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Published on October 06, 2024 12:08

October 4, 2024

Officer Gurt woke up with the sun as he typically did. He looked for a moment at his wife lying next to him and swung his feet over the edge of the bed and into their slippers. After starting the stove to boil water for coffee, he went to the front door and picked up the day’s copy of The Crumb Herald.

But he was caught by the bold headline on the front page:

STAY INSIDE!

Looking further at the copy, he saw that every column of text was composed of the same two words, repeated over and over.

Stay inside! Stay inside! Stay inside! Stay inside! Stay inside! Stay inside!

He stood for a moment staring at the strange edition of the newspaper.

What’s today’s date? he thought. No, it’s not Crumbfoolery Day.

While he puzzled over the strange paper, he closed the door and paced over to their telephone to call the editor of The Crumb Herald, Edgar Splind. He looked at the clock on the wall and knew it was early, but this seemed like a worthwhile reason to call.

He picked up the receiver and dialed Edgar’s number. It rang four times before being answered by a groggy voice.

“Hello?” said Splind.

“Edward, it’s Gurt. What is this in the paper?”

“What? What do you mean?” said the groggy voice, clearly still waking up.

“What do you mean by ‘Stay inside,’ exactly? Is it some sort of joke? You know Crumbfoolery Day isn’t for three months.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Gurt. It’s too early for this.”

“Edgar, go look at your paper,” demanded Gurt.

“Ok, hold on.” The line was quiet for a minute as Gurt listened to Splind’s feet treading away from the phone. Then, “Gurt, I don’t know what this is…” His voice trailed off. He was audibly shaken.

Gurt heard him frantically flipping through the pages of the paper and muttering to himself. “Whaa…”

“Gurt, I’ll have to call you back. I don’t know what this is. I don’t know who did this,” said Splind, now fully awake.

“You didn’t have anything to do with it?” asked Gurt.

“No, Gurt! We had a normal issue set to come out today. My daughter’s recital details were going to be in it! I have to go,” and the line went dead.

Officer Gurt hung up the telephone and looked back at the paper still in his hands. What a curious thing. Of course, it was far from the first curious thing to happen in Crumb Hill.

He flipped through the pages and each one said the same thing: Stay inside!

There must be something he was missing. He walked over to the stove, poured his coffee, and then sat at the table to more closely examine the paper. His wife had heard the conversation and come to the dining room too. Gurt showed her the paper and the two of them looked through it page by page.

His hunch was right: there was one small hint left on the inside of the last page. All of the headlines and columns said the same two words as all the rest, but there a clue as to what was going on. A little poem was printed at the very bottom of the page:

Dangling Jerry
smoking his chains
come out to play
and see what remains

Day 74 of 100 Days of Blog

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Published on October 04, 2024 15:33

October 2, 2024

Why my goofy tattoos are the most theologically profound

I just hit 76 tattoos — I keep track on a note on my laptop — and numerous people have asked me to give the explanations behind them all, which may or may not ever happen, but I can certainly do some! (I wrote before about why I got a tattoo from Spongebob here)

My newest tattoo, above, was done by my friend Meghan from church. She has a whole flash sheet of kiddish-looking drawings, like the one I ended up getting. They were all so great.

She had a whole page that was Psalm 68, played out by bugs.

I told her I want four of them, but of course, you have to start with one, so the first one I got was the little kid asking Jesus if He ‘got games on his phone.’

It seems goofy on the surface, if not a hint sacrilegious: a kid asking the Incarnate God if He has games on His phone. But the reason I love it is, that kid is all of us.

Think about how many people in the Gospels approach Jesus and ask Him for dumb stuff.

James and John ask Jesus to sit at His right and left hand when He becomes a king.

Pharisees and Sadducees ask Him to perform miraculous signs.

Peter asks Him, ‘We’ve left everything…what’s in it for us?’

The woman at the well asks Jesus for bottomless water so she doesn’t have to keep coming to the well.

Even after His resurrection, the disciples ask Him, “Now are you gonna restore Israel to its own kingdom?” Like, talk about still not getting a point.

And I’m sure there are many more, but those are all off my head! And it makes me wonder, do you think Jesus got tired of dumb questions? Or, people not getting it? I know I can handle about two dumb questions before I simply lose my cool.

So it’s important to remember that I am the kid who would ask Jesus if He has games on His phone.

I’m the one standing before the Lord of the Cosmos and asking for a distracting dopamine hit.

That’s why Meghan’s doodle struck me so deeply. We have access to the Living Water, but we want a root beer instead, because it’ll feel better right now.

