An Aberration on a Wednesday

In the week before Christmas, two teenagers follow a glitch in reality through the frozen arteries of downtown Winnipeg, discovering a source of impossible light in the city's forgotten corners.

He saw it again. A fracture in the air above the bus shelter. Not a crack in the glass, but a shimmer in the space just beyond it, like heat haze off summer asphalt, except it was minus twenty-two and the wind was sharp enough to peel skin. For a split second, the red of a passing bus tail-light didn’t just reflect off the grimy plexiglass, it smeared sideways, stretching into a violet-and-green ribbon that hung in the air, impossibly vibrant against the city’s washed-out palette. The sound went with it—the diesel rumble of the engine momentarily thinning into a high, clean chime, like a single note played on a wine glass.

“Norman? You coming or are you gonna freeze to the sidewalk?” Abigail’s voice pulled him back. She was already halfway to the entrance of the skywalk, her breath a series of white puffs that the wind immediately tore away. She had her hood up, but a few strands of dark hair whipped around her face. She wasn’t looking at him; she was looking at the flow of pedestrians, impatient.

“Did you see that?” he asked, his own words feeling thick and slow in the cold.

“See what? The guy in the Jets jersey who looks like he’s about to cry? Yeah, saw him. Tragic.” She shifted her weight from one foot to the other, the worn tread of her boots squeaking on the icy concrete. “Come on. My ears are literally in pain.”

He jogged to catch up, stuffing his bare hands into his pockets. The Flicker was gone, the world snapped back to its normal, dreary physics. But the memory of it hummed behind his eyes. A chromatic aberration. That’s what his physics teacher would call it, a failure of a lens to focus all colours to the same point. Only the lens was the whole world.

“No, not him. The light. Over the bus shelter.”

Abigail finally turned to face him as they stepped into the stale, overheated air of the skywalk entrance. She pulled her hood back. “Norman. We’ve talked about this. It’s the cold, or your eyes, or the reflection of the stupid decorations. It’s not… a thing.”

Her tone wasn’t unkind, but it was firm. The tone she used when he’d left his history assignment to the last minute or was about to spend his last twenty dollars on a useless vintage video game. The ‘I’m your friend, so I’m allowed to tell you you’re being an idiot’ tone. He hated that tone.

“It was different this time,” he insisted, following her up the escalator. The warm air felt soupy. Below them, the traffic on the avenue was a sluggish river of red and white. “It made a sound.”

“A light made a sound.”

“Yeah.” He knew how it sounded. He knew he was one step away from telling her he saw fairies in the park. “Look, just… can we go this way?” He pointed down a less-trafficked section of the skywalk, one that led away from The Bay and towards the older, emptier office towers.

Abigail sighed, a long, dramatic exhalation. “We’re supposed to be getting my dad a tie. A boring, grey, ‘I’m an accountant’ tie. Not ghost-hunting.”

“It’s not ghosts. It’s… something else. It felt like it came from over there.” He felt a strange pull, a sense of direction he couldn’t explain. A resonance. “Five minutes. If there’s nothing, we’ll go to the tie store and I’ll even help you pick out the most soul-crushingly dull one they have.”

She studied his face for a long moment. He tried to keep his expression neutral, not let the frantic, excited energy show. She could always read him too well. Finally, she gave a short, sharp nod. “Five minutes. Then it’s all about suburban dad fashion. Deal?”

“Deal.”

---

The further they went, the emptier the skywalks became. The polished floors gave way to scuffed, seventies-era linoleum. The bright storefronts were replaced by darkened windows of defunct travel agencies and dental offices. The only sound was the hum of the fluorescent lights overhead and the squeak of their boots. The air grew colder again, the heating less efficient in this forgotten limb of the city’s circulatory system.

“Okay, where are we even going?” Abigail asked, her arms crossed tight against her chest. “This is giving me major zombie movie vibes.”

“I don’t know,” Norman admitted, and it was the truth. He was just walking. It was less a decision and more a compulsion, like a magnetic pull he could feel in his teeth. He stopped, looking down through the wide, streaked window to the street below. They were over a back alley, a narrow canyon of brick and dumpsters. And there, on the grimy wall of an old warehouse, he saw it again.

This one was bigger. A ripple, starting from a single point near a frosted-over window and expanding outwards. It warped the brickwork, making the straight mortar lines curve and twist. A cascade of impossible colour—cobalt blue and a searing magenta—washed over the wall, and this time the sound was undeniable. A low, resonant hum that vibrated up through the soles of his shoes. It lasted for three full seconds before vanishing, leaving behind a faint, ozone smell that tickled his nose.

“Whoa,” Abigail breathed from beside him. He turned to her, his heart hammering. Her eyes were wide. “Okay. I saw that. What the hell was that?”

Relief washed over him, so potent it made him dizzy. “I told you.”

