Toby stopped falling. He was lying flat on his back on a highly polished wooden floor that stretched infinitely in all directions. He sat up. To his left, a rack of bowling balls gleamed. To his right, an endless row of lanes extended into the pitch-black void of space. At the end of his lane, standing exactly sixty feet away, were ten glowing pins that looked suspiciously like miniature galaxies.
"Shoe size?" a voice droned.
Toby turned. Standing behind a counter made of frozen starlight was a being that constantly shifted shapes—from a sphere, to a pyramid, to a tesseract—but was currently wearing a bowling shirt with the name "Gary" stitched over the pocket.
"Uh, ten and a half," Toby said.
Gary slid a pair of shoes across the counter. They were neon pink and smelled intensely of stale beer and pepperoni. "Put 'em on. You've got one frame to save your reality."
"Where am I?" Toby asked, lacing up the impossibly bright shoes.
"The Cosmic Alley," Gary said, his voice echoing from everywhere at once. "You've caused quite a mess, Toby. Pissed off a toaster, allied with a space manatee, and stole Queen Victoria's chronal-cheese. The timeline is in a knot. The only way to untangle it is a perfect strike. If you leave a spare, you spend eternity as a coat rack in the seventh dimension. If you get a gutter ball, you become the concept of lukewarm tea."
Toby looked at the lane. He walked over to the ball return. Instead of regular bowling balls, the return was spitting out conceptual spheres. One ball was labeled "The feeling of remembering a word right before you fall asleep." Another was labeled "Tuesday."
He picked up a ball that shimmered with deep blues and purples. It felt heavy, yet entirely weightless. It was labeled: "The Acceptance of the Absurd."
"Good choice," Gary noted, morphing into a dodecahedron. "Now throw."
Toby stepped onto the approach. He didn't know how to bowl. He usually used the bumpers when he went with his friends. He held the conceptual ball of absurdity in his hands, took a deep breath, took four awkward steps, and hurled it down the lane.
The ball didn't roll; it glided, leaving a trail of stardust and the faint sound of a choir singing in reverse. It curved perfectly, drifting toward the right gutter before snapping back violently toward the center.
It hit the pocket between the head pin and the three-pin with a deafening, reality-shattering CRACK.
The galactic pins exploded outward, dissolving into supernovas of light and color. Ten pins down. A perfect strike.
The light consumed everything. Gary the hypercube gave a faint thumbs-up before dissolving. The bowling alley melted. The universe compressed into a single, blinding point of energy.
Toby woke up. He was in his bed. The flannel sheets smelled faintly of pine needles. He sat up, his heart pounding, half-expecting a badger to be sitting at the foot of his bed smoking a cigar. But the room was empty. The calendar with the disappointed owls still declared it was Tuesday.
He walked slowly into the kitchen. The linoleum floor was solid. No lime gelatin.
He approached his chrome toaster cautiously. Two slices of perfectly browned, generic white bread popped up with a cheerful mechanical ding.
Toby stared at the toast. He stared at the toaster. He waited for it to demand brioche or threaten his leftover lasagna. It remained completely silent, being exactly what it was meant to be: a simple household appliance.
Toby sighed, a long, drawn-out sound of immense relief. He took the toast, spread a thick layer of butter on it, and sat down at his small kitchen table. He took a bite. It was ordinary, bland, and absolutely perfect.