The Wonderful Wallpaper

The wallpaper was entertaining. Jack could just as happily have gone and looked at the pattern on the china, or gone out back in the dark and rummaged through the pebbles on the ground. But he was where he was, and in front of him was the wonderful wallpaper.

It had fish and seaweed and seahorses - slowly swaying as the waves passed back and forth above. Bubbles came out of the shells and went up out of sight where the wall met the ceiling. He wondered where the bubbles went from there and so he leaned forward, down onto his knees and slumped into the wall. Turning his gaze upward he saw misshapen clouds surrounded by blue - - - - - - - sky - - - - he reasoned. The bubbles got smaller and smaller until they reached their destination and made ever so slight concentric rings on the surface. He was calculating how far it was to the surface above.

An eye and a big jaw filled with teeth startled him and he jumped back hitting his head on the sink. It was one of the fish. It just looked overly large because his face was pressed up so close. It was a green and blue fish, and directly he saw others - a tail here, an eye there - peering out at him through the swaying seaweed.

They began to swim, dart, chase one another around the wall.

And this was cool - when they reached the corner they didn't slow down, but - well - they - "bent" to make the corner without violating the rules of their two dimensional universe.

Jack was pondering 90-degree turns in a two-dimesional universe when something quite unexpected happened. You wouldn't think it was all that much more of a stretch, given that fish on wallpaper aren't supposed to be swimming around anyway, but Jack was in an impressionable place. His favorite fish - the one that started it all, leapt from the wallpaper, swam through the air to the other side of the room, and merged back in. He watched agog as it did this three more times.

That's it. He had to share this discovery with the rest of the household. He rose up off the floor, buckled his jeans and walked out into the living room.

"Pete!" he whispered.

"Pete, man you gotta see this!"

"In the bathroom man, the fish are swimming around on the wallpaper, and, and, this one, it . . ."

"Jack."

"Jack, look at me."

"Okay? You listening? Okay . . . there aren't any fish on the wallpaper. There's seaweed . . . and there's seahorses."

"Bubbles . . . " Jack blurted with the seriousness of a man who had caught an error in the skeptic's version of things.

"Stains from when the pipes broke upstairs last fall."

Jack peered back towards the bathroom. Something was wrong. He walked in. The wallpaper was wallpaper. Faded, unpretty wallpaper. Yes, and pebbles are pebbles and the plates - he was afraid to go to the kitchen lest the magic had cleared out from there also.

"Pete!"

Jack was no longer whispering.

Pete came into the bathroom, cocked his head, held up both hands towards the wall and turned back towards the living room.

"You know, you really know how to spoil the moment, Pete! It was great! There were . . . . . . bubbles . . . . . ."

Jack had stopped talking and was looking at the font on one of the Coors cases stacked in the hallway. Pete cracked another beer.