She came back to me through the rain that night, looking like someone who’d just come back from a war. Like someone who had just survived some great catastrophe. We hung on to each other through that dark and stormy night like two storm-tossed survivors of some great wreck. Around us the world we knew tore from the reality we understood and set adrift on these wilder waters of some stranger possibility.
Until that night, I was sure of reality. I felt the great weight of it anchoring us to this world around us. That night, though, we clung to each other as we saw the world outside our window slip, break, crack and fall. The world we knew became this new, strange place we could not understand or even name.
For a while afterwards, neither of us was sure if we were alive or dead. We did not know whether we had slipped through some crack in what we once regarded as the real. Or, if – somehow – we had slipped free of the living world altogether.
Each night, from then on, as we searched these twisted, changed streets for some sign of the familiar. Seeking somewhere where we could be safe as we dodged and evaded those strange creatures that had merged from the cracks in all that was once real. All while we wondered if we would ever see our familiar old world ever again.
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