I like how Jesus is leaning into the kid, still holding his hand, like it’s ok to want or ask for dumb things every now and then — we’re all still learning and growing, and learning to ask for better things.

Click here to see more tats on Instagram!

Day 72 of 100 Days of Blog

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Published on October 02, 2024 13:40

October 1, 2024

The Box (part 12 – final part!)

Throwback to the Great Crumb Wars.

“I’m going to have to whisper,” said the Tonic Woman. This sentence alone sent shivers down the spine of Mrs. Gurt. Whispering had been outlawed in Crumb Hill since long before the Great Crumb Wars, and everyone knew why: You’d either summon beasts from The Dimension, get sent into it, or something worse altogether.

“You…you are?” asked Mrs. Gurt. “Is there no other way?”

“Unfortunately not. But don’t worry! If I do it correctly, nothing will go wrong! I’ve done this a number of times before. And that number is four. And only one of those times was dangerous.”

“Alright, so what will we have to do?”

The old woman walked over to a chest in the corner of the room and began rummaging through it. She pulled out a long thread and then cut it into three arm-length strands. The Tonic Woman tied each one above windows on three walls of the room — one faced east, one west, and one north.

“So,” she began to explain, “now we wait. The wind will tell us when the time is right. Once all three threads are blowing in, that means that the three winds are allowing us to whisper the names of the departed.”

Mrs. Gurt thought the old woman was crazy. Of course, wind can only blow in one direction, so one or two would blow in and the others would blow out.

Ten minutes later, a breeze blew from the east, but the western thread flapped out the window.

The Tonic Woman looked at Mrs. Gurt and smiled. She could tell that the younger woman thought she was crazy, and said, “Patience.”

It was almost an hour before all three threads were blowing in from their respective windows. A steady breeze came from three directions, blowing all three strings in to about a 45 degree angle between the ceiling and the wall.

“It’s time!” The older woman hopped up and hurried over to the wall hole. She put her face into it, and Mrs. Gurt barely heard her whisper into it.

“Little Timmy Shugger,” she clearly annunciated through a whisper into the hole, with her face pressed all the way into it. “Principal Bearhair. Little Bailee Nuckles.”

She then pulled her face out of the hole and immediately the wind died down. Mrs. Gurt had been tense the entire time, expecting something terrible to come from the whispering. She waited, and looked around, out the windows, watching for a monster. But nothing came. She allowed her body to relax and she finally inhaled.

“It worked?” she asked the Tonic Woman.

“I think so,” said the older woman, taking another bite of seashell.

“Well, that was easy.”

“Yup, sometimes I’m wrong about things!” replied the Tonic Woman with bits of seashell sputtering from her lips.

After thanking her for her time, Mrs. Gurt walked back to town. She realized it had gotten late and her husband may be worried about her.

But after arriving at their home and finding it empty, she decided to walk to the school, out of curiosity.

The sun was dropping beneath the horizon as Officer Gurt sat next to the cube. Suddenly, he heard moaning coming from it. He hopped up to his feet and ran to it, then around it.

“Hello??” he yelled at the smooth walls of the black box.

The moaning continued. It sounded like it was coming from under the thing. Officer Gurt ran around to the side where the dynamite had blown a hole in the ground beneath it. He began pulling dirt out from under it with his hands.

The cries sounded like a child stuck under the cube.

“Hello?” he yelled again while pulling out clumps of dirt. “I’ll get you out!”

Officer Gurt heard footsteps behind him as he was digging, his face down in the hole. Without turning to look, he yelled, “Hey! Get help! Or help me dig! I think someone is under the cube!”

When there was no response, Officer Gurt looked over his shoulder and saw a cow standing near him, eating some grass from the lawn. He was so jarred that he paused and stared at it for a moment.

Must have escaped from someone’s farm.

He turned back and continued digging.

Half an hour later, his wife approached the school and found her husband halfway beneath the cube, his legs sticking out into the hole. A cow was chewing on the lawn some thirty feet from the cube.

“Honey?” she said as she approached. “Is that you?”

“Just….about…” he said from beneath the box, out of breath. “Got it!”

She watched as his feet scooted backward out from under the box and he emerged from the hole. Then Mrs. Gurt was shocked to see a child-sized piece of paper follow him out of the hole. It was the size of a little boy, like a moving, living sheet. It was paper thin, but moved like a kid.

When it turned to face her and she could see it fully from the front, she exclaimed, “Little Timmy Shugger!”

A week later, Bailee still had not been found.

