We have no admissions desk, and no curators, but our collection is vast and eclectic.

The north wing borders the Kyner Playfield, and features an ever-growing collection of sporting goods. Soccer balls of all colors and patterns, from black-and-white to bright yellow, are suspended in the shelves of our vines. The sun has cracked most of their skins, and the seasons have relieved them of their pressure. Visitors are cautioned to watch their step, as the floor of the north wing is scattered with chipped golfballs and rain-swollen baseballs, split and spilling their strings.

We have two bicycles, one of which hangs from the ceiling of the north wing. It is a modern ten-speed, previously owned by Levi Orenstein and donated to us by Brayden Collins. Mr. Collins was our most generous benefactor of the last year, having donated the Orenstein bicycle, six baseball gloves, two basketballs, three schoolbags, five lunchboxes, one rented clarinet, and the headless body of a possum.

He recently departed to attend a military academy upstate. We thank him for his contributions.

The southeast wing features several exhibits dedicated to the science of time. This is where our second bicycle can be found, chained to a sapling by one Marcie Pittsmouth in 1975, and which now rests six feet off the ground, embedded in the trunk of that same tree. When it rains, visitors are invited to admire the drool of rust that issues from the tree’s lips of wrinkled bark.

The Green Tangle Museum is also excited to announce that approximately three years from now, coinciding with the fiftieth anniversary of Marcie Pittsmouth’s contribution, the bicycle’s front fork bolt will have completely rusted through, and the wheel will fall to the ground. We warn visitors that the timing of this event cannot be precisely predicted, and as such it will not be advertised.

While they wait, attendees may choose to explore the museum’s Dome, so-dubbed at its inauguration in 1988 by Crossbridge High School students Paul Ashby, Lindsay Milligan, and Roger Zarn, whose initials are inscribed in a commemorative tree in the Dome’s west wall. Use of the fire pit is open to all museum guests. But we caution visitors to wear closed toe shoes, and ask them not to disturb the Dome’s immersive diorama of drug paraphernalia and contraceptive materials.

The prize specimen of the Green Tangle Museum is not yet accessible to the public: the body of forty-four-year-old Herbert Selnick, offered to our archives in 1953 by an anonymous donor. The specimen’s exposure to the elements was mitigated by an archival covering of vines, and volunteer fauna served to remove the most perishable matter.

The “Selnick Skeleton” exhibit will treat visitors to a veritable time capsule, from the specimen’s intact ochre suit of polyester gabardine, to its red-and-white nubuck Oxford shoes. Ephemera enthusiasts will appreciate the still-legible dry cleaning ticket in the back pant pocket, as well as the matchbook from the long-defunct Cassman’s Deli in the jacket pocket. Amateur and experienced forensic analysts alike will marvel at the “kerf marks” carefully revealed by our preservation team, made in the lower thoracic and upper lumbar vertebrae with a Schrade Walden Muskrat 2 model folding knife.

The knife itself can be seen in the collection of the Silty Delta Museum, located six miles south, beneath the Route 80 overpass.

We encourage everyone to visit the Green Tangle, Silty Delta, or any of our sister museums worldwide—in forests, near freeways, behind buildings, under porches, or inside your very own home.

We welcome you and your donations any day, at any hour, year-round.

Also, a child rides a tricycle over bright green grass behind a brown-shingled single-story house. He hunches forward to pedal across the chop.

The boat wake softens, the horizon sways, the sun flashes in and out of frame.

A bigger kid runs up to the tricycle and grabs the handlebars. The small kid steers away from him, into the sun. The horizon evens out as the big kid tips the trike and pushes the small kid into the rippling grass.

A large white bucket. A screwdriver pries the lid off to reveal a sludge of purple-red fish parts. The two children wrestle in the sludge, and a woman in a yellow sun dress rushes to separate them. A man with a blond crew cut and swim trunks says something and points out at the water. The woman guides the big kid out of frame, which pivots away from the man to look where he’s pointing, where the small kid rights the trike on the water. Another man dumps the bucket, and purple-red blooms into the lawn.

