"The storm on the outside looks oddly calm..." she thought with half closed eyes. For a moment she stayed that way, slumped in the old chair by the window, listening for the low rumble she expected but didn’t hear. The sky was washed in a flat gray that reminded her of wet paper. No lightning. No wind pushing against the house. Just that heavy stillness that made her shoulders tense. She sat up a little. The dog wasn’t barking. The trees weren’t moving. Even the clock on the wall felt too loud.

Maybe it wasn’t a storm at all. Maybe it was the kind of quiet that comes right before something shifts. Not dramatic, just… different. She pressed her forehead against the cool glass and watched the street. A plastic grocery bag lay in the gutter, untouched. She checked her phone for the weather alert again. Nothing had changed. Strong storm warning. High winds expected. Stay inside.

She frowned. “Then where is it?”

The first hint came a second later. A flicker at the edges of the houses across the street, like heat rising off asphalt, except it wasn’t hot. It moved too slowly, like a curtain being pulled back. She blinked. The houses didn’t glitch or dissolve; they simply… slid out of place, as if she were seeing them through water. Her chest tightened. “Okay. That’s not wind.”

She grabbed her coat without looking away from the window. The quiet deepened, as if the world were waiting for her to notice something important. And she realized she’d been wrong: the storm wasn’t outside. Not really.

It was coming from the space between things, creeping into view, patient and unhurried. And it wasn’t done yet.

Eir stuffs her arms through her coat, the rustling fabric making no sound as she creeps through the front sitting room of her house. She momentarily loses sight of the storm as she moves to the front hall. She quickly thumps over to the front door in her socked feet and peers out of the front window. Eir blindly toes around for her rain boots as she watches the storm intently.

Two spots of light warp out of the entity, wobbling in a way that gives Eir a headache that puts pressure on the backs of her eyes. She squints and glances away, heart ready to pound out of her chest. She slides out of its view and presses her back against the wood paneling of the wall. A drop of sweat lazily slides down the back of her neck despite the chill that’s settling in her spine. Eyes squeezed shut, Eir sucks in a breath and holds it as a deep rumble rises from nothing to roar all around her. The wood paneling vibrating and creaking as heat builds on the outside of the house.

The ground seems to start sliding out from underneath Eir, and her rain boots squeak against the floor as she grabs the curtain hanging to the side of the window and chances a glance out the window. The thing glides closer, and the suburban street stretches and pulls at Eir’s stomach, making her feel faint. The rumble surges to a high-pitched ring. Her breath was coming quicker and shorter. Cold stagnant air sticks inside Eir’s lungs. Blistering heat and light burn at her eyes.

Eir’s grip on the curtain stutters. She’s going to fall. Everything’s too far away. She can’t breathe. The dust of the old wool rug invades her nose. Eir’s face wrinkles at the scratchy feeling of fibers on her cheek as everything starts to fade away.

There is a pop. A fizzle. Then a BANG!

A fresh gasp of air enters Eir’s lungs, and she sits up on her elbows, a cough startling itself out of her lungs. A little bit of spit gets stuck on her chin as her chest heaves and her eyes water. Her hand comes up blindly to wipe at her face.

Through the cacophony of sensations, Eir squints and sees… her neighbor? She watches him in disbelief as he tuts and reaches down to brush splinters off the top of her head. Eir feels some of them tug and get tangled in her hair. Her neighbor shrugs and tugs at his beard with his hand, gloved in thick, black rubber. On a second look, Eir realizes that his entire outfit is rather strange. Aside from the unusual gloves, he has round goggles settled on top of his head with lenses that shine in a way that indicates a very high magnification. He was dressed in blue flannel pajamas with yellow stars that evoked the image of a lazy wizard and a pair of chunky orthopedic sneakers. In his hand, he sported something that looked akin to a whisk but was a meter too long and too gold in color to belong in a kitchen. If it wasn’t for the fact that his hair was dark and his face was wrinkle-free, Eir would have thought that he was a senior citizen who had escaped from the old folk’s home.

“Well, come on, get yourself up,” he booms out.

What?

The last time Eir remembers being this confused was in the college organic chemistry class that caused her to drop out. That was like learning the ABCs compared to whatever this is.

Crazy Guy rolls his eyes and pokes at her with his long whisk before insulting her. “What, are you stupid? Up,” he gestured urgently before poking Eir some more. “Up, up, up!”

