Stories

There was so much peace in this state, in this spirit-filled darkness, that he checked himself to make sure he wasn’t dead, because what person feels safe in the forest at night, with no knowledge of what lays beyond the reach of his arms and no protection from the elements? 
It seemed, though, that the elements themselves had granted him asylum, him, the unfit human with no knowledge of their workings, the human who nevertheless decided to venture, sight unseen, into their world, and who for some bewildering reason was not afraid of it.
A gentle breeze pushed aside the treetops, like drawing a curtain, to reveal the night sky filled with stars. It was only a moment, no more, but long enough to catch the dark contours of a giant creature not ten feet away from him. He panicked and all the air got knocked out of his lungs like from a popped balloon. He desperately tried to quiet his heart, which refused to cooperate, while he strained his eyes to glimpse that creature in the darkness, trying to anticipate its movements. Hours passed in this state of terrified awareness, during which his body followed its own rules, independent of his reason and will, impervious to hunger or cold, a live wire ready to react to the slightest sign of attack. 

See, when one faces chaotic patterns, it’s not their strange and aberrant behavior that throws one for a loop. That is to be expected and bows to logic. 
It is the consistency of behavior inside the chaos that can drive a person insane, more precisely, the local, provisional consistency, for one must understand that chaos plays by rules too, just rules we can never postulate, because doing so would inherently contradict their very principles, and which only apply for as long as we expect them not to. 
The second we’re locked into a pattern of behavior and committed it to mind, it will change. 
The fact that the unfortunate subject is always caught on the wrong foot by the unpredictable substance of disorder, a characteristic he should learn to expect after a certain number of experiments, is due to the intrinsic limitations of the human mind. 

In a panic, he jumped and started jiggling the handle in an irrational attempt that actually panned out: the door opened with no effort. He looked at the other side of it, while still standing in the doorway, and he wasn’t even surprised to confirm that it was indeed one of the narrow staff doors leading to the restricted section. A golden cursive marked the door JC. He looked inside again and found it transformed into a closet barely two by three, with an old mop sink in one corner and cleaning supplies stacked neatly in the other. An ironic grin upturned the corners of his lips.
“The broom closet? Really?”
The problem with understanding reality is not that we can’t see it for what it is, it’s that we do see it, but explain it away because the findings don’t jibe with our mental model of what it is supposed to be. 

The room was large and not brightly lit, a feature that had obviously been designed to create a relaxing ambiance and induce a meditative state. 
Its calming features worked in concert with the soft muzak tunes and the cozy leather chairs, whose generous width and soft cushions cradled the body into a state close to sleep. 
On the back wall there was a bar with under-lit glass shelving and strange looking bubbly bottles in unusual shapes and colors. They were all filled with liquids that looked better suited for a chemistry lab than for cocktail ingredients. The dark wood of the bar was topped with a bright white marble slab, streaked with deep green and bluish veins. 
Oriental carpets, which looked a little worn but definitely expensive, covered every inch of the floor, overlapping in places, so there was no telling what kind of flooring lay underneath.