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As soon as her ass touched the mesh, she knew she’d made a tremendous mistake.

But by then, she was already through the chair, on the other side of that thinning of the fabric of the Universe.

She was in a garden, not so different from the garden of weeping cherry trees in Ault Park, east of downtown, where she’d spent plenty of afternoons ambling around with Ben.

But that was maybe only the case because it wasn’t so different from anywhere, because it was somehow everywhere, and everything, all at once.

The grass was shorn perfectly even, like an Army recruiter’s brush cut.

The sky was a pale bleached-out yellow somehow undergirded with a terrible, geometric webwork.

She didn’t know what could possibly be terrible about a shape—something like a mesh, something like a honeycomb—but it was awful.

The sun was at the zenith of the sky, but it did not hang there.

It was dividing steadily, like time-lapse footage of a cell in a documentary about cancer or evolution.

And Ben was there, because Ben was everywhere, because everyone was everywhere there.

She was steeped in Ben, soaking in him and soaking him up.

She knew the reality of his delight in seeing her on their wedding day, and his final thought of her as he lay dying.

She knew a strange teen had touched him in a swimming pool when he was six.

She knew Ben had been addicted to online pornography.

It was a tremendous relief to be home with her husband again.

It was awful knowing everything.

She shot out of the chair, then bolted out of Itzie’s apartment.

* * *

Itzie was bounding up the stairs as Sadie headed out the door.

“Gotta go,”

she said in a rush.

“But I got two-for-one Crispy Ch’King chicken sandwiches!”

He held up the bulging Burger King bag for proof.

Sadie pushed past and carried on down the stairs, loose limbed as a rag doll.

Itzie rushed after. “Sadie, c’mon, I need you. You’re the haunted house home inspector! You’re the only person who can bounce ideas around with me on this, help me explore it. At the very least, we’ve got, like, two dozen chairs to take apart and figure out if they’re for-real ?LEI crap, or some sort of paranormal mimics of ?LEI crap!”

She was already to the first landing, not slowing down. “This is a you thing, not a me thing,”

she told him.

“Of course, it’s a you thing!”

Itzie said. “This is the thing you been looking for since Ben…”

She didn’t slow.

“This is proof, Sadie. The chair is proof—not that there’s a God or an afterlife or any of that—but it’s proof that it’s worth asking the questions we been asking since we were kids. Proof that there is somewhere out there.”

She was at the front door.

“Hey! At least tell me you’ll be my, like, trip-sitter when I try sitting in the chair?”

For that Sadie stopped. She turned back to look at Itzie—who really didn’t look like he’d aged a bit since they’d been kids. And maybe, in the most important ways, he had not.

“You haven’t sat in it yet?”

she asked, almost incredulous. After all, isn’t sitting in a chair the first thing you do?

Itzie snorted in reply. “If I’d woke up one morning and there was an oven-fresh mystery pie on my counter, it ain’t like I’d just cut a slice and dig in.”

“Ok. Agreed. But knowing what you’ve seen so far, now you’re gonna dig in?”

“Not dig in, per se. Just taste it. Tasting this pie is the only thing that’s left to do, Sadie.”

She took a breath. “Itzie, definitely do not sit in that chair. Trust me.”

Then she was out the front door, putting much-needed distance between herself and the edge of the Eternal.

These were her final words to her cousin.

A week later she got the call from Officer Pigott.