“Move, for Christ’s sake!”
Jeremy Collins knew yelling at the cars wouldn’t make them move faster, but he found it cathartic. He sighed and glanced at his phone. It was 7:05, which meant he was already late.
“Goddamn it!”
Jeremy sighed again and started drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. He hated sitting still. Moments when life seemed to stand still, like now sitting in traffic, drove him crazy. The desire to move forward gnawed at him. He fiddled with his rearview mirror just to give his hands something to do.
What a great way to start the day!
***
By the time Jeremy got to school, his first class had already started.
He powerwalked down the hall to his classroom, stopping briefly to tuck in his shirt before entering the room.
“Mr. Collins! How thoughtful of you to join us!”
He grimaced. Franklin Price had taught at the school since Jeremy was a student there—possibly since Jeremy’s father was a student there. It was hard to pinpoint just exactly how old Frank was. He looked like he could be sixty-five or eighty-five. After fifty, it all looked the same to Jeremy.
“Hey, Frank, sorry I’m late. The traffic was—”
“Mr. Price in front of the students, if you don’t mind.”
Jeremy rolled his eyes but corrected himself, nonetheless.
“Excuse me, Mr. Price, sorry I’m late. Traffic was a nightmare, and I—”
“Yes, well, that is why one should endeavor to leave for work a few minutes early every morning just in case one should run into any unforeseen circumstances.”
The students sat quietly, watching both men like hawks. They were still at an age where watching two adults argue in public was a novelty.
“Of course,” Jeremy said through gritted teeth, “I’m so lucky to have a seasoned veteran like yourself around to dispense such sage advice.”
“You certainly are,” said Mr. Price, matching his tone. “Anyhow, you’re here now, so I shall take my leave. I already took attendance.”
“Thank you,” Jeremy said, putting his backpack on the floor beside his desk.
“My pleasure,” said Mr. Price as he walked out of the classroom.
As soon as Frank left, Jeremy made a silly face and a rude gesture in the direction of the door, prompting laughter from his students.
“All right,” he said, addressing the class, “where did we leave off yesterday?”
“Um…I think we started talking about those things that can’t be true one way but can’t be true the other way either…” said a boy in the front row.
“Parallaxes!” shouted the girl in the seat behind him.
“ParaDOXES,” Jeremy corrected her. “We started discussing paradoxes. I remember now.”
“Can we do the one where the cat is dead but alive at the same time?” asked one of the students.
“Schrodinger’s Cat,” Jeremy said with a smile. “That’s a good one, but no. Today I’m teaching you about my favorite paradox.”
He walked to the blackboard and picked up a piece of chalk.
“Has anyone here ever heard of the arrow paradox?” he asked the class. He finished writing on the board and clapped the chalk dust from his hands before facing his students.
“Anyone?”
No one raised a hand.
“Ok, well, here it is in a nutshell. Motion is not real.”
“Movement,” continued Jeremy, “is an illusion, at least according to Greek philosopher…” He pointed to the blackboard where he had written the word Zeno.
“Ok, but like, I’m moving right now?” said a student in the back of the class. The teen waved his arms around frantically, prompting laughter from everyone, including his teacher.
“Of course you are. All of us are constantly moving. That’s what makes it a paradox. Jeremy chuckled. “Zeno came up with a thought experiment that, when spelled out, makes it seem like nothing ever moves. But since we know things move constantly, it’s a contradiction.”
He could see by all the blank faces that no one was getting it.
“Ok, before anyone blows a logic circuit trying to figure out what I’m talking about, let me explain. An arrow is flying through the air towards a target—”
A student’s hand shot up.
“Yes, Rebecca?”
“Who shot the arrow?”
“Doesn’t matter. Your mom shot it. How about that?”
The whole class chuckled.
“So an arrow is flying through the air. Let’s say you take a picture of it while it’s flying. In the picture, the arrow isn’t moving, correct?”
Most of the class nodded.
“Ok, good. For the sake of argument, let’s say you whipped out your phone and took a bajillion photos of the arrow during its journey. If you can break down an arrow’s flight—from the bow to the target—into an infinite number of still images, that proves the arrow’s movement is an illusion, right?”
The class uttered a collective “Huh?”
“Here’s another way to think of it. If a car—”
The bell rang and cut Jeremy off.
“I’ll explain it better tomorrow, I promise!”
***
The rest of Jeremy’s day chugged forward slowly, without interruption, until the last bell. After work, he went straight home. He graded some papers, ate dinner, took an edible, scrolled through TikTok for a while, and passed out.
***
Jeremy woke up with the vague feeling something wasn’t right. The back of his neck felt prickly like someone was staring at him. He opened his eyes and looked around the room. The hair on his arms crackled with static electricity like someone had rubbed them with a balloon. He couldn’t shake off the feeling something was lurking in his apartment. Just out of sight, but there, nonetheless.