The blond man laughs and says something, while another him wearing old jeans carries a ladder and big pruning shears to a tall hedge on the boat deck, where he and other men assemble large fishing rods. The man opens the ladder and beckons to someone out of frame. The men cast off the back of the boat as the big kid runs up to hold the ladder. The man climbs and raises the shears.

Another man’s face is large in the frame, looking out to sea. He scratches his head, and the man on the ladder uses the shears to trim his curly hair.

The small kid sitting on the water blows dandelion fuzz and laughs at the way it spreads. The surface of the lawn shivers to life with snapping fish.

A man pulls a flexing rod, reels, and his line is suddenly connected to a TV in a living room, where the two children dance and hop around, and the small child climbs onto the couch clear of the biting fish. A gray fin cuts through the carpet and lowers again. The big kid joins the small kid on the floating couch, laughing. They both bounce.

The man pulls, relaxes, pulls, relaxes. The blond man steps through the couch to help hold the rod. He shouts and points at the TV. The carpet churns, and a smooth gray shape with rows of hooked teeth bursts from it.

A dark dining room with a doorway to a lit kitchen. Oven and microwave combo stacked over the horizon as a man enters with a knife and cuts the fishing line. He points at one of the party-hatted kids seated at the table in the dark and shouts, beckons others with an arm.

The yellow dress woman enters from the kitchen carrying a cake with five lit candles that drift down from the flare of the sun onto the deck of the boat.

The table boils and the shark’s gray face appears and grimaces among the children.

The small kid leans over the shark’s open maw and blows, and flames on the shark’s teeth flicker out.

The lights come on in the dining room. The blond man stands in slacks and party hat by the lightswitch, and he and the woman and children clap as the other him rushes in swim trunks to the edge of the table and points a gun at the small kid.

The shark reappears in the cake, and sparks and tufts of smoke blast into frame as the woman plucks the candles from its gills, where “Happy Birthday, Felix” is written in cursive red piping, leaving holes that bloom purple clouds.

A man points at the birthday cake, gets on his knees on the table and wipes his forehead. Another man appears with a long hooked baton. They jab at the cake as the big kid scoops his hand into the jerking, twisting shark and smears red and white across the small kid’s face.

Two men guide the hook into the small kid’s eye, and he cries, shows rows of curved teeth, grabs more icing from the chop and throws it at the big kid.

A few men stand around the dinner table with beers. One raises his can and takes a swig. Two of the men hold up a wooden handle with a metal hook from which hangs the shark, scooped and smeared.

The boat deck is a churn of children throwing fistfuls of sea foam.

He hopes she won’t go in the back yard, because he doesn’t want her to find out that way. Slipped and fell on a garden fork stirring compost in the rain. He feels like a dumb old man.

He was scared until now, but now she’s back from her trip, and he’s calm. He can’t see her yet, because he’s still hidden away, waiting to burst out.

It’s dark where he is.

He has trouble remembering.

There’s still some of him out back, staring up at the dim gray cords of falling rain, which push more of him into darkness with each slapping drop.

Over the last few days, most of him filtered down through layers of grass roots, muddy topsoil, clay, sand. Ants drank drops of him. Worms used him to remoisten themselves. The marbling veins of mold absorbed what they needed as he sank through them.

He finally met a hard surface, then found pores to push into and passed through it almost like a ghost, regathered himself and slid into a large, dripping chamber.

There were others with him, so many others. Parts of others. Sent bobbing and spinning by more falling drops. Drifting. Some muttered clipped phrases in other languages, some in ancient tongues, some roared or growled, or they chittered, squawked, or grunted. But most were silent. He passed them, passed through some, felt their anger or sadness or confusion, felt some of it come with him, felt himself shrink a little.

The others frightened him, so he used the pulse of drips in the chamber to move along the walls, and found a way out. A long black tunnel full of others sitting, muttering, idle. It was harder to push through them, and they pulled more from him as he went.

The tunnel shrank and split.

He thought to split himself with it, to see where both paths led, but stretching apart made him feel weak, blurry at the edges.

So he chose only one and followed it.

Now he waits at the mouth of the tunnel, seeing light for the first time in days, staring down at the kitchen sink drain.

He hears her take the kettle from the stove, smells her vanilla hand cream—and he rushes forth into the kettle. He’s dizzy, blurred with others and bubbles in a new dark place. Loud metallic whooshing rises in pitch as it fills.

