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In the middle of the next night Sadie got up from tossing and turning in her wide and empty bed. She wanted to think of nothing at all, but mostly she thought about Itzie and Ben and a universe that seemed hellbent on carving you down to a sliver.

“It’s nothing you can’t fix,”

she reminded herself.

Then went out to the N?lmyna, sat down, and fell through the hole in the Universe.

It was nice to be in and with Ben again.

And it was awful.

It was awfully nice.

He screamed and sang and spoke to her, as did everything and everyone else, ever. It was noisy, in the way that a silent room can somehow be deafeningly loud.

Itzie and Pigott were there, but not in the way Ben was—not everywhere all at once. They were present bodily. They sat on the perfectly shorn grass beneath the weeping cherries and the kaleidoscopically propagating suns.

They sat cross-legged, kneecaps nearly touching, holding hands. They were skeletal with hunger, eyes closed, bodies blurry with dissolution.

Itzie’s eyes jigged beneath the eyelids, dreaming. It was like seeing a corpse in its casket slowly crack a grin. Sadie wanted to scream and run.

Yes, Itzie’d done this to himself. But the cop? It would be hard to argue that his state was not her fault.

“Sadie,”

Pigott and Itzie said, exultant, eyes closed. Both their lips moved as they spoke, but the words themselves came through the suns steadily consuming the sky. “We’re glad you’re here.”

Their skin bled out into the air, like ink applied to wet paper, forming tendrils that grasped and consumed the drifting petals of sunlight.

“We’ve learned an awful lot in our years here. For example—” And then, instead of explaining, they put a notion in her head that she would never be able to fully articulate.

The closest her mind could come was to imagine something like an immense whale sucking in water and straining out brine shrimp.

But the shrimp were stars, and each star was orbited by planets, and each planet was populated by billions, and each of those billions clung to their kin in terror as they found themselves shorn from existence and devoured.

“We think we’re ready to return now,”

they sighed. “As god. Help things along. Clean up the clutter. But we aren’t sure of the way any longer. You’ll lead us back through the thin spot in the N?lmyna, yes? And then join us all in the Godfold?”

Sadie abruptly flashed on a joke Itzie had told her when they were kids:

Hey, cuz, what did the Buddha ask the hotdog vendor?

“Can you make me one with everything?”

Sadie was acutely aware of time passing, so fast that it seemed like it wasn’t moving at all. She recalled what happened to the cop when she dumped him into the N?lmyna, and knew it was happening to her body back in her entryway.

“Sure,”

Sadie answered, nearly mad with her inundation in all of everything. “Sure, I can help.”

Then she stood up from the chair, leaving them behind.

Over the ensuing years she’d often debate with herself as to why it was she could come and go through the N?lmyna while others could not.

She hoped that it was because some essential element of Ben, pulsing through the annihilating Godfold, buffered her from absorption.

But she suspected it was simply because she kept her visits so short, leaving before her dissolution could start in earnest.

Sadie found herself in her entryway, gasping, skin burning, eyes buzzing, ears ringing with the imminent immanence of the New God Thing’s voice.

She had inspected the Universe and found an extremely dangerous structural deficiency.

Once her heart calmed she went down to her workroom, returning with hex wrenches, two sets of pliers, a long flathead screwdriver, and a utility knife.

Over the next several hours Sadie patiently and completely unmade the N?lmyna. She started by pulling all the bolts.

Bending the first into an irredeemable curl, she was struck by a tremendous flash of bitter agony, knowing that Ben was really and truly gone from her forever.

Her choice had been between eternal union collapsing into her best beloved, or saving this ugly, petty world; she’d picked her poison.

The rest was easy, if tedious: Sadie carefully cut the seams of the N?lmyna’s seat cover, then unwove it strand by strand.

She worked the screwdriver between the layers of laminated birch and peeled them apart.

She stacked the pieces along the wall under her coat hooks as she worked, just where the chair had stood, patching that thin spot between worlds.

The next day the police came with a warrant and a wrecking crew. They tore out drywall and dug up the basement, searching for bodies or evidence or clues.

Yes, it was a mess. But nothing Sadie couldn’t fix.