Our story begins with a man named Corvin. He was a perfectly average man—average height, average width, average capacity for mediocre deeds—aging dangerously close to the cusp of thirty and feeling not good about it at all. His features were dark, mostly sharpish, with broad bushy brows and pinchable rosy cheeks. His eyes themselves were weary and shadowed. He had a forehead obscured at irregular intervals by shaggy black hair that was long and messy and sometimes even cute, though that depended on who you asked, while his gray hoodie and faded jeans suggested a bland taste in clothing with just enough coherence to still be considered a taste. Altogether, he was a mostly reasonable looking person, certainly eligible enough for a fling. Alas, his romantic prospects did not much matter at the current moment, because Corvin was in the process of falling a very long way.

“Oof,” he said, when his momentum finally stopped. The oof became a groan.

In the midst of his groaning, Corvin managed to find the wherewithal to wonder several things. These included: Where had he landed? Why had he been falling? Where had he fallen from?

The answers to these questions were … hazy. He could partially recollect that over the course of something, his circumstances had started off normal-ish, become exponentially more untethered, and then taken a brief splash into ethereal strangeness before plunging into full blown horror.

Or at least, that’s what he remembered remembering. When Corvin tried to actively recall the details, he realized he couldn’t pin down a single concrete bit of it, having been left only with a vague impression of the vibes. It turned out the vibes were still enough to make him shudder.

The vagueness of his memories seemed reciprocal to the clarity of his pain, which mostly took the form of a prickling soreness that pulsed throughout his body. When he tried summoning the energy to uncurl himself from his fetal position, he promptly and painfully re-curled in a convulsion of synaptic spice. What the hell. Why did he hurt so badly?

Obviously that massive fall, the less dim part of him replied. Right, sure. Except that if the fall had been real, and if his perception of its length had been anywhere close to accurate, then his body should be feeling a whole lot worse. Or rather, if he had actually fallen that entire way, he should have lost the capacity to feel anything at all.

Unsolicited mental snapshots of blinding light and a rapid plummet abruptly crowded his perception, squeezing his brain like a sponge. There had been some kind of vortex, and a flickering semblance of space, and an angle. He remembered the feeling. Down through a bizarre hell and out the other side, he’d ridden that impossible line.

Corvin shook his head and blinked his eyes, trying to escape the frenzied impressions by grounding himself in his surroundings. When he got his first good look, he soon wished he’d stuck with the impressions.

First, he noticed the texture. Gentle, fuzzy, a bit like carpet: if carpet were woven from fractalized vapor and creeping moss. The composing patterns appeared endlessly intricate yet impossible to discern, with details that seemed to morph and change according to the path of his vision. Color assaulted his eyes. Every surface contained some seething mix of neon and pastel, a clash of blends that roiled together in kaleidoscopic mud. The vibrance should have been beautiful, yet it felt borderline grotesque. It reminded Corvin of the aquamarine patches of mold that sometimes grew on his forgotten bread.

Comparisons to forgotten bread were also soon forgotten, because next Corvin noticed the shapes. Bulbous lumps and spiraled growths and shards like shattered plastic played topographical havoc with the terrain, all jumbled wrongways in a cross between fungal forest and mystic junkyard. The various swirling shapes all seemed to contract and expand as if they were alive.

Lastly, and worst of all, he noticed the scale. It kept on changing. What at first seemed small and nearby would slyly distort until it appeared large and far away. Unreal landmarks wavered and stretched, fluctuating moment to moment, making him feel both minuscule and claustrophobic. The one notable exception to this involved the vast space above, which at no point shrank from its vastness. The rainbow churning texture that dominated the sky could have been a formation of vivid clouds or perhaps even some strange distant galaxy. Corvin had no way of gauging the dimensions. What he could gauge—with a level of certainty that shocked even himself—was that it formed the approximate shape of a very cozy-looking bed. The bed was upside down, as if its frame had been overturned, its cosmic mattress flipped over top of the world, with a morphing mass of blankets and pillows facing towards the landscape. If those pillows had somehow fallen, they would have smothered everything in sight. Yet through the mysterious hijinks of some non-Newtonian force, the fixings of the bed stayed put.

