LeBron James tossed and turned in his reclined seat on the team plane. Normally he had no problem getting to sleep, even midflight, but now, everything seemed more uncomfortable than usual. He flipped over his pillow, readjusted his noise-cancelling headphones, and pulled his blanket over his head to block out the little light there was on the plane, but nothing was working. Every time he felt like was approaching the brink of sleep, a brief, but vivid, image of Anthony Tolliver would flash in his mind’s eye.
He didn’t understand it. Tolliver had scored twenty points, sure, but Tolliver wasn’t the main reason why the Cavaliers had lost to the Pistons. So why was Tolliver intruding so boldly into his thoughts?
Frustrated, LeBron threw the blanket off of him, thinking he would read a book for a while to make him sleepy. However, this plan was forgotten when he saw who was sitting in the seat next to him. “How’d you get on the plane?” LeBron asked in disbelief.
Anthony Tolliver did not respond. He just sat there, turned in his seat, smiling silently at LeBron. In the darkness of the aircraft, his face was visible only in shadow.
“Yo, this isn’t cool,” LeBron said nervously. He looked around to see if any of his teammates had noticed that a Pistons player had snuck on board their flight, then, seeing that they were all asleep or engrossed in their phones, he turned back to Anthony. “Yo. Say something, man!”
“I dominated you, LeBron,” Anthony intoned in an echoing, distant voice that sounded like it was coming from a hundred miles away. “I destroyed you. I, dare I say, dad-dicked you.”
LeBron’s heart was pounding way too fast. “N-n-no you didn’t. Not at all.”
“Oh, but I’m pretty sure I did,” Anthony repeated in that same weird voice. “You can deny it, but you know the truth.” As Anthony spoke these words, his mouth seemed to get larger, taking up more of his face. It contained no teeth or tongue; it was just a black void. LeBron watched with shocked horror as the void grew larger still, but somehow, Anthony continued to talk.
“I own you, LeBron. I own you. You career is slipping away from you, LeBron.”
Now the empty space, perfectly dark and absent of matter, had engulfed Anthony’s head and was expanding to where LeBron was sitting. “Hey, what’s going on?” LeBron yelped, trying to undo his seatbelt buckle but finding it jammed. “Stop! Stop it! AAAAHHH!”
The encroaching void of negative space was consuming him, as well. It reached his hand first, and when LeBron pulled his hand away, he saw that his fingers had been cleanly removed, but with no trace of injury. This amplified his panic, but he still couldn’t free himself, and his screams seemed to go unheard by his teammates.
The last thing LeBron saw before everything went to black was another vision of Anthony’s head. It didn’t open its mouth, but the words it said were projected loud and clear through the frayed and disordered jumble of thoughts running through LeBron’s mind:
“I dominated you, LeBron.”