by Arthur Breur

“No, I’m fine. My phone’s totaled, but I don’t have a scratch — just this weird vision thing. They’re going to do a cat scan to make sure it’s not a stroke or brain cancer or something. I’m not going anywhere for a while — at least overnight.”

I waited as Colleen did the obligatory worried sounds and get-well wishes. “Look, Coll, can you run by the motel and get some stuff for me? I literally got here with just the clothes on my back. I told the lady to expect someone and I’d way rather it be you than one of the Bobs.”

“Sure thing, Ava. All the excitement’s done, here. I’ll head out now. Pearl Jamison Memorial, right?”

My gym-body nurse walked in again as we were saying our ‘kay-byes, followed by a tech with the gurney.

<<<<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

I lay there in the weird, sterile tunnel, feeling bored and a little silly. OK, maybe a little bit scared. I’d never passed out before, and I had certainly never had any vision problems before, much less this. 

Every morning before driving to the field lab with Coll — Dr. Colleen Graves, biochemist — I’d walk over to the beach to watch the sunrise and get some killer pics. North Carolina’s shores are hard to beat for “dune grasses in front of the pristine ocean sunrise” photos. My morning Cheerwine bottle had been nearly empty once the sun was well up from the horizon — relax, it’s a kind of soda, and I hate coffee — and I remember thinking I’d have another out of my motel fridge as I turned away from the sunrise and headed back. 

I don’t remember any of that walk, in the way that routine, boring moments don’t stick in your head. But I absolutely remember the voices and sounds of EMTs and the police radio, and my being lifted up onto what would turn out to be just the first gurney of my day…

<<<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>>>

“Ohmygawd, Coll, you’re a life saver.”

I’d just seen the Cheerwine bottles way at the bottom of the Food Lion bag, under some clothes and my toiletries. She knew about my thing for the brand, and my dislike of coffee. What she didn’t know yet was that the hospital lunch had been inedible. All my life I’d heard jokes about hospital food, but I’d never really believed them. This stuff had tasted awful. I’d managed to down the coolaid and the jello, barely, but everything else had tasted like chemicals — or worse.

Sifting through the bag, I cheered up as I pulled out my current gay werewolf romance. Hey, don’t judge me for my weird addictions!

But then… “Aw crap. I can’t read this…”

“Embarrassed that the nurse will catch you?” She grabbed the book, scandalously. “I don’t know, I think he might be into it,” Colleen sotto-voce’d as she flipped the book over to read the steamy summary on the back. This gave me a view of the two ridiculously beautiful men on the cover, posed in front of a full moon peeking through clouds. (Well, that wouldn’t work, would it? I suddenly realized, noticing the very-clearly-not-currently-werewolf guys, despite the Very. Full. Moon. Right. There.)

I also couldn’t ignore that the text and image were stubbornly reversed for me.

“No, that’s what I was talking about. The vision thing. Coll, I’m worried I had a stroke this morning, even if they don’t see anything in the scans. Everything’s backwards.”

“Did you hit your head when you fell?”

“No, there’s not even a bump or anything.”

“Well, I’m just glad you’re ok. I flipped when I got on site and realized you hadn’t gotten a ride with one of the Bobs.” A number of the other members of the team were named Robert something, so the collective noun had stuck. “I figured you’d gone in early before the extraction when you weren’t there when I knocked.”

“Yeah, sorry for the scare.”

“Don’t you apologize. Just get better so you can observe the specimen. It started acting funny after we released it…”

<<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>>

I should explain. My name is Ava Margretta Driver, and I study animal behavior. I’d been invited into one of the coolest opportunities ever after Colleen recommended me for The DANI Project. She’d been brought on as a chemist only a few weeks ago, and had sounded more excited than I’d ever heard her when she called. She’d become kind of a mentor when I attended a guest lecture she gave on biochemical foundations of behavior at UNC Wilmington.

