INTRODUCTION & DISCLAIMER - When Corey, a university student from Brisbane Australia experiences an odd feeling of missing 10 seconds of time while driving, he is annoyed at himself for a lapse of concentration on the road, but nothing bad seems to have happened. However when peculiar things start to happen he cannot explain, Corey finds himself in a strange alternate dimension where some things are exactly the same, some slightly altered and some completely different from the real world he left behind. This includes major world events and closer to home Corey's family, who are now very different from the way they were just 24 hours earlier, not only in structure but the way they think about certain aspects of family dynamics...
Please enjoy the first chapter of 'Incest in Another Dimension', and be sure to rate and comment, as feedback is always welcome. All characters and events depicted are fictional, and any similarity to real people living, dead, or in a parallel universe are coincidental and unintentional.
*
The feeling was a familiar but disconcerting one. A sensation of missing time but 30 seconds at most, and the concern of what I had done during this small amount of lost time I couldn't account for.
"Get yourself together Corey and concentrate on the road for fuck's sake," I said to myself, annoyed at the slip in concentration when I was driving, especially as it was starting to rain more consistently.
Driving wasn't the only time this had happened to me, but this sensation only ever happened to me while I was moving. It would never happen if I was sitting still studying, working or watching television. During my last year of high school -- three years ago now -- I had participated in the school's 5 kilometer cross country run on sport's day. I had been running towards a stand of pine trees that grew on the perimeter of the oval -- then all of a sudden I was past the pines and running towards the adjacent rugby field. I had no memory of running this 300 meters at all.
I had a similar experience just last year when participating in a large fun run in Brisbane, when I simply could not account for about 500 meters. I, along with thousands of other participants pounding the pavements around Brisbane city on a fine and sunny Sunday morning. I was running along the Brisbane River on the southern side underneath the towering cliffs of Kangaroo Point, and could see across the water on the city bank the distinctive white Riparian Plaza building approaching, and the iconic Story Bridge in the distance.
Then before I knew it I was level with Riparian Plaza which towered high above the Eagle Street Pier and which had been Brisbane's tallest skyscraper until about 2006, and the Story Bridge -- as iconic to Queenslanders as the Sydney Harbour Bridge was to residents of New South Wales -- was in full view, leaving me utterly perplexed. Could I remember every other step I took of the 12 kilometer fun run? No, of course I could not, but I could remember running in all of the other scenic spots around the city. Except for this half a kilometer. So what happened? I had no idea.
This odd feeling also happened when cycling. One Sunday my mother Marnie, my twin sister Morgan and I went to visit our maternal grandmother Dora. Grandma had been widowed a few years prior, and lived in a retirement village in the Gold Coast suburb of Varsity Lakes, a few kilometers inland from Burleigh Heads. With Mum driving an SUV and having an attachment to carry bicycles, this was not a problem and Mum drove down to Southport, parked the car at the Broadwater Parklands and the three of us commenced our ride down to see Grandma.
It was a scenic ride down the Gold Coast past all the stunning beaches, towering high rises and the plentiful green vegetation that grew in this region. Mum, Morgan and I cycled from Southport down through Main Beach, Surfers Paradise, Northcliffe, Broadbeach, Mermaid Beach and to Miami, the weather fine and the vibe on the Gold Coast great as usual.
But as we rode through Miami, I suddenly found myself along with Mum and Morgan riding down the Burleigh Beach foreshore towards the Burleigh Heads, through all the towering Norfolk Island pines that dominated this area of the Gold Coast. We must have crossed at least two sets of traffic lights plus turned off the Gold Coast Highway to ride down the coast. I remembered none of it, but my mother and sister seemed to sense nothing was amiss. So everything must have been okay, I obviously hadn't gone riding through red lights or in front of traffic and added the name Corey Gibson to the list of road fatalities for the year. But where the hell was my mind during that missing time?
However and for obvious reasons this feeling was most disconcerting if it happened when I was driving. Tonight wasn't so bad -- well it was still un-nerving to be driving along the Pacific Motorway connecting the Gold Coast with Brisbane in deteriorating weather conditions and see the freeway exit signs for the theme parks in the Oxenford and Helensvale plus the higher attractions at these parks to my left one minute, then the exit signs for the theme parks at Coomera and the higher attractions at these parks in the dim light and rain to my right side the next -- but it was Good Friday. This meant not too much traffic around me. Had it been an ordinary Friday with lots of traffic, this would have been far worse.
It was far worse when it happened on Brisbane's busy Gateway Bridge near the airport in Eagle Farm one time, with me remembering driving onto the bridge one second then off it the next, and nothing of how I crossed the Brisbane River. I had a similar experience in Brisbane's West End, where to my dismay I had no memory of driving through several busy intersections, and another in the Redlands area one day while driving to Victoria Point with my mother and sister in the car.
