Interstices

PUBLISHED IN THE FALL 2025 / WINTER 2026 ISSUE OF JUNQ MAGAZINE

I was in a forest, or what I thought at first was a forest.

What were you doing in the forest?

Maybe it wasn’t a forest, or at least not in the way we understand a forest. There were trees and animals but there were also mountains and oceans and deserts and buildings and cars and people and they all flowed together, shifting, the negative space between them becoming new trees and animals mountains and oceans and deserts and buildings and cars and people. They were all the same, but at the same time they were not. They were themselves and they were each other; they were everything and they were nothing.

What about the people? What were they doing?

Existing.

Did you speak to them?

Speak isn’t the right word.

I struggled to make the experience cohere in my mind and translate that into words that could convey the experience to Emma. I sipped the last of my coffee. I got up and rinsed out the cup and got ready for work. Before I left I stopped and told Emma that we didn’t speak because we didn’t need to speak. Our consciousness was like everything else there, like the trees and the buildings, it flowed. Even if you could examine it at a small enough scale to see the space between whatever it was that comprised everything, those separations didn’t exist outside the context of the flow of everything.



Driving home from work that evening I took a road through a field on the outskirts of town to avoid traffic. A report on the radio told me that there was a spate of missing persons reports that had come in across the county. As the reporter read a list of names and descriptions, my car engine died. I turned the key and nothing happened. My phone was also dead. When I pressed the power button it turned on but there was no signal and the battery was at one percent. Dialling Emma’s number I walked ahead but no matter where I stood there was no signal.

It was a two hour walk home. I walked through the door and found Emma sitting at the kitchen table talking to someone on her phone.

“Cedric just came in, I’ll call you back,” she said to the person on the other end. She stood up when she saw the state I was in. “What happened to you? I was worried.”
“The car broke down and…” I trailed off. I noticed the time on the kitchen stove. 8:37 p.m. I checked it against my wristwatch. “What time do you have?” I asked, but she didn’t register the question.

“You should have called. Or did you get a tow? The tow truck driver could have dropped you home.” Emma’s voice was a mix of worried and irritated.

“What time do you have?” I asked again.

"8:37, why?”

I showed her my watch. 6:13.

I plugged my phone in to charge and the lock screen showed the same time as my watch. I unlocked my phone and the time in the corner synched with whatever atomic clock server phones use and it was now 8:38.

I called a tow truck and told them where I had left the car. It would take them an hour to pick it up. An hour later the driver called me back and said the car wasn’t there, was I sure that’s where I left it? After I hung up I called the police to report it stolen, though I wasn’t sure that’s actually what had happened.

That night I couldn’t sleep so I sat up in bed and scrolled Instagram and Twitter. There were dozens more missing persons reports, people sharing photos and descriptions of loved ones who had left home with no warning. An odd detail that seemed to be common in every news article about these cases was that they left behind smashed clocks and phones and wristwatches, and one news article I read even reported a house fire that arson investigators believe started when a calendar had been set on fire. This resonated. I felt the same compulsion any time I looked the the time in the corner of my screen. I put my thumb over the time and looked at a few more reports.

Emma has always been a light sleeper so I quietly snuck out to the living room and turned on the television. More missing persons reports. A few reports had come in that people who were later confirmed missing had been seen walking in an uninterrupted straight path, not deviating for obstacles, crossing roads with no regard for traffic, climbing over fences and other obstacles, only going around the perimeters of objects that were too big to scale. Walking felt like a good idea. That’s what I wanted to do, I wanted to walk.



When I woke in the morning Cedric was gone. In the living room I found his phone with its screen shattered and a hammer next to it on the coffee table. The television was tilted backwards, embedded in the drywall, screen glitching. One part of the screen was more damaged than the rest and had dried blood smeared across. The front door had been left open but Cedric’s shoes were still on the shoe rack. I called the police and waited for them to send someone over. They asked me all sorts of questions like did Cedric have a history of mental illness and did Cedric have issues with drugs or alcohol. They told me there was no sign of forced entry and that if someone had broken in and taken him I probably would have heard it, right? They said they’d file a report and when I mentioned that this felt like those other cases that had been on the news lately they said yeah I guess it is as if the obvious idea hadn’t even occurred to them until I mentioned it. They said they’d make a note of it. When I told them his full name for their report one of them asked isn’t that the guy whose car got stolen just outside of town yesterday? When the cops finally left it occurred to me to check where Cedric said his car had broken down.