“You know that thing I’m doing out by the beach?” I did, but just barely at that point. She’d been recruited to study the newly discovered two-dimensional phenomena scientists were calling “D^N-1 branes” or (because of how “D^(N-1)” looked, and how saying “D to the N minus one” added a year to every conversation) “DANI Branes”. “N minus one” referring to them having one less physical dimension than our… universe? …has. I mean, these “branes” are in our universe, aren’t they? So this all gets very messy.

But anyway: they were 2D environments that wrapped around the planet like invisible bubbles: fine onion-skin layers with apparently zero depth, each positioned a certain distance above or below sea level. There seemed to be an infinite number of them, and some of them seemed to have “stuff” in them. Like they had two-dimensional rocks or something. So they’d brought in Colleen as a chemist, since she was nearby at Chapel Hill and one of the Bobs knew her. She’d been working to figure out if there were two-dimensional atoms and molecules and chemistry, and if so, how they worked — despite her expertise being bio chemistry. 

“I can’t tell you anything over the phone, but I’m texting you an address. There’s gonna be an NDA to sign — but Ava, you’ve just got to see this!”

A week later I was staying at the same beach-town motel as Coll and most of the team, and studying something that nobody had ever expected when they discovered those curious two-dimensional universes: life.

There were… things… in one of the countless brane layers. Things that moved of their own volition. They interacted, they ingested, they reproduced. The largest of them found so far could fit in a circle about as big around as your fist, but they were amazingly complex. 

They’d been discovered by researchers studying near-sea-level branes on the coast of North Carolina. As they were studying permanent two-dimensional features in some of the brane layers, they observed something that was moving in that brane. Not just moving, but searching. It moved around the permanent objects, seeking out smaller objects and consuming them. Eating. And all of this taking place in only two dimensions. 

Colleen had waxed enthusiastic about how “everyone” had assumed the chemical complexity of life required the infinitely more complex interaction provided by folding in three dimensions, and here were things that were clearly alive without any way the molecules could bend and twist and fold the way that our chemistry does.

She was nearly spiritual about the experience. She had described it as watching an animated stained-glass window, but laid out horizontally, insubstantially floating just above the ground. All of it was only visible due to a very specific recipe of magnetic fields and polarized light viewed through exact filters. But there it was. Completely alien life. Life we could see, life we could observe, life that exists in an insubstantial bubble that wrapped all the way around the planet. But so far, life that was only conveniently observable in this particular spot by the ocean in North Carolina.

The DANI Project had made this discovery here, and now they had added me to help them understand the behavior of the two-dimensional animals… which one of the Bobs had called “Dannies”.

<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>

“What do you mean, it started acting funny? Coll, what’s it doing? Did the extraction hurt it?”

<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>

Wanting to study how physics operated in a space that had left and right, had forward and backward, but had no up and down, the team had learned how to generate an artificial DANI brane in a small, controlled space — about thirty centimeters across. It was a machine that literally created its own small bubble of two-dimensional universe. Then they’d discovered that if they activated it aligned very closely with a known brane, an intersection occurred — an alignment with the larger, natural brane. They could then move the contents away from that brane, leaving a temporary protected circle where those contents had previously been.

This had turned out to be very helpful in more closely scanning the “material” they’d discovered in the branes, as the equipment they had developed to do detailed scans was bulky and hard to move around. 

Colleen had shown me the video of the discovery: the extraction arm with its circular field ring, and the circular glass slide that fit perfectly into it. It could have been a dinner plate, or maybe a picture frame, because it had the solid white edge where it rested in the armature. The robotic arm positioned the combined elements (now officially acting as a “collector”) with the chosen brane, the field activated, and the chunk of “Danny Space” was captured in the slide; it could be moved to be scanned by the big machines.

This allowed them to move a sample to the large scanners and record what they found. It even allowed them to put the sample back into the “missing” space — which they’d done in a very big hurry when tiny things inside one of the samples had been observed moving, clearly alive.