Eir scowls and pushes off the ground, slapping his long whisk away with a sound not unlike a soccer ball hitting a chain-link fence. She opens her mouth to insult him back and—

Crazy Guy grabs her by the elbow and waves his enormous whisk in front of them. He pulls Eir through what's left of her splintered front door and out onto the front walk, which slides beneath their feet like ice. Eir looks down at the concrete sidewalk slipping by beneath them as if she were in a plane looking down at the runway speeding by. Her brow furrows as she looks ahead, beyond the waving giant whisk.

They are barreling right towards the weird entity that was peeling the neighborhood apart.

“W-wait! Not toward that thing!” Eir yells, trying to pull away from Crazy Guy. She digs in the heels of her rain boots, but it feels like they are a hot knife slicing through butter.

She braces herself, muscles tenser than concrete as they near the hole in the universe with eyes she can’t quite look at. Eir can’t look away. We are going to die.

The whisk cuts through the distortion, waving it away as if it were nothing more than a puff of smoke. Eir’s eyes go wide as the whisk clears a hole through the monstrosity, revealing brilliant blue. The world had been so gray and loud and confusing that Eir almost couldn’t believe it when they were suddenly floating.

Crazy Guy pulls Eir close, even though she pushes away from him, as a gentle tug of gravity pulls at their stomachs. A quick look down tells Eir that they are hundreds of feet in the air. She grasps onto Crazy Guy for dear life.

They fall, faster and faster. However, Eir swears there isn’t any wind like there should be. She always imagined that skydiving was a loud affair. Maybe, there is no air here. Instead, they plummet without a sound besides Crazy Guy’s breathing in her own ear. As the ground approaches, Crazy Guy lifts the whisk above his head, and the wires shiver before waving like ribbons in a gentle breeze and expanding into the shape of an umbrella. A shimmer distorts Eir’s vision, and imaginary fabric stretches over the umbrella. Eir can see right through it. It’s there but not there at the same time. It is also blue with yellow stars to match Crazy Guy’s pajamas.

Their descent slows, and they touch down gently on the ground. They are on an itty-bitty island. It couldn’t be any larger than the house across the street from Eir’s. The island is made up almost entirely of sand and is populated with sparse amounts of sea grass. They are surrounded by nothing but glass-like light blue-green salt water. In the middle of the landform is a ramshackle tower. Eir would say it looks like a wizard tower, but it is far too squat and made out of driftwood. The windows have no glass and have curtains fluttering in the sea breeze. The curtains are also blue with yellow stars. Crazy Guy is certainly committed to the bit.

In fact, it looks like Crazy Guy has gone on without Eir. He has pushed his goggles over his eyes and is studiously searching the ground as he makes his way over to the wannabe wizard tower. Eir huffs after him, kicking at the sand with her rain boots.

“Hey.”

He ignores her.

She tries again, “Hey.”

He ignores her.

She picks up a fistful of sand. She throws it at Crazy Guy. He yelps in surprised disgust.

He pivots to look her in the eye. His eyes are made huge by the magnification in his goggles. Eir steps back in surprise, feeling a little sheepish all of a sudden. To be fair, Crazy Guy can apparently do magic.

When Eir doesn’t say anything right away, Crazy Guy flips back around and carries onward. Eir throws her hands up in annoyance.

“What is going on? Where are we?” She yells out.

“Technically speaking, this is my house,” he says simply. “More strictly, the pocket dimension in my house.”

Ugggghhhhhhh. Eir does not want to deal with this. She would rather deal with the once-in-a-century storm that was supposed to hit.

“Look, can you just, I don’t know, put me back in our neighborhood?” She asks hopefully.

Crazy Guy starts to look a little embarrassed. Oh no. No. No. No.

“Ehhhh. Unfortunately, no,” he squeaks out.

No. No. No.

Crazy Guy waves his hands in a noncommittal manner. “You see, part of the pocket dimension, sort of, got out, so to speak?” He says, not sounding entirely sure himself.

“Got out?” Eir says shrilly, “Do you mean that scary thing that peeled all those houses apart?” She finishes seriously.

Crazy Guy doesn’t say anything, but he could not look more guilty. Eir takes in a very deep breath. Then she cusses him out like she has never cussed before.