Episode Three: Breads

When the power goes out in the evening, lights blink off and A/C fans whir to a halt. Astral practitioners know —love— to sit mudrasana and await stretching into the liminal chasm a dusky humid wind-down provides.

In a parallel universe of only one known difference, people say “Ooowee! My cats are purring!” when their knees hurt, instead of the better-known allegory of the barking dog and its sore paws.

It is rumor only —never confirmed— that the sole consequence of this difference is that, in Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, when John Candy says “I’m tellin’ you, my cats are purring today”, it is Steve Martin who has the mustache.

Naturally suspicious and conspiratorial folks that hover around astral and lucid circles feed off the vast reeling possibilities the mustache belies. Like, it begs the question: do dogs even bark in this other universe?

But soon enough the power surges back up, and the TV resumes your episode of the Bake Off. The window to the other side shutters its blinds once again as the Metropolitan Faraday Dome gets back to its ignoble work. Honestly, we’re all just so sick of these “fifth dimension thunderstorms,” the open-secret euphemism the DOE uses to explain away their perennial sweltering ineptitude.

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Scott Russell (they/them) is 39 years old and lives in New Haven, Connecticut with their cat, Penny. Television is their comfort food, as their every meal is too elaborate and messy to be attempted again. Currently celebrating an 80% houseplant survival rate for the first time, Scott doesn’t get out enough but had recently gotten over all self-conscious hangups to happily go dancing at every opportunity. It was a recent discovery that all their unmet software/art project ideas could be fed into a writer’s world-building hopper and still be fulfilling without having to actually code.