This churning is almost too much, but the rhythmic click of the stove lighting reminds him of who and where he is, and that he may see her.

Others relax into the heat and stretch themselves into division. Their mutterings go monosyllabic, then silent.

He focuses himself.

The water bucks and roars. Fragments of others split further, expand, and blow out the spout in a scream.

The kettle lifts and he feels the water calm.

Porcelain tinkles, and he’s poured into a mug where he mingles with sweet, pungent chamomile leaves.

She looks distracted—he’s almost forgotten why—and she disappears.

The stairs creak. Thumps above as she walks down the hall and says his name again. Then again.

Stairs creak, and she reappears, curls her hands around him, a single concerned eye visible past the lip of the mug.

She has her phone. He recognizes his own voice quiet and tinny. Then she speaks, but from all of it, he only understands the sound of his own name.

She puts the phone down and still looks concerned.

Everything shifts as the mug rises and tips, her face grows in the sky like a planet, the water lifts to touch her lip, air gusts from her nose above him, stirring the steam, and he relaxes and splits, and half of him disappears into her mouth.

That part sees more darkness. Another descent. He feels warm and thick, and the walls are soft and more porous than the chamber in the yard. He pushes through membrane and pulls in all directions, divides, and blurs to nothing.

The rest of him sloshes and drifts and watches from the mug. He has trouble staying together, is too relaxed now, and divides, and divides again, and expands and rises from the surface to float before her face, her eyes staring through him, before he forgets himself and joins the air completely.

No, at first I thought he meant he could only draw with his feet, because he didn’t have arms. But no, he said again, “I can’t draw anything else, only feet.”

I told him drawing hands was basically the same thing, just make the “toes” longer, but he literally couldn’t get it right. He held the pen with his toes and drew on a napkin I put on the barstool between us, and the person he drew was like a lump with the head and arms and legs all on top, like a fucking foot.

I was like, “You did that on purpose.”

And he goes, “No, I swear, this is all I can draw.”

Of course I did. I got another napkin and said, “Draw a bird.”

So he drew the round body part, but the legs were little stick things up on top, next to the head. So it was like a foot with three weird-ass toes. I just put my head down on the bar, and when I looked again it had wings—yeah, shaped like little feet!

And the bartender went, “See?” like that proved something.

And the guy was like, “Come home with me. I give the best foot massages.”

Of course I laughed. It was funny, he meant it that way. No, I didn’t want to be rude. He was kinda weird, but he had no arms, and it was clear this was like, his thing, so I went, “Okay, draw a tree.”

So he flipped the napkin over with his other foot and did two lines to the top—okay, so it’s like the tree’s growing past offscreen or whatever, fine. Then he puts the roots at the bottom, little stubby things in the ground. So it’s kind of like a leg, but with no ankle or knee. Just a foot!

No, I know, but I’m making it sound like a thing because it became a thing.

I go, “Draw a school bus.”

He draws a giant foot. With wheels.

“Draw scissors.”

Weirdest fucking scissors I’ve ever seen.

Yeah, I actually felt bad for mentioning the scissors, but he didn’t seem fazed. I wanted to ask him if he used special scissors, but I figured that was rude. He probably would’ve lied anyway, since he was already on a fuckin’ roll.

Of course he was lying! Nobody can “only draw feet,” that’s ridiculous. I kept going ’cause I thought I’d come up with one to stump him. But saying all these objects and only seeing feet made me feel claustrophobic. You know, like the old Tootsie Roll commercial where everything turns into Tootsie Rolls?

Yes, I know “tootsie” also means foot, thanks. As if this isn’t traumatic enough. You’ve seen that commercial? YouTube it, it’s exactly the issue I was having. I wasn’t hallucinating, but I looked around the bar and saw how everything’s like a step or two away from being a foot. All the bottles, the bartender’s face, the football players on the TV—they looked like little feet running around. Yes, football players, you see what I mean? Everything felt different.

No, I know my drink wasn’t drugged; the bartender sort of knows me, and my drink never left my hand. But even my hand looked like a weird monkey foot with toe rings!

I actually started having trouble breathing and I had to get outta there.

