You're sitting on a bench in a park, and it's hot. The kind of heat that makes the air thick and lazy, where even your thoughts move like honey. Children's laughter drifts from the playground to your leftāa sound that should be comforting but feels oddly distant, as if you're hearing it through water. You shift on the warm metal slats, feeling the sun press against your back like a heavy hand.
An airy tick flashes in the corners of your periphery, forcing a reflexive head turn. Nothing. Just another empty bench, no movement aside from the shimmering heat waves rising from the concrete. The distortion wavers in geometric patterns that seem almost... intentional. You blink hard, but the shimmer persists, and for a momentājust a momentāit resembles the outline of a figure.
No, that can't be a person.
But it raises its gaze to gaze through you. Not at you, through you, the way light passes through glass without acknowledging the glass exists. You understand, with a clarity that makes your teeth ache, that it's not seeing you so much as aware of your presence, just as you can't see wind but sense its aftereffects on the trees.
The playground behind you begins to exhale childhood. Each swing releases small puffs of scraped-knee summers and birthday cake promises. The children's laughter becomes visibleāgolden threads weaving through the air, spelling words in a language you remember from dreams you haven't had yet.
The heat shimmer doesn't step forward; it simply becomes more itself. More present. More undeniably there in a way that makes your spine remember it was once liquid, once a river flowing upward through landscapes that don't believe in gravity.
Your peripheral vision starts behaving like peripheral hearingācatching conversations between park benches and lampposts, overhearing the trees gossiping about root systems and underground friendships. The entity's attention settles over you like a weighted blanket made of questions you've never learned how to ask.
Something opens. Not a door, not a window, but a fold in the fabric of paying attention. Through it pours understanding that arrives too fast, too complete, like trying to drink from a waterfall of pure knowing. Your consciousness expands to accommodate truths it was never designed to hold.
The bench beneath you begins to remember all the other people who have sat hereātheir weight, their worries, their ways of breathing. You feel yourself becoming temporary, a brief interruption in the bench's longer conversation with gravity and time.
Your thoughts start arriving before you think them. The entity speaks without moving its mouth, without having a mouth, and its words arrive as changes in air pressure, as shifts in the color of silence. You understand everything it's saying and nothing it means.
The park itself becomes unstable. Trees negotiate new relationships with sky. Shadows detach from their owners and begin independent social lives. The distance between your heartbeat and your breath expands until there's room for entire civilizations to rise and fall between inhale and exhale.
Reality stutters. Blinks. Forgets its own rules.
You are sitting you are remembering sitting you are the memory of someone who once knew how to sit and now the sitting sits you and you become the verb of being seated while the bench benches you into existence and existence exists you into being and being becomes a way of happening rather than a way of being
The heat shimmers you and you shimmer back and shimming becomes a conversation becomes the way light learns to speak to light learns to speak speaking and the entity entities itself into your peripheral which peripherals you until you are the edge of your own vision the edge visioning itself
Playground grounds itself into play and play plays itself into ground and children child themselves into childhood and childhood childs the children into being young and young youngs itself into was and was wases itself into never and never nevers always
Time folds into origami into gami into fold and fold folds time until timing times itself and the entity gazes gaze and gaze gazes entity and you you yourself into being youed by the being of you being be
consciousness negotiations its own bound perception becomes verbing the sitting benchs and benching sits heat shimmer speaking light to light playground grounds play into playing entity gaze gazed gazing you understanding arrives too fast complete reality stutters blinks forgets peripheral vision hearings thoughts arriving before thinking being becomes happening you you you is
Produced in collaboration with Claude AI