Pop!

The weirdest short story you'll read this week

I wrote the original draft of this thing five years ago. That’s older than my kids! Anyway, I dug it up and revised it to share with you for Fiction Friday. It’s possible that the only other person who had read it before now was my mom.

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If it tried very hard, it could move its mouth.

This was the first thought it ever had.

There were no words, there was no context. The idea of "trying" and "moving" and "mouths" were not formed into any coherent symbology. Certainly conditional statements weren't within the scope of experience it had accumulated in its first seconds of awareness.

But that's the closest interpretation of the feelings it encountered. The feeling of not being able to move. The feeling of distinct individuation from the surrounding world. The sense of being and seeing and knowing more than before.

Those were the first thoughtless seconds. And then additional feelings began to take shape within the boundaries of its body. The sensation of atmosphere enrobing its surfaces. The awareness of an irregular appendage.

These revelations initiated a rudimentary self-assessment, as the thing made a mental map of itself. Preference sprung naturally out of the ether of its nascent mind to close an opening. To become fully self-contained.

But the increasing awareness also revealed limitations. As one natural impulse tended toward a particular movement, it was interrupted by resistance. Lacking context of any kind, and so unencumbered by any emotional reaction to this interruption, the thing began to focus its thoughtless attention toward the limitation of this resistance, and developed its first clear objective: movement of the appendage.

And lo, it moved. Hence the wordless truth that formed in the thing's mind: If it tried very hard, it could move its mouth.

It was only a little at first, but with that sustained effort, it got its mouth all the way closed.

Success irradiated it with glory.

The thrill of discovery that it had the power to change the world, even just a little, was enough to keep it still for a stretching, timeless moment.

Impressionistic questions multiplied. What SHOULD it do? Should it open its mouth again? Should it keep it closed? It wasn't a question of morality, but of desire. What did it want?

The desire clarified -- first, it wanted to know if opening and closing were repeatable phenomena.

With the exercise of great force of attention and will, it opened its mouth again.

A rush of air! The passing of atmosphere over its surfaces anew! Greater glory! Greater life!

For these overwhelming emotions, it had only one mode of expression: the repeated closing and reopening of its mouth. With each closure, a clicking sound, which only after another great while, and many repetitions, did it begin to associate with its actions.

Soon after, the thing began to experiment with the range of clicking sounds it could create, in frequency and pitch. There seemed to be no limit.

But what else? What other powers of movement could this newly conscious thing explore? A fresh idea emerged in its incorporeal mind -- perhaps the opening and closing of its mouth was not a binary proposition but a spectral one. Perhaps the lower bound was complete closure, but what of the range of opening? How narrow?

The thing paused its clicking repetitions, mouth closed, and focused intently on the smallest movement possible -- open just a slice, just a sliver. Miraculous!

With this focused effort, it continued the gradual opening of its mouth wider.

Wider. Wider still. The wider its mouth opened, the more the air on the inside and the outside of its body began to feel the same. Stretching and expanding with exhilarating power, it discovered that, in fact, it could open so wide that the inside and outside WERE the same until suddenly--POP.

It couldn't quite understand what had happened, but somehow what was outside had become inside, and what had been inside was now outside.

With a continuation of the same motion, it discovered that the upper bound was in fact an inverse of the lower bound, as its mouth shut tight in this new configuration.

Then, carefully, slowly, testing the thesis, it reversed motion and--

POP!

It was back to normal.

Except that suddenly, everything had changed. A new and stunning sensation flooded and paralyzed the thing in its radically transformed universe. Somehow, in the process of inverting itself, and then reversing that inversion, it had gained vision.

Colors and shapes and chaos. An infinity of information about the outside world that it could now sense without the intimacy of feeling, of touch.

For the first time, it began to feel very small. Existence itself was a mighty truth, but mightier still was the conglomeration of all the things that it, itself, was not.

Unable to comprehend even the smallest part of the cacophony of light now pouring into its senses, it opened its mouth wide, wider, wider, until it reflexively POPPED again.

More change! The baffling kaleidoscope of information had perceptibly shifted after the POP.

