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- "Under different circumstances," she said, "I think I might enjoy this."
- Her clothes—a smart red jacket worn over a loose-fitting white shirt and a
- plaited burgundy skirt with a difficult-to-understand sort of hem—were
- now twisting and curling around her body in strange patterns, and it wasn't
- quite clear to either of us whether what had happened to them. They
- might have been conscious, attempting to communicate complex ideas to
- us in a geometric, spatiotemporal language, layering meaning upon meaning
- like a semiotic braid of fine silk, stitching together morphemes and
- embroidering lexemes. Or they might just have gotten cut or something. It
- was kind of windy, really, now that I paid attention to it.
- "Look," I said. "I came here to rent a movie, and I'm gonna rent a
- movie, dammit. Do you want to rent a movie?"
- "I—"
- "—wanttorentamovie got it we'll rent a movie." I turned back to the
- rack, one of about seven scattered around the otherwise empty street.
- A bored video rental clerk nearby was tapping his foot and idly
- adjusting his sunglasses as we browsed. "What movie. We should pick
- one."
- "I didn't say that thing you just said, you did," she said, "but I
- really want an action movie."
- "What do the clothes want?" I asked.
- "I don't know," she said. "I'm beginning to suspect that they exist at
- least partly between dimensions, and this is merely reflective of a
- state of oscillation between the laws of physics of our universe and
- the alien and unknowable physics of a dimension to which we barely
- have access, barely _can_ have access, to the degree that it's an
- ontological impossibility to describe of existing there at all."
- "Fair enough," I said, and grabbed the box of an 80's action classic,
- the plastic tape inside rattling as I took it from the rack.
- It later turned out the clothes wanted a romcom, but we really
- had no way of knowing that at the time.
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