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matter , he thought. There was only the now, so only the now he was now in must be the now he was supposed to be in. Had there been a now before now, a then you might say, he didn’t remember it and didn’t know if it had been any better than now anyways. He supposed there was a future now still to come, but he would just deal with that when he came to it. His brain began to hurt a little at these thoughts, but he pressed on with his self-reflection.
    Where am I? He didn’t know that either. He would like to say it was a foreign world he had woken up in, since he had no knowledge of it. But since he had no memory of a world other than this one, perhaps he should assume this was where he was supposed to be. Well, where he was supposed to be in a larger sense anyways. Emal still felt like he had a specific destination somewhere in this world. Like a specific address he was supposed to be arriving at for a dinner party. The answer was somewhere in the back of his brain, hiding under the rubble of his collapsed memory palace.
    The bigger question that occurred to him was— how did I get here ? In this now and this world .
    He had an inkling he wasn’t the first person to ask this question in a moonlit swamp, and he got that strange heartburn feeling in his chest again. In order to make the feeling go away, he decided he would deal with the bigger question some other time, in some other story.
    At least I know who I am, but what am I doing here? That is a good question—one I haven’t been able to answer. Had I been out for a morning jog when I ran into that brick wall? Perhaps I’d been running to the grocery store for eggs. The thought of eggs made him realize how hungry he was, especially after pushing through this swamp. Well, lunch might be a good option in the near future; perhaps I can find a little stand selling BBQ cat. That could really improve my mood . But lunch isn’t going to help me figure out my grand purpose. I need to think bigger.
    Maybe I should become a cat lover. I could travel this strange tube world rescuing these stray cats that are clearly such a menace to a civil society. I would put them in shelters that I would make from renewable resources. Surely, I would be able to get others to help me because they would be amazed at how brave I was to work with cats, even after my harrowing ordeal at their paws. That would fill me with a sense of purpose.
    Instead, of course, I could work on getting the world’s biggest collection of skirts. I do find the skirt I’m wearing comfortable, so why not collect them? I could find leather skirts, plaid skirts, fishtail skirts, bubble skirts, broomstick skirts, dirndl skirts, flared skirts. The list could go on and on. I would become renowned for my skirt collection and people would marvel that they never saw me in the same skirt twice. That would fill me with a sense of purpose.
    “No, No, No,” Emal said out loud. None of these things would be fulfilling . He needed something different; there had to be something else he could do with his life. Something he was meant to do.
    “Help me,” he cried out loud to the weeds.
    A loud pop, which seemed to come from all around him, nearly caused him to fall off the stairs and into the stinky swamp water. Right in front of his eyes, surrounded by light, had appeared the strangest thing. An angel? Not quite. It looked exactly like a paperclip but yet somehow not quite a paperclip. It had large, dark, doleful eyes. The thing had no mouth or anything else you’d expect a face to have except those sad eyes. The inner part of the paperclip curled up slightly, and if you were really desperate to label it, you might consider the slight curly bit to be a mouth.
    It was . . . disturbing.
    “How can I help you?” the aberration asked. The part of it that sort of looked like a mouth apparently really was because it moved out of sync to its words when it talked.
    “Who are you? Where did you come from? What do you want?”