Shut the car’s door. Leave it. Walk away. Cross the wide street, dodging traffic, darting between parked cars. Hands upon the door – glass cool beneath fingers’ touch. Enter the café. Pause to scan the interior from the threshold. Pendant lights shed a warm, welcoming glow over booths and small tables. Quiet murmur of conversations. Locate him. Seated in a bentwood chair, he leans forward, shirtsleeves rolled up, elbows on table. Across from him, on the upholstered bench, a second man nods, interjects, listens.

Descend three steps. Weave between tables clustered about the dark-tiled floor. Sit down on the bench nearest his table. Don’t interrupt – he discusses business. Also, the baby needs attention. Nine-month-old April. Balance her on one knee as you wait, hands spread to cup and support her small form. She is a contented froth of white-clad lace and ribbons, taffeta and crinolines.

Another woman, clad in crisp dark skirted suit and hat, slides down the bench, asks: “Do they have a date?”

A date? Search her face for understanding – skin thin as parchment, creased at the corners of her eyes, downward at her mouth’s edges. Her expression yields nothing. Scan the café again, observe the small clutches of people – mostly men discussing business. Observe the women – all plain-clothed, practical, narrow women. Women with infants of various ages. Women waiting. Nannies?

Tell her, “No. No date yet.”

The woman nods shrewdly, asks: “What are your hours?”

Tell her, “Mornings. Evenings. Most afternoons.” Hold April closer. Feel her warmth, her aliveness, the pleasing weight of her. Inhale the fresh infant scent of her.

The woman seems surprised, says: “I only have the day shift – that’s enough.”

Smile at her. She doesn’t understand. She doesn’t know.

The men finish their discussion, rise to depart. Time to go. Lift April – taffeta crinkling – balance her on one hip. Follow the men around the tables, across the café, outside. Pause briefly to consider poster on wall – “DJ’s Café”; curling periwinkle and white paper on old brick.

Shoulder the door open. Step outside, into crisp Autumn. Realize the men have drawn away – across the street, into the dappled shade of the tree-lined park, brightly studded with the colored silk tents of a fair. Holding April close, hurry across the street to catch up. Lose sight of them amongst the shifting current of fairgoers and performers.

During the first incident, I had only to draw in a great breath and expel it in a strong, even shout. It had been effortless, like singing. The column of sound had hung on the air over the shocked monster until a red mist had formed and collected along its bulbous head and tentacles. It had vanished. Dead, banished, dismissed — I did not know; but it had gone.

Now, word of my feat has spread, and when another of the creatures begins eating employees in a nearby office building, a representative of the remaining staff seeks me out, begs me to dispatch it.

The building where the creature lurks is a featureless concrete complex spread in a long, single-story. I’m astonished to discover that, despite the very credible threat, business is being conducted as usual. Once inside, I direct everyone “OUT” in a voice of thunder. All scurry off in the direction of my command through a pair of glass doors. They spill outside to safety within a courtyard, and I begin my hunt.

I prowl long corridors, search utility closets, until at last, I locate the monster in a large corner office. A fleshy, orchid pile heaped upon itself, it crouches beneath a large desk in the room’s corner. Its tentacles quest, reach out and over and around the desk’s legs, the wastepaper basket. It gropes. It seeks. And it is enormous; far bigger then the one I had previously encountered.

Uncertainty creeps in as I take a great, deep lungful. Breath catches in my throat; ribs constrict. When I try to shout – no noise emanates, only silence. No ringing, exhaling column of sound. No banishing red mist.

The monster remains, a shifting, shivering heap of flesh and tentacles in the corner of the office. It fixes me with a yellow eye…

 

It sits in a flagstone courtyard in the middle of a manicured field – a shallow, bronze bowl, filled with clear water. Concentric circles ripple outward from the bowl’s center to its smooth sides. Together we work, he and I, to keep the bowl filled. We each lug buckets, paths intersecting back and forth.

I cross the field’s shorn grass. Water sloshes in the bucket I carry, but maintains its level. And no sooner do my steps touch the flagstones, than he is headed away to refill his own bucket. When I arrive at the courtyard’s center, I pour a quantity of water into the gleaming bowl – far more than it should reasonably contain. Though neither he nor I have spilled a drop, though the surrounding flagstones are dry as bone, the water’s level continues to leach away. No time to linger. He is back now, ready to pour another dousing, and I must hurry. Replenish, pour, repeat.

Each time I approach with a new contribution, I can see more clearly the shimmering pattern that radiates outward from beneath the bowl. A pattern that arches out across the flagstones and over the field; the arms of an infant galaxy that spiral, stretch, and extend. Ethereal, as if superimposed over flags and field, this other, liminal dimension must lie just beneath our own – beside, over, within. Here, the bowl is firmly centered on muted flagstones over that glittering system’s heart. All the water we collect and carry and pour into the bronze bowl nourishes this emerging galaxy.

Again, we cross paths; his bucket emptied, mine brimming. Our feet tread flagstones – slate blue, gray, brown; they chart the lengthening, strengthening spiral arms – cosmic motes of purple and silver. We skip lightly over stardust, our paths crisscrossing again. And I wonder, as I empty my bucket, as I pour a steady stream of water into the bowl’s void – when the new system has grown, when it has enveloped and reformed our world (as it will and must) will I remember all of this? Any of this? Will we?

Cool grass beneath my cheek, pressed into my hand and arm. I awake in a close-cropped field. Blinking eyes open, I see a world of green spreading in all directions and wide blue sky tilting above. Before I can press myself upright, I also see, resting in the grass nearby like a small planet settled within this lush green universe, a smooth stone…

Ahhhh…. I remember.

 

 

A darkened stateroom. At one end, a thin seam of light defines a door; directly opposite, a porthole set high in the wall contains only the night sky. The room’s rectangular space is as dark as it is narrow. Pressed hard against one long wall are three single beds, their white-painted, tubular metal frames and tightly tucked white linens, impart a sanitized, clinical aspect. There is no other furniture or decoration in the tidy room, and the beds do not appear to have been slept in. I sit in the dark at the foot of the bed beneath the porthole.

Muffled steps in the hall beyond the room. Sound upon the door – not quite a knock, but a scratching noise, low on the doorframe’s seam, more akin to fingernails, or claws. No time to wonder if the door is locked — a wedge of yellow light forms on the floor as the door slowly, noiselessly opens inward. Silhouetted in the door’s mouth crouch two children, a boy and a girl. She appears older than him, but they are both scrawny and unkempt – hair matted and tangled, clothing tattered.

I rise to approach as the urchins toss armfuls of random toys into the room. The objects bounce and scatter, and the boy and girl straighten, intent on entering under the pretense of play. Before they cross the threshold, I reach the door, grab the handle to narrow the angle of entry. I usher the two back into the dimly lit hall and, as they watch in silence, I bend to gather the toys up into green plastic grocery bags. The bags hiss and snick, swallowing each toy dropped within. Pulling the door shut behind me, I hand over the bags. The children are so small and gaunt and scraggly, it startles. The boy snatches the bags and scurries away down the hall, but the girl stands perfectly still, looking up at me with her hands clasped and resting on the front of her grubby dress. For a moment, her face is almost serene, devoid of emotion. Then, the pupils and irises vanish from her huge eyes, overwritten by a rapid series of forms and symbols — mathematical, scientific, utterly alien. The threat is apparent. Back pressed to the door, I fumble with the handle to return to the safety of my room.