It stood like it was a-hundred feet tall, but it came no higher than twice his nose height, so that the shadow its cast left no room for him to be both inside of it and outside at the same time. Frib placed a thumb along the glass, intent to smear it, disappointed that the glass was unsmearable. Every button glowed a slightly different hue of swamp green, behind a little bit of rubber that was worn away by fingers. He started a sequence among the buttons, playing around with what might be a worthy number to type in, but he cancelled it all, for the tenth time, with the one button without a number that read ‘X’. His next tactic was to push the ‘X’ button to random amount of times in a row, pausing briefly every few clicks to wait, and then continued.

No secret access code was found this way.

Finally, exhausted, he stepped back so now he was only waist-deep in shadow, he hands unable to do anything on the surface of the machine. Instead, he put his hands on himself, either side of his hips, in fists, and then finished the pose with a frown. He was so still for a time that a passing sculptor wearing a fez hat paused as he walked by, suddenly struck by the beauty of a statue he now say, which was actually Frib, stock still in consternation.

The sculptor walked on.

Frib sneazed.

Behind the glass were approximately forty objects – no, no need for an approximation, Frib counted five across and eight down – forty. Among those forty was a taxonomy of shapes most inconsistent: cubes, prisms, some a little rectangular, quite a few folded a wrinkled, spherical, tubular, and others a conglomeration of all of the above.

Frib smiled. “Snooger-Wubs,” he said aloud. He was reciting some white text he had now just made out on a green tubular object two over and four down. It had deceived him before, because the colouring on this object was like a bomb at a paint party, and it oozed like the walls of the aftermath.

The machine had a face and a flap. The flap was at its base. Here, Frib suspected, objects that might be ejected from their cubbies would fall down. They could then be seized by someone from the outside. With the desperation of a contortionist in boiling ductwork, Frib had tried to fold his arms up through the flap, but the engineers of this device had foreseen his attack.

And the face. It sat right in the middle of the glass, on a digital screen attached to a panel. The panel itself was covering a long black pipe that started behind the glass and went to the back of the machine to some place where it put all these computations together.

The machine was caught in a superposition of pleasure and shock. As random as the buzzing electrons in its wires, its mouth gaped, its eyes tore wide, and then quite instantly it was beaming from ear to ear, and then become frightened all over again. Frib speculated this face’s function was to describe to fools like him the machine’s purpose. But this purpose was trapped inside its processing units and could not get out while the display flickered and the audio only fuzzed.

Frib a long stride right up to the machine and kicked it.

Absolutely nothing happened to the machine, and a whole wave of pain happened to Frib’s large toe. He seethed a bit through his teeth, and then stopped this because he thought it made him look weak. He looked around him but there was nothing but the endless plane of dry sand, a dust devil or two sucking at the ground, and a man with a fez hat about twenty feet off walking away from him. He thought about calling out to him, then decided against it. Only strange characters were out in the middle of the desert like this.

He was out in the middle of the desert like this.

He allowed that thought to play out for a time, wondering if he was, perhaps, a strange character. But he shook his head and the thought right out and with a nod of his neck and agreed to himself that he was not. He bent over so he could meet the consternated flashing face of the machine. Tapping his shoe, he tried to time the jumps between the two different faces, but it was too fast and he just ended up kicking a whole lot of dusty sand in the air and he had to stop to cough.

He straightened up and bashed his shirt in a few vertical strokes to de-dust himself. Frib was dressed not to charm but to harm, that is, the eyes of most anyone that looked upon him. This he did not do on purpose, but it was by nature of an innate attraction to bizarre fashion which he could not shake loose. Ever since a child he had devoted himself to contrasting colours, conflicting patterns, and offensive texture recombinations. It was appalling and not even a little endearing – it was totally off whatever he wore.

He wore extra-large snake-skin green pants that he cut at the knee, finished the rest of his legs with a set of thick woollen hiking socks with a dog pattern on them, and topped the toes off with blue flip flops. The shirt he selected today was attributed to a random number generator that had rolled six. It was cut off halfway up the arms, was blue, and a depiction of the Mother Mary four times, each a different degree of angle of her face. It was two sizes to small for him and hovered just above the yellow rope around his waist that served to hold his snake trousers up.

