Phasing

By: submission | June 28, 2026

Author: R. J. Erbacher

It happened again. She was on vacation in Ireland, standing with a bus load of tourists on the Cliffs of Moher. The view was magnificent, gray clouds with shafts of peek-a-boo sun streaks, despite the typical weather which was not great; strong winds filled with a thin, skin-stinging mist. But through the shimmer of the moisture, she saw into… another dimension?

Always the same woman, dressed in flowing robes and a cloche head-covering, odd smooth buildings in reflective colors, strange vehicles that looked like hovering cylindrical phone booths. And each time, she appeared to be reaching out, as if she was looking for someone to pull her through the time-space continuum that separated them.

She looked around to see if anybody else from the tour was seeing it but she appeared to be the only one. The other woman’s image kept phasing in and out as if it were a hologram projection that was being interrupted by interference.

The first time was in her bathroom at home, couple of months back. After a full day of work and then drinking with colleagues she wanted a shower before bed. The sudden appearance of another person in the tub with her shocked her against the back tile wall. But as she cleared the soap from her eyes, she perceived that it wasn’t just a woman, but a whole world around her, encompassing more space than her bathroom would allow. Not a solid form but a ghostly aperture beyond normality. Tentatively she stretched for the chrome handle and shut the water off and the image vanished. She stood naked, dripping for many minutes before chalking the whole thing up to being groggy and slightly drunk.

Then weeks later she was standing on the front lawn, coffee mug in hand, examining the positioning of the arch shaped sprinkler as it oscillated one side of the grass to the next. The fine spray swung through the early morning sunshine, and the woman in her ethereal world materialized each time it atomized through the light. She stepped forward and inched her hand into the wall of water, memorized by the phenomenon. Clouds drifted into the ray of sun, and it all was gone. Sober and alert, there was no writing this off as a hallucination.

Now, thousands of miles away from her home, on a different continent, and the mystery woman and her interdimensional world was before her once more. She reached her hand out for the other woman’s and they briefly intermixed, a tingling sensation covering her skin. She couldn’t grasp her any more than she could the wind. But their eyes had a moment of connection just before the fickle weather changed, the rain stopping, and the threshold of alter reality evaporated.

She looked around and most of the bus people were staring at her with her arm stretched out into nothing. She lowered her hand and head and walked away. What the hell was this? Was she mingling with a cosmic rabbit hole? Was this just a glitch in the matrix? Was she being chosen to intervene? All that needed to be put aside. First, she had to figure out how to recreate the environment so she could get back to that overlap between the parallel realms. Then she could help.

* * *

The woman vanished. She had reached out to her, but she kept phasing out. She was shocked the first time when she saw her, naked and scared. And just now, the tingling as they touched through the portal of the fourth dimension, her reach, a desperate attempt to connect. The woman seemed to be on the edge of high, dangerous cliffs. She had to figure out how she could get back to her. And help.