Chapter 1: The Snickers Prize

Chapter 1: The Snickers Prize

The heat in Tucson was a physical presence, a weight that pressed down on the city and seeped through the thin walls of Aaron’s new apartment. It was only 10 p.m., but the cheap air conditioner in the window could do little more than rattle and stir the soupy air. Sweat trickled down his temples as he stared at the last of the moving boxes, a cardboard mountain range bisecting his barren living room.

He’d been here a week. A week of unpacking into silence, a week of the monotonous click-clack of his remote data entry job, a week of realizing that moving to a new city where his only connection—his brother—had already packed up and left for a better offer was a special kind of self-inflicted exile. He was twenty-eight, drowning in debt, and his greatest ambition for the evening was to decide between instant noodles or the slightly more extravagant option of a frozen pizza.

That’s when he first saw the light.

It was coming from the pantry. A sliver of it, sharp and brilliant, leaking from under the cheap, hollow-core door. It wasn't the warm, yellow glow of a bare bulb. This light was fluid, electric, shifting from a vibrant magenta to a deep, chemical green, then to a blinding gold.

Aaron froze, a half-empty glass of water in his hand. A prank? The previous tenants? He was on the third floor. No one could be outside. He crept closer, his socked feet silent on the worn linoleum of the kitchen. The air around the pantry door felt… different. It hummed with a low, almost inaudible thrum, like a massive television on mute.

His rational mind, the part of him that spent eight hours a day spotting irregularities in spreadsheets, offered up a dozen logical explanations: a bizarre electrical fault, a reflection from a passing car hitting a piece of glass just right, a stress-induced hallucination brought on by heat, dehydration, and loneliness.

He reached for the knob. It was cool to the touch, unnaturally so. Taking a shallow breath, he pulled the door open.

The logic in his brain shattered.

It wasn't a pantry. The small, four-by-four-foot space that should have held his pathetic collection of canned soup and pasta was gone. In its place was an impossible vista. He was standing at the edge of a brightly lit stage, looking out into a vast, dark auditorium filled with the suggestion of a massive crowd. Gleaming gold arches swept overhead, pulsating with light. The floor beneath his feet was a polished black obsidian that reflected the dazzling chaos above. In the air hung a cacophony of sound—a jaunished, upbeat theme song, the roar of an unseen audience, and a synthesized voice that boomed, “RISK! OR! REWARD!”

Aaron stumbled back, slamming the door shut. His heart hammered against his ribs, a frantic drumbeat in the sudden, oppressive silence of his kitchen. He leaned against the counter, gasping. A dream. It had to be a dream. The heat was getting to him. He was losing his mind.

He waited a full minute, his breathing slowly returning to normal. He splashed water on his face from the tap, the lukewarm spray doing little to cool his feverish skin. It was just a pantry. A dusty, empty pantry. He had to prove it to himself.

With trembling hands, he opened the door again.

The game show was still there. And this time, someone was waiting for him.

She stood center stage, bathed in a brilliant emerald spotlight. She was impossibly tall, a willow-thin figure poured into a dazzling green sequined pantsuit. A vintage microphone was held delicately in one long-fingered hand. Her face was a sculpture of perfect, angelic beauty, but her smile… her smile was too wide, stretching just a fraction too far, a flawless, predatory crescent.

“Well, hello there!” she chirped, her voice echoing through the impossible space, yet sounding intimate, as if whispered directly into his ear. “It’s about time you joined us! Don’t be shy, come on down. You’re our next contestant on RISK! OR! REWARD!”

Aaron remained frozen in the doorway, a liminal creature caught between two worlds. One foot in his sad, beige kitchen, the other on the precipice of a fever dream.

The woman’s emerald eyes, ancient and hungry, locked onto his. “No need to be frightened. It’s a very simple game.” She took a gliding step forward, her movements unnaturally smooth. “We ask you a question. You answer it correctly, you get a REWARD! You can’t answer, or you answer incorrectly… well, that’s when you have to RISK!”

The unseen audience oohed and aahed on cue.

“Let’s start with a nice, easy one to get you warmed up,” she cooed, her smile tightening. “A little trivia. For a lovely little REWARD, tell me, darling… What is the most common color for a nation’s flag?”

The question was so mundane, so absurdly normal in the face of the utter insanity surrounding him, that it short-circuited Aaron’s panic. His pattern-recognition mind, desperate for something to latch onto, took over. Flags. Data. He knew this. It was a useless fact he’d picked up during a late-night internet spiral.

“Red,” he croaked, his voice barely a whisper.

The Hostess’s smile widened even further, a terrifying display of perfect white teeth. A triumphant trumpet fanfare erupted from unseen speakers. The lights flashed gold and silver.

“Red is CORRECT!” she boomed. The roar of the crowd was deafening. “Congratulations, contestant! And for your magnificent display of knowledge, you’ve won tonight’s special prize!”

She snapped her fingers. In the air before Aaron, a shimmering cascade of golden light swirled and solidified. It coalesced into a familiar brown, white, and red wrapper. A Snickers bar dropped from the light and landed softly on the stage at his feet.

The Hostess winked, her long black nails tipped with blood-red polish glinting in the light. “Until next time.”

And just like that, with a sound like a television being switched off, the stage, the lights, the Hostess, and the noise vanished. He was standing in his pantry again. The single, bare bulb overhead cast a weak, yellow glow on the dusty shelves. The air was still and smelled of old wood and drywall.

But on the floor, where the polished obsidian stage had been, sat the Snickers bar.

He picked it up. It was real. The wrapper was cool, the chocolate inside firm. His hands shaking, he tore it open and took a bite. The taste of peanuts, caramel, and nougat flooded his senses. It was the most real thing he had experienced all day. He devoured the rest of it in three bites, the cloying sweetness a grounding force against the tide of madness.

The next day was a fog of cognitive dissonance. He worked his job, his fingers flying across the keyboard, processing endless streams of data while his mind replayed the impossible scene. He tried to rationalize it. A waking dream. A microsleep. He’d read about them. But the memory of the chocolate, the phantom hum in the air, the echo of that impossibly wide smile—they clung to him.

As evening fell, a new feeling began to bubble up from beneath his fear: a raw, compulsive curiosity. The sheer, crushing boredom of his existence had been shattered. For the first time in months, he felt something other than anxiety over bills or the dull ache of loneliness. He felt a sliver of excitement.

At 10 p.m., he found himself standing in front of the pantry door again. He told himself it was just to prove that it wouldn’t happen again, to put the delusion to rest. But he knew he was lying. He wanted it to happen again. He craved the lights, the noise, the escape from the four beige walls of his life.

He hesitated, his hand hovering over the knob. What if the next question wasn't so easy? What was the ‘RISK’?

But the thought was drowned out by a stronger one: What was the REWARD?

A sliver of multicolored light seeped out from under the door. The low thrum began again, a siren song for the desperate and the forgotten. He had a choice. He could walk away, lock the door, and return to his life of quiet desperation.

Or he could play.

Aaron opened the door.

The stage was waiting, brighter and louder than before. And in the center of it all, the Hostess stood with her blood-red smile, her emerald eyes seeming to look right through him, into the hollowest parts of his soul.

“Welcome back, Aaron,” she purred, the sound a velvet promise of everything and nothing. “Ready for round two?”