Out of Place

   August had to use his hands to help pull himself up the steep slope of the dune. The surface felt smoldering on his skin, but the sand beneath was cool against his fingertips — a small comfort he tried to make the most of. Every sensation was extreme out here: the heat cascaded in waves from above and below, the thirst parched and cracked from within, and the poor skin didn’t know what to do — be wet with sweat, or be dry in deference to the sun’s scorching will. It was a hell of a way to die; August felt more alive now than he had in thirty years.

   Soon he reached the top of the dune, and he let his arms drop to his sides. This hill was taller than most of the rest, and it afforded him a greater, more thorough view of the rows and rows of identical hills that stretched out beyond the curve of the earth. August couldn’t help but admire them all. There were as many as there were words in a Shakespeare play, and he hadn’t even turned to look at the ones behind him yet. He might have named them all — God knows he had the time — but there was no way to tell them apart; he’d have himself thinking in loops and reusing names before he’d even identified a dozen.

   It was only a minute or so before he had enough of the view — the sun really was quite hot up here, and the dune was so titanic that it might shade half of August’s body if he reached the bottom and leaned up close against it. Turning his attention downward, he gently lowered his foot onto the slope, letting his foot sink into the loose sand of the surface.

   As soon as he put his full weight onto the lowered foot the ground shifted beneath it, and that shift rapidly mutated into a stumble, then a slide, then a roll. August let it happen, his limbs flopping every which way as the sand and sky whirled together; the battering and scratching were far more engaging sensations than anything else he’d felt that day. He reached the bottom quite quickly, and after a brief period of repose he busied himself with blinking the sand from his eyes. The sky he eventually beheld was no longer pale blue merely, but contained strange floating shapes that shifted in size and color with the throbbing of his head.

   “Mrowr?”

   August lay in quiet contemplation as his brain meandered its way to the comprehension that a strange sound had just disturbed the empty air. He let his head flop to the right and found himself not five feet away from a small white cat, which sat sphinx-like in a divot in the sand, watching him with wide blue eyes. “You’re not supposed to be there.”

   “Mrowrowr?”

   “Hm. Right. Neither am I.”

   The cat blinked, clearly at ease in the warm sand. August turned himself over to face the creature, pulled himself closer with one arm and reached out with another. The cat balked at the approaching hand, pushing quickly onto its feet and turning to scamper away over the sand.

   August stood, collapsed, stood again, collapsed again, and, realizing the tumble down the slope had taken quite a bit out of his dehydrated body, resorted to crawling along in much the same manner as the cat. The sand scorched his palms, and he wondered how the cat was managing to walk across it on its own paws without being utterly miserable. It was a most unusual feline, and August was desperate for anything unusual after so long spent in this featureless wasteland.

   The cat passed behind a slope further ahead, and August scrambled after it, determined not to let it stay out of view. As he rounded the bend he saw it had stopped some distance away and was looking back at him, its wide eyes inscrutable. August stood shakily, dizzy, but stable. The cat flicked its tail, turned, and sank headfirst into the sand.

   August blinked once, twice. He squeezed his eyes tightly shut until stars swam across their insides, then opened them again, then squinted. Where the cat had been standing, it stood no longer. He considered whether he had imagined it — these were the optimal conditions for delirium, after all — but dismissed the notion as terribly uninteresting. He would prefer to spend his final hours in a world where desert cats could blink in and out of existence.

   August shambled his way closer to where the cat had vanished. What appeared through his hazy vision to be a dark patch of sand proved to be something flatter, and firmer; as he reached the spot where the cat had gone, the ground bent and creaked beneath his feet. August frowned and fell back down to his knees, his fingertips meeting a smooth grain that was entirely at odds with the course desert. Light glinted; ahead of him was a glass pane, and through a gap between it and the wood — wood! — he could see blue eyes, impassive but alert.

   “What are you doing in there?” August asked, but the cat merely blinked and vanished deeper into the depths of whatever this was. At this point August’s head had really started to swim, and he turned to fall onto his back, landing with a hollow thud. An experimental arm flop discovered something hard and round jutting up just left of his waist. He grabbed at it and gave it a fiddle, finding that it was able to jiggle and twist.

   He lifted his head to regard it. “That’s a doorknob.” He turned his head to the cat’s portal. “That’s a window.” He rotated his head every which way, taking in the whole of the flat expanse of wood on which he lay. “This is a—”

   Beneath his hand the doorknob twisted on its own, and August found himself plummeting through open air, until something hard hit the back of his knees and he landed with his legs kicked up in front of him. His vision went black for a moment, and when it returned August found himself in a sitting position in a chair that was on its side. The floor at his back was cluttered with frames, cabinets, and shelves, much like a wall; the wall at his feet had an assortment of tables and chairs attached to it, as if it were a floor. The door he had fallen through hung open above him, but as he watched it slowly swung back upwards to be pushed gently back into its frame. As the bright light of the sun snuffed out, August saw there was a man, standing on the leg of a long table that jutted out from the wall-floor, who had just used his vantage point to close — and earlier, one must assume, open — the door. He was a tad on the short side, with long white hair and the lines of his face set in a scowl as he looked down at August.

   “Sure, alright, come on in, make yourself at home,” the man muttered, hands now on his hips. “Don’t even bother knocking, not a problem at all. I’m sure my hospitality is world-renowned.”