After digging Little Timmy out from under the cube, they had discovered a bunch of chewed up pieces of someone lying nearby. Since people don’t die in Crumb Hill — they just go to The Dimension when they’re too old to shovel— the bits of the person were still alive. After some investigation, the police determined the mushy pieces were Principal Bearhair.

Doctors are still trying to piece him back together, but they have made one thing clear: “Don’t expect him to dance a Jittercrumb anytime soon; his spleen and left tibia would slide right out.”

No one knew who the cow belonged to. No farmers were missing any of theirs, so the residents of Crumb Hill just let her wander freely around the town, and she quickly became a sort of well-known fixture around the town. The people began to affectionately refer to her as Bailee, since she had mysteriously appeared the same way Little Bailey had mysteriously disappeared.

Little Timmy never went back to his normal dimensions. He is still two-dimensional, and doctors think that he may always be. They have to use hammers to smash his food down to a digestible proportion and then slide the thin food into his mouth.

And the cube disappeared the day after Little Timmy returned. There was a square patch of yellow grass in front of the school next to a big hole in the earth. It was determined that it was simply the most unique entrance to The Dimension that had opened in the town yet, and they’d be more careful with mysterious objects in the future.

the end

Day 71 of 100 Days of Blog

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Published on October 01, 2024 09:05

September 30, 2024

The Box (part 11)

Mrs. Gurt was not anywhere near the cube, as her husband feared.

But she was looking at it…or, through it sort of.

She stared into the hole in the wall of the Tonic Woman’s home and her senses couldn’t make logical sense of what was happening. As she stared into the wall hole, she saw what appeared to be the inside of the cube, but it went off in six directions, like six different worlds that she saw and experienced all at once. She did not just see in one direction, as all humans do. Instead, it was as if she could see in all six directions simultaneously, as if all six sides of the cube led into different parts of The Dimension.

This must be how flies see, with their hundred eyes, she thought to herself as her reverie began.

In one direction was a roaring flame. In another was a silent and infinite number of stars, drifting forever. There was an extraterrestrial planet and buildings unlike anything she’d seen before. She saw a child floating through space and was immediately convinced that it was one of the children who had gone missing from Crumb Hill years before.

Two of the walls of the cube were simply solid colors she had never seen before, like a cloud or a solid wall of fog filled the void.

In another direction was the yellow, idyllic fields Bailee had seen, with a cow lying peacefully beneath a clump of trees.

One direction looked like a sleek black maze of cubic directions and ledges and terribly high walls. She saw a beast wandering in the pit of one of these massive, dark vaults.

The last way seemed to be a world where everything was made of paper; everything was paper thin, and made of small, shaded brown paper-thin squares. There were simply layers and layers of two-dimensional trees and paths and beasts and everything, but it was all paper thin. She saw a bird fly by and at one point, when it flew by her at just the right angle, it was just a thin line. She saw a woman carrying a little boy to the edge of a cliff.

Officer Gurt was out of breath when he made it to the school’s front lawn. He didn’t see his wife, so he frantically looked around the building and the cube, then ran around the building again. The exhaustion from the cases had really taken its toll on his mental state.

His second time around the building, he came back to the cube, looking for any trace of his wife. He called out her name, but there was no response. He didn’t know if he should feel relieved or more afraid that she wasn’t here either. Had the cube sucked her in too?

He dropped onto the grass a few feet from the cube to catch his breath.

Mrs. Gurt’s senses became overloaded and she pulled her head back from the wall hole.

“What is that??” she exclaimed. “Is that The Dimension?”

“Oh, yes,” replied the Tonic Woman. “Well, parts of it. The Dimension cannot be fully comprehended or explained. And everyone experiences it differently. If you went into it, your experience would be unlike any of those!”

Mrs. Gurt was still confused as to why the old woman looked so scary and esoteric, yet spoke with such a joyful lightness. It threw her off.

“So are the missing people in there?” she asked.

“Oh, yes! You saw them all.”

“I did?? The girl floating through space looked nothing like Little Bailee Nuckles, and she had both her feet!”

“You’re right! That was not Bailee. But as for the others, remember that things change in The Dimension.”

“So, can we bring them back? Principal Hairbear, Bailee, and Little Timmy Shugger?”

The old woman thought about this while chewing on another seashell from the necklace. “It won’t be easy…but we can.”

But she was wrong.

Little Timmy fell into the blackness for a long time.

After what seemed like hours of falling through blackness — or was it minutes? — he hit the bottom. It was painless.

His thin body lay completely flat on a dark surface, but he could not move. He tried to move an arm, or even a finger, and not a thing budged. It was like he was being held down by a monstrous weight pressing down on him, though it didn’t hurt.

