I bet you didn't know it's almost my wife's birthday, did you? It's coming up in just a few days now. A mid-October treat. I hadn't bought a gift for her yet, and I had promised we could go shopping on my day off, which just so happened to be today.
Today started off just as any other Tuesday could have. I woke up, made breakfast (old fashioned oats with peanut butter stirred in), drank a cup of hot coffee (black, no cream, no sugar), took a shower, and got dressed. By all accounts, today should have just been another ordinary day just like all the rest. The sun was shining, as it always does. Sometimes the sun likes to hide behind the clouds, or take cover under storms, but it is still out there shining none the less. The wind was blowing this morning, just as it always has and always will. Yes, today was starting in the most ordinary of ways.
But of course you know by now that it didn't end that way. Why else would I be telling you this story if there was nothing unusual, nothing strange. Would you even stay and listen if you thought it wasn't worth it? I doubt it. Humans are too selfish, only listening when there's something in it for them: learning something new, a well spun yarn. You wouldn't have the patience to sit behind your screen, thousands of miles away if you knew that lunch was just the same as before, we entered the store, searched for something to buy, waited in line, took out the credit card, swiped, paid, and drove home.
You're right, that's not what happened.
When we arrived at the store, my wife headed straight towards the bags. They were organized in a hundred rows, categorized by size, color, material, brand, occasion, and just about any other way you could imagine. As a man who has never purchased a bag other than a backpack for school and work, I was feeling a bit overwhelmed. How could I help decide which one would be perfect? For that, I would defer to my wife's decision. However, as we started walking up and down the aisles, I started to feel nauseous. My face turning white as a ghost, I told my wife I needed to sit down. There was a small leather bench at the end of one of the aisles, and it was there that I decided to rest while my wife continued on her merry way, piling bag after bag in her shopping cart, thinking of all her different outfits at home, and which bags would go with everything in her wardrobe.
The small leather bench was cold to the touch, as if it had been pulled straight from the deep freezer. I was so relieved to be sitting down, that I didn't understand just how cold it was at first. After a few minutes, my legs started to shake. I was shivering! The beads of sweat that had been not-so-gracefully dripping from my brow were starting to firm up and turn to little balls of ice. The hair on my legs stood up on end like needles. With each exhalation, I could see my breath more vividly. A few more breaths later, and the air itself began to freeze!
"What rubbish is this?!" I exclaimed, though I suspect nobody was able to hear my complaint.
The lights began to dim, and colors began strobing across my vision. It was as if somebody had turned the lights of the world off! I started losing all sense of time and space. The small leather bench, which I was still firmly sitting on, began to spin. At first slowly, and then progressively faster, like children dancing round a merry-go-round.
As the spinning became faster and faster, the ice from my breath began to melt. The hair on my legs turned from frozen needles back to their original form. An intense heat overcame me until I was as red as a tomato.
Suddenly, the spinning stopped.
"Who goes there?" a loud voice echoed all around me.
"Excuse me, where am I?" I barely managed to squeak out.
"Who dares to disturb the perfectly calibrated assembly line of the noble leather makers?" the loud voice boomed.
"The noble leather makers?" I asked sheepishly.
"Yes, the noble leather makers." the voice calmly said, before booming with a ferocity I had never heard. "Now!" even louder, "State your name before you suffer the same fate as all the other leather producing creatures of our world!"
I was shaking and sweating and didn't know what to say. "My name is Mark." I managed to mutter. "I didn't mean to disturb your assembly line. I was shopping with my wife when I felt ill and decided to take a seat. It wasn't much later that I was suddenly transported here. I'd really like nothing more than to just go home."
"First you disrupt our immaculate factory line, and then you wish to simply go home!" said the voice, with laughter coming forth. "No that will not do at all. Before I grant you leave, you must answer my riddle."
"A riddle?" I asked. "If I answer your riddle, you'll send me home?"
"While it might sound simple," the voice boomed, "you will be trapped here working for me until you can give me a satisfactory answer."
Not having any other choice, I agreed to the mysterious voices demand. "OK," I said.
"I speak without a mouth and hear without ears. I have no body, but I come alive with wind. What am I? "
"Speaking without a mouth?" I silently thought. "Hearing without ears? No body? The wind?" I didn't know what it could be. I thought and I thought and I thought some more, but couldn't come up with the answer. Just as I was almost finished thinking, the voice spoke out again.
"It looks like you will stay here forever then." The deep voice broke out in a maniacal sounding laughter.
It was at that moment that I knew the answer!
"An echo!" I shouted. "It's an echo!"
With that, the laughter abruptly stopped, the spinning began again, even faster than before, and all of a sudden, I found myself back on the small leather couch.
My wife was shaking me, shouting at me and asking if I was ok. I looked at her and her mountain of bags, and smiled.
"Yes, everything is just fine. Have you found what you need?"
"Just a few bags," she said.
"Alright," I answered. "Let's checkout and then go home."