Dimensional Hiatus

           At this moment, and every other, a boy and a girl are falling and clutching desperately at each other’s mittened hands so as not to lose one another through endless gaping doorways into swirling dimensions. When last they were fully formed particles, they were standing together outside Harrods, following their fur clad mothers through the doors of honeyed wood and luminous gold. Now they are a million light years away and their mothers have not even noticed their disappearance.

Of course, if everyone who has ever fallen into a dimensional hiatus is everywhere at once, the odds are that you are likely to meet people during your journeying through the void. The boy and the girl watched curiously as an old man floated merrily by waving at them. His beard was wrapped three times around his neck against the surprising cold of the endless universe. Now that they had met, it made it much more unlikely that they would ever meet again.

After an eternity and no time at all, the boy and the girl looked at each other in confusion as they were sucked into a rip in time and space. And they landed in the mud on their bottoms with a bump. The dimension they had quite literally accidentally stumbled across was very dark and quite. The little boy and the little girl got to their feet, and brushed themselves down as best they could, still holding hands for a meager sense of security.

The little boy was reminded of a picture of the Antarctic he has once pondered over in his father’s library. Only it was a though the whole picture had been dropped into a pool of red dye and strung out on the line to dry. The world in front of them dripped with rusty and salty liquid. The ground beneath them was gluey and warm, unlike the clean whiteness of the picture.

Lost for words, they scanned dimension with growing trepidation. They saw what appeared to be an immeasurably large grey mushroom in the distance. The sticky light - whether it was day or night, the pair could not be sure – made it particularly difficult for anything to be made out properly. But as their eyes adjusted, they saw tiny far-off figures swarming around the obese lump. As they watched, the grey skin of the mushroom was pulled away by the creatures to reveal that it was not at all what they had first thought. A dozen miles away from them, the canvas pulled back from the gigantic corpse of a ship jutting into the foggy brown horizon.

How it had got there was seemingly a mystery. There did not seem to be any water around, and unless the ship had navigated the shifted hills of mud during its lifetime, it was a long way from home. Decaying as though it had been under water for centuries, the metal ship seemed to be staining the land for as far as their little eyes could see. The boy and the girl thought that if the swarming creatures were the same size as themselves, the ship would have stood as tall as anything they could have ever imagined. The creatures clambering over the body were as small as barnacles in comparison. But like barnacles, they were slowly, very slowly, eating away at the metal. Perhaps they lived on it. There certainly did not seem to be any other source of nutrition.

‘Could we go home now, please?’ asked the little girl. She, like so many of us in a hopeless situation, wanted someone to tell her that everything was going to turn out for the best and that she would be safely in her bed very soon. The little boy could only squeeze her hand and hope that somewhere in this world there was a dimensional hiatus for them to stumble back into. This was not the dreamscape of castles, indians, spaceships and dragons that he had always wished to have an adventure in. But he supposed it must do.

For now.

The little boy and the little girl set off determinedly towards the metal-eating scurrying black creatures and their dead catch of a mud ship.

: 31 Oct 2007 21:25 |  Tags: Icw Prose |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem