ball

Hole in the Wall: The Fifth Monday Three – Part Four

/ Ben Van Dongen / Leave a comment

By Edele Winnie

“Jocelyn, is it really you?” Carol asked the white-coated woman up on the catwalk. “I am so…. muddled.” Carol ran her hands through her brown hair but the confusion remained. They were surrounded by buzzing machines, tubes and metal catwalks. “What is this place?”

Jocelyn laughed. “It’s definitely not the bank. The Jocelyn who works there with you is just one version of me. A sister, if you like.”

Carol pointed at one of the large glass tubes. It was filled with green liquid and an exact copy of Carol herself, floating languidly. Beside that there were more tubes and copies. Carol shook her head, unable to find words. Beside her, Gary shifted into a quivering red cylinder shape.

“I see you’ve met Gary. He’s a portal jumper. A creature that can transfer between dimensions without decomposing.”

“You make me sound so dull.” Gary complained and transformed into a star shape. “I’m actually a star.”

Everything seemed to be swirling in her head and Carol looked for a place to sit. She settled on the bottom step of a metal ladder that led to a catwalk above.

Gary changed into a rhombus. “There was a cloh enforcer right behind us.” Continue reading →

Hole in the Wall: The Fifth Monday Three – Part Two

/ Ben Van Dongen / Leave a comment

Ben Van Dongen

Gary rolled into the portal and fell to the ground, landing with a splat. “Ahhh! Damn that hurts! Tanya? Where are you? That crazy thing threw acid or something at me!” Composing himself, he became a ball again.

The ground was a piece of land, ten metres around, floating in the ether. The bare earth beneath it bowed out, like the bottom of a bowl, but at a sharper angle and uneven.

A large tree sat in the middle, stretching up to the empty nothingness, its roots dangling below the platform. Shrubs and tall grasses sprouted all around, making it look like the tree was dug out of a forest, taking the ground coverage with it.

Hundreds of other platforms floated in the void, stretching out into blackness. Each of them had a single tree, roots dangling below the convex bottom, nothing tethering them, nothing holding them up.

“Tanya? Did you hear me?” Gary formed a cube, a tall cylinder, and went back to a ball. “Tanya!” Continue reading →

Failure Angels

/ Ben Van Dongen / Leave a comment

By Edele Winnie

Puker Peters held onto his beer cup too tightly and spilled half the contents. On another day he would have been angry, but today was different. Today everything was going to change for him.

He had bought the Pierre Angels National Basketball League Franchise for a paltry seven million dollars. It was all the money he had in the world combined with all he could borrow. It was the chance of a lifetime, an opportunity too good to be true.. And that turned out to be quite accurate- it was too good to be true. Pierre, capital city of South Dakota, had 15,000 people and only four of them liked basketball. At every game Puker Peters lost money that he didn’t have. He started drinking as his life and future withered, and that was how he’d gotten his nickname.

But today was going to be different, because he had done something extreme. He didn’t have a good team filled with skilled players. The Pierre Angels were in last place and the team were dregs of the dregs. Puker didn’t hate them- you had to start somewhere- and they were all he could afford at the time. Truthfully he couldn’t even afford them anymore. He’d mortgaged his house, his car, his children, he’d sold his dog for scientific experiments and removed one of his mother’s kidneys while she was sleeping and sold it on the internet. Continue reading →