“What in the actual …” Corvin slumped as he trailed off, finding himself wholly unable to assign his ‘what’ a fitting home. The expanse in which he found himself went so far past reasonability that he couldn’t settle on a response. Fear chilled him, awe struck him, and ‘fuck’ came to dominate his internal dialogue.

Luckily, Corvin had a trick. In his normal life, whenever his feelings started to venture past his preferred emotional depth, his insides would respond by going pleasantly numb. His mind would freeze, his manner would calm, and he would immediately cease to grapple with whatever problem had overwhelmed him. Since Corvin’s preferred emotional depth was in fact cripplingly shallow, he had racked up a lot of experience.

So after a few calm inhales and a few calm exhales, Corvin looked out on the chaos and calmly said: “Good job. You finally broke yourself.”

His fists clenched and his eyes twitched. On the bright side, he couldn’t possibly be expected to work his next shift with a broken brain.

“You don’t look so broken to me,” said a voice. “At least not beyond repair.”

Corvin scrambled to his feet and turned around. What he saw did nothing to dissuade him of his recent broken assessment.

It looked like a man. Except, in the area typically occupied by legs and other bits, there instead tumbled out a fluffy billowing pseudopod, an oozing plushy slug-foot that hadn’t quite sewn in the stuffing. Also, the man’s entire body was tinged a fuzzy bluish gray, a color which to Corvin’s knowledge did not exist anywhere in the normal human spectrum. The hue contrasted sharply with the man’s clothing: a yellow plastic poncho doing its best to contain the fuzz. In one hand he carried a very tall walking stick capped by a large tan cylinder. To Corvin, it looked strikingly similar to a lint roller.

“Hi there, stranger!” said the strange man, hoisting up his roller-staff in greeting.

Corvin managed to raise a faint hand in response. He watched bemused as the man slunk his way over by stretching and compressing his nebulous bottom half.

When the unsettling motion finally stopped, the man said, “Griffin’s the name. Giffin for short. But a lot of folks just call me the lint-man. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

“Oh.” Corvin blinked at the barrage of nomenclature. “Um, I’m Corvin,” he said. “So … Giffin?”

“Sure enough.”

“Right, um …” Corvin paused and shook his head. “What the hell is going on?”

“With my life?”

“With everything!”

“Everything. Hmm. That might take a while.”

“No, I just—let’s start with where.”

“Where what?”

“Where the fuck are we?”

The blue-gray man named Giffin laughed. “Ah, that’s right. You wouldn’t know, would you?”

Corvin frowned at this. “What does that mean? Do you know me?”

“Not in the slightest. You’ve just got the look of a castaway about you.” Giffin paused to chuckle. “Mercy me! You could serve a whole buffet on eyes that wide.”

“Is this real?”

“Oh, it’s real all right. Realer than real. You’re getting your first honest look at the spice of life.”

“Look, man.” Corvin briefly paused to focus on maintaining his fragile internal state. “I don’t … I can’t …”

Giffin sighed. “Don’t make me pity you. So unbecoming for someone in need. Okay, alright, how about this: what exactly do you remember?”

“I remember … being at my job. And I … met someone.”

“She got you too, huh?”

“I don’t know who you’re—” Suddenly, a brief flash of silver passed through his memory. “Wait. Who was she?”

Giffin rolled his eyes. “Fuzz almighty, I don’t have time for this. Here. Let me jog your memory.” In a deft movement, the enterprising lint-man used his roller-staff to bonk Corvin squarely in the forehead.

“Ow! What was—ohh …”

*. *. *

Corvin stood behind the bar, annoyed and sweaty, trying to get the excess froth out of a beer. He schlooped and poured, schlooped and poured, all while staring dead-eyed into the cruel indifference of the universe. He noticed that the man who had ordered the beer was watching him. “This is actually what you want to see,” lied Corvin. “If you see one poured perfectly, it’s probably got disease.” The customer smiled humorlessly and turned back to the TV.

