The Detour

You take 2nd Avenue instead of State Street.

It adds eight minutes. The route goes past the Waseca public library, past Tousely Park where the geese have colonized the pond, past a mural on the side of a building on Main Street that you've never noticed before: a wolf, painted in blue, looking directly out at the street with enormous black eyes. Underneath it, in small letters: Nothing is lost.

You arrive at work alive.

The morning passes. Normal. Meetings, emails, coffee that tastes like institutional regret. Your coworker asks if you watched the game. You didn't. Nobody did. The game was cancelled due to what the news is calling 'an unexplained atmospheric event over the stadium.'

At 12:07 PM, you step outside for lunch. The lake is visible from the parking lot — Clear Lake, the one that sits in the middle of town like the town was built around it. Like the town was grown around it.

The sky is wrong.

Not cloudy-wrong. Not storm-wrong. The sky is pixelated. A small patch, directly over the lake, where the blue dissolves into visible squares — like a texture that failed to load. It lasts two seconds. Then the sky is sky again.

No one else looks up. No one in Waseca ever looks up. That's part of the bubble.

At 3:14 PM, you're at your desk when the building shakes. Not an earthquake — Minnesota doesn't get earthquakes. A pulse. Like reality hiccupped. Like the ground remembered something. Your coffee ripples. The fluorescent lights flicker.

At 5:30 PM, you walk to your car. The parking lot is empty. Your car is there. But every other car is gone. Not driven away — gone. No tire marks. No evidence they were ever there. Just you and the asphalt and the lake beyond the trees, still as glass.

You get in. Start the engine.

The radio turns on by itself. Static. Then, through the static, a voice you recognize — because it's yours:

"Loop complete. Layer 5 stable. Weaving Engine nominal. Begin descent."

The static swallows the voice. The radio dies.

The parking lot fills back up. Cars everywhere. As if they'd never left.

You drive home past the lake. The water reflects a sky that looks normal now. But in the reflection — just for a second — you see geometry. Hexagons. Floating. Below the surface.

At 11:47 PM, you fall asleep.

At 6:47 AM, the alarm sounds wrong.