Where the World Went Thin

“It wasn’t just light—it was like someone cut a hole in the sky and let the wrong colours out.”

The man stopped at the edge of the building — just beyond the dented concrete steps and the twisted tin awning where the sun used to fall, back when this place had a clock-in and a siren and people with lunchboxes and dust on their boots. When it had been alive with purpose and noise and ordinary human concerns. Before the desert had started to reclaim it, grain by grain, rust spot by rust spot, forgotten memory by forgotten memory.

Now it was just him.

And her.

And us, though he didn't know it. Hidden witnesses to something we were never meant to see.

He let the girl slump against one of the beams. Her knees buckled, and she slid halfway to the ground like a marionette with half its strings cut. He didn't catch her this time. Didn't steady her or check if she was hurt. Just let her lean there, her face hidden behind hair and shadow, her chest rising in soft, shuddery breaths that seemed to take more effort than they were worth. Each inhale looked painful, deliberate, as if she had to remind herself to do it.

My own breathing had gone shallow, my lungs refusing to expand fully. As if my body sensed that making any sound at all—even the whisper of air through nostrils—might be enough to alert the man to our presence.

Then — calm as if he were checking a watch or adjusting a cufflink — the man reached into the inside of his coat. There was something ritual-like in the deliberate way his hand disappeared into the dark fabric, as if he'd performed this exact motion countless times before.

And drew out something small.

I didn't know what it was at first.

It wasn't a torch. It wasn't a phone. It wasn't a weapon, at least not any kind I'd ever seen. It wasn't anything that belonged in the world of school bags and breakfast cereal and bedtime stories.

It was a thin object, maybe the length of a longer finger, made of something dark and shiny like glass that had been dipped in black water. No—not glass. Something smoother, more perfect. Something that absorbed light rather than reflecting it. He held it lightly between two fingers, turning it slightly as if to catch the pre-dawn light, and as soon as it touched the air, something about the world shifted.

Not loud.

Not sudden.

But strange.

The kind of strange that made your skin itch without knowing why. That made the hairs on your arms stand up even though there was no electricity, no storm coming. The kind of strange that animals sense before earthquakes, that makes them hide or run without understanding what they're running from.

The air grew dense, charged with something that wasn't quite sound and wasn't quite smell and wasn't quite anything I had words for. Like the moment before lightning strikes, but stretched out, suspended, refusing to break.

He raised the object and pointed it at the flat metal wall of the mine's outer structure. He stood very still, feet planted, one hand tucked behind his back like a soldier at attention. His posture was eerily perfect, inhuman in its precision.

Then suddenly, the tip of the device flared to life.

A ball of light burst from it — not with a bang, but a fierce, blinding intensity that filled my eyes even from behind the wall. The brightness was so sudden, so complete, that my vision blanked out for a moment, leaving only purple-green afterimages dancing across the darkness. It shot forward like a comet, a tight white core trailing streaks of silver and violet, and struck the wall with a soundless impact.

And then—

It exploded.

Not outward — not like fireworks or bombs or anything that belonged to the world of physics and chemistry and explanations.

But inward.

The metal rippled like it had turned to liquid, shimmering and groaning as if the wall itself had drawn a breath. A rectangular shape bloomed across the surface — tall, uneven-edged, echoing the panel lines of the rusted cladding. Its borders pulsed with jagged bands of colour: electric green that burned to look at, deep indigo like the bottom of a forgotten ocean, searing yellow that sliced through the eye, and a raw, pulsing red that throbbed like an open wound. The colours twisted and sparked against each other, flaring with tiny forks of lightning, alive and wrong and impossibly real.

Wrong in a way I couldn't explain but felt in my bones, in the pit of my stomach, in the primitive part of my brain that recognises danger before the thinking part can name it. Wrong the way a face might be wrong if you saw it without skin. Wrong the way the world would be wrong if gravity suddenly reversed.

It was the most beautiful, terrifying thing I had ever seen.