Corvin eventually managed to complete the sisyphean task, moving quickly through the money before returning to his dignified slouch. A small scattering of the usual folks slurped their drinks beneath a flicker of tired neon, their low conversation blending with the televised hum to create a sluggish ambiance. It was slow. Weekday, right on the cusp of evening, with no one here who had anywhere else to be. Corvin sighed. He needed a drink.

That’s when he saw her, walking inside wearing a garment that looked like a drug-rug had bred with a ballgown. Corvin stared. Not because of her unconventional clothing choices, though they certainly caught the eye. It was her hair. Silver. Long and flowing. Shimmering like polished … silver. Accented with curious colorful splashes hidden in the layers beneath.

She walked slowly to the bar, craning her head this way and that, taking in the sleepy regulars and authentic grime with the titillation of a parent chaperoning a field trip.

When she sat down, Corvin smiled a genuine smile—not the sardonic half-one he normally wielded at work. “How’s it going.”

“Adequately,” she smiled in reply.

“Can I get you anything?”

“Hm,” she said.

Corvin watched her as he waited. She had a strange face: beautiful, undeniably so, yet tinged with a peculiar quality that made it impossible to guess her age. At first he thought she could be around his own, then became sure she was at least a decade older, before wondering if she might actually be fresh out of college. He supposed he could ID her, but he’d been riding the subpar employee train for too long now to stop.

“You know, I think I’ll just have coffee—black,” she said. “I’m not a big drinker.”

“Sure thing. Um. We're not exactly known for our coffee, so I’d set your expectations.”

“Oh that’s fine. I don’t believe in expectations,” she said, her face serene. Corvin noticed her radiant, gold-green eyes.

He had the decency to brew her a fresh pot, and as he poured her the cup, she said: “I’m honestly just here to be somewhere, you know? I normally prefer cafes, but recently I’ve found my usual spots to be a bit unwelcoming.”

“Oh.” Corvin’s hospitality senses began to itch. Baristas weren’t exactly renowned for their volatility. On the other hand, she was quite cute, which in Corvin’s book could counterbalance a whole host of other unsavory traits. And besides, ‘unwelcoming’ could mean all sorts of things.

“Well, it’s pretty tough to get kicked out of here,” he said. “Just keep your hands, slurs, and fluids to yourself and we’ll be golden.”

“Can do!” she said with just a touch too much enthusiasm.

Time passed. As Corvin took yet another lap down the bar, he noticed she was watching him. Incessantly, in fact, with an intensity that would have been terrifying if she wasn’t both pretty and petite. In response, Corvin set about his normal evening work routine, which mostly consisted of rearranging glasses, opening the dishwasher to make sure it was still empty, and avoiding Annoying Tom.

“How long have you worked here?” she asked.

Corvin fell into his rote reply: “Not long enough to know what I’m doing, too long to care that I don’t.”

“You like it?” she asked.

“Better than most things. Which …”

“Isn’t saying much,” she finished.

“Yep.” As he said it, he saw that she’d already drank most of the coffee, consuming it far more eagerly than the quality of the liquid deserved.

“Coffee?” he asked.

“That’d be great.”

“I can make a virgin thing too, if you want. Really tasty. I promise you’ll like it.”

“Sure," she said. "More the merrier."

Corvin poured the things and shook the thing and it came out a beautiful pink. The glass sparkled as he set it in front of her.

“What’s in that?” he heard Annoying Tom ask from a few seats away.

“Blood of my enemies,” said Corvin. The drink was pink though, so all that adversarial blood must have been diluted by something. “And the sweat of my lovers,” he added. Corvin heard Annoying Tom give an annoyed harumph, but he paid him no mind. The exchange had gotten a smile out of the silver-haired girl, which quickly ranked it as his best Tom interaction in all three years of exposure.

Corvin continued bustling through his anti-bustle, performing his nontasks with pizazz. With his highly trained peripherals, he noticed that the girl was still watching him. She really did have lovely eyes.

“You seem sad.”

“What?” asked Corvin as he turned.

“You seem sad,” she repeated. “Your emotions feel like they’re hunkered down in sadspace. I wonder if it’s because you want to die.”