   "Um,” said August. Some motion in the corner caught his attention: the cat had descended from the window in the ceiling-wall onto the edges of shelves that lined the wall-wall to his right, and was watching him intently with its bright blue eyes.

   “Hey, come on. Are you stupid?” The man snapped his fingers until August turned back to him. “Look, what are you here for? You come right in the door, sit down in my chair, not a word. What do you want, huh?”

   August blinked. In a situation like this, he didn’t feel he was the one who should be answering questions, but he honestly had no idea what to even ask. He said the first thing his brain could think of: “Water?”

   The man threw his hands up. “What, that’s it? Jesus, alright. Why not.” The man clambered over the backs of some chairs tucked into the wall-table and looked up at the cabinets on the ceiling-wall. One of them he pressed gently with one hand, and with the other undid a latch that kept it shut. He lowered the door by inches until a glass came rolling out, which he promptly caught as he slammed the cabinet door closed and secured the latch. Then he shifted to a sink, also embedded into the ceiling-wall, beneath the window, and let water pour out and down into the glass he held aloft. With the water secured he crossed back over the chair backs and carefully descended from the side of the table, using the legs of the table and another tucked chair as the rungs of a ladder, until he was standing on the floor-wall, looking down at August.

   August tentatively reached up and took the glass. What followed was a titanic clash between a desire to show a reasonable amount of restraint and his body’s urgent desire to consume any amount of water as quickly as possible, a conflict which, exacerbated by August’s position on his back and the difficulties that came from trying to drink in such a way, ultimately failed to endear him to his host.

   “Good God, it’s like a baby with a whiskey bottle.” The man snatched the empty glass from August’s hand and set it on the top edge of the table. “Seriously though, what are you doing here? Besides making a damn mess.”

   August was still thirsty, but as the water settled he started to feel more at ease. “I’m sorry about that. I’ve had a rather trying day. I am still struggling with the concept of ‘here.’ Where am I, exactly?”

   The man looked affronted. “You’re in my house.”

   “Ah; well, I’d inferred as much, but I’m still a little perplexed. Why does your wall have furniture on it?”

   “That’s the floor.”

   “So, your house fell over? Why is the furniture still there?”

   “It’s bolted on, clearly. And I never said the house fell over.”

   “Was it… was it bolted before it fell over?”

   “I never said it fell over! But it certainly wasn’t bolted on as is. What, you think I hoisted this table up all by myself, and then bolted it in while it sat on my shoulders or something? Not with my back the way it is, good grief.” The man threw his hands up again. “You ask a lot of dumb questions, you know that? What’s next, you gonna ask about where the water comes from?”

   “I think that’s a very reasonable question, all things considered.”

   The man glared down at him. “It comes from the sink. Now look, if you’re just going to sit around gawking at my decor I’m going to have to ask you to head out, you’re cutting into my craft time.”

   “Oh. Well, respectfully, I’d really prefer not to go back out into the desert. I wasn’t doing so well out there, and I think if I were to remain stuck in the heat another day or two it would mean my certain death.”

   “Geez louise, why did you even come here in the first place?” August opened his mouth to answer, but the man waved him off. “Whatever, I don’t care. You want to avoid the desert, you can take the back way out.”

   August arched an eyebrow. “The back way?”

   The man waved an arm towards the further end of the house, where August could see a doorway-shaped hole in the floor-wall. “Go through there — I recommend crawling along the bookcase and shimmying down the gap between the top of the shelf and the ceiling. I don’t want you stepping on my books. Watch out for the ceiling lamp, and don’t go poking around in my room, just take the door out the back and be on your way.”

   The man stepped around the chair to reach the other end of the house, which resembled a parlor, and he clambered into an armchair that creaked ominously on its bolts. August looked back at the doorway and watched as the cat slinked down beneath it. Carefully, August maneuvered his way out of the chair, rose, and stepped over to the open portal. He followed the old man’s instructions, crouching his way between the top of the bookshelf and the wall-ceiling until he landed on the floor-wall in what appeared to be a study. He ducked under the lamp that jutted into the space and saw two doors in front of him: one was shut, but the other opened into a bedroom with plain furnishings and a bet bolted to the wall-floor, its sheets hanging down like curtains.

   August shook his head and turned to regard a third door beneath him: evidently the “back way.” He knelt and turned the knob, and the door swung out, shining light onto a porch hanging over a dark space. The stairs of the porch had splintered and bent upwards, offering a level descent to the ground below.

   As August turned and made to drop down, the cat poked its head over the edge and bounded through, beating him to the bottom. “Are you supposed to go down there?” August called after it as he found his footing and made the descent himself. He was in a cavern of some sort, and from what light there was he could tell there was a tunnel stretching out; he could just make out the white form of the cat trotting off into it.

   “Hey!” came a voice from above. The man was there, holding a small bundle, which he tossed to August. “It’s probably going to be a while in there, so good luck to you, you weirdo.”

   August looked in the sack and saw two water bottles and a flashlight. The lack of food was concerning, but he tried to see it as a positive: he wasn’t expected to be down here long enough to starve. “I thank you. Say, your cat has run off down here, is that alright?”

   “What? I don’t have a cat. Get out of here.” The man reached down and pulled the door up, and the light was extinguished.

   August fumbled in the dark until he extracted the flashlight. The beam was strong, and when he shone it down the tunnel he could see the glint of two blue eyes blinking back at him. “It seems I’m not the only one out of place,” he muttered, and he took his first steps into the darkness.