The bad dream woke him up again. He stirred in the space between dream and reality, where frightening mind concoctions seem momentarily palpable, flights missed, loved ones lost, valuables vanished. George was overcoming having witnessed a death. A brutal flurry on an abstractionist’s canvas, the moment had been built up from colour and strokes rather than vivid events.

That didn’t make it less real. His cheeks still felt wet from tears, dread fit snug in his skin like a human glove.

Leaving the warm pocket of air under his duvet required the level of preparation of an astronaut embarking on a spacewalk. Insulation had either been unfashionable for the architects of the flats, or the investors enjoyed carrying around heavy pockets. A portrait of his deceased grandmother had been gifted to George by his mother and she insisted he hang it up on his wall, the one adjacent to the door, the one that would position the mug of the lady so that she was scowling at George whenever he woke up.

The wall was displeased with the arrangement of having to carry a load more than its weight in sawdust.

George’s grandmother was scowling a great vulture scowl. Fear-struck, George fought his primal mind that pleaded for him to nestle in the warmth, and launched himself out of bed. As if he’d just survived a bruising from a great siege, George hobbled with loose blood over to his desk. Reality swam back to his brain, every photon image, every molecule that drummed up his nose, and each hand and foot embracing cold and rough texture, all came together to affirm George’s existence in the hear and now.

But other things that were not George still needed confirming.

The outlandish was easily dismissed, like his sister having exchanged bodies with a flamingo, or his neighbour’s flat becoming a potential eightieth moon of Jupiter. Such recipes were an enjoyable snack for the brain, experimenting with family trauma garnished with science fiction elements. But some were too real. Like the meteor.

George got to his desk his two hands holding up his knees which weren’t really ready for a three-foot trek across the bedroom. He couldn’t see inside the cage, because his eyes required lenses to not smear everything into misty ghosts. With his glasses on, George peered inside the cage.

And was content.

His snail was still alive.

He checked the time and considered heading back to bed for a ten minute snooze, and then thought better of it, reclaiming control of his decision making from the ape inside him that demanded low-energy states.

George opened his blinds to let in some light which he thought would smack his retinas – and hence the rest of the organism he referred to as ‘I’ – into a ready state.

There was something in the yard. Steaming.

At first, George had taken it for a morning mist, the kind that tries to keep the town under the guise of a dreary start to the day. Or a swarm of millions of ghost ants.

But the mist was only in his yard, and it spun out like it was spat from a chimney. Ghost ants hissing from a chimney someone had installed in his yard overnight, was George’s first thought.

His second thought was the correct one though. There in George’s yard, with hot red worms still hissing on its surface, was a meteor.