“Oh shit,” he said, chuckling nervously. “You know, um, you really shouldn’t throw stuff like that around. I’m fine, but you could really end up rubbing someone the wrong way.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, frowning with what seemed to be genuine contrition. “It’s just I think you’re interesting. Your feelspaces aren’t what I normally sense.”

“Good to know,” said Corvin. He had no idea what feelspaces were, but could infer enough to presume that he probably didn’t believe in them.

“This is tasty.” She gestured to the frothy pink drink.

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

“Don’t tell anybody,” he replied, happy to be back in his conversational comfort zone. “Otherwise they might ask me to make another.”

“Mm,” she said, bobbing on her stool like she was dancing to her own personal brain-song. The way her eyes moved as she soaked in the minutiae of the bar made Corvin feel like she could see something he couldn’t. “This is a good place,” she mused. “Soothing contours. I like it here. It smells like life.”

Corvin lazily wiped a rag over a sticky patch. “Never heard it quite described that way, but … yeah. Some folks really like it.”

“Are you one of those folks?” She teased her fingers through her silver hair, and Corvin once again noticed those inner, hidden splashes of color.

He shrugged and smiled. “Depends on who’s here with me.”

Time passed. Corvin continued to aimlessly stack and wipe and serve the occasional other, while the girl continued to toss comments his way. Topics included the best style of clickbait, how to quantify honor among thieves, and the secret purpose of coasters. At a certain point, Corvin decided she was into him. He quickly realized that he was into her in turn. She was strange, sure, but since when had that stopped him? He certainly had his own quirks. And within the wide range of people he’d ever been attracted to, all were some kind of interesting. Nothing to it then. For better or worse, it would be another adventure in emotional distraction. His last half-invested fling had perished a month ago in a flurry of stress and guilt, and he felt just about ready to punish himself again.

On the other hand, maybe he’d completely misread the situation—he wasn’t exactly the pinnacle of social awareness. Oh well. Worth a shot regardless. Probably better to give it some space though, spare her from being immediately hit on by the first employee she’d met. Maybe even wait a bit and see if she actually came back to re-grace this dive.

He was thinking about the best way to approach the thing, the optimal how and when, when he heard her ask: “Do you want to hang out sometime?”

“Say what?” he asked in surprise.

“Hang out. You know, meet up, get together, rendezvous … I’d love to show you my apartment.”

“Oh.” Corvin noted the play in her tone and the slyness on her face. Well when she put it that way. “I’d love to,” he said.

“Wonderful!” she exclaimed.

“Um, I’m Corvin by the way.”

She smiled. “Penelope.”

* * *

The scene warped. Was it the same day? A different day? A different week? Such temporal nitpicking did not matter in the face of Penelope lounging in her underwear.

At least, Corvin figured it was her underwear. While the bright and moplike strips of cloth bore little resemblance to any style of the traditional undie-sphere, they did make some amount of contextual sense. If her psychedelic ghillie-suit of a dress had been considered fitting enough to wear outside, then it only followed that these floppier, more intimate variants should reside underneath.

She had stripped the moment she’d shut the door, shedding the larger garb like a shell. “That’s better,” she had sighed. “It gets so brittle out there.” Penelope had paused and eyed him. “I expect you’d like to do the same.”

“Um …” Corvin had spent a moment staring at her magnificent body, which turned out to be thoroughly decorated by abstract rainbow tattoos. “Sure,” he’d said. After finishing the task of disrobing, he had been struck with a strange pang of self-consciousness at his own anticlimactic underthings, which were composed of a measly neutral gray.

Amidst his sneaky burst of shame he’d soldiered on, and now they sat idly in her bedroom. Penelope stretched out luxuriously on her bed while Corvin sank into a nest of disheveled cushions below. With both of them alone and nearly naked, they engaged in something like smalltalk. It wasn’t quite the order of operations Corvin was used to, but he wasn’t one to be shackled by precedent.

She told him about primary colors. It turned out that there were far more of them than he ever could have imagined, and that the societally accepted color wheel was actually a brutish prison constraining true chromatic sight.