Day 70 of 100 Days of Blog

The post The Box (part 11) appeared first on ethan renoe.

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Published on September 30, 2024 15:24

September 28, 2024

The Box (part 10)

As Bailee lapped up water at the stream running between the trees, she felt more refreshed than she’d ever been. She licked her lips after lapping up half a gallon of water and shook her head.

She also noticed — one of her last human thoughts — that she felt more at peace than she ever had before. There was no stress weighing on her, no fear about the future or homework she had to get done. There was simply a nice patch of shade beside some delicious grass for her to lie there and munch on.

Her tail wagged to swat away some flies and she lumbered her hefty body over to a shady patch of grass and settled herself down, being careful not to crush her udders.

Bailee’s last thought before the human bits of her passed away once and for all to her bovine impulses took over was, What a nice, yellow day this is.

And she lay there beneath the tree enjoying the day and swatting flies away with her tail until she was taken back to Crumb Hill.

Officer Gurt came home in the late afternoon and was confused when his wife wasn’t there. He wandered around the house calling out her name, but there was no answer. He began to get concerned immediately. With all the disappearances recently, there was ample cause for alarm. His wife was never gone without leaving a note or letting him know where she’d be.

In a panic, he rushed out toward Crumb Hill Elementary. He hadn’t been there for hours, with all the paperwork he’d been doing at the station. His mind was swimming, out of fear and exhaustion, in thoughts of what could have happened to his wife. Did she get sucked into the black cube too?? Is she in The Dimension?? He imagined running up to the school and seeing his wife’s shoes lying next to the cube. He blamed himself for not being more cautious, for not watching after his own wife!

He half walked, half jogged up the road to the school, terrified of what he’d find. The fact that she could have been running a simple errand or doing anything else didn’t even cross his mind.

Little Timmy was being carried along by the tall woman as she sailed effortlessly through the forest in the strange, two-dimensional world made of squares. As they moved forward, he saw the world revealed to him in layers. As they moved toward a tree, it was like pieces of thin, translucent paper were removed and it became clearer as they got closer. Like a fog made of sheets.

“Where are you taking me?” asked Timmy for the sixth time.

The woman didn’t answer. She didn’t even seem to hear him or acknowledge his presence, but kept holding him in her arm. Her face looked straight ahead as she lumbered through the trees.

They finally came to a clearing in the trees and he saw a huge expanse, like the ground dropped off. And as they got closer, her saw that it did — they stood on a cliff over a massive chasm. But as he looked down into it, Timmy saw that he couldn’t even see the bottom, it simply descended into blackness, one layer at a time.

“What are we doing here?” asked Timmy, no longer expecting a response.

The woman slowed her pace and walked toward the edge of the cliff. The cubic rocks between them and the edge grew fewer and fewer, and soon Timmy was looking straight down into the blackness. His papery heartbeat picked up and he wondered what the woman was going to do. Was she going to jump with him? Was she going to throw him?

He began to get agitated and thrash his body around in her arm. “Put me down! Let me down!”

So she did.

And Little Timmy Shugger dropped onto the edge of the cliff, bounced off of his leg, and tumbled into the abyss.

Day 68 of 100 Days of Blog

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Published on September 28, 2024 13:39

September 27, 2024

The Box (part 9)

The dark form of the woman towered over Little Timmy as he stood frozen in the two-dimensional world.

“H-hello?” he stammered. It sounded like words, but transmitted through beeps and boops, like his vocal cords were electronic.

In response, the woman let out another loud groan that hurt Timmy’s papery ears.

“Can you help me? I live in Crumb Hill and I need to get back before dinner.” Timmy didn’t know that in The Dimension, time moves differently. For him, what had been a few minutes was days in his home town.

The woman stepped closer, and suddenly Timmy could see more of her features, still made of countless brown squares. She leaned over him and brought her face close to his. Then, she reached down and picked him up as if he weighed no more than a leaf. She pulled him up to her bosom and began lumbering through the woods with him cradled in her arm like a baby that weighed nothing.

“Where are you taking me?” asked Little Timmy Shugger.

The woman said nothing, but let out occasional wails as she walked along with him in her arm.

Principal Bearhair screamed as he was chewed by the beast. The lantern fell to the ground and flickered as it lay on its side, eventually burning out and falling dark long after the screams had stopped.

Once again, the only sound was the periodic voice of the beast, which sounded like a little kid, calling out into the darkness:

“Hello? Is someone there? Can you help me?”