As soon as the researchers saw movement on their monitors, they’d burst into a frenzy. They cheered and argued and shouted and postulated — until Coll had snapped them out of it: “Guys, we have to put them back! We’ve torn them out of their environment! Who knows how long they can survive this way?”

Coll’s common sense observation snapped everyone back to attention, and they quickly recovered the slide from the scanner and moved it back to the extractor arm. They had the computer move the collected material back to exactly the same place and re-combine it with its brane universe. The moving things had continued to move, back in their horizontal plane. They seemed to be none the worse for wear, all things considered. Everyone had been breathing a collective sigh of relief, when Coll had dropped the next mood breaker:

“I wonder if we cut any of them in half at the edge of the sample…”

<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>

“No, Ava, we were very careful that it was exactly in the center of the slide when we activated the collector. It wasn’t harmed. It seemed confused because it couldn’t get out of the collector, but it didn’t seem to freak out or anything, And it seemed absolutely fine when we put it back. But then it… I don’t know… it kind of got lost and confused at first. It started doing things… differently.”

“Like what? Oh!” My insides had just done a full somersault. “Uh oh…” I held my stomach for a moment before throwing a panicked look at Colleen. “Out of the way!” I made my way to the bathroom as urgently as hospital garb and the IV stand would allow.

Colleen made a discreet exit during my bathroom emergency, leaving me feeling awkward but also kind of relieved. I settled in to watching some mindless television. I found it interesting, in a very non-entertaining way, how different sitcoms look when their sets appear completely backwards.

<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>

In the morning, I woke with my brain feeling rested but slow, and my body felt both hungry and exhausted. I begged desperately to be allowed to have one of my bottles of Cheerwine, and the nurse on duty relented. But that, too, tasted off — instead of the sweet, black cherry goodness, it had a flavor like how I imagine sweetened brake fluid would taste. I was starting to really be worried about what was going on with my brain. I didn’t like coffee in the first place, so I didn’t want that. Eggs and bacon and toast all smelled… wrong. I asked for just a repeat serving of the coolaid and jello and was rewarded again not very long after with another bathroom emergency.

Colleen showed up late morning carrying a tablet and a Walgreens bag.

“Ooh, presents?” She mugged at me and looked proud.

“Of course! What better way to take your mind off things than putting you to work?” She turned on the tablet and pointed to a video file icon. “Video of the Danny, before, during, and after the extraction. You can watch it and give us your opinion.”

“Excellent! And the Walgreens bag? I love expensive surprises!”

Coll pulled out a hand-held vanity mirror.

“There’s a mirror in the bathroom…”

“Yes, but you can use this one…” she grabbed my book and opened it to my bookmark, sliding the mirror tight against the spine, “… to read!”

I looked down at the mirror — and at the perfectly legible words reflected there. “Smuuuuut…” I drawled, a zombie begging for brains.

“Knock yourself out, sweetie! But also take a look at the video. I can’t figure out what that little bugger is up to. Can’t stay now, but I’ll check back later.”

<<<<<<<>>>>>>>

After a couple chapters of moody male shapeshifters, my curiosity got the better of me and I put the book and mirror on the nightstand. I picked up the tablet. True to her word, Colleen had provided the video footage from tracking the solitary “Danny” along its usual path away from the others, out to a point by a nearby… something… and then back. As it reached the spot exactly in the center of the collector, they activated the field, made sure the Danny was safely contained, and quickly removed the slide and moved it to the large scanner. It would be extracted for less time than the tinier life they’d originally, inadvertently, captured.

I wanted to see after the extraction so I lifted my finger to the slider… and was momentarily confused when the “current frame” indicator was all the way at the right — near the end of the video? I angrily remembered the vision thing. I scrolled the bar to the left and watched the thumbnail show quick, stuttering frames of the slide being put back in the housing, the arm moving back in position, then moving away, then that strange “sideways stained glass window” effect that the special polarized light had on the two-dimensional world we were watching.

The camera moved to follow our Danny. At first it just sat there, not moving. Then it tentatively nudged its way around. I expected it to continue on its usual way after it realized it was back on its normal path… but it hesitated. It moved a little bit forward… it turned around and moved a little bit back the other way… it looked… lost.

