A Bit to Read

Soon, it wasn’t only Gerald, who now looked like he was drawn onto a flat picture of a small apartment building.

As Catalog vacuumed up the space between,  inside, the puffiness of it all, the flowers, the trees, the man and the dog, the jogger,  the bag, all of them compressed together, flatter and flatter and flatter.

The bag with the sugar packet inside left Taryn’s hand, yet she didn’t drop it. It just melded with the rest.

All but Catalog. And the crow.

“See?” said Alex. The voice now was tinny, like an old-fashioned recording. “See?”

Taryn patted herself down, feeling remarkably plump. “I’m still normal?” she asked, standing atop all that had been there a moment before, like the pop-up of a pop-up book. “Why am I not flat?”

“Two,” came vaguely from somewhere below her, indistinct and depressed.

“Because it’s you,” Sam said. At least she thought it was Sam. It was getting harder to tell.

“Two.” Taryn could have sworn that time it was the apartment building.

“Is this some ‘chosen one’ scenario? Fate and destiny and I don’t know my true origins kind of thing?”

A flat sound wafted up from the squashed scene below. A squished laugh.

“Uh no.” Definitely Alex. “I mean if we could do that, we would have chosen an astrophysicist or something, not a…you.”

“Well I seem to be fine so you can handle this yourselves.” Taryn turned to storm off but found nowhere to go. Only Catalog and the crow no matter where she faced, with the sheet of everything else below.

“Two?” Even more nondescript.

“No, don’t leave,” Sam said.

“How could she?”

“But still.” Sam said to Alex. And then to Taryn: “You’re fine because you saw the sign.”

“Because I saw the sign? What does that mean?”

“The ten. It entangled you, quantumly speaking, with the tenth dimension. But since you are not in that dimension and you only have three, it and all the lower dimensions are insulating you.”

“Like bubble wrap?”

There was a silence, and Alex sighed a very Alex sigh. “Fine. Yes. Like bubble wrap.”

Catalog rattled its pages at her much like a catalog would lick its lips if it had lips to lick.

“Because I saw it?”

“The universe is far more complex than you can imagine. Or it was, at this rate. It’s getting simpler every second.”

Catalog lunged at her, flipping it’s pages at her like glossy knives. The crow cawed at it as Catalog’s pages bent against an invisible barrier.

“Huh,” the syllable slow and deliberate. “How do we defeat it?”

“Finally, a good question.”

Until next time…