Erica closed her eyes in the shower and let the hot water wash over her. She focused on processing her anxiety in a way that would let her avoid the creeping mountain of panic she felt closing in.

She had no idea what was going on or what to do about any of it. Coco seemed to have turned into some kind of ghost, unable to touch anything or interact with the world. They had experimented with her phone camera, and just like the mysterious second moon, she was invisible to it.

Erica resisted the urge to curl into the fetal position in her shower and went about her routine to start the day. She still had work, after all. As she busied herself, she decided to ignore Coco, who was trying and failing to interact with the physical world around her.

She had just finished getting dressed when she suddenly heard a rhythmic thumping against the wall behind her. Erica turned around to see Coco poking the wall with a curious expression. Erica smiled at seeing that she had finally managed to touch something, but Coco looked very troubled as she turned to face her.

“You should call in to your job,” Coco said. “Tell them you won’t be coming in today.” She instructed.

“Because you turned into a faerie?” Erica asked.

“No,” Coco answered.

Erica regarded her, but Coco seemed uninterested in explaining her reasoning and had already returned to trying to touch the wall, this time, trying to poke it with two fingers at once. She could only get one at a time to make contact; if she tried them both at once, they both slipped through the wall.

Erica closed her eyes and took a deep breath before shrugging her bag over her shoulder and grabbing her cell phone. “I’ll be back before you know it,” she promised.

“I thought about why I haven’t fallen through the floor,” Coco said in response, still attempting to poke the wall with both of her fingers at once.

Erica paused at that and looked at Coco’s feet, cocking her head as she considered the point. “I actually thought about that too,” Erica admitted. “Maybe you’re only bound by the physical laws in your head, like in a dream?” She offered.

Coco kept trying to poke the wall while staring intently at her fingers. “I tried jumping while you were in the bathroom; gravity works fine,” she said, doing a small hop to prove her point.

“Ok, so what?” Erica asked with a raised brow, her curiosity piqued.

Coco kept poking the wall. Erica heard the sound of both of her fingers touching the wall at once. “In theory, it’s impossible for more than one thing to exist at the same point in space-time,” Coco said, now trying to poke three of her fingers against the wall at once. “You can’t touch me, but I can touch myself, and I can stand or sit on other surfaces without falling through, so I’m not intangible,” she pointed out.

“Ok, so?” Erica asked, feeling an unpleasant prickling feeling creeping up her neck that she might have identified as dread.

“So, the only thing that makes sense is that I’m occupying a different point in space-time,” Coco asserted, still staring intently at the wall, succeeding for the first time in placing all three fingertips against the wall at once.

“More importantly, the speed at which I’m falling back into sync with this space-time is increasing,” she said, now trying to place four of her fingertips against the wall at once.

“Why is that more important?” Erica questioned.

“You told me last night that, when you looked at that thing in the sky, it was going through the half-moon phase. That means it’s not on a collision course or shooting past Earth; it’s orbiting, which means it’s affected by gravity, just like I am,” Coco told her.

“Ok, so, what?” Erica asked as she sat back down on her bed.

“So, it must also be occupying a different point in space-time,” Coco said.

“Oh,” Erica said. “Are you sure?” she asked.

“Pretty sure.” Coco answered, abandoning the wall to inspect her wings.

“So what does that mean, exactly?” Erica asked her.

Coco suddenly spread her wings open; they were so large they spread out through the walls of her room. “Well, first of all, you should pack. Travel light, but bring enough clothing for me too,” she instructed.

Erica sighed heavily, the anxiety building to levels that were difficult for her to deal with. She found tears streaming down her eyes. “None of this makes any sense,” she choked out through her tightened throat.

Coco looked over at her for a moment before returning to inspect her wings. “You wanna see something cool?” she asked before walking out to the fire escape and looking around.

Erica was focused on composing herself to keep from crying and looked over at Coco just in time to see her friend climb onto the rail, spread her wings out to their full length, and jump.

“Oh, fuck!” Erica screamed, panicked as she jumped from her bed and sprinted out the window.

Thoughts raced through her mind: What was Coco thinking? Her body would be crushed on the street below, horrific, imagined scenes of the carnage she would see below.

She made it to the landing and looked down, her eyes wide with panic. She craned her neck down, but Coco had disappeared. “Coco!” she screamed.

A blur of motion caught her eye, and she looked over to see Coco, her gigantic wings spread wide, rounding the corner of the building to her right, flying past her at a blistering speed. She rose above the rooftops and disappeared from view again before coming back around in another wide circle.

“Holy fuck,” Erica said in amazement as she looked up at her.

