Portals and Pizzas

“One moment you’re bartering with belief at the edge of worlds, the next you’re apologising to a pizza delivery driver—absurdity doesn’t even begin to cover it.”

As I stepped back into the bedroom, the shimmer of the Portal collapsed behind me with a reluctant sigh, its light folding inward until nothing remained but the plain, plastered wall.

I stood for a beat too long, bracing myself for the storm I expected to find.

Gladys's questions, sharp as thrown stones, should have been waiting, ricocheting off the walls, demanding answers I could not comfortably give. I steeled myself against the inevitable barrage—the how and the why and the what-the-hell-have-you-done that would surely follow.

But there was nothing.

The room yawned empty, its silence conspicuous, almost accusatory. The bedspread lay untouched, the air stagnant, and the absence of her presence thudded louder in my chest than any outburst could have.

"Gladys!"

My call cracked the hush, rising at first with a note of forced brightness before dipping into unease. The sound carried down the hallway, echoing back to me, thinner, lonelier, unanswered.

What her silence might mean gnawed at the edges of my composure. Had she fled? Called someone? Gone to the neighbours with wild tales of glowing walls and disappearing men?

Then it came: a faint scuffle from the direction of the kitchen.

The shuffle of feet, a muted scrape of chair legs, something alive and real in the quiet house. My body moved before my mind caught up, drawn towards it with a reluctant urgency.

"Where's your father gone?" Gladys asked Duke quietly as I entered the kitchen.

She was crouched low, her back to me, the arch of her shoulders rigid yet oddly tender as she addressed the small body in front of her. Duke's nails clicked softly on the tiles as he shifted, his little frame vibrating with attention. The scene, almost domestic in its simplicity, struck me with a strangeness that only deepened the unease twisting inside me.

Here was Gladys, who moments ago had witnessed the impossible, now speaking to my dog as though nothing had changed. As though the fabric of reality hadn't just torn itself open in front of her eyes.

"Gladys," I murmured, announcing myself with a softness that felt necessary, my hand extending almost of its own accord to rest gently on her shoulder.

The warmth of contact was brief.

"Luke!"

Her voice broke with surprise as she twisted suddenly, the motion too abrupt for balance.

The moment unravelled in an instant. My attempt to steady her only tangled us further. Her weight, unexpected and off-centre, slipped through my grip. I clawed instinctively for purchase, but the effort was clumsy, ineffective. The inevitable came hard: Gladys toppled, landing with a graceless thud on the tiled kitchen floor.

"Ouch!"

The word burst out of her, half-growl, half-gasp, as her hand flew to her lower back in instinctive protection.

"Wait—let me—"

I stumbled forward, reaching for her arm in my urgency to undo what I had just caused. But the moment my fingers closed around her, her voice cut through the room.

"Don't touch me!"

The sharpness in her tone stunned me into stillness. Her eyes, blazing steel, left no room for misunderstanding. Reflex took over; my grip loosened instantly, leaving her to drop the last inch back to the floor with a muted, humiliating bump.

"Sorry," I breathed.

Duke, ever the opportunist, seized the pause.

His small body bounded forward, springing onto her lap with an exuberance that ignored the tension bristling in the room. His tail wagged like a frantic metronome, his tongue poised for affection, eager to turn calamity into play.

But Gladys, her patience evidently frayed beyond measure, waved him off with a brisk shove.

Rising stiffly, she brushed herself down in a series of sharp, dismissive motions. Then, without so much as a glance in my direction, she strode past me, her presence a gust of determination that left no space for words, no opening for repair.

The kitchen felt emptier in her wake, though her disapproval still hung thick in the air, as tangible as the echo of her fall.

I trailed after her, the sting of our last exchange still clinging to me, though concern pressed heavier than pride. Duke and Henri bounded ahead with unthinking joy, their paws padding into the carpet as they wove in and out of her stride, tails wagging like banners in some private parade. They, at least, were untouched by the jagged edges of mistrust and revelation.

Gladys moved quickly, her shoulders squared, the determined rhythm of her steps betraying her urgency. Whether it was distance from me she sought or answers she hoped to wrench from the silence, I couldn't tell. Perhaps both. Either way, I matched her pace.

"What happened to it?"

Her voice cut through as we entered the bedroom. The question struck sharp, unexpected, pulling me up short.

She was pointing directly at the wall, her finger a spear of accusation aimed at the blank plaster where only moments ago the Portal had pulsed with otherworldly life.

I lifted my hand, the Portal Key resting in the centre of my palm.

"I can open and close the Portal with this. It's a Portal Key," I said, though even as the words left me, I knew they were pitifully insufficient. Language buckled when asked to carry something so impossible.

