I was muttering under my breath, although I could have just as easily spoken; I did not speak, however, because the whole ‘holding mental conversations’ things sorta freaked me out: “fucked, fucked . . . so let’s just head back to the apartment?”

The creature resting atop my head did not like that suggestion and it snorted. Where is your sense of adventure, human?

“Back lying dead in my fucking apartment with— wait,” I said suddenly, interrupting myself, “where is that chip-o-bag creature?”

Oh, you didn’t see, bruh? It was pierced by one of the donut-troopers spears and died. Lame

“Poor old chippy,” I thought. “We hardly knew ye.”

Poor. Right. It will be back. Ferals like it always come back.

Normally, I would have asked about what the creature meant by ‘feral,’ but I felt now was not the time, especially with the donut troopers now fanning out in a resumption of their search for us. Spying a non-fenced off route through someone’s lawn, I crawled slowly away from the spreading donut monsters.

Obviously, I had no clue where I was crawling toward. This whole night was surreal, and I was just living moment to moment. I wasn’t even wholly positive that the events of late weren’t some kind of fever dream; perhaps I was in my bed back home or maybe I was in some hospital room, dying? Between the donut beast-men, talking bag of chips, and the cat-butterfly creature on my head, it all seemed very fishy.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

For the last time, mortal, you are not dying: this is real; I am real; and those donuts and chip bag are real. You have just been awakened to the Unreal Sphere— and no, it is not an actual sphere; I am only using sphere here as a metaphor, like a part of society. And continue crawling that way. I just thought of something that might help us. Hopefully.

Again, I thought better than to ask questions. All of the answers I would receive, after all, would only generate more questions, so what was the point?

So, instead of talking and chit-chatting, we crawled in silence.

Silence.

And more silence.

I swear, at least an hour must have gone by and I was still crawling; glancing behind me, I saw that the donut men were away from our line of sight. I got to my knees and then lifted myself up to a standing position, cursing my increasingly aging body’s limitations. And then I felt something like relief as I could walk normally; truly, the best things in life are free and things you do by nature; you don’t realize how good you have it by walking until you are forced to crawl in the dark.

The cat-butterfly creature started giving me directions via its telepathy. “Turn right, turn left. Stop. Straight ahead for three minutes. Shake your butt.”

Ashamedly, I did, in fact, shake my butt; but in my defense, I was running on fumes by now and didn’t feel much like interpreting the difference between an actual direction and what was a joke. In retaliation, I swatted at the creature, bopping it on its nose as if it were a dog. It growled back at me, but our little altercation ended there when it suddenly exclaimed that we had reached out destination.