184 - vital stable

ictor watched as the cream swirled into his black coffee. As the spoon clanged against the edge of his mug, he witnessed the whirlpool of white and black mix into a uniform tan. He rotated the spoon around the mug a few more times. He liked to be sure.

In the corner of his eye, he thought he saw something glimmering in the air. Victor's vision didn't often play tricks on him, but the moment of perception was so brief that he questioned whether or not it had happened at all.

He swiveled his head around twice, but the glimmer was gone. Victor resigned the event to yet another mystery of the universe, when it happened again. This time, his eyes were able to lock onto the source.

The glimmer was a little white speck floating through the air, slowly gliding toward the floor of his kitchen. Victor's eyes quickly calculated its trajectory, and glanced down at the ground. Indeed, he found a small pile of little white specks which had already completed their descent.

At least he wasn't hallucinating.

Victor shuffled his slippers closer to the area of activity. He used his powers of deduction to suppose that these were little bits of his ceiling falling down, and looking up confirmed this theory.

He saw a small hole no bigger than the circumference of his pinkie finger in the ceiling. He couldn't recall any sort of damage being there before. A steady trickle of dust was floating out of the hole. Certainly he would have noticed the dust and the mess it was making if it had been present before today.

In one of his braver moments, Victor stepped directly beneath the hole, and looked up. He couldn't see anything in particular, just a black pockmark on an otherwise clean, white surface. The cause of the hole or the dust trickling out of it remained a mystery.

He let out an audible "huh," as he stared at the dot above him. While he was somewhat curious about the hole and its origin, he was more concerned about how much it was going to cost him. As far as he could tell, he did nothing to cause it, but his landlord was always so difficult.

Victor was just about to de-crane his neck and resume his morning when the entire room began to move with a low rumble. The dust began spewing from the hole at a furious pace, and the hole itself quickly spread and widened.

He spilled his coffee, though it hardly mattered, contaminated with dust as it was.

The dot in the ceiling became a bonafide shaft, bored directly from the roof of the building through the seven floors above him. Victor shielded his eyes from the light that was suddenly flooding his kitchen.

He soon realized that the light was not coming from the sun. It grew in intensity, a yellow-white aura now glowing around him. The cloud of dust motes was no longer falling. They hung, suspended in the air, and then reversed course, going against gravity.

This sight would have been more spectacular to Victor if he had still been obeying the laws of physics himself. But his body began to float upward through the hole, too, which was now just big enough to accommodate him. The sensation was pleasant, like floating in an invisible pool.

Victor felt no fear as he mysteriously floated through the building toward the blue sky above. He moved slowly enough that he had time to observe his neighbors' apartments as he floated up through them. He was amazed how unique each one looked, despite being built from a common floor plan.

He hoped they didn't mind his intrusion.