Gladys's eyes lingered on the Portal Key, her expression unreadable, her silence longer than I liked.

Finally, she released a single syllable, flat and heavy.

"Oh."

Without giving her time to fully absorb the enormity of the Portal Key, I extended the water bottle towards her, the label still crinkled with Jamie's hurried scrawl.

"Jamie wrote a message on the label for you," I said, my voice tighter than I intended, carrying a threadbare hope that his handwriting—the familiar loops and slants she'd recognise instantly—might achieve what my words could not.

Gladys snatched it with a quickness that betrayed her inner turmoil.

Her fingers clenched around the plastic with a firmness that belied the mask of irritation fixed on her face. She looked every inch the sceptic, but her urgency betrayed her. I watched, barely breathing, as her eyes darted across the ink, lips pressed into a thin line that never softened. Every second stretched, each heartbeat magnifying the tension coiled in the silence between us.

"Believe me yet?"

The pause that followed was excruciating.

Her silence filled the room, heavy and immovable, the air thick with disbelief and the impossible weight of what I was asking her to accept.

Then came the shrug.

A small, infuriating lift of the shoulders, evasive and dismissive, that carried more power than a flat refusal ever could. It hollowed me out. Frustration surged hot in my chest, sharp enough to make my hands twitch with the almost primal urge to shake sense into her, to force urgency where she seemed determined to withhold it.

She's impossible, I thought bitterly, despairing at the brick wall we seemed doomed to keep slamming into.

Words weren't enough. I knew it. She knew it. And that left me staring down the one option I had sworn to avoid—the gamble of taking her through, of showing her the truth by stripping her of the safety of ignorance.

The air between us grew taut, charged, the silence no longer empty but alive with the strain of our standoff. It wasn't merely about explanations or evidence now. It was about trust—about whether she could let go enough to believe in me, and whether I could risk pulling her into a world that might hold her fast and never let her go.

The realisation sat heavy in my gut: words alone would never bridge the gulf yawning between belief and disbelief.

Then came the sound.

A knock—sharp, ordinary, utterly mundane. For a moment, the world of Portals, impossible keys, and incredulous standoffs dissolved, replaced by something so banal it almost felt absurd.

"Oh," I muttered, a flicker of recognition darting across my mind like a candle flame. "I forgot I ordered pizza."

"Pizza?"

Gladys repeated, her eyebrows knitting in confusion. The sharpness in her expression softened, displaced by something closer to bemusement. It was a tiny shift, but I seized it.

I caught Duke's body vibrating with anticipation, the telltale coil before his inevitable dash.

His little paws twitched, his eyes locked on the hallway like a soldier sighting the enemy. Anticipating chaos, I swooped him up before he could launch into his frenzied charge. His body wriggled against me, muscles taut with thwarted excitement.

"Hold him, please," I said quickly, practically thrusting the warm, restless bundle into Gladys's arms.

Her hands closed around him with reluctant inevitability, Duke's tail already lashing against her side in protest at being restrained.

My gaze flicked to Henri, whose deceptive calmness often preceded his own brand of mischief. He lingered at the edge of the room, his dark eyes wide, ears pricked, tail poised with a serenity that could tip into chaos without warning. I kept him in the corner of my eye, wary. Henri's mischief was quieter than Duke's exuberance, but no less disruptive.

With both dogs accounted for, I turned towards the door, the absurdity of it all not lost on me: here I was, standing between worlds, and yet still tethered to the ritual of takeaway dinner.

I moved quickly down the hallway, the sound of my own footsteps oddly amplified against the hush of the house.

The delivery person stood with the stack of boxes balanced neatly in their arms, the smell of warm dough and melted cheese seeping into the cool evening air. A young man, probably university age, with the slightly bored expression of someone who had knocked on a dozen doors that night and would knock on a dozen more.

I offered a distracted thanks, more gesture than words, before shutting the door with my hip and making my way back towards the kitchen.

The heat from the boxes seeped through the cardboard into my hands, a small but grounding reminder of reality as it had once been. Three pizzas—one for me, one for Jamie, one for Paul. A meal shared across dimensions. The thought was so absurd I nearly laughed.

In the kitchen, Gladys was waiting.

I set the three boxes down on the bench with deliberate care, the soft thud of cardboard against stone a grounding sound in the middle of so much upheaval. For a moment, it was just food—ordinary, unthreatening, real.

"You're going to eat three of them?"

Gladys asked. Her tone carried incredulity, the barest thread of amusement weaving through it, as though the sheer excess of food had managed to cut through her frustration.

