Falling Cube

by Matt Jancer

I’m falling. But not just naked through the sky. I’m inside a hollow cube, and together we’re falling through the sky. Who knows how I got here. But I’m weightless inside the cube, drawn to its center by a weak gravitational pull.

The cube wants me dead. Why, I don’t know. Whatever I did to it—cut off its parents in traffic, accidentally embarrassed it in public—was bad enough that it keeps changing shape in an attempt to crush me. But it can only deform the space inside its hollow self; it can’t reduce the volume, and so I dodge the pinching interior walls by floating out of the way every time the cube tries to smush me.

I can doggie paddle my way up, down, side to side, in any direction toward the edge of the cube’s interior, but the weak center of gravity always gently pulls me back to the center. It’s a bit like being deep underwater. When I move too quickly, spurts of color erupt in existence in the sky, rooster trails of violent pink, royal purple, electrified blue, verdant green. They’d fade out and dissipate as gently as the gravity pulls me.

We fall for a long time, the vague underlying threat of the end of my existence dampened significantly by the beauty of the streaks of color that appear and fizzle out with every movement, the satisfying tactility of floating weightlessly like a deep sea diver, the slow loping movements the cube makes to try to end me. As ill-tended as the cube’s endless morphing deformations are, as they for sure would end my life if I failed to dodge them, they come slowly enough that there’s only the faintest hint of a threat. We’re in an almost symbiotically cooperative routine, a tango in which one of us is holding a knife.

It was beautiful, and it was the last dream I dreamt for four years.