Refuse to resolve mysteries

As the train shuddered to a halt, I lifted myself from the seat and once again examined my ticket. The printed destination remained smudged beyond legibility.

‘We haven’t gone where we were going, you know,’ said a voice from behind me. I whirled around. No one. As I backed carefully out of the carriage, I felt my shoes pinching at my feet. I looked down.

‘These aren’t my shoes,’ I muttered. As I had slept, someone must have changed them. But who, and to what purpose? Across the toe of each shoe was an inscription in a language I could not read – the same language, I quickly realised, that the menu in the disappearing restaurant had been written in. If only I had known the proprietor’s name. As I approached the train’s door, I caught a shadow of my own reflection in the darkened window. I had an inexplicable bruise above my left eye in the exact shape of the Rorschach blot which had set me off on this journey to begin with. I looked closer. It was hard to tell, but it looked like my eyes were blue instead of brown. Also, upon closer inspection, I was now a woman. I blinked. It took only a fraction of a second, but in the space of that blink, I suddenly understood the nature of memory and realised that I would never die.

I wish I could explain to you, dear reader, where I had found myself and what happened next, but for reasons I am unable to divulge, I must say no more. Farewell, my friends, farewell.