“That was not just a reflection.” She pressed her hand against the cold glass of the window. “It came from down there. From that building.” She looked at him, the skepticism in her eyes replaced by a cautious curiosity that was far more exciting. “What is it?”

“I think it’s a thing,” he said, a stupid grin spreading across his face. “And I think we should go find it.”

### Down Through the Layers

Getting to the alley was easy. Finding a way into the building was harder. The doors were chained, the windows boarded up. But the Flicker had been centered on one specific window on the ground floor, one with a single pane of frosted glass that was cracked down the middle.

“This is a monumentally bad idea,” Abigail said, but she was already checking the alley to make sure it was empty. “If we get tetanus, I’m blaming you.”

“Fair.” Norman used the sleeve of his parka to brush away the snow and dirt from the edges of the broken pane. It was just big enough to squeeze through. “Give me a boost?”

Inside was colder than outside, the kind of deep, still cold that sinks into brick and concrete over years of neglect. The air was thick with the smell of dust and decay and something else… something metallic and clean, like after a thunderstorm. It was a workshop of some kind. Heavy workbenches stood like sleeping animals under thick shrouds of dust. Rusted tools hung on pegboards, their outlines traced in the grime.

“Okay, so we’re in,” Abigail whispered, her voice sounding loud in the silence as she slid in behind him. “Now what, flicker-hunter?”

He didn’t answer. His attention was fixed on the far corner of the room. There was no light, but there was a presence. A focal point. The strange, magnetic pull was stronger here, a tangible thrum in the air. He moved towards it, his boots crunching on debris.

In the corner, half-covered by a mouldy tarp, was a metal cabinet, the kind used for storing industrial equipment. But the hum, the weird resonance, was coming from inside it. He reached out, his fingers tracing the cold steel of the cabinet door. He felt a faint vibration against his fingertips.

“Norman, maybe we should just go,” Abigail said, her voice tight with nerves. “This is trespassing. And also extremely creepy.”

“Just one look,” he said. He gripped the handle. It was stiff with rust, but after a moment’s struggle, it screeched open.

He wasn’t prepared for the light. It wasn’t a glare; it was a soft, internal luminescence that poured out of the cabinet and painted their faces in shifting colours. It didn’t illuminate the room so much as it filled it. Inside, nestled on a bed of what looked like crumbling, grey foam, was a device.

It was about the size of a shoebox, and it didn’t seem to be made of any one thing. Parts of it were a smooth, matte black that seemed to drink the light, while other facets were a crystalline material that pulsed with an internal, multi-coloured glow. It wasn’t blinking; it was breathing. A slow, steady pulse of emerald green, then sapphire blue, then a deep, warm gold. There were no wires, no power source he could see. It was just… on. The hum was louder now, a perfectly pitched, clean note that seemed to settle right in the centre of his chest.

“What is that?” Abigail whispered, her earlier fear forgotten, replaced by pure awe.

“I don’t know.” He felt an overwhelming urge to touch it. It felt less like an object and more like a message he didn’t know how to read. It was beautiful and alien and somehow… familiar. He could feel the Flickers originating from it, pulsing out into the city like ripples from a stone dropped in a pond.

He reached his hand forward, slowly, cautiously. The air around the object was warm, and it tingled against his skin.

“I don’t think you should touch it,” Abigail warned, but her voice lacked conviction. She was just as mesmerized as he was.

His fingers were a centimetre away from the crystalline surface. He could see the light swirling inside, intricate patterns forming and dissolving like snowflakes. He hesitated, his breath catching in his throat. This felt important. This felt like a dividing line in his life—the before and the after.

He didn’t get to make the choice. As his fingers hovered just above the surface, a filament of pure white light, no thicker than a thread, lashed out from the device. It didn’t shock him. It connected to him, wrapping around his fingertip with no heat, no pain, just a sudden, overwhelming flood of information and sensation. The humming intensified, rising in pitch, and the light inside the object flared, exploding outwards.

For an instant, he saw the city. Not as it was, but as a thousand different possibilities at once. He saw the skywalks as tunnels of pure light, saw the snow on the ground as a field of glowing fractals, saw Abigail standing next to him, not just as she was, but as a child, and as an old woman, all at the same moment. The single note of the hum fractured into a million-part harmony. It was too much. It was everything.

Then the light from the device contracted, pulling back into itself with a sound like a sharp intake of breath, and the filament attached to his finger vanished.

The workshop was plunged back into darkness and silence, except for the sound of their ragged breathing. He stood frozen, his hand still outstretched, his mind reeling.

“Norman?” Abigail’s voice was a shaky whisper. “Your hand.”

He looked down. In the faint gloom, he could see it. Etched onto the tip of his index finger, glowing with a soft, residual blue light, was a perfect, intricate circle, filled with patterns he’d never seen before. And as he stared, he realized the hum hadn’t stopped. It was just quieter now. And it wasn’t coming from the box anymore. It was coming from him.