The air in Leo's apartment always tasted of three things: damp, dust, and desperation.
Tonight, it was particularly thick. He closed the door behind him, the cheap lock clicking with a tired, metallic sigh. The sound was a punctuation mark on another sixteen-hour day. Double shift. Warehouse. He could still feel the phantom weight of boxes on his shoulders and the monotonous drone of conveyor belts in his ears.
His body, a lanky twenty-two-year-old frame that was more bone than muscle, ached in places he didn't know he had. He dropped his keys—a single key for the apartment and a tiny one for the mailbox—into a chipped ceramic bowl on the counter. It was the one nice thing he owned, a thrift store find with a painting of a bluebird on it. The bird was supposed to signify happiness. Leo mostly saw it as ironic.
He bypassed the lumpy sofa with its faded floral pattern and went straight to the kitchenette. It was less a kitchen and more a suggestion of one: a two-burner stove, a mini-fridge that hummed a frantic, off-key tune, and a sink with a perpetual, rhythmic drip… drop… drip.
Ignoring the growling in his stomach, he pulled his phone from his pocket. The screen was a spiderweb of cracks, but it worked. He logged into his bank app, his thumb hovering over the balance icon. He always did this. A little ritual of self-flagellation. He tapped the screen.
Available Balance: $12.47
Rent was due in three days. Three hundred and fifty dollars for a glorified shoebox where the heating was temperamental and the roaches paid their share of the rent in sheer, unnerving presence.
A hollow laugh escaped his lips. It was a dry, humorless sound that was quickly swallowed by the oppressive silence of the room. $12.47. Not even enough for a decent pizza. It was enough for two, maybe three more days of instant ramen, assuming he bought the cheapest brand, the kind where the noodles were mostly broken shards in the bottom of the bag.
His stomach growled again, this time with an insistent, angry roar. Food first, existential dread later.
He opened a cupboard. Stacks of ramen packages, all the same garish orange and yellow, stared back at him. He grabbed one, tore it open, and dumped the brick of dried noodles into a small, dented pot. He added water from the eternally dripping tap and set it on the electric burner, which took a full minute to glow a dull, reluctant red.
As the water slowly came to a boil, he stared out the single window. His view was of a brick wall six feet away, decorated with a lattice of graffiti he knew by heart. It wasn't a view; it was a reminder of his box.
The ramen was, as always, a profound disappointment. A salty, soupy mess that filled the void in his stomach but offered no satisfaction. He ate it standing over the sink, watching the last dregs of brownish broth swirl away. He wished, with a sudden, sharp pang of longing, that he had an egg. Just one simple egg to drop in. Luxury.
He rinsed the pot and placed it on the rack, the drip… drop… drip of the faucet already starting to wash away the memory of the meal. He was tired. So deeply tired. But his mind was racing, a frantic hamster on a wheel of debt and worry. Sleep wouldn't come easy.
He lay on his mattress on the floor—he'd sold the bed frame months ago—and stared at the water-stained ceiling. The patterns looked like a map of a country he never wanted to visit. An hour passed. Then two. The city sounds outside—a distant siren, the rumble of a late-night bus, the muffled argument from the apartment above—were the lullaby of the broke and the sleepless.
And then, a more urgent, biological need made itself known.
With a groan, Leo rolled off the mattress. His bare feet recoiled from the cold, cracked linoleum. He didn't bother with a light; he knew the ten-foot journey from his bed to the bathroom door by memory. His apartment was so small you could navigate it by instinct, a rat in its own familiar maze.
The bathroom door was old wood, covered in countless layers of peeling white paint. The brass doorknob was loose and cold to the touch. He turned it, the latch mechanism making a familiar ker-chunk sound. He pulled the door inward.
And everything changed.
The weak, flickering light of the bathroom bulb wasn't there. The scent of mold and cheap bleach wasn't there. The sight of the cracked toilet and the stained shower curtain wasn't there.
Instead, a soft, golden light spilled into his dark apartment, warm and inviting. A gentle breeze, smelling of damp earth, sweet pollen, and something wild and clean, washed over his face. And the sound… it wasn't the drip of a faucet but the hushed rustle of a million leaves and the distant, melodic chirp of a creature he'd never heard before.
Leo froze, his hand still on the doorknob. His eyes, accustomed to the gloom, slowly adjusted. He was staring, not into a cramped and water-damaged bathroom, but into a forest.
It wasn't just a forest. It was The Forest. Trees, so colossal they made his apartment building feel like a dollhouse, rose into a sky that wasn't black but a deep, twilight indigo. Strange, beautiful flora grew in abundance on the forest floor, some pulsing with a soft, internal, blue light, casting a magical glow on the mossy ground. The air itself seemed to shimmer with life. A patch of what looked like oversized mushrooms nearby glowed with the soft, steady warmth of a bedside lamp.
One of his feet was on the cold, gritty linoleum of his world. The other, he slowly realized, was hovering over soft, green moss on the threshold of this one. His mind, already weary from a long day and bogged down with financial anxiety, simply refused to process the sensory information. It was like his brain had just encountered a 404 error: Reality Not Found.
He stood there for a full minute, a silent, gaping statue framed in the impossible doorway. The pressing need that had sent him here was the only thing that felt real. It cut through the shock, the awe, the sheer, pants-wetting terror and confusion. It was the one, single, grounding thought in a universe that had suddenly unzipped itself.
He took in the impossibly vast, alien, and sacred-looking wilderness before him.
"What the fuck," he whispered, the words small and utterly inadequate. His voice was swallowed by the immense, living silence. He glanced down, then back up at the cathedral of alien trees.
"Now what? Should I… should I pee here?"