Beantown Bug

In the distance I could see something: a mass of colorful blotches all huddled together. Curious to see what the blob was, I flicked my hand and conjured up a pair of binoculars. As is expected to be done with binoculars, I then put them against my face and looked through the lenses.

With my view magnified, I could see a black and white pair of winged unicorns standing together, flanked on either side by a quarter circle composed of hundreds of smaller, wingless unicorns. One of them waved at me, and then their horns all lit up at once. A few seconds later, I saw faint beams of light shoot from each individual horn. A few hundred yards into the air, the beams all collided and the light formed one big ball that shone like a second sun. I flipped the shaded lenses down onto the goggles, to protect my eyes from the sudden brightness. I wanted to see where this went.

Before I knew it, the ground shifted. I looked down to find myself perfectly balanced on the peak of my house’s roof. I turned back to my binoculars to find that my view had gone cloudy. I pulled the binoculars away from my face and looked around to find a fine, pink mist slowly rolling across the street below, and I watched as it rose up to me.

Breathing it in had been a bit of a mistake, I found. My chest tightened up immediately, and it became hard to breathe in the pink miasma. I didn’t have anywhere to go, so I took up my binoculars once more and decided I’d have another look at those unicorns.

A flash of lightning blinded me through the binoculars’ smoked lenses, before said binoculars shattered into pieces. When I looked at my hand, it was covered with strange, pink minerals that had burst through my skin. It didn’t hurt, but I was definitely startled, and when I tried to step back, I found couldn’t actually move. I looked down. A bright pink crystal had impaled my foot when I wasn’t looking, and it kept me pinned to the roof. As the seconds passed, I found more and more of the evil, pink shards exploding out of my body.

The loud crack of thunder and a shadow that loomed over me prompted me to look up.

A mirror image of the earth had appeared above me, and it shoved aside the clouds as it fell. Even without my binoculars, I could see the forests on the land and the waves in the ocean. I could see the little animals, the familiar houses, and I could even see the people. They were strange, colorful, little horses, like the hundreds of unicorns I’d just been observing. Some of them traded their horns for wings. Some had neither. They were all looking down—up—down—ah, whatever, they were looking from their planet to my planet.

I couldn’t help but wonder. Are they seeing what I’m seeing? Another world falling from the sky, intent on crushing them to dust? What were they feeling? Were they afraid, like I was? Had they already made their peace? How much longer did we have?

As the planet drew closer and the clusters of buildings became more familiar, I saw a figure that was larger than the rest. It wore the same clothes I did, and it stood on the roof of what I recognized as my house. Was that supposed to be me? If so, why did this alternate me look so different from all the other little horses on that world? I wasn’t anybody special, so why did I look special?

I was so caught up in the observation of my alternate universe self, that I didn’t realize how close the other world had gotten. The cracked up streets of the city rushed down to meet me, and I held my arms up in the futile hope that I might cushion the blow. The other me did the same, and my hands touched his hooves. We phased through each other until our heads came together.

Clonk.