Corvin only half-listened, still busy processing the contours of the room. It was, to put it mildly, a mess—a wild mess in fact—though a more diplomatic individual might call it quirky and untamed. Commercial refuse stacked atop a tangle of knick-knacks and furniture that lay strewn across gaudy quilts, the whole jumble working together to enclose Corvin and Penelope in a cocoon of patterns and warmth. It was a perplexing place to pin down. For one, there were far more plastic toys and bags of candy scattered about than Corvin would have expected.

A question popped into his head, one he realized he’d forgotten to ask. “So um, what do you do?”

She fixed him in her crystalline gaze. “Whatever I please,” she said, a wicked smile creeping across her face. “Also, sometimes I teach music,” she added, pointing to a shabby guitar buried under three layers of lego-kits.

“Oh. Nice.” He looked back at the delicate spirals and geometries that traced over her skin. “Those are cool, um, tattoos.”

“Not tattoos,” she said dreamily. “Expo.”

“Expo?” he asked. “Like … the markers?”

She smiled. “Markers indeed. Just as you and I mark one another every moment our paths entwine.”

“For sure, for sure,” said Corvin, following a neon green line that looped underneath her breast and plunged past her naval. “Definitely.”

They lapsed into momentary silence. As time went on, Corvin became increasingly preoccupied with comprehensive thoughts about Penelope, while wondering if she might be thinking the same. The distance between them somehow made the setting feel even more intimate.

“Are you happy, Corvin?”

The question caught him off guard. “Happy?”

“Happy,” she repeated. “Serotonin and fulfillment and all that.”

“I mean … no,” he said. “Not really. But who is?”

“Lots of people. Including me.”

“Oh.”

“You probably just need to tighten up those feelspaces and lock down that perspective. It does wonders. I’m personally happy because I’ve learned how to match my feels with my acts and align my schemes with my goals. Though I obviously still want more for myself, because endless hunger is the mark of true alignment. Don’t you ever want more, Corvin?”

Corvin shrugged. “More of what?”

A mischievous smile stole across her face. “Now that’s the hefty question, isn’t it?” She abruptly stood and said, “I’m feeling thirsty. Do you want anything?”

“Oh, sure, what kind of …”

Before he could finish, Penelope had danced out of the room. She returned holding a blue gatorade, a red gatorade, and two elegant wine glasses. Clearing a space on the rugs that criss-crossed the floor, she knelt down and opened the gatorade bottles. First, she filled both glasses nearly to the rim with blue, and then with the precision of a chemist measured out two splashes of red. Appearing happy with her work, she gave the purple results an appreciative swirl.

“Here you go!” she chirped, handing him a glass.

Corvin accepted it as he tried to place what he’d just seen. It certainly wasn’t the most conventional thing to do, but what did he care? Based on their interaction at the bar, he’d figured there would be some amount of idiosyncrasy. Besides, she wasn’t a big drinker, as she’d said. What was the harm in classing up your run-of-the-mill hydration?

Corvin shrugged and took a sip. Penelope remained with him on the ground, slowly sipping her own beverage. She watched him closely, her face curled up in an expression of adorable curiosity.

The longer she watched him, the more he felt compelled to watch her in return. They sat in silence, Penelope seeming to gaze through his very essence while he sat caught like a dazzled deer.

As she peered deeper into him, Corvin fixated on the green and gold patterns of her eyes. They truly were stunning. Eyes like gemstones. Eyes with secrets. Eyes that shone with a light of their own; filled with sparkling ripples that made him feel as if he did contain the latent stuff to become more than what he was, as if absolutely anything was possible once he embraced his infinite potential to be.

“Whoa,” said Corvin.

“Hm?”

“Nothing,” he replied, breaking eye contact. He took a closer look around the room and noted how all the objects lumped and accumulated to such a degree that they resembled a parody of a forest floor, an eclectic ecosystem complete with its own underbrush and evolutionary niches. He saw faded plushies entwined with feathered boas; magnet-covered cooking utensils leaning on keychain-filled mugs; disconnected puzzle pieces burrowing amongst fidget toys in stacks that piled and piles that stacked.