Jeremy threw off his comforter and sat up in time to see what looked like a hand disappear under the bed. A thick blanket of morning fog covered his brain, giving his thoughts a hazy quality. He blamed what he saw on some forgotten dream lingering in his subconscious and headed for the bathroom.
His bladder felt like it was going to burst. Distracted by the need to pee, he didn’t notice the other pair of hands helping him raise the toilet lid.
He stared at the wall and hummed as he relieved himself. When he finished, he flushed the toilet and turned on the faucet to wash his hands. A tiny creature stood in the sink, pulling strands of translucent thread from the tap. It took Jeremy a second to realize those threads were water. He rubbed his eyes and looked again. The tiny thing shimmered in and out of existence like it only had one foot in the third dimension. His eyes tried to focus, but the creature continued to slip from his vision. Jeremy felt a migraine forming behind his eyes. The pain worsened the longer he stared at the thing in the sink until it ached so bad he had to look away.
He had better luck with his peripheral vision, but it was like looking at the color magenta—his brain couldn’t process what it was seeing, so it made something up. Jeremy watched out of the corner of his eye as the tiny goblin continued pulling the stop-motion water from the faucet. He would never know what the creature really looked like.
He turned off the faucet, and the creature stopped what it was doing and scurried down the drain. Jeremy stepped back and looked in the mirror.
“Am I going insane?” he asked, his reflection.
He wondered briefly if the organism could have been a hallucination from the edible he’d taken the night before but quickly dismissed the thought. He’d been smoking pot on and off since he was fifteen, and it had never caused him to see anything like that.
Maybe I’m still asleep?
He knew he wasn’t, but he was running out of explanations for what he saw. He decided to make some coffee, hoping the caffeine would help him think more clearly.
Jeremy went to the kitchen sink to fill his Keurig but couldn’t bring himself to turn on the water. He grabbed a Diet Coke from the fridge instead. He chugged half the can and paused to burp before drinking the rest. He went to toss the empty can in the recycling, but something grabbed it as soon as he let go. A tentacle-like appendage carried the can through the air and placed it in the bin.
A wave of dizziness washed over him. He struggled to remain upright as the tentacle’s owner stood beside the recycling bin, pulsating grotesquely in and out of focus. The creature was somehow every color imaginable, yet no color Jeremy had ever seen.
He sat down at the kitchen table until the dizziness passed. His eyes wandered over to the beast standing next to the recycling. Its whole body seemed to beat like a heart flickering on and off like a faulty Christmas light. Every time Jeremy thought he had an idea what he was looking at, the creature became slippery and hard to make out.
He picked up a drinking glass from the table and attempted to drop it on the kitchen floor. As soon as he let go, the recycling bin monster waddled over and plucked the cup from his fingertips. The beast lowered the glass to the floor, where hundreds of tiny imps suddenly appeared to break it into shards. The inch-high creatures scattered the jagged pieces around the floor as if the glassware had shattered organically.
The whole thing happened so fast that Jeremy could barely follow what was going on. He got up and walked carefully around the broken glass to the cabinet above the sink, where he kept his cups and plates.
He took out a coffee mug and raised it above his head. The creatures—big and small—stood there throbbing but otherwise entirely still. He let go of the cup, and the same tentacle snatched it out of the air. Once again, it guided the cup to the floor, where the imps waited. They had the mug broken and scattered around the floor in less than a second.
“What the hell is going on? WHAT ARE YOU???” Jeremy screamed at the group of strange life forms skulking around his kitchen.
The larger beast turned what his brain registered as an eyeball in his direction but didn’t make a sound.
He backed slowly out of the kitchen and into the living room, where he collapsed onto the couch and closed his eyes.
***
What could those things be? Jeremy wondered. A man of science, he immediately ruled out anything supernatural, like demons or ghosts.
They have to be interdimensional. Jeremy reasoned. That would explain why I can’t see them very well. They must exist at a frequency beyond what humans can comfortably observe.
That still didn’t answer the biggest question: what were they doing in his apartment?
A nagging voice picked at the back of his skull the way a vulture picks at roadkill: What if it’s not just your apartment?
Jeremy jumped off the couch and sprinted toward the front door. He stopped when he realized he wasn’t wearing pants and ran to his bedroom instead. He went to his dresser and threw open the drawers, looking for something to wear. A freakish squid-like being leaned against the side of the dresser, helping Jeremy open each drawer. It had several limbs, some ending in claws, others in gaping orifices that secreted a viscous fluid of unknown origin. A couple of appendages even ended in fleshy nubs that resembled fingers that hadn’t developed properly in the womb.
A grotesque curiosity overtook Jeremy, and he reached out to touch one of the creature’s limbs. His fingertips screamed as the nerves in his hand shorted out. The squid thing felt hot to the touch but also cold at the same time. The creature’s skin, for lack of a better word, crackled with electricity.