I was interrupted from my curiosity by the nurse… and my doctor and… another doctor and… 

Crap… three doctors.

“Ms. Driver… Ava?” At my nod, they continued. “We need to ask you some more questions, and then we’re probably going to be doing some more tests.

<<<<<<>>>>>>

They’d brought a neurologist and a gastroenterologist, of course. They were convinced that my new food intolerances and my whacked senses of taste and smell being off were both related to the vision issues; as all three symptoms had appeared when I had lost consciousness on the beach road.

“And you’re aware that you have situs inversus?”

“No… sounds expensive.”

“It’s not,” he laughed. “It’s rare, but it’s completely natural. Your EMT thought it might be a heart condition that made you pass out when he noticed your dextrocardia — I’m sorry, he discovered that your heart is positioned differently from in most people. That can come with heart conditions, but in your case, your heart is very healthy. The ‘situs inversus’ part just means that it’s all of your organs that are arranged differently, not just your heart. We’ve mostly ruled it out as related to your sensory issues.”

And here I’d been hoping that this newly discovered physiological condition was the diagnosis, but it was just a curiosity.

<<<<<>>>>>

“No real changes, it’s just doing more of the same.” Coll was leaning against the wall the next morning, her arms crossed. “It’s frustrating, because we don’t want to study another Danny if extracting it is going to hurt it, but we can’t tell if we did hurt it. It’s just acting… different than before.”

I had to agree and tilted my head in thought. The Danny had previously followed the same route approximately every 12 hours 25 minutes. Somehow, their “daily” behavior was related to the moon’s position overhead in the sky. Light apparently had no effect on the two-dimensional world, but lunar gravity certainly seemed to. And this one had moved along the same path every 12 hours 25 minutes for as long as we had observed it. The other creatures had their “daily” habits, but this one was the only one that was alone far enough from the others that we could be certain not to risk another Danny getting hurt — or killed — by being cut by the edge of the collector.

“Hey, Ava… I mean, I know you’re in the hospital and everything, but… are you ok? You look really tired.”

“Yeah, I’m just really hungry, and my insides hurt from what happens every time I try to eat. Well, now I’ve got a headache, too, but that could be from nerves. I’m worried, Coll. I mean, I could probably get used to the vision thing, but what’s going on with my insides? There’s no cancer, there’s no obstruction. But anything more than water and I cramp up and run to the toilet and…” Oh, great, I’d started to cry.

Coll walked over and gave me as good a “lean-over-the-bed” hug as she could.

“And I’m a freak,” I snuffled, appalled at how comically pathetic I sounded. I explained how my insides were arranged differently, and she smiled a quirky smile.

“Like Enrique Iglesias and Donny Osmond!”

“Who?”

“Little girl, do not make me kill you.”

<<<<>>>>

Way too early the next morning I found myself completely unable to sleep, so I picked up the tablet and looked at the video. It was paused showing the form of the post-extraction Danny. I pressed the seemingly left-facing ‘play’ button and watched the creature moving around the space where it had been extracted. Yeah, “lost” was the best description for it. We’d dropped it right back where we’d found it, but it was looking around like it had never been there before. I’d asked if somehow we had dropped it into the wrong universe — if there might be another brane that was similar enough we could put the Danny into it, but that was a different environment than it was used to.

But that didn’t make sense. All of the same “features” were there, the same landscape, if two dimensional shapes could be landscape. And, of course, there were still the other Dannies running around doing their thing.

I moved to scroll the video forward and made a “gah” sound when I realized I had again scrolled the wrong way — but before I could move the cursor again, something caught my eye.

<<<>>>

Waiting for Coll to show up that morning was made easier by some scandalous wolfy reading material. I’d gotten completely used to my curious reading process and had made my way through several increasingly steamy chapters when visiting hours started and Coll walked in only seconds later.

