Dim cracks in the distance.

Subtle rumbles far away.

The girl squints, touching tips of fingers to her temple.

Pressing eyelids fails to fix her.

But she shakes it off.

We witness colorful fingers slashing across walls of gray. These motions, smooth and certain, are not those of any ordinary person. Still, the result strikes us as unfinished. Something is there, but lacking. Some sort of formless, pervasive pattern echoing down from the depths of existence.

She, of course, could not care less.

Her hands float across several soft and current creations, their shapes and forms hinting at suggestions. An impressive lack of concreteness beams from each of them.

The girl’s squint deepens then drops. A defined lack of interest reveals itself across the surface of her expression.

This, too, is fleeting. With a shrug she turns and wanders over to the wall. Clangs and clatters from some external reality punctuate her stroll. She hums a tune that does not exist, failing and nailing the right and wrong bits. Some notes sound likely. Others scatter to the wind. Then again, we cannot trust the wind. It feels broken and hollow. The air here lacks care, and it is air that breathes wind into being.

This could be the cloud where freedom is born.

Finally reaching the wall, the girl places her paint-caked hand atop it and goes with the flow. Her fingers dissolve into the fluff through gentle motions. Thick, billowing gray blossoms into hues of granite by the time her hand moves out of it. She uses this material to make things in the air.

But what things? What are these shapes? They defy definition but cradle its edge. As if their creator began and lost interest, or forced an abrupt end to their development.

We try to consider this, but the same sounds that seem to not reach the girl begin to bother us.

Some of them are clear cuts of conversation. Most of those are words and chunks of sentences too fragmented and wavy to extract meaning from. Others feel far more mechanical, as if born from some factory or machine. These clunks and clucks and clatters of clicks are violent and incoherent.

The girl does not care. She is hard at play with her latest creation. What once was gray becomes a bloodbath of kaleidoscopic brilliance.

She is lost in creation.

We take this time glance around us and notice several things we failed to before.

Walls surround us, no more than four but most likely fewer. We find it hard to tell; the smooth transition from each to the next, broken only by branches and leaves, falls beyond the scope of our imagination. Adding fuel to flame, the spectrum of gray holding the whole environment together appears almost alive. Its pace might be indolent, but the telltale signs of movement cannot be mistaken. Like waters poisoned by pencil shavings of gods. Beyond this gray lack of floor we see tufts of blurred green between seams peaking out from either under, beneath or between sheets of glass.

A loud rumble snaps our attention back upward. As if our eyes have adjusted to the room, we notice something new; a pattern, tugging at the edges of our consciousness.

At first it eludes us. The scene screams of chaos and glee. Clutter climbs atop its corpse to create fresh clumps of crude disorder. Paintings, pictures and people-like things lean on each other in bundles, suicidal mountains of neglect.

Now we notice piles of color. The paintings in this cluster show bold use of blended reds and blues among many hues we fail to recognize.

Next to this brilliant display of color we find carvings, almost in a heap of their own. Two or a few of these ornate wooden trinkets seem to have a little color but most are lacking herein. Not a single one seems close to finished.

As we step back a realization grips us…

The single overarching thread that seems to weave through all these creations is a thin but strong string of insistence against ending. Everything culminates into a singular and paradoxical incompletion.

Despite all this the girl whirls and twirls around the room, moving with grace that stutters at the edges but never betrays more than an unfathomable sense of carefree wonder.

What are we to make of this?

A loud sound thuds the world. Within this noise grows thunder- a dual sided thunder; first broad and booming then sharp and hollow like smacks on water. The second sound is lower than the first, the smack being a failed echo of its former father.

Abruptly, the same thing happens but in reverse; the high-pitched, treble-tinged slap slams into being first, followed by the deep bass-laden boom, with the first sound again louder than the second.

All of this is obscured by a smattering of yells, laughter and crying, which in turn are obscured by noises that do not belong in a forest.

This brings us to another realization as we notice- perhaps for the first time, perhaps not- that the sounds from outside differ wildly. From muffled yells to horns and honks, they all strike us as having only one thing in common.

This one thing might be an important clue, and so we follow the thought; these noises sound distant yet close at the same time. As if the first noise was born light years ago and its echo emerged next to our ear, then dissolved instantly and through its dissolution birthed a new noise within our skull that would echo out somewhere in the distance.

Perhaps that is our role, then; to observe these minute and most likely insignificant details. We assume this is our role simply because the girl does not seem to care, and we seem to be the only other person in the scene.

But this brings about our sudden awareness of being aware.

What are we?

Are we, even?

The girl seems to not see us. We cannot, or do not, speak. Nor can we touch things. Our only possible course of action, apparently, is to observe.

