Kendrid used his feet as leverage to push his swivel chair away from the desk. He spun the chair in circles while staring up at the ceiling. He blew out a frustrated, slightly dizzy groan and loosely clutched at his hair. Then he stood up and started pacing back and forth across his room, absently gesturing with his hands as he silently and emphatically lipped the various words of an imaginary debate with an even more imaginary person. He groaned again and quit his pacing. He stood still and surveyed the room. It seemed to be a perfect cube.
He went back to the chair and then dragged it over to the wall. He climbed up on the chair and carefully reached up to pinch at the edge of the ceiling. It came loose easily and moved down a little. It seemed to be hinged to the opposite wall. Supporting the ceiling with his arms vertically stretched upward, he slowly stepped down from the chair, which brought the ceiling a little lower with him. He stepped forward and crouched as he let go of the ceiling. It swung forcefully across the room like a planar wrecking ball. His desk, dresser, bookshelves, chair and bed made a violent commotion as they squished and broke against the far wall.
A rush of cold air descended on the room and Kendrid looked upwards to see the stars in the night sky that had come into view. He felt philosophical.
Then, feeling a need to complete the task thus started, Kendrid decided to take the wall to his right and pull it across the room until there was barely any space between the wall and the collapsed ceiling at his back. At this point, he noticed that he had grown relative to the size of the walls. The walls now seemed to be only a couple inches taller than him. This made it possible for Kendrid to hoist himself over the wall as if it was merely a low fence.
Hopping down on the other side, he took the next wall and folded it in the same manner as the last one. The room was thus reduced to two walls, a floor and his person. He then proceeded in the most pragmatic fashion to fold up the rest of the room. To complete the task, he had to trap himself in the compressed walls, because he was also still inside the room he was outside of. He decided it was worth it. As he pulled the last two planes of the cube closer to each other (which looked humorously like the jaws of a toothless crocodile swallowing him whole), Kendrid found that he held the six sides of his room between his fingers as if it was nothing more than a small, wooden card. Around him, the black of space ran off to the fringes of the universe, the unfathomable distance empty except for a peppering of stars. And, still, he remained wedged between the walls; the pressure crushed his chest as he pinched the card of his former room that he was holding as well as presently inside.
His fingers, unable to control themselves, began devouring the card (which seemed to have transformed into a paper-like consistency) that crumpled at the bidding of his hungry fingers as they wrapped themselves into a fist. Kendrid squeezed this fist tightly until he could no longer feel the difference between the crumpled room and his flesh.
After a short time, he opened his hand, which in turn revealed itself to be empty. He gasped at the realization that his room, with himself in it, had disappeared entirely.
He woke up a little while later to a room drenched in sunlight. The clock next to him expressed the time as exactly two o’clock in the afternoon. His mother was yelling something at him from downstairs. He sleepily sat up and ran a hand through his tangled mass of dark hair. His mother yelled again, but it was impossible to distinguish a single word of it. He figured her distorted message had something to do with him sleeping so late into the day. He squirmed out of the bed sheets and walked over to the mirror to press his hair down. He smiled mischievously at his reflection, an expression that his reflection promptly returned. He picked a blue t-shirt up off the floor and put it on.
Downstairs in the kitchen his mother greeted him with a smile that Kendrid promptly returned as he took a seat at the counter. His mother was a mousy woman with a disproportionately small head that was topped off by dull, jaundice-yellow hair, the bangs of which were draped above her pallid-gray eyes. She wore an almost constant expression of ironic amusement that had served as a mask almost since the beginning of her marriage nearly twenty years earlier. Her defining characteristic, if she’s to be summarized succinctly by the impression she gives to others, was a tendency toward obsequiousness. This was either her greatest strength or most tragic flaw, depending on the perspective of the person judging her.
“What’s for breakfast?” asked Kendrid, crossing his arms and putting his elbows on the countertop.
“You mean lunch.”
“I mean lunch.” His mother walked over to the refrigerator and pulled out a bag of baby carrots.
“Carrots,” she said, handing him the bag. Kendrid took a carrot out and munched on it thoughtfully.
“Not a very substantial meal,” he mumbled after eating a couple more.
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