“Hey, girl! Ooh, good chapter? You’re looking… well, you look like crap, but you look like happy crap.”

“I think I found something.”

“Good! Danny Kaye has us worried.”

“Danny… K? What, they’ve named him? Why Danny K?”

“It’s pretty awful. The Bobs started calling it that because… well, because it’s kind of… dancing. It turns around, then stops, then turns back. 180 degrees. Over and over. Like it’s doing the hokey-pokey or something.” My face was still blank. She looked disgusted at me: “Danny Kaye? The dancer? OMG, girl, do not make me kill you. Ugh. I’ll send you a video link. Anyway, the Danny is slowing down, a lot. We’re all getting pretty worried — which probably explains the morbid humor of the name.”

“OK, look, Coll! I think something happened to the collector in the scanner. What’s this mark on the frame of the slide?” I pointed to the strange mark that I’d noticed on the slide’s circular edge.

“That’s just the battery cover. It’s there on every slide frame. It keeps the field going when the slide is out of the collector.”

“But it’s not there when they take the slide out to put it in the scanner. It’s only there when they put it back into the collector. Here, I’ll show you.” I’d practiced moving the video controls back and forth plenty of times now, moving between two spots in the video: one where they took the circular slide out of the collector to put it into the scanner, and one where they put the slide back into the collector. In the first segment of video, the frame was entirely white. In the second, there was that mark.

Coll took the tablet from me and scanned back and forth in the video. “Yeah… that’s the battery cover, alright…”

“Damn, I thought I’d figured it out — I thought they’d broken the slide frame somehow, or damaged it. But they’d just rotated it so the battery cover was in view.”

“No, Ava, you’re right… The slide frame has three uneven notches at the edge, so that it can’t be rotated. If it’s not turned with those notches in the right places, then it doesn’t fit into the collector or the scanner… but…” She pointed to something else that happened just after the slide came out of the scanner: Bob 1, who had taken the slide out of the collector and also taken it out of the scanner, then handed the slide to Bob 2, and Bob 1 walked off screen. Bob 2 took the slide and returned it to the collector.

“Did you see it?” The excitement in her voice caught me off guard.

“No, what? What happened? What did I miss?”

“They didn’t rotate the slide — they couldn’t because of the notches! But they did flip it. Ava, they flipped it over! They put Danny Kaye back upside down!”

It took me a minute to process the idea. Upside down? How? But then I remembered the whole “two-dimensional” thing. Dannies did not have up or down — they couldn’t. They had front, back, left, right. Up and down required THREE dimensions. My initial mental picture that they’d put the creature down in a headstand pose disappeared in a mental puff.

“Coll, it’s not dancing… it’s communicating! It’s figured it out. It’s telling us we turned it around, the only way it can. It can’t show us that it’s upside down, it can only turn in circles, and it’s telling us to put it back right-side up!”

Coll’s face went slack. She pulled her phone from her pocket. “Bob, get the collector ready. Grab Danny Kaye again and take him out, then turn the slide over and put him back again.” She picked up her stuff and pulled out her car keys. “Yes! Yes! Don’t argue! You guys flipped the slide when Bob handed it to you after the scan. Yes! Exactly! The Danny is upside down. It’s probably killing him!” She looked at me apologetically as she rushed out the door.

<<>>

Three hours later Coll returned. Her expression was stern, but positive. “He’s doing better. He stopped turning back and forth as soon as we put him back right-side up.”

“Definitely a ‘he’ now, huh?”

“No, we still don’t know anything about if they have genders… but it stuck after they started calling the thing Danny Kaye.”

“Coll, you realize that we’ve not only found life—” it had occurred to me after she’d rushed off, “but we’ve made first contact. It was communicating, Coll. It was telling us. Though you surprised me with how upset you got about it.”

