These worlds are flat.

Tethered one-to-another by flexible, gray tubing, each hangs suspended in space like a great dish; floats, like a flattened bead strung along a cosmic necklace. Deep, inky-dark, vast, star-pricked space surrounds, but travel between the flat worlds is possible by way of the tubes. Slide through them – a whoosh of air, a thought – and arrive at your destination on another world that extends, equally flattened, edge to edge, and scrapes against unprotected space. No walls. No railings. No net below to catch any misstep. Yet there is air – lungs expand and contract easily, naturally. There is gravity – the surface underfoot gently accepts and repels each stride. And each flattened world glows softly with gathered, reflected light. See them shine; beacons within a nameless constellation.

All is perfectly ordinary…except for the door.

A reinforced storm door rises, monolithic, from an embankment of silt-gray earth and stone. Twin horizontal lengths of orange metal. No sun-kissed citrus shade; but a dull throb of sullen color. A warning. A threat. It both draws and repulses. And does it – beyond its fierce, featureless slab – protect, or imperil?

Breath catches, heart ratchets.

One..

step…

closer…

— C.Birde, 9/17