To get to the home of the Tonic Woman, Mrs. Gurt had to walk through the main street of Crumb Hill. She walked quickly and tried not to make eye contact with anyone as she went, lest she get held up in conversation.

As she went, she rehearsed what she’d say once she got there. She wanted to come off as confident and not nervous — no stuttering once she was face to face with the enigmatic Tonic Woman!

Hello, I’m wondering if you can lend me any advice regarding the black cube in front of the Crumb Hill Elementary School, or the three disappearances of the three people — no, that’s too convoluted…Or the three people who have gone missing?

She muttered this all to herself as she walked.

To get to the woman’s house, she had to get to the far side of town, then follow a dirt walking path another mile through the winding woods that bordered all of Crumb Hill. She made it to the path, and the air immediately got cooler. The wind picked up, creating a sort of howl through the branches of the trees. Mrs. Gurt pulled her coat tighter around her frame and continued on. She would not shiver or stutter before this mythical Tonic Woman.

Yet that’s exactly what she did.

When Mrs. Gurt finally saw the shack in the middle of the woods at the end of the winding dirt road, it had gotten at least five degree cooler, and the sounds of the wind had picked up, though she didn’t feel it blowing at all.

She approached the worn-down little building and knocked on the dilapidated door. It opened immediately, which she was not prepared for.

The woman before her was a head shorter than her and wore all sorts of random things about her body. She had on a black shawl, but attached to it were animal bones, feathers, branches, beaks, and stones. She looked Mrs. Gurt up and down with her one good eye — the other was a solid, pale brown thing, perhaps a stone? Her lips folded in as if they contained only gums.

Mrs. Gurt propelled right into her stuttering opening. “He — Hi. I’m here for. I’m wondering if you know anything about the black cube in the, in the town? By the school? Or the three people who went missing? Can you help us? Er, help me?”

The small woman was silent for a moment, continuing to look Mrs. Gurt up and down. When she spoke, her voice was surprisingly clear and upbeat. “Oh, hello! Well yes, I can tell you whatever you need to know! It will just cost you a ferret and we can peer into the wall hole together.”

“A ferret?” replied Mrs. Gurt, caught off guard.

“Well, yes. I do love ferret. It has the richest natural flavor.”

Thinking quickly, Mrs. Gurt said, “But it’s not the season for ferret right now.”

“Oh, it isn’t?” said the old lady, looking down.

“But,” started Mrs. Gurt, reaching into the bag slung around her shoulder, “I brought you this…” and she pulled out a necklace made of shells from around the shores of Crumb Lake.

“Oh, how lovely!” exclaimed the Tonic Woman. “It’s not as good as a ferret, but it’ll do.” And she accepted the necklace from Mrs. Gurt and brought it promptly up to her mouth, biting off half of the first shell.

“No, it’s not — ” started Mrs. Gurt, but then stopped. The old woman seemed to be enjoying gumming the shells.

“It’s no ferret meat,” she said between crunches, with flakes of shell around her lips and gums, “but it’s not half bad!” She took another bite as she turned to walk inside and waved Mrs. Gurt to follow her with her other hand.

Mrs. Gurt ducked to follow her inside and wondered what in the world was meant by ‘wall hole.’ But she didn’t have to wait long to find out. The Tonic Woman walked to one of the few spaces in her cluttered little shack where the wall was clear. She stood in front of it, took one last bite of a seashell, and let out a little “mmmm” to herself as she chewed, and set it down.

Then, she pulled her little fist back, and punched a hole right into the wall. The horsehair plaster collapsed from one punch from her surprisingly strong arm, leaving a perfectly round little hole.

“There we have it!” she said, turning to Mrs. Gurt with a smirk.

“Oh, a literal wall hole,” she replied, to herself as much as to the Tonic Woman, who was picking up her seashell necklace again for more nibbles.

The small woman then walked up to the hole and put her face into it, muttering some gibberish to herself. She then pulled her face back, saying, “yup, yup. Take a look for yourself.”

Mrs. Gurt walked over to the hole, bent down, and could not believe what she saw when she looked into it.

Day 67 of 100 Days of Blog

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Published on September 27, 2024 13:37

September 26, 2024

The Box (part 8)

Little Timmy Shugger also woke up in The Dimension.

He had been asleep with his brain wrapped in a dark brown sort of fog, and now he awoke and felt different. His eyes blinked open into a new sort of world. Everything he could see was made up of tiny squares. They were all two-dimensional, like multicolored pieces of paper.

Everything was various shades of brown, as they were in Crumb Hill, but the world was nothing but paper-thin squares. He looked down at his own body and found that he, too, had become so thin that he couldn’t even see his arm if he turned it to the side.