Everything mixed so thoroughly that the place seemed to have been grown, an image so convincing that Corvin briefly forgot this wasn’t how the average world worked. He noted how many products there were: gizmos and snackfoods and arts and crafts in all their various states of unpackagedness.

“You’ve got a lot of … brands,” he said.

Penelope gave an elegant stretch, looking pleased. “Of course I do. Branded variety is the spice of life.”

“Huh,” said Corvin. “I guess I just figured you more for a brew your own kombucha kind of person.”

She chuckled. “That’s because your perspectives are formed through a crusty orifice of perception.”

Corvin frowned. “Through what now?”

Penelope gestured to his face. “Pitiful jellyballs. Flaccid peepholes. Skidmarked portals ill-equipped for the task,” she said, her voice turning sing-song. “Yet the truth hidden adjacent to it all is so much grander. You see, there is no power in the rhythms of the earth anymore. At least none of consequence.”

“Wow,” said Corvin. “That’s … good to know.”

“Right!?” she replied cheerily. She wrapped her hands around her knees and grinned.

Corvin did not respond, instead deciding that this would be an opportune time to ask himself certain questions. Firstly: What? Secondly: Should he still be here?

Certainly not, his more rational self responded. And yet. Corvin had liked her in part because she had seemed oddly interesting, and she was certainly proving that in spades. He still found her quite attractive, and really, how badly could things go? So what she had some views?

Sure, sure, but there were views and there were views. Based on her general energy, he'd figured she'd be extra in tune with something, whether nature or stars or some global brand of justice—all perfectly reasonable pastimes as far as Corvin was concerned—but not ... this. What exactly this was, Corvin had no idea. All he knew was that Penelope seemed to be exceedingly in tune with it.

The rational part of him might have won out over the part that craved romantic distraction, but at that moment another part weighed in on the exchange. It was his deep part, the scabby one, which all too often had the final say.

Corvin promptly remembered that he didn’t care at all what happened to himself. How cute of him, pretending to worry that things might go wrong somehow. What did he fear? That something would be different? That staying here would upset his beloved status quo? That some shocking twist of fate would dislodge him from his endless slumped existence? So what she was weird; Corvin still preferred her to himself.

He shrugged, smiled at Penelope, and took another sip. She had taken to rummaging through the vibrant debris, apparently looking for something she very much desired.

As he watched her dig, he remembered that just because he was playing along didn't mean he couldn’t ask her questions. “So what was that about?” he asked with a gesture to his beverage, figuring he’d start with something innocuous.

“Hm?” She looked up at him blankly.

“Mixing gatorade in a wine glass?”

“Oh,” she laughed, “what a delightful question.” She paused to swirl her own glass, closely inspecting the contents. “Blue is for trust. Red is for hope. When it comes to electrolytic synergy, balance is essential.”

“Ah. Right.”

Penelope returned to rummaging while Corvin returned to his uneasy thoughts.

“Ha! There you are you little miscreant.” Penelope held up what looked like a pink plastic egg. She cracked it open at a central seam and scooped out a dollop of pink goop. When she began to roll and tease the goop into a longer cord, Corvin realized it was silly putty. He watched wide-eyed as she began to coil it around a strand of her hair.

“And um, what’s that about?” asked Corvin. “If you don’t mind me asking.”

“I don’t mind in the slightest,” said Penelope as she worked. “Silly-sheaths help catch the goodwaves and keep out the badwaves. It’s like a reservoir and barricade rolled into one. After all, you never know when you’ll need some extra juice.”

Corvin said nothing. He watched her coil and smush and coil and smush, patiently molding a thin tendril that ran all the way to her scalp. As he watched her sculpt with practiced hands, he finally realized the source of those mysterious flashes of color. Her hair was full of putty.

Corvin started to feel strange. Not because of what he was witnessing, though that certainly played a part. No, this feeling went deeper. This feeling came from inside.

It started with a slimy tickle, an internal bout of tingling that made him wonder when he’d eaten a pile of ants. The sensation slowly rose, creeping outward from his mouth only to peep its way back in through faintly familiar sensory twists. Spindly shapes of blurring motion began to dart and lurk in the far peripheries of his eyes. His gaze flitted as his mind spun. The bed definitely looked different, right? And had the lines of the ceiling always been so … fluid?