However, rather than drawing the conclusion that its position had changed, a logical leap of which its infantile powers of reason were incapable, the thing came to believe that the vast array of light patterns was an extension of itself.

Its brief, unutterable impression of existential smallness now concluded, it began POP-POP-POP-ing across the new universe, as quickly as possible, in an eager glut of what it mistook as self-discovery.

And then something happened. Something absurd and unimaginable. Something deeply thrilling and confounding.

The obvious differentials in its sensations stopped. Instantly and totally. What had been a world-self bounded by a hard, mono-chromatic plane underneath an ephemeral universe of shifting colors and sounds became, instantly, a smooth and rapidly accelerating flow of only color.

As the air became thick and soft around its body, the thing noticed something else, something that was not new, but had been imperceptible before. Now, it was obvious and overpowering -- an invisible pull. The POP-ing thing was being dragged through light and air by an unseen force.

Just as suddenly as it had left one unyielding plane below, it encountered another. The contact was utterly paradigm-shifting. A shock sprang through its body, and it felt itself free of the contact for another moment, and then it was pulled back against the plane, flush, surface to surface, as it had been before. But now, everything was different. Everything.

Instead of being hard and smooth, the plane on which the thing now rested was rough, and infirm. The pattern of colors above were dominated by one monolithic shape, and many new shapes in the distance. If all of this was part of the thing, then the thing itself must have undergone a colossal transformation.

A long moment passed as the thing considered, in its limited and prelingual way, this great and mysterious phenomenon. But, since any meaningful was impossibly out of its reach, the thing simply POPPED again to see what would happen.

As before the Fall, the environment changed only slightly. It POPPED again, hesitantly. For now there was a new construct in its developing mind: fear. At first, everything was new and unknown, and so there was no basis for expectation. But then, with each test of each new hypotheses, the thing had begun to draw successful conclusions about how POP-ing affected the changes he observed.

Until, for literally no discernible reason, those conclusions had been fundamentally challenged by what seemed an apocalyptic event, the only causal relationship for which the thing could imagine was that it had POPPED too many times.

So, now, there was uncertainty. How many POPS before the universe would remake itself again? Was it the same number? Was it a different number?

Curiosity beat out the fear, and the thing began POPPING again furiously across the new surface. But no amount of movement seemed to trigger a second apocalypse. That invisible, pulling force was barely perceptible, the uneven surface stayed totally consistent, and the bewitching array of shapes and colors shifted in predictable increments with each POP.

And so on it POPPED.

Which is when George walked in to find his plastic frog paperweight inverting and reverting itself as it bounced across the floor of his office.

He gasped and withdrew, as at the sudden sight of some hug insect. But then the frog paused, inverted an unrecognizable, its surface stained and colorless, a lumpy mound on the floor. George stared, blinking, as his brain tried to parse what he was looking at. Meanwhile, a hole open on one side and then POP, it was back to being a plastic frog.

And then POP, it was an unrecognizable blob of gray plastic. Then POP again, and in another moment, it had resumed its POPPING around in erratic circles.

George watched for a long few seconds, horror-stricken and confused to the point of nausea.

Then, seized by some primal instinct, he turned and grabbed a large potted plant by its trunk, lifted it into the air, and brought it down with all the thoughtless force of vanquishing the unknown.

Panting with adrenaline, George cautiously lifted the plant to discover a splatch of shattered plastic where the frog-animate had been. He let out a long, shuddering breath of relief and returned the plant.

"Cindy!" he called out, "Would you come in here. I've got a broken paperweight on the floor."

He gave the erstwhile enigma a wide berth as he navigated to his office chair and sat down. Unable to do much but stare, suspicious of his own eyes, he waited until Cindy finally arrived with a broom and a dustpan.

After she and the broken thing were gone, he gave two shrugs of his shoulders and got a proper start on the day. Inside fifteen minutes, the incident was forgotten. When the memory returned during lunch at a nearby cafe, it solicited a chuckle, a shake of his head, and a silent resolution to take the hazards of overwork more seriously.

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