But nothing twisted or moved organically; it was all operating on 90-degree angles. His thin hands looked like a hundred little squares running around and moving across his skin as he moved them and the light changed. Darker squares meant shadows, and where the light hit them, were lighter squares.

Timmy had never seen anything like it. He looked around himself again and saw the trees and bushes and grasses were all very thin drawings, made of hundreds of squares. The squares were alive, animating everything he could see. If he walked past a tree, it would get thinner and then disappear when he was next to it, like looking down a piece of paper from the side.

None of it made sense to Little Timmy’s little brain.

The last thing he remembered before he woke up was the black cube in front of his school. He had rushed out of his tutoring session, but paused when he saw the new addition to the front lawn. Timmy was almost positive this hadn’t been there earlier in the day, as he stared out the window of his classroom in boredom.

He had done a lap around the cube, examining its dark black exterior in curiosity. The last thing Timmy remembered was getting close to it and looking in detail at the smooth, hard surface. The blackness of the cube’s wall morphed into a brown haze, and it was from this haze that he woke up into this strange new world, where everything was paper thin and made of squares.

He continued adjusting to this weird reality. The sounds were different in The Dimension too. Every step he took made a sharp little pit sound, like a shovel hitting hard soil. The wind in the thin trees sounded like it was being blown through a long tube.

Then he made out a different sound blending with the wind: a high, pitchy howl. It sounded like a coyote, or someone crying, if they were on the other end of a long-distance telephone line.

Pit. Pit. Pit.

He kept making his way through the woods, and heard the sound again. Timmy started to run.

Pitpitpitpitpit.

The paper-thin world revealed itself to him in layers, like running past flat sheets of paper as he ran forward. Then, from the film of papery fog in front of him, emerged a towering shadow, twice his height. She moaned again, louder this time, as he was standing feet from her, and Little Timmy Shugger realized he was standing feet from a very tall woman.

Through the strange, cubic fog of The Dimension’s air, she seemed to turn and look at him.

Back in Crumb Hill, Officer Gurt was getting worn out. He couldn’t wrap his mind around what was happening, where the people had gone, or where the cube had come from.

Of course, The Dimension was on his mind. Everyone in Crumb Hill had their own theories and legends about it. People told stories about The Dimension all the time. It was common knowledge that you couldn’t get back from it once you went, but that didn’t stop people from claiming to have visited and returned. Everyone had their own rendition of what it was like, and none of them lined up.

There were plenty of entrances to The Dimension around, but none of them looked like this. They had always looked like dark holes to another world, like the vortex made in water as it slithers down a drain. And they didn’t last very long. An entrance would open, maybe one or two people would fall into it, and a week later it would close.

How would this solid object with five solid sides (he assumed the bottom was also solid, but had no way of knowing for sure, and as a police officer, guessing is not in the job description), lead anyone to The Dimension?

The cube clearly had something to do with the disappearances, and little Hilly’s feet lying next to it were now proof. The question was, did any of it have to do with The Dimension or not? And if not, then where in the world did this cube come from? There was no other explanation.

Mrs. Gurt had noticed the wear these cases were having on her husband, and she wanted to help. She wanted her husband back — he had been so preoccupied with work lately that he had barely been home, except to sleep!

She had considered consulting the Tonic Woman who lived on the outskirts of Crumb Hill for help. Many considered her to be a witch, but others claimed she had saved their lives. Some said she made animals aware of their own deaths, while other people claimed that she had cleansed them of their dandruff. There were half as many rumors about her as there were about The Dimension — and that’s a lot!

So the day after little Hilly was removed from her feet, Mrs. Gurt set out to see the Tonic Woman.

Bailee was having fun hopping around the field on her hooves. She could jump higher and farther than she ever could back in Crumb Hill. She was making her way to the crop of trees on the horizon, but would jump to the side and zigzag and then jump backwards, then forward again.

She kept making her way to the trees and having fun doing it.

Bailee didn’t know how long it took for her to reach them, but she eventually got to the trees and was grateful for the shade. The air in The Dimension wasn’t too hot — just a pleasant, yellow warmth — but hopping around so much had made her work up a sweat.

She hoped there would be some water in the trees and to her delight, there was a little stream there in the middle of them, the trees gathered around it. She was so hot and thirsty, she dropped to all fours to drink straight from the ravine. But when she did, she noticed that he hands were also darker than before. They hit the ground on the bank of the stream and felt nothing.