There was a pop. A whiff of lavender. Then, a jarring shift in the space beneath his vision.

Something in his perception had expanded, but it did not feel like the opening of a third eye—more like citrus being sprayed into a fourth.

The air oogled. Boundaries spun. All around him objects began to curve and blend with their neighbors, while the formerly cozy tones of the room became both starker and more subdued.

Then he saw her. In the reverse shadows of the unreal light, Penelope seemed to become even more so herself. More beautiful. More dreamlike. More unnerving.

He watched her stand with slow motion grace, the expo marks on her skin moving as if animated. Around her wavering body, the room pulsed. The walls started to swirl.

While the room changed and Corvin gawked, Penelope began to speak. “There is no power in the earth anymore,” she said in a solemn voice. “But that doesn’t mean there is no power. You just have to be a bit more discerning. You see, real power is in the etcetera. The sugar rush. The zing. You can find it in the crush of manufactured replicas, in the squiggles of intellectual property, in the sticky webs of saccharine plastic that we’ve processed and purified en masse.”

As she spoke she danced around the room, turning on various appliances. Her form writhed as she bent and sprung, pressing buttons and flicking switches, adding ever more boops and drones to the cacophony of sounds. Corvin heard chipper wind-up toys, a wheezing vacuum, the static of an ancient TV …

“It’s divine and cheap and completely untrustable,” she said, her face taking on a ghastly hue. “A miraculous, filthy, potent vibe. You can’t tame it, you can’t bind it, but you can damn well sure buy it—for a reasonable price at the pleasure of your local retailer. And then you can toss it on your heap, and toss more heaps on that heap, until you’re so heap-full of hyperbole that you can’t help but see the truth.”

Corvin blinked his eyes and clenched his fists, neither of which helped him in the slightest. “Something’s wrong,” he said. “Something’s bad. I need—”

“Don’t you worry,” she said, placing a warm hand on his cheek. “We’re well on our way.” Her expression straddled the line between lover and carnivore, and Corvin felt frozen in her stare. “I think you might be perfect,” she said. She traced her hand down until it rested lightly against his chest. “It’s like … there’s a hole where your self esteem should be. A beautiful void. Open and waiting.”

She turned and dug through the carpet of refuse until she pulled out a pink plastic bag. She tore it open and poured out a pile of colorful paper straws. Corvin watched her in terrified confusion. Were those pixy stix?

“This is the real stuff,” she said. “The good stuff. Harder to find than you’d think.” She began to methodically tear the sugar-filled tubes with her teeth and dump the contents into her hand.

Corvin frowned as his eyes darted. The room contracted and swayed. He stared at the half-drunk goblet of gatorade. “What’s in this?” he asked. “You need to tell me right now.”

“Oh, just the typical things,” she said. “Maltodextrin, sodium citrate, salt, monopotassium phosphate, sucralose, natural flavor …”

“No!” said Corvin, gritting his teeth. “I mean something extra.”

“Um …” She paused in her creation of what was now a formidable pile of multicolored sugar. After a moment of apparent consideration, she shrugged and said, “I guess the power of belief.”

Corvin rose unsteadily to his feet and started pulling on his clothes.

Penelope’s head turned sharply. “Why are you re-swaddling yourself?”

He ignored her, blinking through hazy vision to focus on his swirly pants.

“Are you leaving?”

“Sure am,” he said, now dressed and stumbling for the door.

“I’m sorry if you didn’t like the electrolixir,” she said. “It’s just I love when it’s purple but I can’t stand grape. Please stay.”

“Nope,” he said, continuing his unsteady march. His vision was really swirling now—his corneas at the peak of some abstract wash cycle.

“But you must stay!”

“No!” he said. “Whatever this is, I’m done!”

“Just please look over here,” she whined. “Really quick.”

“Look at wha—ahhh!”

Penelope had blown the pixy dust straight into his eyes. Corvin cried as he stumbled, knocking over furniture, blindly tripping over collectibles and trash.