The being recoiled from Jeremy’s touch and howled in a pitch not meant for human ears. Jeremy’s nose began to bleed, and his eyes bulged painfully in his head. He collapsed on the floor, writhing in agony until the creature stopped.
He slowly got up, keeping his still-aching eyes on the squid creature. It dipped in and out of reality like the others, contributing to his migraine. He grabbed some clothes, taking extra care not to touch any part of the squid-thing, and went to the bathroom to change. He sniffed at his armpits and made a face in the mirror. Blood was still trickling from his nose, and he looked haggard.
I could use a shower.
An image of the creature pulling the water out of his faucet popped into his head, and he shuddered.
Maybe just some deodorant, then.
He rubbed on some Old Spice and called it good enough. He threw on his clothes and left the apartment.
***
Jeremy stepped out his front door and into an eldritch hellscape. A school bus moved down the street carried on the back of a giant millipede. The gargantuan insect’s countless legs skittered across the asphalt, clacking like an old typewriter. It left behind a trail of putrefied jelly as it went.
A mutant the size of a gorilla pushed a child on a bicycle. It had a deformed paw on the child’s back, guiding the bike forward. Bones poked through the soft tissue on its feet, scraping the concrete as it walked. He winced at the sound it made—like teeth grinding.
Something soared above him, carrying a pigeon. The airborne terror gripped the pigeon tightly, flapping the bird’s wings like a toy. The flyer looked like something from the lowest circle of hell. Looking at it made Jeremy’s teeth itch.
Across the street, a slug with four arms was posing a mail carrier as if she were a Barbie Doll. Another creature—this one an indescribable jumble of tooth, nail, and fur—was doing the same thing with a jogger. The two women met, and the creatures pushed and pulled them into the correct stance to converse. The whole scene resembled a twisted children’s fantasy come to life. It reminded him of how he used to pose his GI Joes as a kid.
“Excuse me!” he shouted at the mail carrier.
The slug creature turned the mail carrier’s face toward him while the toothy furball did the same with the jogger.
“Excuse me, ladies,” Jeremy said as he ran across the street toward them.
“Can I help you with something?” The slug moved the mail carrier’s jaw up and down like a ventriloquist dummy.
“Just had a quick question.” He was unsure whether to look at the mail carrier or her disgusting puppeteer.
“I was just wondering, er, have you seen anything weird today?” As soon as the words left his mouth, he realized how stupid he sounded.
“Weird, how?”
“Well,” said Jeremy hesitantly. “Like weird creatures, or—”
“Um, we were having a conversation, buddy,” interrupted the jogger puppet. “You’re being incredibly rude right now.”
“Uh…”
He suddenly felt uneasy talking to what were essentially two life-size marionettes.
“Do puppets know they’re puppets?” he mumbled to himself.
“What?” asked the jogger. The creature controlling her had placed the jogger’s hand on her hip to punctuate how annoyed she was.
“Er…nothing. Sorry to bother you.”
He turned away from the two women and started walking. Everywhere he looked, repulsive horrors of all shapes and sizes were moving humans around like pieces on a chessboard. Jeremy’s brain glitched trying to process everything, and he bumped into a woman carrying groceries.
“Hey, watch where you’re going!”
A creature that was nothing more than a giant mouth wrapped a fleshy, mucous-covered tongue around the woman’s arm and moved it to get a better grip on her grocery bag. The tongue slithered up the woman’s arm all the way to her face and pushed down her brow in a look of disapproval. He groaned and backed away.
He was in such a hurry to escape the woman—and the gaping maw behind her—that he didn’t see the stray cat crossing in front of him until he tripped over it. A footlong cuttlefish opened the cat’s mouth so the poor animal could cry out in pain. Jeremy struggled to regain his footing and stepped directly on one of the tentacles dangling from the cuttlefish’s face.
The creature howled in the same demon pitch from earlier. Jeremy covered his ears with his hands, but it did no good. The sound vibrated in his bones and shook the fillings in his teeth. More creatures joined in, creating a cursed symphony that grabbed him by the stomach and squeezed violently.
Bile crawled up his esophagus and scorched his throat. Blood ran from his nose and ears, and his eyes felt tight enough to pop. The screeching droned on, driving Jeremy toward complete and utter madness. He bashed his head against the concrete sidewalk in a desperate attempt to get it to stop.
The monsters eased their discordant symphony before he managed to do any permanent damage to his skull. Shallow breaths escaped his lungs as he lay on the sidewalk and stared up at the sky. The air high above him seemed to ripple and slither like a snake. He imagined a great cosmic wurm, Leviathan herself, wrapped around the Earth, slowly spinning it and dragging it around the sun. Maniacal laughter erupted from his diaphragm and didn’t stop until the paramedics came.
