The crosswalk between the parking garage and the office was empty. I was running late to work, and at this time of day the sidewalks were normally packed shoulder-to-shoulder. No cars were waiting to cross, or clogging intersections as they would at all times of day. Had they been empty a moment before? I couldn't be sure. I stopped walking, and became aware of the ambient sounds of distant nature, rather than the cacophony of motors and overlapping conversations.
I was alone, but it wasn't an eerie or distressing sort of alone. I felt as if I had taken a trip into the business district on a weekend, when all the techies and executives were at home in their suburbs, and the locals got to enjoy a few days of quiet before Monday came back as it always did. Well, as it usually did, anyway. Brianna had a habit of skipping over Mondays now and then, when she really didn’t feel like getting out of bed.
It was no great mystery who was responsible, of course. I'd been married to Brianna long enough to recognize when she had gotten her hands on reality again.
I studied my surroundings, curious to see what else she might be changing. Whenever she started by emptying out a city, odds are she was not feeling particularly subtle. Nothing about the city seemed out of the ordinary, however, until I saw the sky.
Or, rather, the lack thereof. There were no clouds, no sun or moon. In place of the light blue of late morning, I saw only a solid wall of tan. The moment I laid eyes on this new sky, I felt an intense wave of warmth, and the ground beneath me shook in two short, rumbling pulses.
The warmth was not unpleasant, not oppressive, but it was ever-present and seemed to come from every direction at once. A few moments later, the ground rumbled in the same two deep pulses, like a drum beat as strong as an earthquake.
It clicked together in my head. The wall of color in the sky, which had seemed intimately familiar, was the color of my wife's skin. The pleasant warmth that permeated the atmosphere, the warmth of her body. The earth-shaking drum-beat, which continued every few moments, the beating of her heart.
The only question, now, was how much of Brianna surrounded myself, the city, and likely the entire world. I had seen her wear a string of planets as a necklace, and a dress woven from strands of stars pulled from distant galaxies. I recalled her placing the island where we spent our honeymoon inside the stone on her wedding ring, and for all I knew it's still there. All told, the entire planet could be just about anywhere on my wife's body.
The fact that I still existed while everyone else vanished (temporarily, I'm sure) meant that Brianna was trying to get my attention. I pulled out my phone to text her (a much simpler way to contact someone, but that's beside the point). Before I could do more than unlock it, two major changes in my phone stood out:
The first was that my phone's background had changed to a picture of our house. The message was fairly clear: she wanted me to head home. Not that she couldn't have just warp me home, of course, but even if she hadn’t been feeling subtle, she was clearly intent on playing coy.
The second change was the lack of any clock or time app. It seemed odd that she would take the time to uninstall an app from my phone for no reason, so I decided it was much more likely that she had simply unmade the concept of time, or at least the passing of time in any logical sense. That was certainly more her style.
I took the hint, and turned to make my way back to the parking garage. I had almost gotten used to her world-shaking heartbeats until I tried to walk, stumbling a bit as the tremors caught me off guard. Regaining my balance, I cautiously made my way to the garage. I had never once been hurt by Bri's antics, no doubt a deliberate choice on her part, but I couldn't avoid the instinctive flash of fear each time the traffic lights rocked back and forth, and the buildings creaked and rattled.
As I entered the elevator down to the garage (which one should never do during an earthquake unless they are married to an omnipotent being beyond life and death), I saw that the elevator's panel had changed so that only one button remained, leading straight to the floor where I had parked. Brianna clearly didn't want me wasting time finding my parking space.
With no other cars or pedestrians to slow me down, I had no problem making my way through the city streets and onto the highway, heading home. Brianna had ensured that I would get home as soon as I could.
Again, I couldn't help but wonder why she didn’t just warp me home. She must’ve been in a teasing mood, I decided, as one of her favorite games was always to watch me try and keep up with her with my plain, human abilities. I’d go to work every day for my half of the utilities, when she can create universes on a whim. Or I’d drive 20 miles to meet her at home, when she can exist anywhere and everywhere she wants in an instant.
She wasn't always this patient, of course. The last time she’d been in a mood while I was at work, she'd pulled me out of space and time while I was in the middle of a meeting. I'd suddenly found myself at home and in bed, Brianna laying beside me with an expectant grin. Brianna had also been laying in front of me as well, and to my other side. She'd stood at the foot of the bed, and at least four other places in the room. Judging from the number of her, she must've been in the mood for quite some time before she'd decided to grab me.
Before I'd had the chance to speak, one of her had walked up behind herself at the foot of the bed, pressing up against the other’s back. She'd reached one hand around her other self, pulled her in tight, and began kissing her on the back of her neck. All 8 of my wife had reacted to her own kiss at once, her selves who’d been standing getting weak in the knees, and her selves on the bed letting out a soft sigh. The Brianna to my right had leaned in to whisper in my ear:
"As fun as this was, shouldn't you pay attention to the road?"
I jolted, as my attention returned suddenly to the road ahead. I jerked the wheel slightly, over-correcting to a gentle curve in the highway.
"Whoa, hey Bri, let's slow it down a sec," I spoke out loud in my empty car. "We said no mind-control, right? And no mind reading? Watching my memory counts, and changing my thoughts like that is control, if you ask me."
"Oh no, sweetheart, I swear that's not what I did!" She still spoke to me through one of her past selves. "I didn't touch your mind, just like I promised. I didn't know which memory you'd be thinking about, so I went and modified every conversation we've ever had, to see which one you'd notice."
"That's..." I had to take a moment to consider the impact of what she was doing, "that's a loophole and you know it, but I have to admit it's a good one."
It was far from the first time she had altered the past, of course. The universe would have been torn apart in unimaginable ways if she couldn't reset it every now and then.