No, I tried to finish my drink, and the ice cubes were like gross cold dead toes touching my lips, I almost threw the glass, I swear. And I closed my tab while the guy got another napkin and started drawing something else I refused to look at. He was like, “No, stay, I wanna show you this,” and he tried to like grab my arm with his other foot, and I was like, “If you touch me, I will kick your ass so hard.”

I know I shouldn’t have said it, but I did.

And I went outside and got in my car. It was like sitting inside a big foot—it’s a real problem I have now, I’m fucking serious. And the people walking around on the sidewalk had creepy toenail faces, and I kept thinking, “This little piggy, this little piggy…”

Paradox Manifestation Department, what’s your emergency?

“Paradox Manifestation Department, what’s your emergency?”

“What? Hello? No, I need to call 911!”

“Technically, ma’am, you need to call the PMD, so here we are.”

“No, I took my phone specifically to call 911, and you started talking before I could even dial! I have an emergency! Who is this?”

“Ma’am, please remain calm. This is an emergency number. If you had dialed 911, you would have explained your situation, and they would have connected you with us. We are the service you need.”

“How could you know that before it even happened?”

“I didn’t. But since we are speaking now, you clearly need our services, so what is your emergency?”

“A crocodile has stolen my baby! My little Hailey! Can you help me?”

“That depends, ma’am.”

“It depends?! If you say you’re the person I need, why are you unsure whether you can help?”

“Did the crocodile say anything when it stole your child?”

“How did you know it said something? Crocodiles can’t talk!”

“Ma’am, if the crocodile spoke to you, then it must be true that crocodiles can speak.”

“But I’ve seen crocodiles at the zoo and on TV, and none of them said a word!”

“Yes, but if any one of those crocodiles ever spoke, then it would validate the idea that crocodiles do indeed speak.”

“My god, I must be going crazy. I hope I’m going crazy.”

“You would prefer going crazy to getting your child back from the crocodile?”

“No, if I were going crazy, there would be no crocodile and Hailey would still be safe at home!”

“Well, since neither of those are the case, then you must not be going crazy, which is a good thing. Now, tell me what the crocodile said.”

“I can’t belie— The crocodile said that in order to get Hailey back, I must guess what the crocodile will do next.”

“Ma’am, the crocodile will not return your child.”

“What?!”

“That is to say, you must tell the crocodile that its next act will be to keep your child.”

“Why on earth would I do that? What kind of emergency service is this?!”

“Ma’am, please remain calm. If you tell the crocodile it won’t return your child, then according to its own terms it cannot, in good conscience, keep the child, since that would result in your guess being correct, and it would therefore have to return the child to you.”

“But… if I say the crocodile won’t give her back, then I’m only correct if it actually doesn’t give her back!”

“Yes, but any other guess will be incorrect and the crocodile will keep your child.”

“This is absurd! Get me Animal Control!”

“I’m afraid they won’t be able to help you. Now please, ma’am, I am a trained professional. Tell the crocodile it will not return your child to you.”

“I can’t— My breathi—”

“Ma’am, please remain calm.”

“My chest is— tight… Every breath feels— like it’s only… half as much air as the… previous breath…”

“I’m glad to hear that, ma’am, rest assured it means you’ll never completely run out of air. Now, please, tell the—”

“Okay, okay… Cro—crocodile… your next act will be—oh, god… to not return my poor little Hailey to me…”

[silence]

“Ma’am? Ma’am, are you there?”

“Yes, I… The crocodile is clawing at its head. Its eyes are bleeding.”

“This is good, stay on the line. Keep talking.”

“There’s a box here, near the crocodile.”

“What does the box look like?”

“Just a wooden box. Oh, god, do you think Hailey is inside?”

“She very well could be.”

“But she might not be… Because if I guessed correctly that I wouldn’t get her back…”

“No, you guessed correctly that the crocodile wouldn’t return her to you. That box could quite possibly contain your child.”

“I don’t see how to open it. Oh, but lifting it, it weighs the same as Hailey. My poor little girl, oh, Hailey! Hailey, it’s mommy! Hailey, can you hear me? Oh, god, what if she’s dead? I’ve got to get this box open!”