Bailee expected her fingers to feel the grass and soil beneath them, but instead, it felt the same as her hooved feet did when she was hopping around — there was no sensation, except the setting down of her weigh on her limbs. And as she looked at her hands, she found that they were no longer hands at all, but also black hooves.

Her arms still had some skin, but as she watched, she saw fur growing out of it before her eyes. Her skin was being quickly hidden by this whitish fur.

She shook her head, and with it, shook concerns about her taxonomic state from her mind. Bailee snorted and bent down to lap up some water.

Day 66 of 100 Days of Blog

The post The Box (part 8) appeared first on ethan renoe.

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Published on September 26, 2024 15:41

September 25, 2024

The Box (part 7)

Read part 1 here!

Officer Gurt was getting tired of responding to emergency calls. Not because they weren’t real emergencies, but because they were. The folks of Crumb Hill were accustomed to weird things happening, but when they got hit, they got hit hard. And three disappearances in one week was rough.

He now stood in the school building again, talking to Miss Yarris and Little Hilly Bildagard. He had gotten there before her parents, or any other authorities, and was listening to the story through Hilly’s sobs.

“…and j-just her shoes and f-feet were there,” concluded Hilly.

“I see,” he replied. “Thank you for sharing that with me. I’m going to go look at the cube again, can you stay here with Miss Yarris and just try to breathe?”

He walked to the cube once again and just as Hilly had said, found the feet lying near the box. He bent down to look at them and it was just as the girl had said. There were two little girl’s shoes, with feet inside of them. It looked like a clean cut at the ankles, both at similar, yet slightly different angles.

Officer Gurt looked at the box and still noticed nothing different about it. It looked solid and dead as ever. It just sat there. He wracked his brain trying to piece together Principal Bearhair’s pen, and these shoes, and Little Timmy Shugger, and how they all fit together. Or were they not connected at all? He made a few more notes in his pad.

Bailee stared at her ankles as the ends of her legs formed into hooves before her eyes. As she watched the rapid growth of the appendages before her eyes, she did not feel horrified. Instead, she felt an intense sort of curiosity. Perhaps being in this new world had calmed many of her fears and made her feel at peace for the first time in a long time.

The hooves came together and nearly met in the front, leaving a split in the middle. She moved her legs around once the hooves seemed to be done growing, watching her new feet in fascination. Bailee then stood up and jumped around. To her delight, her hooves propelled her further and higher than her feet ever did.

She even found herself giggling as she thrust herself up and through the air. Bailee bounded around and eventually made her way to the nearest cluster of trees, where she would eventually pass away.

Principal Hairbear continued lowering down the vertical wall of the ledge. Minutes had passed and he couldn’t tell how far down the side he had gone. It was so dark that he couldn’t see the top where he had come from, or the ground below him. He simply hung down from the vines which grew from his wrist and let them slowly lower them downward.

He swung the lantern out to the left, then the right, and hoped to see anything. It was just darkness. The yellow glow from his lantern reached out into the black and came back to his eyes empty.

Mr. Bearhair called out again, “Timmy! Are you down there?”

A moment later, the same small voice answered him from far below in the abyss, “Help me!”

He heard the scratching sound again.

It felt like 30 minutes had passed, but it could have been an hour. At last, a floor appeared ten feet beneath Mr. Bearhair’s feet.

Then eight feet.

Five

Then his dangling feet slowly came into contact with the floor of the same black color and smooth texture as everything else in The Dimension. Once her could stand up, Mr. Hairbear yelled out again, “Ok, Timmy! I’m here! Where are you?”

“I’m here, help!” responded the voice, but now it seemed to come from above him, maybe ten feet above his head. Mr. Hairbear figured Timmy was trapped on a ledge somewhere up ahead.

The air had changed down here, and he just now noticed the thickness of it, that the air down here was tinged with a foul, rotten scent. He held the lantern up and took a step forward.

He realized that the scent was terrible, and getting worse as he moved forward. He knew Timmy was ahead of him now, and could hear him moving just several yards in front of him.

“Timmy! Where are you?”

“I’m here!”

Now the voice was just beyond the flickering light of his lantern.

Two steps later, Mr. Bearhair saw it.

He saw the claw-like tentacles rising up dozens of feet from the smooth black floor. They were hairy with terrible scum and dandruff falling from them. He suddenly heard the breathing too.

There was no wall or ledge in front of him.

There was no Timmy.

Mr. Bearhair’s eyes slowly moved up the tentacles to the grotesque face of The Dimension Beast. He could now hear the raspy breath and couldn’t look away from the dead white eyes.

In the same childish, timid voice, the Beast looked at him and said, “Hello.”