It wasn’t a door. Not really. But something had opened in the wall — a rectangle of swirling, shifting light that didn’t belong there. It didn’t show another room, or outside, or anything at all. Just light. Twisting, bending, folding over itself like a ribbon caught in water. The colours weren’t still — they moved in slow waves, as if the air itself was trying to decide what shape to be.

It wasn’t flat. It looked like it went inwards forever, even though there was nothing to step into. Like it was deep and hollow and endless all at once. Like falling, but with your eyes.

My mouth was open. I hadn't realised it. My jaw had gone slack, my lips parted in silent horror or awe or some emotion that existed between the two. I felt Ribbons slip from my grasp, falling softly to the concrete floor, but I couldn't look away from the impossible thing swirling outside our shelter.

Beside me, Mack was still. He'd seen it too — I knew by the way his breath had caught, by the sudden rigidity of his body, by the almost imperceptible tremor that ran through him. His hand on my wrist, had tightened to the point of pain, his fingernails digging half-moons into my skin. But I didn't pull away. The pain was grounding, real, a reminder that this wasn't a dream or a hallucination.

But he didn't say anything.

Because what do you say when the world folds in on itself?

When something impossible happens right in front of your eyes, and no one tells you it's a trick? When reality tears open like wet paper, revealing something beyond that was never meant to be seen by children’s eyes?

What words could possibly contain this?

I watched the colours twist around each other, clashing like waves, never blending. They sparked every time they touched — little starbursts that snapped at the edges of the frame. The air around it seemed distorted, as if heat waves were rising from it, though there was no heat—only a cold that didn't belong to any season or weather pattern I knew.

The girl didn't look up.

She didn't even flinch when the light came. Didn't react to the tearing of reality happening just feet away from her. Her eyes stayed half-closed, unfocused, seeing nothing, or perhaps seeing too much. Her arms limp at her sides, fingers curled but not quite forming fists. Her body barely holding itself together, as if only proximity to the man kept her from dissolving completely.

But I saw it.

I saw everything.

Every impossible, reality-denying second of it.

I didn't know what it was.

I didn't know if it was a machine or a spell or a dream. I didn't know if it was science too advanced for ordinary people to understand, or something else entirely—something from outside the categories I'd been taught in school, something that made even the strangest fairy tales seem mundane and predictable.

But I knew it wasn't from here.

It wasn't from Broken Hill or Adelaide or anywhere else in Australia. It wasn't from Earth at all. It was like someone had torn a hole in the sky — and now anything could come through. Or something could go back. Back to wherever it had come from.

The colours began to stabilise, the violent clashing giving way to a more rhythmic pulsing. The edges of the portal grew more defined, solidifying from chaotic energy into something almost architectural. A doorway. A passage. An exit.

Or an entrance.

The man stood in front of the colours like he'd done this a thousand times. Like it was a doorway to his kitchen or the corner shop. Like creating rifts in reality was as ordinary as catching a bus or making a sandwich. His familiarity with the impossible was perhaps the most terrifying thing of all—the casual way he wielded powers that shouldn't exist.

His coat flapped lightly in the breeze. The glow of the colours lit the side of his face in sharp contrast — a narrow cheekbone, a hollowed eye socket, and lips pressed in a pale, flat line. He didn't blink. Not once. His eyes reflected the swirling colours but showed no emotion, no wonder, no fear. Just patient waiting, the blank attention of someone who has performed a routine task and is now waiting for the next step in the process.

He turned his head slightly, scanning the scrub — as if checking for watchers.

I ducked back instinctively, pressing myself against the cold metal of the locker, suddenly terrified that he would sense us. That he would know we had seen what we were never supposed to see.

My heart hammered so violently I was certain he would hear it.

And even though he didn't say a word…

Even though his eyes were shadowed by the brim of his hat…

I knew — somehow — that this thing he had opened…

…was not a place.

It was a destination.

Not to a house or a city or a country I could point to on a map. Not to anywhere that existed in the world I knew. But somewhere else. Somewhere fundamentally, terrifyingly other.

The knowledge settled into my bones with absolute certainty, though I couldn't have explained how I knew. Some truths don't need explanation. Some revelations bypass language entirely and speak directly to the oldest parts of your brain.

He was going home.