My Name is Trevor Bluem. I'm 33 years old, married, with no children. Technically, I'm a widower. My wife, Patricia, had been killed in an accident at her job just over two years ago. Two years, two months, and eleven days, actually--but who's counting? Before she died--and I say "died" on purpose. I don't care for the phrase "passed away", but I couldn't tell you why. It always struck me as saccharine and escapist. Anyway, before she died, we did the "responsible" thing and took out matching life insurance policies after we got married. I suppose I'm thankful that I haven't had to worry about money to survive while I figure out what on Earth life is going to look like in the future, but it would be the biggest understatement of my life to say that I'd rather have Patricia back than a few hundred thousand dollars.

At any rate, my daily life was terribly boring to talk about. I woke up. I had breakfast. I went to the gym. I went to the grocery store. I Showered. I played video games. I had lunch. I watched TV. I made dinner. I read books. I went to bed. And in the warm months, I could add yard work and gardening to the list. My little slice of suburbia was as typical as it could be.

One Spring day, I was preparing the garden for this year's small complement of vegetables, going back and forth between the shed and the raised beds for some tool or other. I had just finished tilling in some compost, carried the hand tiller back to be hung on its pegs, and grabbed the roll of weed-blocking cloth, when the warm breeze blew the door of the shed closed and wrapped me in darkness--a common occurrence when I forgot to latch the door open.

"Whoa!" I exclaimed when I opened the door again. I was greeted not with my back yard--two trees, a fire pit, a rack of split wood, two fenced garden beds, and the steps up to the deck just six feet in front of me--but an open field of knee-high grass, dotted with yellow flowers, leading out to the horizon.

Of course I blinked a few times, rubbed my eyes, and shook my head. Had something fallen from the rafters and knocked me unconscious? Had an aerosol can of something leaked and made me hallucinate? This had the feel of an "Inception" style dream, where you can't remember how you got into the situation, you just find yourself there, believing it's real. Despite that, I'd never had a lucid dream before, so even having the thought, "Is this a dream?" led me to believe that I was conscious and in my right mind.

So, I sat down in the doorway, with the breeze nudging the door against my left knee, and pulled my phone from my pocket to try to pull up a map to see where the hell I was. I tapped the Maps app, but received a "loading error" message after a few seconds. Glancing at the upper right of the screen, the "No Signal" icon was displayed--the normal signal bars with an "X" through them. I hazily noted that my battery was at 65 percent.

Oooookay. So I'm in the middle of nowhere with no way to find out where I am or to contact anyone. Alright. So, what the hell happened? One second I'm in the middle of suburban Kansas, and the next I'm very much NOT there. Okay. Okay. Deep breaths. In through the nose...two...three...four...Out through the mouth...two...three four...And in...two...three...four...And out...two...three...four. Okay. What DO we know? I'm alive, for one. I'm probably conscious and not hallucinating. It's warm, so I'm not going to freeze to death. It's light out, so I can take a look around. Actually, speaking of light, the sun looks like it matches the time pretty well, about 10 am. So that tells me that I've been moved latitudinally, rather than longitudinally. Though whether it's North or South, I can't tell. Since the temperature's about the same, maybe South? Nebraska and the Dakotas would be noticeably cooler this time of year, right? Hell, maybe I'm even still in Kansas, just away from a city. Easily possible, considering how flat and empty most of Kansas is.

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Based on the assumption that I'm somewhere in the Central Plains of the US, I should be relatively safe, except from wildlife. On the off chance I've been moved to the Southern Hemisphere at a similar Latitude, things could be much more dangerous. If I were to go straight down from Kansas around the globe...I'd actually end up in the Pacific. Right. So the only country that comes this far West would be Mexico? God I hope I'm in the US rather than in some cartel's back yard.

Shifting my assumption back to the States, I decided to have a look around. Directly in front of the shed was the open grassland out to the horizon. Not surprising. Looking to the right, more grass. As I walked around the other direction, North, to latch the door against the outside of the shed, I observed additional grass in that direction. Way in the distance was what looked like a dark green lump, probably the edge of some forest.

Coming all the way around toward the back of the shed, I could see some mountains in the distance, something like 30 miles away. So long as the shed wasn't rotated when it traveled, that direction would be West. And the only mountains to the West of anywhere in the plains would be the Rockies. Considering you couldn't see them from anywhere in Kansas, that hypothesis was out. I had no clue whether you could see them from states farther North, so there was a good chance I had moved at least one state to the West.

While I was trying to figure out which states can actually see the Rockies, I caught movement out of the corner of my eye. I backed around the corner of the shed and peered around to see what kind of animal it was. Because it has to be an animal out here, right? I can't imagine there'd be some OTHER guy and his shed here in the middle of nowhere, Colorado (or Idaho, or whatever).

Human heuristic processing is kind of amazing. Evolutionarily, the ability to recognize what an object is in a few thousandths or hundredths of a second is part of what allowed our species to survive long enough to dominate the planet. When you have a fraction of a second to decide whether something is a threat, and act accordingly, every tiny part of that second counts. We're really good at very, VERY quickly comparing the first glimpse of an object, especially a new one, to the database of things we're already familiar with. We can tell almost instantly a canine from a feline, a banana from a pear, a house from a bus, a bicycle from a horse. It's part of why Captchas have you pick all the squares with cross walks in them, to train AI models to make the same split-second judgements by comparing the current view to something it already knows. This process isn't always perfect, and can yield some false assumptions, but for the most part it works well.

Anyway, the thing moving behind the shed was a gnoll.