Evelyn first noticed it at work.
The paper she was holding in her hands didn't seem right. It wasn't the words on the page—they were her notes from the morning meeting. But the paper itself felt… off. She turned it over, and the blank side shimmered faintly in the fluorescent light. As she stared, the shimmer shifted, and for a brief second, she saw an impossible depth in the flat surface.
She blinked, and it was gone.
She brushed it off as a trick of the light.
The second time was at home.
Her apartment, usually her sanctuary, felt subtly different. Corners that should have been sharp looked oddly rounded, and straight lines—walls, shelves, even the edges of her laptop—seemed to bow inward, just enough to make her dizzy.
When she tried to ignore it, her surroundings seemed to resist.
A glass she placed on the table slid uphill, defying gravity, before settling with a soft clink. Her reflection in the window moved a fraction of a second too late, lagging behind her real movements like a bad video game.
Evelyn closed the blinds.
Reality unraveled further the next day.
The elevator at work refused to stop at her floor, no matter how many times she pressed the button. When the doors opened at last, she stepped out into a hallway that didn't belong to her building.
The walls were dark and pulsating, as if alive, and the air was heavy with the smell of iron. She turned back to the elevator, but the doors had vanished, replaced by a blank wall.
A sound echoed down the corridor—a low, wet scraping.
Evelyn didn't wait to see what made it. She ran.
Everywhere Evelyn went, the fabric of reality seemed thinner.
She passed people on the street whose faces blurred like smeared paint, their eyes sliding to the sides of their heads before snapping back into place. Shadows on the sidewalk moved independently of their sources, growing longer or shorter without warning.
Her own shadow seemed to have a mind of its own.
She caught it moving in her peripheral vision—standing still when she walked, or turning to face her when she wasn't looking.
One night, as she lay in bed, her shadow stepped out of the wall.
It was featureless, a silhouette of her own form, but its presence was suffocating. It stood at the foot of her bed, motionless, for what felt like hours. Evelyn couldn't move, couldn't scream.
When the shadow finally left, sinking back into the floor like spilled ink, she didn't sleep again.
The final straw came a week later.
Evelyn was at the park, hoping the open air would calm her fraying nerves. She sat on a bench, watching a jogger run laps around the pond. But on his fourth lap, the jogger didn't turn the corner.
He kept running straight—into the pond.
The water rippled like glass as he disappeared beneath it, running on a surface that bent and folded as though the pond were made of paper. Evelyn stood, her heart pounding, as the jogger reappeared on the other side of the park, still running, his face expressionless.
She looked down at her hands. Her skin shimmered, just like the paper from before.
Evelyn's apartment had folded in on itself.
The walls no longer met at right angles, and her belongings were scattered in nonsensical positions—her couch clung to the ceiling, her bookshelves bent like melted plastic.
In the bathroom mirror, her reflection stared back at her with wide, terrified eyes.
"It's not real," she whispered to herself.
Her reflection shook its head.
"Yes, it is," it mouthed silently.
Reality gave way entirely on the final night.
Evelyn's apartment folded and twisted, collapsing into a labyrinth of impossible geometry. Hallways stretched into infinity, doors opened into voids, and the floor beneath her feet rippled like water.
She found herself in a vast, featureless expanse where the sky and ground were indistinguishable.
Ahead of her stood a figure.
It was her—but not her. Its features were hers, but warped, its edges flickering like static.
The figure held out a hand, and Evelyn felt a pull, a magnetic force drawing her closer.
"Step through," the figure said, its voice a distorted echo.
"Through what?" Evelyn asked, her voice trembling.
The figure smiled.
Evelyn looked down and saw the paper in her hands, shimmering with that same impossible depth. It was blank, except for two words scrawled in her own handwriting:
Step through.
Before she could resist, the world folded again, and she fell into the page.