“Ava, we don’t understand Danny chemistry yet — heck, we haven’t even figured out what makes up molecules for them. But an upside-down Danny would probably starve. Organic molecules have a thing called “chirality” — everything we eat, all of our chemistry, it’s all turned one way. We call it “left handed” in biochemistry. Maybe for them it’s the same. If you turned all of our chemistry upside down…” She looked at me, looked me over. She grabbed my wrist and looked at my “AVA” bracelet. “Fuck.” I looked at her, a bit shocked at her language. “Ava, what were you carrying when you fell?”

“Just my phone and my room key… and a bottle of Cheerwine. I told you, my phone was a mess. I don’t know what happened to the Cheerwine. It was empt—”

“Where’s your stuff?”

I pointed to the bag in the net basket by the bed. She pulled out my clothes, mumbling at them. “No care tags, just M for ‘medium’... crap.” She pulled out my hotel key. “Oh, yeah, it fuckin’ had to be number eight.” She held the key in her hand, staring at it a moment. “I’ll be back.”

She was gone before I could figure out anything to say.

<>

“Girl, we gotta go!” Coll woke me from a doze and was actually taking out my IV.

“What are you—” 

“Ava, trust me!”

Luckily, they’d disconnected me from the EKG when my heart had proved to be healthy — if oddly arranged.

Coll handed me my clothes and shuffled me toward the bathroom to change. I could hear her putting my remaining stuff into the Food Lion bag.

I felt like I was breaking out of jail when we walked out the door and she guided me to her car.

“Wrong side!” she said, as she moved me to the actual passenger door of the car. It felt like the time I’d been a passenger in England: steering wheel on the wrong side.

As we pulled out of the lot, Colleen stated matter-of-factly: “Your key didn’t fit in the door.”

“What? It wasn’t bent or anything—”

“No, Ava, it wasn’t bent. It was backwards. When I got back to the motel, the key didn’t fit the lock. So I went to the desk and told the lady that you’d asked me to get some stuff for you again. She handed me another key and I went back to your room… and it opened. I had to compare the keys themselves — I couldn’t tell from just the key or the tag.” She held up the key by the tag and showed it to me.

Black tag, number 8.

“I don’t get it, Coll. What’s going on.”

“Ok, then.” She opened the glove box in front of me. Inside was an empty Cheerwine bottle. For a moment, I didn’t notice. Then it hit me: I could read the label. The letters were the right way around!

I looked up, but I was still on the wrong side of the car. A street sign going by was still stubbornly backwards.

But the Cheerwine bottle… I could read it! I turned it around and could read the back label too. “Coll?”

“It’s your empty bottle, Ava. I found it where you fell; it had rolled into the grass on the shoulder.” She gripped the steering wheel, hard. “They put you back, upside down, Ava. Not top-to-bottom upside down. They put you back flipped over, left to right.”

“They… who?”

“Ava, you don’t have situs inversus, you’re perfectly normal — you’re just… flipped sideways!”

“Coll, this doesn’t make any sense.” I thought for a second, ideas inevitably sinking in. “Wait, why would I be sick then?”

“Chirality, Ava. Sugars, proteins, fats — aha, vitamins!” She slapped the steering wheel. “Those are all left-handed chirality like everything else. But they flipped you. You’re all… right-handed stuff now. Your chemistry is backwards from everything they can feed you at the hospital. Oh, that’s why it all tasted bad, too: flavors gotta be chiral, too!”

“So… Coll… how can I even breathe, then? Why don’t I suffocate?”

She thought a moment. “Oxygen is just O2. It’s not chiral. Nor carbon dioxide or nitrogen or water… not even salt. The basics are safe, but everything else will taste bad — or worse, make you sick!”

I looked at the oddly familiar road ahead as Coll pulled up and parked by a peculiar semicircle marking the asphalt. The white line on the side of the road didn’t quite exactly match up where it met that circular curve.

“Ava: you’re not sick from a stroke or some nerve condition. Girl: you’re upside down and you’re starving to death…” 

She reached past me and pulled the door handle to open the passenger door.

“...And it’s time for you to start dancing.”

---

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, organizations, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to real events or places is entirely coincidental.

©2026 Arthur Breur. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.