“Ma’am, I strongly recommend against opening that box.”

“Don’t open it? But what if she’s alive and needs help?”

“It’s just as likely that she’s dead.”

“But why on earth wouldn’t I open the box to find out?!”

“Because as long as the box remains closed, your daughter is simultaneously dead and alive. Technically speaking, if left as-is, she’s guaranteed to outlive you.”

“She… she is?”

“Yes. And if you see to it that no one ever opens the box, your daughter will live until the Sun explodes and swallows the Earth. But if you find a way for her to escape even that fate, she will live quite literally forever.”

“Alive forever… in a box.”

“In a box, alive forever.”

“I don’t know what to think… I suppose I’ll have to buy her a whole new wardrobe; none of her clothes will fit around this thing!”

The voice muffled through the glass took the form of a small insect with an ugly, irregular buzz. He swatted at the sound in his mind, and it was gone.

Back to exploring the sphere’s familiar yet ever-changing interior. When he first entered it, he was aware of its earthly construction—a stained-glass orb two meters in diameter, islands of transparent color arcing overhead like a frozen wave, curving under his naked back to cradle him like the shell of an egg, embossed everywhere between the islands with beveled rivers of lead came, above like thick spiderweb, pressing against his skin from below like veins of hardened blood. In the beginning, it hurt his feet to stand on those irregular ridges. They left marks.

“Rise.”

Swat. Even in his physical body, his hand twitched.

The hand’s movement caught his attention and he stared at it, across the landscape of his reclined body, hills valleys and plains of skin dyed unreal in the light. He relaxed his eyes, and his hand resting on his chest became a cave, a place of uniform darkness for a very small someone to hide.

“Rise!”

He imagined he’d caught the voice insect beneath his hand, and he flattened it against his ribcage, ground it down.

Despite this violence, it buzzed again, and for longer. “You must move your bowels, or you will experience great pain.”

A lie. Since he drank from the tube the day before (which to him felt like weeks ago), he had felt full, satisfied, his boat had finally pushed away from the dock and now drifted where there was only a sea of bleeding color, a patchwork sky of crystalline ozone, and the curve of the horizon. The earth had reached up around him, turned inside out like a sock. He became its molten core boiling with fleshy magma that was red, blue, yellow, pink, orange, purple, and green. His temperature was consistent, the humid air of his breath and sweat vapor beading and running on the glass. The stink of his caverns’ methane expulsions lingering, diluting, reabsorbed and filtered through the porous loam of his body. He had entered as a human being with all he needed, and now after however much time—months? decades?—had achieved equilibrium.

He assembled his words carefully and burped them into the shell, “Don’t open,” he said. “I have nothing to give you.”

“You may see it that way,” buzzed the insect, which entered his vision as a shape the size of a man behind the glass. “But while you have nothing to give, there is something we must take. You’ll burst.”

He stood. “I am not a man! I am a planet! I am geology!”

The shape leaned closer, and its face assembled from jigsaw fragments that didn’t interlock so much as settle next to each other—a mouth of teeth through a pane of yellow, one eye through red, the other eye through purple so dark he only saw the white.

Behind the man-shape were other orbs. Perspective layered them in such a way that their transparent centers overlapped into muddy dark. Forms moved in them like festering pupae.

The man-shape reached for the hatch.

He lunged backward, hitting the wall with such force that the sphere bumped loose and rolled onto the floor. The roll caused him to fall, which caused the sphere to roll further, and he realized his planet had been flung from its orbit and was free to explore further reaches, pulled not by the gravity of a larger body, but propelled by the will of his own churning core.

On all fours he rolled his planet past rows of other occupied spheres. Spotlights in the ceiling shone perpetual explosions of colored light in his eyes. A bright void opened before him, and the revolving floor of his sphere dropped out from beneath him.

It still contained him. But he could stretch himself weightlessly and press his fingers and toes against its single curved wall.

He guessed the sphere was still turning because the light kept changing across the skin of his arms, legs, and chest.

He clawed at the lead ridges to spin the sphere faster. Its panes flashed by, as if soaring over a brilliant map of alien land, the lead rivers smeared silver across his vision.

The man-shape’s voice boomed clear in his head.

“Rise!”