The Built World
03 May 2019Today’s prompt: “What is the place or object from your childhood that you most think about when you think about home?”
You had a set of wooden blocks when you were a child. Squares, rectangles, a few triangles and cylinders. You put together buildings, built whole towns out of them, and then watched them topple with a wooden clatter.
You woke up this morning in R’lyeh, your captors having dropped you off, unconscious on the shoreline, and then rowed away. The buildings here remind you of that moment when your block houses were knocked down, when they had already begun falling. Physics demands the structures collapse, and yet they stand. Staring too long at them gives you a headache. It’s like looking into a funhouse mirror, one that reflects back a combination of hyperbolic geometry and imminent doom.
It’s only a matter of time until Cthulhu finds you here. You can hear his raspy, wet, juddering breaths several maniacally-angled streets over. You stare in the direction of the breathing, past an Escher-esque monstrosity of architecture with improbable spires jutting out of the concave edges sprouting from its twisted base.
You stare at the building, willing it to fall. It does not. You listen to the breathing, willing it to fade away. It comes closer.
You close your eyes and picture your blocks again, those solid, unwarped geometric friends with their right angles and parallel lines, those mementos of home. You open them and look out on the landscape of R’lyeh, and know that you’ll never see home again.