do have that as well.”
Not even a sound on the other end. Daisy’s heart beated hard and rapidly against her chest. She gripped the door handle and turned it only to find out he locked her out totally.
“Hey! Open the door. Be respectful.” In her house, she opposed locked doors by guest.
“IM OK!” Mark shouted.
Daisy took a step back feeling a mixture of aggravation and relief. At least he said something to let her know he was alive. They used to be close, as if they were twins. They played games together, went shopping at bookstores, roamed the neighborhood on bikes when they were younger. Daisy being the oldest by just a year, she allowed her brother to move in after their parents passing since mark had no where else to go and didn’t have the skillset to start his adult life even though he was well into his thirties.
Daisy poured herself another glass of champagne and glanced at the clock. Ten minutes left until the new year. Her resolution was to take more vacations. She also wanted to finish her master’s degree in program developing, solely focused on the new virtual reality experiences taking over the world. As for her brother, who knew?
On the floor next to the garbage was a large white box with a yellow eye branded on the center. Daisy hadn’t noticed it before, but upon closer inspection she realized the reason why Mark was completely hiding himself away from life. The box was for the newest goggles she had been assigned to develop games for. She scoffed and walked out onto the balcony. Giving him the device was to help him cope with the loss of their parents, but ultimately it had been a huge mistake. He’d rather look at artificial stars than the glow of Miami’s city lights on a chilly night.
Daisy gazed down at the street and counted the thousands of tiny red dots from streetlights and break signs moving in a row. The fireworks were set to go off from the beach further south. She checked her watch. Two minutes left in the old year.
Her heart sunk. With no one to kiss or to hug in celebration, the loneliness loomed over her like a morning front in the dead of winter. Not even her brother to hold. She considered plugging into the other side herself to run in the new year with other lonely, digitally masked people and her brother.
“Ten, nine, eight,” a group of people on the neighboring balcony shouted. Daisy raised her glass and sipped the rest of her drink. “Three! Two! One!”
The first bulb shot into the air and exploded followed by hundreds of others creating a beautiful bouquet of multicolored flames. Daisy zipped up her jacket and went back inside for a hat. As she strolled through the hall, she caught onto the smell of smoke and cooking wires from her brother’s room. She looked at the space between the floor and door and listened through the thumping of fireworks for any movement in the bedroom.
“Mark?” She said, inching closer to the door. The smell intensified and soon smoke began to crawl through the crack. “Oh, my God!”
Daisy rushed to get a screwdriver from the kitchen. Her hands trembled as she removed the screws from the door hinges. She screamed out for her brother, but he didn’t respond. When the door broke free from the hinges and a cloud of smoke plumed out, the smell of wires and burring flesh intensified. Daisy covered her nose to keep from vomiting and waved her hand to clear a path through the smoke. Through it, the computer screen flashed rapidly like a strobe light. Her brother’s position in his chair leaned back became visible. Daisy screamed seeing the skin around Marks eyes and ears were seared and bubbling with puss.
The flesh of his forehead had fused with the rubber cushioning of the goggles and the computer screen, although the tower was burning continued to flash the manufacture’s logo, a blinking eye.