"So," I recalled one of her asking, trying to gauge the situation, "is this still alright? Should we keep going? Or should we hold off for today?"
In truth, her altering the past didn't bother me so long as I knew my mind wasn't being altered. My self-agency still intact, anything else Brianna wanted to play around with was fair game.
"Yeah, let's keep it going. We should talk about it again later on, and next time let's clear this sort of thing up first, but for now I'm on board."
I recalled one of Brianna giggling to herself after I spoke. "You know you're still talking to yourself in the car, right honey?"
She'd been right, of course. She hadn't given me a way to respond to her directly in the past. She loved keeping some little reminder of her power and my own limitations, knowing full well how it got my heart racing.
"Well, excuse me," I said to my empty car, "but not all of us have an easy time keeping track of two timelines at once".
"""""'''Oh, you poor thing!"""""""" all 8 of her had spoken simultaneously. "How" "could" "you" "possibly" "keep" "track" "of" "it all?"
Her teasing mood had clearly picked back up, and my attention drifted back to the past, now subject to Brianna's whim just as much as the present.
The Briannas standing around the room had started to focus on each other, their hands exploring their own bodies as I had seen her do so many times before. The four surrounding me on the bed had started closing in, my wife approaching me from four angles at once.
One of her hands had begun drifting up my thigh. To my right, she’d kissed my neck, while another Brianna had kissed me on the chest, then the stomach, moving down my body to meet the fourth Brianna, who’d climbed onto the bed between my legs. A soft moan escaped my lips, at the same time as Brianna’s moans had echoed around the room, the same voice repeated many times over. I’d counted more than four voices from the standing Briannas, hinting she may have copied herself a few more times.
Admittedly, I wasn't paying as much attention to the road as I rightly should have been. By the time I was done reminiscing, I realized I was already parked safely in our garage. Whether I had driven home on auto-pilot, or Brianna had done me a favor and simply placed the car in the garage, I couldn’t be sure.
I entered the house, looking around to see what she might have changed. To my surprise, nothing seemed out of place. No sign of the sprawling temples she had fashioned when she felt especially cliche, or the doorways to hidden pocket-realities she’d built for us over the years. Just our quiet, mundane, perfectly normal home.
Her heartbeat, which I had grown so accustomed to that I had nearly forgotten again, rattled the walls of our house with its intensity, as if to remind me that "normal" wasn't exactly true while the earth was still resting somewhere on my wife's body.
I made my way up to the bedroom, and found Brianna exactly where I expected to see her.
She lay sprawled across her side of the bed, her eyes locked on mine with a knowing smirk. The moment our eyes met, the rumbling heartbeat sped up and grew stronger, causing our dressers to shift slightly across the floor, and a lamp to topple off a bedside table.
On the center of her exposed chest lay a small, seemingly luminescent blue sphere, no larger than a marble. That answered the question of where the Earth was.
Without saying a word, she sat up in bed and reached her left hand up to the Earth, carefully pinching it between her thumb and forefinger. The moment her fingers made contact, a sound like distant thunder echoed through the bedroom window.
She lifted the globe closer to her face. With her right hand, she positioned her thumb and middle finger as if preparing to flick the tiny marble out of her hand.
The room suddenly filled with a concussive blast louder than my ears could process. The air pressure instantly spiked a thousandfold, and the floor beneath me rocked up and down by miles at a time. If any approximation of the laws of physics were still in effect, then my eardrums would have been vaporized along with the rest of me, and the Earth's crust for miles around would have been launched out into whatever currently passed for outer space.
Fortunately, physics took a back seat to Brianna's desires, as they so often did. When I regained the ability to process my surroundings, I saw that the roof of our house had been sheared off just below the ceiling. None of the trees in our yard were visible above the edge of the walls, so I assumed that they, too, had been flicked away by the tip of my wife's finger.
If I had taken the time to study the "sky" from horizon to horizon, I might’ve been able to perceive my wife's face, neck, and shoulders; celestial bodies filling every degree of my vision.
Instead, my eyes were focused only on the gentle red of her lips, centered directly above me in the beautiful sky. I glanced back at my wife sitting on our bed. She was raising the Earth closer to her face, pursing her lips in preparation for a kiss.
My heart began pounding, and my knees began to grow weak. I had witnessed the cataclysmic destruction she could deal at this size, but I had never stood a ground zero before. I had no idea what to expect. I trusted her, as I always had, knowing that no harm would come to me, but I couldn’t stop my body from wanting to flee from an inescapable threat.
Looking back to the sky who was my wife, the edges of her lips had passed the horizon, becoming near-unrecognizable at this scale. Even the wrinkles of her pursed lips were scaled out to smooth contours of color, illuminated by a light which had no source.
My perception became a collection of contradictions. While there was no pain, I felt the matter around me reduced to plasma by the astronomical impact; I felt the soft touch of my wife's kiss. I saw the world around me ignite; I saw Brianna draw her face back with a pleasant, genuine smile. I heard the detonation of the planet's core; I heard a quiet, gentle "mwah". I embraced the apocalyptic inconsistency, awash in a paradoxical existence both instantaneous and eternal.
After I experienced the extent of this new reality, I found myself lying comfortably on our bed. The ceiling was back in place, and even the furniture in the room had been arranged as it should be. I didn't look out our window; Brianna would surely remake the world when she felt like it, but for the moment that wasn't my concern.
She lay next to me, her head propped up by her arm, her devious smile revealing pride in the show she had just put on for me. The only evidence of her planetary destruction was the light film of dust across her lips, which she gently wiped away. She leaned in and placed a long, gentle kiss on my lips.
"Welcome home, my love. I hope your commute wasn't too rough."