Mr. Hairbear screamed.

Day 65 of 100 Days of Blog

The post The Box (part 7) appeared first on ethan renoe.

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Published on September 25, 2024 10:22

September 24, 2024

The Box (part 6)

Read Part 1 here!

Hilly kept screaming, staring at the shoed feet of her friend lying there, a foot from the black cube. From inside the school, Miss Yarris heard the screams and ran out to see what the problem was.

She found Hilly there, staring at the cube and screaming hysterically.

“Hilly, what happened?” she asked. “What’s wrong?”

Hilly began stuttering, now through sobs. “Bailee was sitting-g th-there,” she began, “and I looked away and I look-ked, and she was g-gone.”

That’s when Miss Yarris saw the shoes. The little girls’ shoes had stained the grass around them a dark brown. Otherwise, the cube and the area around it looked the same as ever.

“Come inside Hilly, let’s call the police and you should wait for your parents inside,” said Miss Yarris, putting her arm around Hilly.

Mr. Bearhair had walked quite a distance along the edge of the drop-off and saw no way to get down. Every now and then, he continued to hear the little voice crying out from down below. “Hello? Is someone there to help me?”

He made a decision to try to climb down. Either he went now, or his lantern would eventually burn out and they would both be back in the blackness.

Mr. Hairbear set the lantern on the ground and lowered himself onto his stomach on the corner of the abyss and spun so his legs dropped off over the blackness. He inched himself backwards, still on his sizeable stomach, and grabbed the lantern. There was no solid plan at this point; he was making it up as he went and hoping for the best.

But as he grabbed the lantern with his right hand, he noticed something strange happening with his left hand, which lay flat on the smooth ground, holding him from sliding into the pit.

The vines which had grown out of his wrist had slowly been multiplying, and now seemed to be alive again. They were moving around like snakes, seeming to sniff along the ground. Each one found the smallest fissure or crack in the ground and dove into it, securing itself to the ground.

Each vine latched itself to the floor as Mr. Bearhair watched in fascination. He almost forgot that half of his body was dangling over a dark cliff, and caught the lantern just before it slipped out of the fingers of his right hand.

As the vines seemed to multiply before his eyes, each finding a new spot to latch onto the floor, they began to extend in length as well. He let himself slide further over the corner and into the darkness, and to his relief, the vines began to lower him down until he was hanging down the side of the ledge by his left hand, with the lantern in his right.

Its rays of light reached out as far as they could into the abyss, but found nothing but more blackness. He could see the smooth black wall along which he was being lowered, and the vines letting him down slowly, and nothing else.

As he continued to descend into the darkness, he yelled, “Timmy, I’m coming!”

Bailee fell backwards into The Dimension.

The wall of the box had opened as she leaned against it and she fell through, but it closed just as quickly, chopping off her feet. But as she fell through light, yellow air, she felt no pain. She didn’t even feel afraid.

Bailee simply felt content for the first time in a long time. As she fell for an incredibly long time, she noticed two things. She seemed to be falling slowly, as if gravity was suddenly half as strong. It felt more like she was being lowered through thick, full air to a gentle ground — she had no fear of hitting it.

And the other thing she noticed was what grew out of her ankles. Where her feet once were, now something else was emerging. She couldn’t tell what it was, but there were no wounds or blood — something hard was emerging from the ends of her legs.

She hit the ground with a poof, like a pillow being tossed onto a bed.

Bailee sat up and began to take in the surroundings. Her eyes had been fixed on her legs during her fall, so now she could actually look around and see where she was.

Bailee, too, quickly realized that she was not in Crumb Hill, or anywhere she knew before — it must be The Dimension. She was on a grassy hill in an idyllic prairie, only the grass was not green but gold. It wasn’t dead though, it was a vibrant sort of gold, as if it had surpassed being green and become more alive and golden. The sky also was a permanent shimmering gold, as if it had gotten stuck in an eternal sunset.

Bailee didn’t see any other living things at first, just some gathered trees in random clusters in the distance. The soft, golden grass below her was comfortable like a cushion and she felt at peace.

After taking in her surroundings, she looked back at her feet and was shocked to find that they were being replaced with something else entirely. The skin around her ankles was hardening like a fingernail, with cartilaginous strands. The bottoms were becoming black, thick and dense like a four-inch nail.

The process happened quickly, before her eyes, and she was shocked as she realized what was now growing where her feet used to be.

Bailee spoke it out loud.

“Hooves?”

Day 64 of 100 Days of Blog

The post The Box (part 6) appeared first on ethan renoe.