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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 →

Through the Blinds, Darkly

/ Ben Van Dongen / Leave a comment

By Edele Winnie

Through the broken window blind she could see his mouth. Just his mouth, as he frowned, as he ate, as he smiled.   She did not know what his eyes looked like. She had never seen his face, or his body. Never heard his voice or saw his hair. Just his mouth. The lips. The teeth, sometimes the sneak of the tongue. And she fell in love.

It seemed crazy. She was a reasonably normal young woman, a bit on the scrawny side, brown hair and brown eyes with an unfortunate penchant for the dramatic- but only when it came to love, she reminded herself.   Love was some kind of a drug and she could not stop watching his mouth through the blinds.

Was it an obsession? She started out thinking that it was not. It was just curiosity. A tiny peek into another house, another person’s life. She did not know her neighbour, had not known that it was a man with a mouth like that. A mouth made for kissing, for saying I want you beside me always. Continue reading →