Yana was holding a cucumber in one hand and reaching for the knife with the other. She was standing in the middle of a field, surrounded by a dense forest, with no knife in sight. Yana looked around. There was a large black boulder on her right, a fallen tree on her left, knee-high prairie grass sprinkled with wildflowers all around, and an early morning sun in the sky. The cucumber in her hand was one of those long, slender, greenhouse hybrids wrapped in plastic. The other hand, the empty hand, was stretched out in front of her, grasping for the knife that was no longer there.

Yana threw up. Her stomach lurched and her head felt dizzy and hot. She bent down into the grass, clutching the cucumber to her chest, and heaved until her stomach was empty. As always, whenever she threw up as an adult, her brain always surfaced the same memory - her mother’s warm hands, one hand holding back her hair and one on her forehead, for support. This made every vomiting a traumatic affair.

She closed her eyes, silently willing for all of this to stop. The sun, the field, the forest, all of this needed to stop immediately and entirely.

One minute ago, Yana was in her kitchen, and she was preparing a poke bowl for dinner. The rice was ready, seasoned with rice vinegar, salt, and sugar, cooled to room temperature, and sprinkled with black sesame seeds and strips of seaweed. The salmon was marinating in the fridge in soy sauce, honey, and garlic. All she needed was to slice up a cucumber, a few radishes, half an avocado, and voila! The dinner was ready. Sasha was in the living room a few feet away, scrolling through Youtube on the TV. She was going to bring two poke bowls and he would turn on some travel vlogger or a digital nomad video and they would spend the quiet evening relaxing, chatting, and maybe planning their next trip.

Yana opened her eyes. She was looking at the jet-black rock. It was roughly spherical, about three feet high and six feet wide, smooth and slick, with no visible texture or pattern. It seemed to be drawing light into itself, an impossibly black void against the background of grass and flowers.

That rock was alive.

It wasn’t moving, it wasn’t vocalizing, it wasn’t doing a single damn thing. It was just a rock, but deep in her recently emptied gut, she knew – it was alive, it was watching, it was waiting.

It was pretending to be a rock.

Yana closed her eyes again and tried to steady her breath. She wished desperately that she had the knife. It was a silly thought. How would a small, serrated steak knife with a 4-inch blade help her now? She considered throwing up again, but it seemed unlikely.

Her breath caught. It couldn’t be. She opened her eyes and looked down. Her other hand, the empty hand, was now holding the knife. Not just any knife, but her knife, plastic handle scratched from years of use, and the metal tip bent just slightly from that one time she used it to pry open a pickle jar lid.

It was one thing when night turned into day and her kitchen was replaced by a field, but this magically appearing knife was too much. Now she had enough. It was time to end all of this, figure it out, fix it, go back home, and eat dinner. Yana carefully balanced the knife and the cucumber on the trunk of the fallen tree, after all, she would need both of these for the poke bowl later.

“How are you doing this?” she demanded from the rock.

For one second, she was a middle-aged woman in a field, wearing slippers, black tights, and an old t-shirt, yelling at a rock. And then…

“Artificial molecular transmutation.” The rock said.

It didn’t speak out loud, but the answer echoed inside her head, in her own voice.

Yana briefly noted down that the chances of this rock actually being alive versus her having a full mental break from reality were approximately 50/50. She hoped it was closer to 40/60 as in truth, she always had outstanding mental health. She was resilient, optimistic, emotionally stable, and didn’t even get depressed during the Covid quarantine. And now this rock was speaking to her, jeopardizing years of uninterrupted mental stability.

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“Who are you?” she asked.

“Elohim.” It answered.

Elohim? Why did that sound familiar? She searched through her memories, all the way to the almost-forgotten Hebrew Sunday School where she studied for her bat mitzvah which she later decided to skip.

“God?” She asked. “God in Hebrew? Are you God?”

“I don’t think so,” the rock said.

