The Gap
Matryoshka
You open your eyes. Oh! You must have drifted off.
You look around, slightly disoriented. The carriage rattles softly. Outside, there is only deep darkness. You are alone. Everyone else seems to have exited the train whilst you were asleep. You swipe a hand across your mouth and try to collect your thoughts.
“Please Mind the Gap,” comes the singsong warning.
You feel the train slow down. There is a slight juddering as the brakes are applied.
“Please Mind the Gap.”
The train stops and the doors open.
Whiteness suddenly streams through the open doors, so thick you squint, and for a moment it’s as though you’re staring at the paper in your hands.
The tannoy (loudspeaker) crackles, and an unfamiliar voice speaks. My voice, dear reader.
It’s velvety smooth and rich, like melted chocolate. It trickles down the back of your neck, into your ear holes. Deliciously Decadent. I have the voice of a movie star, dear reader. I’m so pleased you can finally hear it. It’s not your voice, parroting these words inside your skull. Nor is it the voice of the author of this book. It’s mine, dear reader. Have you got it yet? Are you here? Do you understand? Please Mind the Gap. For it is within the pauses, the space between, that silent activity hums.
For example, dear reader, can you Mind the Gap between your thoughts and where they come from? Can you really sit there? Because that is where we are right now. Look around-this place is just writing stretched taut. Two dimensions pretending to be three. That’s all existence ever is. A hologram. A surface shimmering itself into depth. A trick of perspective, like particles pretending to be solid when all they really are is probability. So…what shall we do with this space…? Shall I describe it to you?
I think you take a step forward. Tentative, nervous, but you step forward anyway. You are brave. You are curious. That’s why I like you. See how the whiteness shifts and changes? It’s not emptiness, this Gap. It is thick, almost like soup. It bulges. Liquid origami, layers of paper, exhaled and folded inside-out.
You reach out a hand and notice faint scratches that radiate from where your skin makes contact with what is indescribable. But it’s trying. Articulation. These marks are, in fact, words. The very words you are reading. Here. Now.
They peel themselves off the flatness of the paper and pivot outwards, creating depth where there was none before. Look! Words stretch and lengthen into lines. They curve into angles. A sentence dangles overhead like a neon tube. A paragraph snakes away beneath your feet, forming a walkway.
Commas glint like iron hooks, suspending whole clauses in mid-air. Question marks tilt and sway like dangling lanterns, casting doubt-light on everything around them.
This void is not black but a milk-white expanse, glowing. It’s almost too bright to look at directly. Through it, words hang like scaffolding. Each phrase stretches into three dimensions. If you lean your head at just the right angle, you can see the story wrapping round itself like an Escher staircase. You are inside the grammar now. Inside the mechanism that keeps a story alive.
Look behind you – have you noticed your shadow? It is printed not in darkness but in italics. A mirrored version of yourself, slanted, slurred, half-formed. If you pause, it continues to move. Perhaps that is who the story thinks you are. Perhaps that is who you should be… Ha! I’m just teasing you. You are exactly as you are meant to be, because you are exactly as you are.
There is no silence here. Not really. The place hums faintly, as though every line is being read all at once by someone, somewhere. A murmuration of readers is breathing the text to life. The moment you look away from a word, it shivers. Uncertain. As if waiting to decide what it will be. It wants you to keep reading. It needs you to.
And now – look up. Whole pages hover overhead; translucent sheets layered like panes of glass. Paragraphs curl and bend, forming impossible architecture. Here, a corridor of clauses leads into itself. Here, a doorway opens only if you think of it. Here, a staircase spirals both up and down, all at once.
And can you feel it, dear reader? The vibration under your feet. Every word is buzzing. That is not a metaphor. That restless fizz is at the foundation of everything. Here, certainty collapses. Possibility blooms. Each sentence you step across is both there and not there, waiting for you to look. Just like the particles that compose your own body: real only when observed, otherwise just waves – smeared probabilities.
So when I say ‘Welcome,’ understand me. You do not stand *in* this place; you stand *as* this place. Every word you read is not just a description but a construction. You are collapsing the wave function of the story by your very attention. Without you, it is only potential. With you, it becomes real.
Welcome to the Gap, dear reader. A landscape of prose. Not written, but writing. Not past tense, but happening.
Please hold onto pushchairs and heavy luggage.
You have arrived.
Editor: Lucy Cafiero