Yet nothing bad had ever happened during these experiences like a car crash or falling off my bike, so it didn't seem like I had a neurological condition like narcolepsy or mild epilepsy, and these events weren't frequent. And other people I had spoken to about this had experienced something similar. Claire, my manager at the discount store where I had a part time job said that this happened to everyone, and that during these seconds that were forgotten, we were completely lucid and aware of what we were doing and Scott, my best friend had also had similar experiences.
This made me feel a bit better, but still it was un-nerving when it did occur so I was hyper-vigilant for the rest of the drive home, especially as the weather conditions continued to deteriorate. I had seen the first lightning strikes above the Gold Coast hinterland somewhere near Mount Tambourine while driving along Smith Street to join the freeway. There were many signs along this major arterial road advising of pending roadworks as part of the tram extension to Helensvale, and of the upcoming Gold Coast Commonwealth Games in 2018.
I continued further north through the large drops of rain, seeing the flashes of lightning in the cloudy skies, my journey taking me through the Gold Coast's northernmost suburb of Ormeau and into the Logan region that separated the Gold Coast and Brisbane. Rain fell intermittently as I continued north and reached Mount Gravatt, and soon I was in Brisbane's inner southern suburbs, and able to make out the light towers of the Brisbane Cricket Ground as I drove through Woolloongabba.
The Story Bridge looked very pretty with the lighting over the metal structure, and to my left the tall buildings in Brisbane's CBD were lit up, the lights reflecting upon the dark waters of the Brisbane River. A car passed by me on the outside lane and I normally wouldn't have paid much attention to it, until I noticed that it had stickers on its back windows stickers for a rugby league club. It wasn't of course unusual to see cars with decorations for NRL, AFL or other sporting teams, but this one stood out due to the team involved, the South Queensland Crushers.
With distinctive dark gold, navy blue and red jumpers and a steam-train as an emblem, the Crushers would make their debut in March 1995 alongside North Queensland and two other new teams from Perth and Auckland. My sister and I did not remember this for the simple reason that we were month old infants at the time, however our father Rick apparently took an interest in the new Crushers team and supported them over the well-established powerhouse team the Brisbane Broncos or the Seagulls down the road on the Gold Coast.
But while the North Queensland Cowboys were still in the NRL and won their first senior title just last year, it was sadly a much different story for the South Queensland Crushers. Brisbane's second team lasted just three years and played their final game on Sunday 31st August 1997 -- the same day Princess Diana had died -- before being liquidated and becoming the first of quite a number of teams to depart top level rugby league in the late 1990s by folding, entering joint ventures with other teams or leaving for lower level competitions.
It seemed a bit strange that somebody would decorate their car with stickers for a short-lived and largely forgotten sporting team defunct for over 18 years. At first I thought it might be an older car from the 1990s, but no it was definitely post 2012. Perhaps though the car's owner like Dad had been a Crushers fan during their short existence, had found these stickers at a market stall, charity shop or a swap meet years later and purchased them for nostalgia's sake?
Yes, that was no doubt the explanation, and nostalgia seemed to be a big thing this evening as another car this time a white van drove by, and it displayed Golden Fleece bumper stickers, blue in color with a big gold ram. Golden Fleece was a brand long gone from the Australian petrol industry before I arrived into the world, but the brand was iconic. My friend Scott's grandfather had a big Golden Fleece sign on the walls of his workshop. And my late maternal grandfather Alf had told Morgan and I about Golden Fleece, and how when he and his siblings were younger a meal at one of their roadhouses was one of their favorite activities.
Continuing to drive north to the suburb where we lived -- close enough to the city for a handy commute but far enough away and high enough for us to avoid the floods that swept through the Brisbane River and inner city streets five years ago -- I turned into the street where my sister and I lived with our mother.
Morgan and I shared this small hatchback car, and Mum's SUV car was parked in the garage as I pulled in next to it. I closed up the garage and went inside the house. It was getting late, and Mum was no doubt asleep. The house was mostly in darkness, save for the living room where the overhead lights were illuminated and I could see the changing colors of the TV.
Going in there, I found Morgan sitting on the couch watching a movie on TV. My sister and I didn't really look like siblings, even less like twins aside from us both being tall and slim, which was almost inevitable given we had tall, slim parents. But I had inherited Dad's brown hair, brown eyes and more tanned complexion, while Mum's pretty face, blonde hair, blue eyes and fair complexion went to Morgan.
This Good Friday afternoon Morgan had worked the afternoon shift at the hospital and was still wearing her scrubs uniform, the color indicating that my sister was a trainee studying nursing at university, and not yet a qualified registered nurse. She was clearly winding down after her shift, sipping on a can of soda and had removed her white nurse's sneakers and socks, her bare feet resting on the table. Our pet cat Panther -- a pure black cat -- was curled up on the couch beside Morgan, allowing my sister the privilege of stroking her.
