Stove Portal Dream

N and I brought home our new stove. It had taken months to find just the right one that would go with our kitchen and also didn’t have the control knobs situated that you had to reach across hot pans to adjust the heat. While it was sitting in our kitchen, waiting to be installed, a portal opened up through the stovetop. It descended into darkness. I went and grabbed a rope and a large carabiner. I carefully tied off one end of the rope and then hooked the carabiner onto a metal grid about arms length below the top of the stove. N looked in through the oven door. Just an oven.

             I climbed over the top and lowered myself down into the darkness using a couple of turns of rope through the carabiner to help keep the speed down. I managed to swing out and contact a metal beam after a dozen feet. There was light filtering in through holes in the ceiling of the old gymnasium.

            My Monkey (!?) and I made our way down the pipes on the side of the gym to the floor. It was dusty and unused looking. The doors were off of it, no sign of them anywhere. There was some evidence of birds or bats roosting in the rafters over the doors. We stepped out into the hazy daylight. The sun was out, but the whole sky was dim like a cloudy day, even though there were no clouds in the sky. The monkey took my hand and “ook ooked” in confusion.

            We headed off campus, all of the college’s buildings looked empty and unused, abandoned to the ivy and climbing roses. I found a street that wasn’t torn up looking and headed into a small strip mall.  There was a café, empty of customers, one waitress behind the counter, mindlessly wiping the chrome surface of a cake cover. She didn’t acknowledge us as we passed through. Inside the small mall we stopped a moment at an arcade. There were more people here, all of them stooped over their game consoles, also oblivious to us.

            We came to a bookstore, the monkey climbed to the top of the book cases and hopped from one to another, shadowing me as I walked through the store. I couldn’t find anyone, and the books were all printed in a language I couldn’t understand. I didn’t even recognize the letters which were printed on the pages. The monkey jumped down and I carried it for awhile; until we were out of the mall altogether and back in the sunlight, what thin light there was.

            I was attracted by the sounds of construction in the distance. We came to a bridge across a ravine. A sort of drawbridge that overlapped the side of the ravine we were on by a good 10 meters or more.  I walked out over the bridge, the monkey clambering over the superstructure. Down below, the ravine was filled with a roiling pink and red liquid with fatty white or yellow chunks floating in it. It smelled like a septic infection.

            There were construction workers, some on the bridge, some working on heavy earth moving equipment. All of the activity seemed focused on bridging the crevasse. They were not having much success.

            The crevasse widened into a ravine. The monkey was getting nervous. The bridge behind us was being pulled away from the far side; the gap had already widened that much.

            We raced up a hillside, trying to get to where the crevasse was narrower. After much running, we came to a point where we were ahead of the rip in the ground and I grabbed the monkey and leaped across the gap, which widened below me, fortunately I had made a running leap as I somehow knew the gap would do that. We landed with a loud thud on a piece of crumbling asphalt. We were behind the strip mall and I could see the campus gymnasium rising above the vines.

            The monkey went up over the vines. I had to push my way through them. We made it back into the gym. I started climbing up the rope. Lifting myself up was much slower than lowering myself. The monkey climbed back down and took the end of the rope up and over the carabiner then back down to me so I now had a kind of pulley and loop arrangement to work with. I could pull just the weight of my legs up, then stand up in the loop. As I approached the stove top I could see the portal beginning to close down. It tossed the end of the rope to the monkey and told him to “find N.”

            The monkey shot through the portal with the rope. The rope remained slack, however. I started working faster and managed to reach the portal just as the monkey shot back down out of it. I told him to go back but he just started climbing down to the beams of the gym. I climbed out and barely made it. The glasslike top of the stove had a chunk of the bottom of my shoe and part of a rope fused with it. I found myself hoping the monkey would be OK, and then wondering where N had gotten to.

 

Ad astra per technica,

FF