Timeline: Present

Point of View: Claudia & Ralph

Location: Earth (Ralph’s Apartment)

Claudia looked at Ralph, terror in her eyes. Had she escaped? She wasn’t sure. She’d been trapped inside for what felt like months, had forgotten what Earth felt like. The man before her was the first male human she’d seen since she’d gotten stuck inside. He looked old, maybe late thirties, and seemed tall and frail. He had on a blue off-brand t-shirt and jeans. He had a small pizza stain on the top corner of the shirt in a place he probably couldn’t see.

“Who are you?” He asked her stupidly, as if he were ignoring the fact that they’d just come from some other world.

“Who am I? Who the fuck are you?” She replied.

Ralph paused for a second. Humorously, the voice in his head, the one that liked to make internal commentary at inopportune times, said: the audacity of this woman!, and he nearly laughed. He could feel the giggles deep in his gut, threatening to escape and completely derail the situation. He decided to extend an olive branch.

“My name is Ralph,” he said. “Yours?”

“Claudia.”

They stood in the middle of his apartment for awhile, neither saying anything, both of them sizing the other up.

“How did you get in here?” Ralph asked, breaking the silence.

“Forget about here, what about there? Were you stuck there, too?” Claudia asked.

“What do you mean by there?” Ralph asked, deciding to play dumb. He figured that, from her perspective, perhaps it would seem as if it had been his first time there. Or maybe it might seem like he hadn’t been there at all, that she’d somehow come back from there on her own accord. Why was he playing dumb? He had no fucking idea. Sometimes Ralph just decided to do shit and then did it.

She stared at him for a long time, trying to read his face. “Is this your apartment?” She asked.

“Well it’s not yours!” He said, well aware that he sounded like a child.

“So it is,” Claudia said, lost in her thoughts, “ That must mean you hadn’t been over there for very long.”

Ralph was acting defensively while the girl, this Claudia, was trying to figure out what was happening. Ralph was keenly aware that she was acting more like an adult than he was, but he couldn’t help himself. He felt as if his world were tilted on edge, and he wasn’t sure yet if he could trust her (she could be from the other side, after all). She was small in stature, sure, but could still be dangerous.

“Our collision must have somehow brought us both back,” she said, “Or you brought me back with you. How?”

“Brought you back, what do you mean?”

“I’ve been stuck over there for months, I think. I don’t know how long, but long. I’ve been wandering. Somehow you brought me back. How did you do that?”

“What do you mean? You were stuck there? I've never been there for long. I go there, I see things, and then I wake up back wherever I was.” That’s why I’ve thought myself crazy, just imagining things, he almost said, but caught his breath, shocked by this near personal admission to a stranger. He understood why, though. For the longest time he’d thought himself crazy from his visions of this other world, and here out of the blue was someone else, someone seemingly human and possibly from Earth, someone that had seen the same things he had. He was happy enough to cry. He felt oddly connected to her.

“You’re lucky you didn’t get stuck there,” she said, “Last thing I remember was getting hammered at a bar with friends on my 21st birthday. I passed out and woke up there.”

“Have you seen the minotaurs? The trees?” Ralph blurted.

“Minotaurs?”

“That’s just what I’ve called them. The creatures that walk on all limbs, but have a large body protruding from the top of their chest. I never see their face. I know they’re not minotaurs, they just kinda look like them.”

“You mean the buzzsaws?” she asked, her face suddenly looking downcast. “They attacked me when I first found the forest. There was one that saw me, that chased me. Then… well a story for another time. Did you touch the trees?”

“No, but I could move them with my voice.”

“Yes, that too. I was… almost eaten by one. Don’t touch the trees.”

“Noted…” Ralph said, now curious.

“How long do you go there? Each time?” She asked.

“No more than a few minutes, if not seconds,” he said. “It’s like I hop in, then hop out. But… I don’t leave this world. It’s like I’m present in both. Or maybe I’m looking into one from the other. Maybe that’s why I don’t get stuck. I’m not going, only looking. I’m not sure how to explain it really.”

Claudia found herself confused and curious by this. She didn’t understand how it was possible. He’d been there a few times, for brief moments, and she’d been stuck there for so long. How could their experiences be so different? She felt a need to understand it, to control it, but was running with so little information. “Okay, so you’ve been there a few times you said. When did you first go there?”

