I thought life was weird enough, until he started showing up.

Stirring cream into my coffee, I heard and saw him for the first time.

He was sitting in my kitchen, on a stool, speaking into the air. “You are about to enter another dimension…” he started saying.

I took a long sip of my coffee and blinked a few times. How the hell did this guy get in here?

“…a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind…”

He was wearing a suit and tie, had dark hair slicked back in a style I’d seen only in old TV shows. In one hand was a cigarette and a pile of ash on my (just cleaned) floor.

“Dude,” I said. “Why are you here?”

He didn’t answer but kept talking nonsensically about some kind of crazy parallel universe.

“Let’s meet Jessica,” he continued.

That was me.

“A single, attractive woman—“

Well that’s true, I thought.

“—who’s recently broken up with her boyfriend, now lonely and wondering if her life is over —“

“Hey!” I yelled. “No need to be so personal!”

I walked over to him and touched him, but my hand went right through him. He was some kind of projected image or hologram!

“What the funk??”

***

He showed up later at the office.

“Jessica Blake: just another female worker drowning in a professional doldrums, dreaming of something better…”

Like a warren of prairie dogs, heads popped up over cubicles.

I buried my head in my hands.

“Jessica, who is this guy and why is he talking about you? Aren’t you happy here?”

“Will someone tell me what’s going on??” I cried.

My boss arrived, along with the company CEO.

“Jess, who is this guy?”

“I swear I don’t know!”

A circle formed around the ghostly image as it smoked and talked about me in thinly veiled insults.

“I know what this is,” Benny, the tech guy, said. “I know a guy who can help.”

***

“So the good news, Jessica, is that you are not going crazy.”

“Ok. Who did you say you were?”

They had agreed to meet at the company cafeteria. Me: coffee with oat milk and turbinado sugar; Dr. Frank Bellamy (astrophysicist): coffee, black.

“A regular office cafeteria, just like any other…” the ghostly figure, smoking, spoke into the air. “…about to become a restaurant of the bizarre…”

“Dr. Frank Bellamy, astrophysicist and in charge of the hyperspace recycling network. I’m here to … explain that.” He waved toward the still-speaking figure.

“You see, we’ve discovered a way to warp space to allow time travel. But there have been some — ahem — glitches.”

“Glitches.”

“Or just this one at least.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

The ghostly figure appeared at the table. Everyone was staring. This was getting really awkward.

“Jessica Blake’s day started like any other, before tumbling down into — The Twilight Zone.”

Frank smiled awkwardly and took a long sip of his coffee. “We have some work to do. Heh.”