“Well, that’s a relief. I really didn’t want to get into the whole why-do-children-get-bone-cancer discussion today. Why are you called Elohim?”

“The witch named me,” the words bounce in her brain.

“A Jewish witch?” Yana smirked.

“A Jewish witch.” The rock agreed.

Yana rubbed her temples and sighed. This rock was not making sense. But then… rocks rarely do.

“How did I get here?” she asked.

“I brought you here through teleportation using an interdimensional portal.”

“Where is here?” she said, looking around again.

“Mezynskyj National Park.” The rock said.

Yana stared at it. “Mezynskyj? You opened an interdimensional portal just to bring me from Chicago to Ukraine? You could have just bought me a ticket to a red-eye flight!”

The rock considered her words and after a brief pause said, “You wouldn’t have come.”

“You are right. I wouldn’t have come. The last time I was here…” she shuddered. “Why did you bring me here?”

“It’s time.” The rock said.

Yana opened her mouth to ask the obvious question, but Elohim echoed in her head, interrupting the flow of her thoughts, “It’s time to prepare for the battle.”

Yana had a lot of questions, all of which she wanted to scream, interspersed with obscenities, at this rock with the Lord’s name. But, by this point in her life, Yana has had enough life experience to know that some things will never be explained to her full satisfaction.

When a man physically removes your earbud at a bus stop because he fancies a chat about how women are so unfriendly nowadays, it’s pointless to ask what the fuck his problem is. When a random woman in a store refuses to understand that you don’t work there and only gets progressively louder demanding you help her locate “canned apples, but the ones that are good for baking”, it’s a waste of time to attempt to unravel her particular train of thought. When a rock in a field tells you it's time for battle and your choice of weapons is a cucumber, a steak knife, or a slipper, it’s time to disengage.

“No,” Yana pronounced the words clearly. “No battle. Take me home.”

Elohim was silent. She thought she could now hear an almost audible humming coming from the rock.

“Transmutate me out of here now!” she screamed.

“You wish to forfeit the battle?” Elohim asked.

Yana opened her mouth to yell again and gasped it shut as a sudden violent burst of wind hit her body, filling her mouth with air, almost choking her. She shuddered and crossed her arms around her chilled body, looking around. None of the prairie grass bent to this wind, not a single petal of a wildflower blew off. Yana could feel hopelessness rising within her, along with tears and general self-pity. As always when trying to stop tears before they start, she pinched her thumb and index finger together, driving a fingernail into the fingertip, hoping the pain would distract her from an emotional outburst.

It had occurred to Yana that her luck might have finally run out. Her life until now has been split in two, The Before and The After. Before her mother’s death, Yana was a sickly child and then an overweight teenager, unable to carry a tune or draw a straight line, no matter how much she practiced. She auditioned for every school play and ended up being stage crew. She was kicked out of the second-grade chorus. “Such a nice loud voice,” the music teacher told her parents apologetically, “but completely tone deaf.” After her mother died, when Yana was twenty, and soon after the fog of grief lifted, she shed the extra pounds effortlessly, no diets or exercise. She taught herself how to play guitar from video tutorials and later, to sing. She performed at the community theater, usually in the main cast. She never got sick, not the yearly colds or flu, nor the leaking bladders or abnormal pep smears or root canals or the need for reading glasses that seem to plague everyone her age. Yana was lucky in everything. Every job she ever had paid well and demanded little. She has never broken a bone or been in a single accident. Things worked out for her all the time, every time. Until now.

“I don’t know what’s happening…” she whimpered, “I don’t know what this is, I don’t know what to do, I don’t know anything about any battle…”

“Would you like to see the Introduction Video?” the rock asked.

Yana raised her face to the sky, and despite her common sense and all the optometrists’ warnings, stared directly into the sun. After a full minute of silence during which she had absolutely no thoughts, no plans, no questions, just a nice calm emptiness in her mind, she slowly exhaled and said, “Yes, please. Show me the Introduction Video.”