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While I sleep, somebody is shifting city blocks like the faces of a Rubik's cube. Every morning I find streets and buildings have relocated. Yesterday my apartment overlooked a sunny park. Today, I face a department store as I eat breakfast. I ask my neighbour, who tells me it's always been this way. I try to track the changes on a transit map, but by the next day, those coloured lines have changed too, and no one seems to notice or care. The only true map is my mind, and oh how the pieces whirl. After a week, I can almost see the shape of it: how the buildings advance and retreat with the ebb and flow of concrete. It's not a Rubik's cube--it's a chessboard. I am determined to uncover whatever invisible hand is playing with us, and whatever strange endgame it moves us toward. I lock myself on the roof with cigarettes and chewing gum, and stare up at the sky, waiting. After three days, the sun stops setting. My eyes ache. I track time by my watch. After five days, the clouds vanish and the blue turns the flat grey of a screen saving power. After a week, a voice calls out from above. This can't go on. And I begin to float upward, up over the skyscrapers and parks and all the oblivious people, until the grey takes me in and the only thought left in my brain is knowing that I was right, surely I was right.
Short story written by Peter Chiykowski
website twitter facebook instagramStory prompt taken from a photo by Inna Yasinska
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