“What the fuck!”

“You’re doing wonderfully,” she said. “I’m so very proud. Soon you will reach your full potential.”

“Fuck you!” yelled Corvin. He forced his stinging eyes open and saw … oh god.

The sugary assault had swept away the last bits of reality. The room looked like a seething monster, churning with bile and spray, infinite items roiling together in a mesh of fractals and trademarked logos. The ceiling warped. The bed bubbled. Rugs reached up like soupy claws. Corvin tried to move, but he felt like he was stuck in a vat of psychedelic molasses, the very air mangled and thick.

“See,” said Penelope. “I told you it was divine.”

“Let … me … go.”

“Of course,” she said. “Just one teensy thing first.” She moved behind him and gripped the back of his hair, painfully guiding his head. “I need you to look into the fourth corner.

“The fourth whaa—”

She gripped his hair tighter. “Just ahead. The fourth corner of the room. That’s where your salvation lies.”

The pressure on his follicles suggested that the fourth corner was the one furthest from the door. In spite of his anger and terror, Corvin found himself looking directly at it. Once he started looking, he could not look away.

The crease between the walls began to glow. Then it began to lengthen. His perspective was wrenched forward until it fused with the corner line. The line was steep. The line was magnificent. The chaos of the room faded until all he could see was that perfect, plummeting line.

He ground his teeth as the hum of scattered appliances became ever louder in his ears, building towards something. And that’s when he saw it, the corner splitting open, drawing him further into itself. He saw past the corner, saw far far beyond it. With numb certainty he realized he was peering into somewhere else.

Corvin fell forward. The angle gripped him. With a final fearful cry, he followed the endless line down into its depths. The last thing he heard before being lost to spatial oblivion was the chirp of Penelope’s voice. Distant and faint, he heard her say: “Drat. Not again.”

With a gasp, Corvin snapped back from his vivid flashback. He wrapped his arms around himself, still consumed by the sensation of that horrible fall.

But he wasn’t falling. He was stationary. Somewhere.

He looked at that somewhere and again saw a space filled with spikes and vortexes and various nonsense that made him want to shrink and hide. He saw the enormous sky-bed, that totem of titanic comfort facing down from above, its looming patterns of blankets and pillows whorling in an endless celestial dance. He saw Giffin or Griffin or whatever-the-hell his name was, that implausible lint-man leaning idly on the cushion of his fuzzy monopodal spread.

Corvin sank to his knees. “Oh god …”

“So it worked then!” said Giffin, grinning hugely, revealing a furry mouth full of blue-gray teeth. “I thought it would. Nothing better than blunt force trauma to grapple with your past.”

“She … she did this. It’s her fault I’m here.”

“Yes, mostly, but don’t wriggle out of your own responsibility. Wouldn’t have happened to you if you didn’t exist in the first place.”

Corvin stared. “What!?”

The bulbous lint-man laughed, his pseudopod rippling. “Just making sure your respective self stays aware. It’s good to know the consequences of your own persistence to live. You’ve got to learn our ways now that you’re a resident.”

“Resident?”

“Well yeah. This is your spot now.”

“You mean I can’t go …”

“Back? You? Doubt it.”

“She trapped me here?”

“Well that’s just a matter of perspective. You could also think of it as her freeing you from there.”

Corvin looked on in horror. “Why … why would she …”

“Oh, she didn’t mean to. She meant to turn you into an undying bridge so she could get here more reliably, which would have bungled your brainmatter had she done it right.” Giffin made an amused tutting noise. “Oh that Penelope. Extremely talented. Highly disorganized.”

Corvin thought back on the knick-knacks, the blankets, the toys—how she’d used hydration and candy to rip a door into a whole other world. He shook his head, mouth agape. “No … this … this can’t possibly be the way things work.”

“And yet.” Giffin smiled serenely at their incomprehensible surroundings. “Here we are.”

“But where is here?”

“Where? Where you ask?” Giffin folded his arms and cackled, taking a slow and dramatic pause, as if a triumphant rock riff were waiting in the wings to follow his next words.

“Buckle up, babycakes. You’re in Roomland now.”