From where I sat everything around me seemed mundane. Lime green carpeting and the matching wallpaper reinforced the notion that I was inside a normal hotel room. Out the window was a scene so serene it was cartoonish. Under a joyous sun floating in a cloudless sky, immaculate verdure grew over subtle hills awaiting the lawnmower pushed by the caretaker. He was oversized, graying, and jovial, waving at me, smiling, when he noticed I was watching him.
What I experienced was a facade, I knew because the truth, however inexplicable, was near. I darted in the opposite direction toward the exit and consulted the peephole before working the knob. The hallway beyond was as expected with a minor exception. More lime green and numbered doors in warm light, mostly unobstructed by a note posted close to the viewing apparatus.
Curious that someone or something could be roaming the hotel, I squinted, straining to read what little chirography I could discern on the note for any clue anent its meaning. A word in cursive and reversed from my vantage, ending in “ing”, I think, was all I could read before the caretaker emerged, rapping on my door. The gesture was as loud as it was violent because he knew I was in there. The knocking ceased so he could scribble another missive that he stuck over the peephole, then he left. When I was confident the hallway was vacant I opened the door to find the world outside was not what I thought.
Gone was the floor and ceiling and the exterior walls of the building, instead was dead space, vast limitless nothing. For reasons that didn’t concern me, I didn’t need to breathe and gravity had relinquished its grasp on my body. Floating, peering into the darkness down the hall, I couldn’t see but knew there was something out there. It was looking back at me, I could feel a pull stronger, more undeniable than destiny. Focusing on a single point in oblivion, I stared but my eyes would not adjust. Whatever was out there couldn’t be perceived.
Until I looked away. Lingering in my vision, despite the absence of light, was an afterimage that occupied much of my periphery. What was out there stayed in my eyes, circular and slightly orange against any backdrop my gaze landed on; out there, in the abyss, floated an astronomical body comparable in size to a planet. To be certain of the true nature of this outlier required instruments that could measure the imperceptible. Regardless, I knew what was out there. What observed me from space was a black hole, lacking the density to accrete matter (were there any), unable to generate an exploding halo.
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