Totem
Louise would never forget the morning she had woken up to find her home in a state of dramatic stillness and of perfect architectural proportions. Everything was as it should be, and yet this was the most troubling thing of all. I will explain shortly why this was a disturbing morning for Louise, who had never in her 10 years living on the 5th floor of her studio apartment on La rue Notre-Dame-de-Nazareth, woken up to such a balanced interior ratio. She did not open her eyes to a ceiling that was only a finger’s length from the tip of her nose, or conversely, an intimidating 2.6 meters away which as you’ve probably guessed is almost the exact hauteur sous plafond. All of her limbs were rationally contained well within the perimeters of her mattress, cradled and centered so that none of her body parts were involuntarily spilling onto the floor, nor was her minuscule form swimming in an endless sea of sheets. Everything else that had legs was intact—coffee table, dresser, lamp, stool, and arm chair all stood motionless, feet firmly planted on the slightly slanted wooden floor. Even the tiny package wrapped in brown paper that she had mistakenly received in the mail weeks ago was propped in the center of the coffee table, adamantly unopened. The little brown paper box was rather standard, maybe even a little boring, but Louise found it extremely suspicious that the appellation of the intended receiver was Lucifer Iblis. She considered this an omen and refused to open, discard or even destroy the box. Though the sealed and unmoved package was a harbinger of strangeness, it had with time become a consistent oddity that had conformed comfortably to the living space, and was therefore no longer an oddity at all. In fact, I am digressing from the actual peculiarity of that morning, which was that everything was exactly as it had never been before: upright, in place, and well ordered. Many things startled Louise that morning but none more so than the Japanese Noh mask of Magojiro that hung stably on the wall across from her little kitchenette. She noticed the woman’s beguiling smile from an angle she had never seen before since Louise was used to greeting the mask either by pulling it from underneath her bulky appendages, or seeing it from the bottom up, which fascinated her every time it so happened to be that kind of morning. What I mean by that kind of morning, and by all of this you see, is that Louise’s apartment had a strange way of scaling up and down overnight, causing her to wake up filling far too much space or barely any at all. This wasn’t an Alice in Wonderland situation though, because Louise hadn’t eaten either side of a mushroom, nor did she change sizes, it was the little studio on La rue de Notre-Dame-de-Nazareth that would shrink and grow, while Louise was merely an experiencer of the fluctuations.