“The first time was maybe twenty years ago. I was a little kid.”

“Twenty years ago?” She asked, her eyes wide in surprise. So this wasn’t some new occurrence. She’d assumed it was, some freak thing of nature. Was it possible this had been going on for far longer? How much longer? Or… wait, did time work differently there? “What’s the date?” She asked suddenly at the thought, fear gripping her.

Ralph pulled his phone from his pocket, and shared the date with her.

“Okay,” she said, “Okay that’s good. Then time doesn’t work much differently over there.” She breathed a sigh of relief, thankful she hadn’t lost much time. “If I’ve been over there since my 21st, then that means I was there for roughly a month and… eleven days. That’s good. At least time feels consistent.”

The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

“Why would time be different?” Ralph asked.

“While I was there, I observed things about the planet. For one, it’s a binary star system. There’s a large red dwarf star, which the planet seems to orbit primarily, and then a more distant white dwarf star that shows in the sky periodically in a weird cycle. Sometimes it does like… loops in the sky. I remember reading that these white dwarf stars have high mass in a small space. Not like a black hole or anything, but still higher than what we’re accustomed to on Earth. I thought… I thought maybe that might lead to time proceeding at a faster rate because of the gravity impact.”

“Jesus, are you a scientist or something?”

Claudia looked at him like he was an idiot. “What are you talking about? That’s like low-level knowledge these days. You can Google search that. It’s in movies.”

Ralph did feel like an idiot in that moment, and it shifted him from a vulnerable openness to a defensive stance. “Fuck you,” he said, having no retort ready.

“Look,” Claudia said, “All I’m saying is that the time difference between here and there isn’t significant. That’s good. It means we don’t lose time by going there. It would have been interesting if we gained time, actually, but I was more worried about losing time.”

“You lived on another planet for more than a month, and that’s what you’re worried about? What did you even eat?” Ralph asked.

“I… don’t really want to talk about that.”

“Don’t you have family? You said you were with friends drinking?”

“I haven’t been close to my parents in a long time. They probably didn’t even know I was missing. My friends… are more like acquaintances, but yes, I’m sure they’ve noticed. Good thing I didn’t adopt that cat.”

Ralph pictured a mummified cat lying dead by its food bowl, and felt empathy for the non-existent creature. “Job?”

“Waitress. I doubt it’s the world’s biggest surprise when we stop showing up. Though my landlord is probably pissed.” In truth, Claudia didn’t really care about the life she’d left behind. She hadn’t been too invested in it, still trying to decide who she was and what she wanted to do with herself. She found she was actually more interested in the other place, about learning more of its secrets. Possibly about mastering the doorway between worlds. She thought maybe between her experiences and Ralph’s, they could figure out a way for him to stay there, and for her to travel back and forth freely. But if you can freely travel, then so could they, a voice said in the back of her mind, thinking about the sentient creatures she’d observed while there. Would they bring their war with them, if they ever gained access to Earth?

“Ralph, right?” She asked.

Ralph nodded his head.

“Have any of those creatures crossed over to this world yet? At least that you’ve seen?”

Ralph cocked his head, as if the idea were preposterous. “No, none at all. Up until now, I’d thought my visions were hallucinations. The minotaurs there sometimes see me, and then I come back without them. Wait, do you think they’re here, too? The ones I saw didn’t seem friendly.”

“They’re not, Ralph. They’re violent. I wouldn’t say evil, but they lack empathy, even for themselves. Imagine a world where there are multiple sentient races competing for resources. Us humans are constantly at war, but at least we can say we’re all human, and have some basic empathy toward each other. These creatures…”

“You mean there are different types?”

Claudia nodded. “Only what you call the minotaur creatures ever saw me, and I escaped. Other than them I saw one other, these large giant creatures in a city beyond the trees.”

“You’ve been to the city!” Ralph exclaimed.

“No, I didn’t go in. But I approached it. After the incident with the minotaurs, I had to get sneaky." Amongst other things... She thought, but didn't say. "I only saw those two types of creatures, but there… I’m sure there are more, in the other geographies of their world. I was told there was. These creatures all seem highly intelligent, with their own cultures and languages. They seem determined to wipe each other out. I’m thinking it must be similar to life on Earth forty some thousand years ago, when Homo Sapiens fought with, and eliminated, the Neanderthals.”