Or… to be observed.

We feel eyes on us. We turn.

We see what is watching.

We watch as it watches, slowly realizing what it watches is not us but the girl at the wall. The little thing’s eyes reveal something ominous, like a stepped-upon daisy or the corpse of humanity.

It opens its long beak slowly to let out low, rumbling noises that stumble towards the girl.

Words appear on the gray wall. “Not my problem,” they say with silence.

The distant storm rages and shatters into divergent voices. Words are heard but lose all meaning.

Again the wall whispers without voice, noise or sound; “not my problem.” These words, appearing below the first sentence, seem to lack serifs.

A blast of noise from outside. Another dull roar from the flightless hummingbird.

A new font but the same phrase, bold and bigger, almost bright.

Not my problem.

Not my problem.

Not my problem.

But every problem you have is yours and only yours, is it not?

Several seconds after this the girl grabs her ears as she drops her brushes. The hummingbird’s serious expression smoothens into a relaxed smile.

But we believe her sudden burst of pain might not be related to the sound at all. At least, not at first glance.

“Shut up,” the girl’s wall says with script. “It’s just a headache.” She shakes her head, grabs a pencil from the table.

Table?

We’ve failed to notice it before. Perhaps because its form is far too natural to be normal here.

This table is pure wood, different kinds. It is unfinished. It may never be finished. In fact, we theorize that it might even be part of a tree, still living.

But we are in no place to make such assumptions.

The hummingbird trots over to the table, its little legs flicking with rhythm and patience. We watch its weak wings grab the thin wooden legs. We wonder about the lack of flight, the bird’s odd movement, its unsettling voice.

Then again, we know not of birds, and what little we do know is not relevant here.

Here, the only thing we know is that we know nothing.

The hummingbird turns and shoots a stiff glare in our direction the moment it reaches the table top. Startled, we stare hard to see if the bird can sense our presence; but its attention is too quickly turned back to the girl.

It opens its mouth again. Again the deep roar. Not so much a roar as a subtle and dull rumble, ominous and stuttering.

The girl begins to hum again, this time louder and with gusto.

We watch as the bird’s irritation blossoms. So do the bleak distant noises, and the frequency of the girl’s headaches.

Every facet of noise around us continues to grow- both in volume and distance between it and us. As that alien, unfathomable thing creeps closer and closer, the girl’s headaches strengthen in frequency. We watch as she drops her brushes and pencils several times and her hands cramp up. Her frustration mounts. But she seems determined to block out the world, as well as everything in it. “Not my problem,” the wall reaffirms.

The hummingbird is not amused. It opens its mouth again, but the girl turns, bringing her face inches from its face.

“NOT MY PROBLEM,” yells the wall, soundless as ever.

For a moment, deep stillness steals the room.

The hummingbird’s beak, which we thought was already fully open, now widens even more; its upper mandible at a hesitant pace while the lower one takes a bolder approach. In the near stillness we hear tiny snaps and cracks.

When the lower part points to the floor as the upper one points straight up, the grotesque movement ceases and we hear a small noise.

At first we fail to put the words together, but we manage on the third take.

“Open the Logic and Close the Dream.”

The girl’s eyes blossom, little red veins widening in the white. Her eyebrows tent inward, pose hardens.

A loud scoff from the girl as she turns away.

“As above, so below,” whispers the thing inside the hummingbird.

A loud crack snaps all other sounds out.

Sudden silence. Startling. Alarming.

The girl turns to the table.

The bird is gone.

Slowly, her gaze falls to floor.

Beneath deep cracks the clouds begin to move. Sluggish swirls surging in speed. The dualistic thunderclap is reborn, and its tempo mushrooms. This rhythmic cadence lapses into patterns unforeseen. Soon enough another loud crack erupts, and all noise fades off.

Still startled, the girl looks around her, eyes wild with panic. Nothing is there, there is nothing to be found. Her hand crawls and clutches her pencil-shaped necklace as she drops her gaze again to the see the soft gray. Streaks of black scatter across the cloud as the sound of breaking glass expands. She stares, watching the rolling gray under the break.

“It’s not gonna hold forever,” whispers the wall inaudibly.

And indeed, hold is exactly what it does not. It gives way to a new reality, one of pure falling preceded by a violent pull. A sudden rush of this pure pull flings her downward with the force of a million failures. A vicious and unknowable feeling of utter despair and confusion.

She can feel it, too; her flesh gets slivered by sharp things and edges, perhaps the very edges of reality itself coming back now to teach her that all things must end and all endings must thing.

“That doesn’t make sense,” we suddenly think, almost as if we can hear ourselves, which would be ludicrous because we are not even speaking aloud.

Regardless, we know one thing.

She falls.