RALPH

Ralph stood at his bedroom window watching the next door neighbour's cat tormenting a mouse on his lawn below. He opened the window and was about to shout at the cat, when a bolt of lightning struck him squarely in the chest. He woke up some time later in a Ralph shaped depression in the ground, feeling as though every molecule in his body had been violently torn apart and rapidly reassembled, which was sort of what had happened. He would have stayed there a while longer, were it not for the fairy that was trying to take a bite out of his cheek. Ralph swatted it away then stood up slowly, unsteadily, and gripped his knees tightly as a wave of pain passed. He straightened and looked around at his surroundings. The first thing that struck him, was that he was no longer in his bedroom. Ralph turned his head and looked up a rocky slope to where a concrete obelisk stood. The obelisk was broken about halfway down, the top half hanging crookedly, held by rusting metal reinforcing rods, so that the obelisk looked like a crooked finger. A small kidney bean shaped moon with a huge scar across its face from an ancient collision, hung in the sky near the tip of the obelisk, so that it looked as though it was to this it was pointing. Ralph shielded his eyes and looked at the sun briefly, except the sun (this sun) was not the sun. This sun appeared smaller, and if the sun could be said to be yellowish, this sun was ever so slightly lilac, and its lilacity put a wash over over everything, so that everything: the sky, the clouds, the field full of large unfamiliar flowers that stretched away into the distance, looked odd to Ralph's unattuned eyes. Ralph tried to join the dots between his bedroom and here (wherever here was), but there was nothing. If he could have, he would have remembered having tea with Edna God, but (as she would have put it) a lady has to have her secrets, and so he did not remember that, or being pushed off of the settee and falling through the rug. Ralph had fallen for an eternity between then and now, and woke up feeling as though he had the mother of all hangovers, wondering where on Earth he was, except that he wasn't on Earth; Ralph was exactly where he needed to be.