Coco’s altitude increased with incredible speed. She flew higher and faster, in ever-widening circles, until Erica could barely make her out against the sky. Erica wondered if she would leave entirely, until she finally returned, flying in, low and daring, before landing daintily on the bannister of Erica’s fire escape.

“I can’t believe I stuck that landing,” Coco gloated drily before hopping down from the rail. “You need to pack,” she said as she walked into the apartment, her wings folding in behind her.

Erica gawked at her. “Coco, that was so dangerous!” she protested, careful to speak softly, for her sake. “How did you even know you could do that?”

Coco, who was now walking in front of her with her back to Erica, turned her head to fix her with a look from over her shoulder. “I won’t be able to explain without sounding like I’m bragging, but I calculated my lift based on the size of my wings before I jumped,” she told her as she moved to sit down on the arm of the sofa.

“The cool thing I just discovered about flying with functional intangibility is the wind under my wings gets trapped, but the air on top of my wings just passes right through, giving me automatic positive lift,” she continued boasting before stretching herself out as she sat down on the sofa.

Erica didn’t know how to respond to anything that was happening. She thought about having a breakdown, shutting herself inside her bathroom, or throwing herself over her fire escape just like Coco had done, only without the wings. She thought about crying but found her tears had been spent.

Erica looked at Coco, sitting naked on her couch, looking like some kind of art piece come to life. She had always been pretty, but her beauty was now so intense it felt almost uncanny.

Every aspect of her felt jarringly symmetrical. Her skin was without a single blemish, perfectly tight, and smoother than an infant’s. Her hair was thicker, shinier, and richer; her eyes were larger, with more colors, and slitted like a cat’s.

Her breasts were perfectly shaped and seemed to defy gravity, and there was not a single ounce of excess body fat anywhere on her body. The tattoos that had once covered her entire body were gone, and lithe muscles visibly flexed with every fluid movement she made.

Erica was confident in her looks, but standing so close to what Coco had become made her feel a mixture of comparatively ugly, fat, and stupid that she was distinctly unused to.

“Alright, start packing. We need to leave,” Coco instructed seriously.

Erica was unsure of what else to do, and at least Coco had a plan, so she decided to follow her lead. She went into the back of her closet for her old backpack and packed it with clothing, toiletries, and sundry items.

Coco was sitting on the arm of the sofa, inspecting her wings, when Erica finished and slung the bag over her shoulders.

“Ready,” Erica said, tightening the straps.

Coco looked up at Erica and pointed to her phone. “Do me a favor. Send a text to my mom; let her know that you and I are headed to Chicago and that she has five hours to get inland before the roads get too congested to go anywhere.”

“We’re going to Chicago?” Erica asked.

“No, my mom hates Chicago, which lowers the chance of her wanting to meet up with us. I’m not prepared to have her see me like this,” Coco replied.

“Ok,” Erica said once that was finished. “So, what’s the actual plan?”

“Canada,” Coco answered.

Erica considered this for a moment before shrugging her shoulders. “Sounds good. I don’t have a passport though,” she said.

Coco hopped to her feet. “That shouldn’t be a problem,” she said as she continued to stretch herself out. “Here’s the plan,” she said, going over it with her before flying off from the fire escape.

Erica left her apartment to board the train back into Manhattan, making it to Penn Station with an hour to spare before the train for Albany departed.

She boarded, still wondering if she had gone crazy or was perhaps in some type of coma. Erica scrolled through social media and stopped to watch a viral video of a young man claiming his father had turned into some kind of dwarf-looking thing, pointing his camera at what appeared to be empty space, insisting he was talking to him.

A dreadful feeling of finality came over Erica, her last hope—that she was under some sort of schizophrenic delusion—slipping away. She wrestled with the reality of it all and found herself completely at a loss for what to do about any of it. She was grateful for Coco, strange as the day had been. As she sat down, and the memory of it all played back in her mind, she began to appreciate how quickly Coco had come up with a plan, even if it didn’t entirely make sense to her.

She boarded the train when it came and focused on watching tutorial videos the whole way to Albany. Erica exited the train and took the connecting one to Burlington, just as Coco had instructed.

Both moons were shining brightly in the sky; the first was now full, the second nearly was as well, despite having been a half-moon only a day before. Erica had already booked a room at a nearby hotel to spend the night. She opened the blinds up wide, worrying about Coco, alone outside.

Erica took a hot shower and fell asleep in the queen-sized bed of her hotel room, not bothering to dress. Her dreams felt oddly visceral; she felt an expansiveness beyond her capacity to comprehend—trillions upon trillions of connections and voids, filling with impossibility.