Duke wriggled free from her arms at last, scrambling down to the tiles with a triumphant little grunt before darting off, tail wagging furiously.

I pulled open the fridge, retrieving a chilled bottle of chardonnay, and placed it alongside the pizzas.

"Don't be silly," I said, the words dressed in a casualness I didn't entirely feel. My hand moved towards the cupboard, fingers closing around the stems of two wine glasses as though the action itself might reinforce the illusion of normality. "Jamie and Paul are having some too."

"Of course they are," Gladys muttered.

Her words were quiet, but the weight in them was unmistakable—a cocktail of scepticism, weariness, and something else I couldn't quite name. Curiosity, perhaps. Or the early stirrings of reluctant belief.

Beneath it all, though, came a small, undeniable sound: the low growl of her stomach, betraying her body's impatience in a way her face would not.

The sight and smell of food, it seemed, carried its own authority. Even in the midst of disbelief, of impossible truths and broken trust, the most human of hungers still had its say.

With a movement that had already begun to feel rehearsed, I slipped my hand into my pocket and retrieved the Portal Key.

At once, the blank expanse of the living room wall rippled, then flared into brilliance, light folding and stretching until it became a living threshold. Colours arced like liquid fire, and the air pulsed with the low hum of energy, a spectacle so strange that even now it unsettled me.

"Remember, don't follow me," I said, the warning sharp in tone though undermined by the sheer absurdity of the moment—standing there with three pizza boxes balanced awkwardly in my arms, about to step through a dimensional gateway as though it were no more complicated than carrying dinner across a garden path. "I'll be right back."

Crossing into Clivilius was immediate, a slip between worlds so smooth it still unnerved me.

But this time, instead of the familiar purity of its air, I was struck by something darker. A faint, acrid tang threaded through the breeze, smoky and unsettling, catching at the back of my throat. My body responded before my thoughts could—muscles tightening, senses sharpening. The instinctive alarm was visceral, an ancient part of me stirred by the scent of fire.

I scanned the horizon quickly, heart quickening as my eyes sought the source.

The ochre sands stretched in all directions, still and vast, until—there. A thin column of smoke twisted upward into the flawless blue sky. My tension eased fractionally, recognition tempering fear. Not disaster. Not destruction. Just a campfire. Necessary warmth. Perhaps the textbooks I'd brought, put to their final use.

Still, the knowledge of fire's duality lingered: safety and danger were always two sides of the same flame.

I lowered the pizzas carefully beside the shimmering frame of the Portal, their cardboard edges whispering against the dust.

"I'll take you down to the river once I bring in the wine," I murmured, as if the boxes themselves required reassurance.

The sound of my own voice startled me, brittle with weariness. A laugh—short, humourless—slipped out, the kind that carried no joy but only a kind of grim acknowledgement. I could hear the madness of it, the absurdity of speaking to pizzas in a world that shouldn't exist, and yet it felt no more surreal than anything else this day had demanded of me.

The moment I crossed back into the living room, the sight that greeted me nearly stopped me in my tracks.

Gladys sat perched at the island bench, a wine glass poised elegantly in her hand as though she belonged in some ordinary evening scene. The incongruity of it—her calm indulgence set against the chaos of my day—was both exasperating and, in its way, oddly reassuring.

"Gladys!"

The word burst out sharper than I'd meant, the strain of the last few hours distorting my tone into something almost childish. "That wine was supposed to be for Jamie and Paul."

She barely flinched, lifting the glass to her lips with a composure that only fuelled my irritation.

Her reply carried the dry sharpness of the drink itself. "There's still plenty left," she said, sealing the bottle with an almost ceremonial twist before sliding it across the bench towards me. The gesture was smooth, deliberate, her eyes daring me to make more of it than it deserved.

The urge to roll my eyes burned behind them, but I held it back. It would have been a petty protest, one that would only deepen the gulf between us.

Still, the irritation remained—a hot prickle at the back of my neck. To me, the wine was not just wine; it was an offering to Jamie and Paul, a promise of normality within the impossible. Her casualness felt like an intrusion, a dismissal of something I considered sacred.

Nevertheless, I reached for the bottle and the waiting glasses.

The simple clink of glass against glass was grounding, steadying me, even as my movements betrayed a renewed sense of urgency. There was no time to quarrel, not over this.

Turning back towards the shimmer of the Portal, I stepped through once more.

As I did, I willed it to fade behind me, watching as the vibrant colours collapsed inward until nothing remained but the still air of Clivilius. The decision carried weight. Leaving Gladys alone on the other side felt reckless, but leaving the door open for her—inebriated, unpredictable—to stumble into this world was unthinkable.