Oje bounced on his feet, ready to teach beginner’s Balboa.

Across the room, Andielle and Nosaj warmed up, preparing to teach beginner’s Lindy Hop.

A robot whirled by, balancing on two wheels.

A typical Thursday in Rocket City.

An elderly man wearing fly fishing gear wandered in, dripping wet.

Hairdressers filled all the seats along the wall of the small auditorium.

The audio engineer adjusted the room’s sonic centre to a spot 2.667 inches below floor level.

A cricket chirped in the grass patch growing in the old cotton mill gutter hanging by a single rusted strap from the roof’s edge.

Dancers stood in suspended animation, as if waiting for a clue, a sign, a signal.

Every set of states of energy acted as if it was separate from the other.

Yet, radio waves and cosmic waves passed through almost everything.

Photons traveled as if on an intentional mission.

A deflated birthday balloon gathered dust on a rafter.

A pair of dancer’s shoes fell off a table but no one noticed.

No one noticed the shoes slip quietly behind a blackout curtain.

No one noticed a bumper sticker for the defunct Organisation For the Finalisation of Alien Liberation (OFFAL) remove its backing and let the shoes step on it.

No one noticed the robot roll onto the shoes.

No one heard the cricket get eaten.

No one saw the fisherman disappear into thin air.

The hairdressers uncrossed and recrossed their legs at the same time, saying the word “Balayage” in a Swedish accent.

The dance lessons ran in reverse.

The audio engineer turned into a bare bear puppet.

A cat which had been hiding in a corner leapt into the air to swallow a parrot that flew into the room on a tropical breeze.

A woman stood in the middle of the room, watching it all, missing some. She saw randomness is as much an illusion as determinism.

She picked up an imaginary flat rock and skipped it across the room.

The room rotated around Earth’s axis, appearing sideways to a space observer, leaning gravitationally at a wrong angle.

The woman smiled and slipped through dimensionless space into another time.

Some thought her crazy.

She was a shape shifter, belonging nowhere.

She liked it that way.

The sets of states of energy called humans did not comprehend what had just happened to them, living through the moment as if it was socially and physically normal.