Day 204 - Gap Story

Gap Story

Matthew Ryan Fischer

And then one day the gap formed in the back yard of Marcus’s house. On one side was his back yard, and on the other side was his back yard, but in between? In between Marcus couldn’t quite say. There was a sliver of something that wasn’t supposed to be there. If you approached it from the side, you would see nothing. It was so slender and thin that it wasn’t visible to the naked eye. Maybe it had the width of an atom. Marcus wasn’t sure. He didn’t know these sorts of things. But when approached from in front or behind, then there it was – the gap. It was flat as all hell, but it was tall enough and wide enough for a man to walk right into it. When it formed, Marcus did not know. But he was lucky enough to approach it from a diagonal when he did, so that he was able to see that something was happening.

The gap was a space-time rip of some sort, not that Marcus knew that or knew what it meant. There was an opening in his yard to somewhere or sometime, but he had no way of determining. Marcus wasn’t going to take a step inside and find out, that was for sure.

Marcus threw a rope up around in his yard to make sure no one accidentally walked into it. Then he set some lawn chairs up nearby so he could sit and look into it. It was a blurry mishmash of color. It was always spinning and mixing and changing. Sometimes it was bright, sometimes it was barely visible. It was always captivating. He could sit transfixed for hours, absorbed in the panorama of it all. He assumed it was something like watching a laser light show at a planetarium while on hallucinogens, although he had never done that himself.

Marcus and his friends began sitting around the gap at night and throwing their empty beer bottles into it. The gap absorbed them. They never knew what happened to the bottles. Marcus liked to think there was someone on the other side getting hit on the head every time they threw a bottle. That would be one pissed off guy if that were all true. It made Marcus laugh. He kept waiting for someone on the other side to throw something back. That never happened. Maybe there was nothing on the other side of the gap. Or maybe it was just a universal dimensional junk yard. Maybe every other universe could dump their trash into it. Marcus liked that idea. If someone could reach the other side then they would be king of the junk heap. They could reuse it or recycle it or trade one universe’s trash to another universe for something worthwhile. Certainly something in the junk heap would have to be of value somewhere else.

The gap proved to be deadly when a friend’s dog was lost inside. None of them had thought about the consequences of leaving the gap unattended before. They had no idea how many other animals had jumped into it. Marcus didn’t think he was throwing off some balance of nature by allowing small creatures to disappear into the gap, but how could he be sure? Exotic creatures always brought exotic diseases with them. That dog could have just killed off an entire planet because it had never experienced fleas.  Marcus was perhaps the greatest unintentional mass murder of all time. Marcus didn’t like that idea.  He didn’t like that one bit. Marcus built a box structure to put around the gap. He didn’t know what else to do. He was sure to run into problems when he moved and had to explain the gap. He was certain he wouldn’t be getting his security deposit back.