“So we need to stop them from getting to Earth,” Ralph said, internally recognizing a bit too late that the statement was stupidly obvious.

“Ralph, I think that’s only a matter of time. I don’t know what’s happening here, but if both of us are able to cross over, or at least see this other world, it’s only a matter of time before life on the other side can come here.”

“Not necessarily. It could be a one-way door,” Ralph said, somewhat optimistically. "And we don't know what opens the door."

Claudia nodded her head, only she did know. The door didn't open. It simply was, and it was inside those with the untapped abilities. “I guess,” she said, letting the topic drop. She looked again at the red stain on his shirt and asked, “Is that tomato sauce?”

Ralph looked down, saw the stain, and brushed at his shirt eagerly with both hands. He only succeeded in smearing it further. “Pizza sauce, actually. I was eating pizza pockets.”

“Can you make me some?” Claudia asked. “And do you have any soda? An energy drink, possibly?”

“I have some Monster in the fridge.”

Claudia could feel herself drooling as her taste buds neared orgasm. “Yes please. Any of it. I’m so hungry for real food.”

Ralph thought about the red grass, and about the tall red trees. He thought about the minotaurs, and wondered again what exactly she’d eaten to survive over there. Perhaps he didn’t really want to know. He went to the fridge to grab food for his unexpected guest.

After Claudia had eaten (the roof of her mouth only a little bit scorched by the pizza pockets, which were never consistently cooked), she spread out on Ralph’s couch and fell asleep. She’d given him her phone and asked him to charge it, but it was an Apple phone and he was an Android type. It was funny how people picked their brands and stuck to them for the rest of their lives for generally arbitrary reasons.

Ralph wanted to leave the apartment and get her some new clothes, but decided against it. He didn’t know her size, and didn’t want to get caught examining the tags on her clothing. How creepy would that be if she were to wake up? He thought about his couch, getting full of that red grime from the other world, but didn’t get too bent up about it. He didn’t like messes, but there was an awareness about something coming, something new, that would soon be invading the life he’d lived up to that point. A dirty apartment would be the least of his concerns in this new world, he figured.

He thought about what she’d said, about those creatures coming over to Earth. He checked his phone and scrolled through top news stories from a few different sites. He didn’t see anything in any of the mainstream places, at least in his Google searches. It didn’t seem like there was anything over here yet. Just a few of us going over there.

They’d talked for a bit while she ate, before she’d passed out, and she told him about her first day. About the missiles and the trees. About the blood river. A world forever at war, she’d said. Multiple races of sentient monsters fighting for dwindling resources. Humans had enough, but were still at war with each other because of greed. How differently would the world be if there wasn’t enough to go around?

He thought about the feeling he’d had when he went over there, about the feeling of violence in the air, about how the world felt angry. It seemed it had been more than appearance. Possibly it was a kind of intuition. People sometimes had sixth senses about those sort of things, that animal part of the brain that was forever on alert.

Something still felt a little off, though. That part of his brain that had those other senses, thinking about how events had played out. Claudia, this woman now dead asleep on his couch, had been running when she collided with him. Why had she run into him, exactly? If she were looking where she were going, she would have spoken to him, yelled at him to watch out. Was she not paying attention to where she was running? Or did she intentionally collide with him? Did she know more than she was letting on?

Second to this, if she was running from something, did it see them leave their world? After they left, did they leave something behind in the other place, something that those creatures could find, exploit, and use? If they were intelligent as she said they were, they would find a way. They’d be asking questions, too.

And if resources were scarce on their planet, how would the existence of another planet, one ripe for pilfering, feed into their war? Would their primary objectives change? Would there be a momentary truce across races until Earth had been conquered?

And this Claudia, this woman that had been there for over a month, who was running from something when she’d run into Ralph, what exactly was she hiding? Because she had to be hiding something. She hadn’t had time to share her whole story, only bits and pieces of the beginning before exhaustion took her.

Ralph had to be careful.

On the other side, on the red planet, the creatures stared at the shimmering edges of the place where the two creatures had disappeared.