It was a short drive to the field, but as I approached I noticed a circle of trees maybe 20 feet in diameter. They were big trees; some birch, some redwood, some Douglas fir. Around the trees a crowd of people had gathered. Maybe a hundred or more. I stopped the car and walked towards them. I looked around and noticed dozens more people approaching from all sides. A few hundred feet beyond the circle was an escarpment maybe half a mile high and I could see at least twenty people climbing their way down. When the newcomers reached the crowd that had already gathered they stopped and just stood there. I recognized some of them from the news reports. I asked various people at the back of the crowd what was happening but everyone seemed as though they were in a fugue state. I showed them a photo of Cedric on my phone. They all covered the time in the corner with their thumb and looked at the photo for what felt like minutes. They all thought he looked familiar, maybe he was closer to the trees, maybe he went into the center of the trees, they couldn’t say for sure.

I made my way through and when I reached the trees Cedric’s car was in the middle with a young birch tree growing through it. I tried to walk to the car but several hands grabbed me and kept me from passing the circle of trees. The more I looked at the car more it looked like they were made of the same material. The tree wasn’t growing through the car, the tree was the car. Another tree nearby had half of a wrought iron gate as part of its trunk, the iron itself growing jasmine blooms. All of the trees were an amalgam of all sorts of matter. Next to the car I noticed an object or some sort of physical form, not quite an orb but sort of round, not quite solid, its shape shifting amorphously. It was maybe three or four inches across and hovered a foot off the ground. It seemed to absorb light completely. No matter the shape it took on, no matter the angle from which it was viewed, it appeared two dimensional, despite clearly being three dimensional.
I sat down at the front of the crowd. When I looked at the tree nearest where I sat one of the roots was Cedric’s wristwatch, the glass of its face cracked. I stared into the hovering void and waited. Cedric was here. Time passed and I waited and Cedric was here. More people arrived. Thousands now. It had been a week and people kept arriving and I knew Cedric was here.

I looked at my phone and the battery had died. I had to keep track of time mentally now, I needed to know how long I had been waiting. Cedric was here, I just had to wait for him. I counted time by sunsets. Two hundred and fifty three. People kept arriving. Ten thousand? More?

I waited. I counted sunsets. Six hundred and thirty one. I don’t know if people were still arriving. I think they were. After one thousand sunsets I stopped counting. It didn’t feel like time mattered anymore, which was perhaps a realization I was coming to much later than everyone else around me, but still I waited. Cedric was still here. I waited as long as I needed to wait. I couldn’t perceive the passage of time now but I could feel the toll it was taking on my body. My skin was wrinkled and my hair, which had turned from deep red to silver, had grown long enough to start covering my lap. Sometimes my head became heavy, then my eyelids became heavy. I propped my head up with my hands.
Every so often there will be a slight commotion in the crowd, I believe caused by someone dying but I’ve never been sure. Can people die here? If I could see where the commotion came from I might be able to confirm it, but I haven’t stood up since I first sat down. Across the circle of trees I can see new trees that seem to have always been there amongst the crowd. As my head once again began to dip a commotion stirred next to me and started to spread much further than usual, until I could hear the murmurs of tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of people, thousands more still arriving.

I looked up and there was now a figure that looked almost human where the amorphous void had been. It hovered a foot above the ground still and it continued to change shape, shuffling randomly through any number of possible configurations of how a human should look. I stood for the first time maybe in my entire life. I watched it go through every possible configuration, every possible interstitial state, every possible non-configuration. I began counting sunsets again. Seven thousand three hundred and five. The form finally cohered and dropped to the ground. It was a man in his thirties, naked and dripping wet. Cedric was here.



Emma rushed to me, the age of her body unable to confine her movement. I sat up and looked into her eyes and told her, we have to go back.