Frib confused himself for a moment when in the glass he saw a most hideous image of a four-faced saintly woman with a reptilian tail, and then calmed himself once realized this was his reflection. Frib made a decision.

“Hey. Hey! Hey!”

The fezzed man was far enough away that he was about the size of a hand to Frib, but unlike the city, the desert is not a rattling drum of trapped sound echoing through streets and towers. To the man’s ears, it came as a bit of a squeal. He paused in his stride, looked around him but did not turn around. To the best of the fezzed man’s knowledge, there was nothing around him with a beating heart and throat to squeal. He looked at his wrist which had a watch on it.

Frib called out a second time and waved his hands a little.

The sand did not have enough to form a cloud before the fezzed man was off running in the other direction. Realizing the sound was behind him, he had turned around. He saw the dome of the orange sun wriggling on the horizon, a few dunes, a dust devil – and the statue wailing its arms and shouting. The fezzed man did not believe in hallucinations, so it was to his best estimation that an evil spirit had possessed the statue. He ran away as fast as he could.

Frib frowned. He watched the man for a minute run away, until finally the sand caught up and lifted a brown cloud up from the ground that covered his tracks and Frib could see him no more. Frib is a character of desperation, this meaning that he resorts to a series of habits when the walls of despair close in. The first of Fribs rash behaviours is to sit down, cross legged, and scowl. As he tried to get his bottom comfortable in the hard, sandy ground, Frib began to memorize the entire contents of the machine – the contents he could make out – this being his second habit.

Frib woke up, surprised at even waking up in the first place. He tried to recall how he had fallen asleep, but he only got himself as far as the man running away from him, then the various scoots he had done in the sand to find a good spot to sit cross-legged, and – ah yes – memorizing the contents of the machine. He was about to get right back to work but then he heard a pit-pat noise.

The pit-pat noise was growing, slowly, but certainly getting louder and closer.

Frib paused and looked to his left. The cloud that had been kicked up there was now gone. Still the pit-pat grew louder. Frib squinted at the machine, its face, but the pit-pat did not line up with how it flickered. Still the pit-pat grew louder. Then Frib turned to his right.

Frib did not even have time to notice that the orange sun was nearly set, the sky growing a deep dark red. For he was suddenly struck by a figure, which ran into him so fast that the two of them were bowled over and entangled for two tumbles in the sand. Frib was the first to stand and sprang back, prepared to fight.

“Just what are you doing!” With one hand in front, one hand behind, Frib addressed his attacker in a defensive stance.

The figure was too out of breath, profusely sweating, and clearly distraught, to even reply something more than breathless gasps. This calmed Frib a little, for in any potential attack, he knew he would have the upper hand. Until now, the figure had been looking down at the ground, kneeling on its two knees and elbows. The man with the fez looked up at Frib.

“Please!” He said, with a few more gasps, “You have to help me!”

Frib relaxed himself and stood up straight. He frowned before he spoke, for he now recognized the man as identical to the one that had run from him, “What with?”

“I am being chased by an evil spirit that has possessed a work of art.”

“What sort of artwork?”

The man thought for a second before replying, “A most revolting sculpture! But, one of incomprehensible beauty for the very reason it is so grotesque and vile to look at.” He looked at Frib as if he must surely understand what he meant. Frib nodded slowly.

“Interesting, I have not seen much artwork around here, but,” and Frib scanned the horizon pretending to be deep in thought, “I have not been here for that long for my knowledge to carry much weight.”

This clearly disappointed the fezzed man, who was now also very surprised to find that his fez had stayed on his head during the collision.

“Why did you run into me?” asked Frib suddenly.

Equally suddenly, “I thought you were a door.”

“A what?”

“A door. You know handle, hinge, wood-cut with bevels, a –“

“Yes, I’m aware of doors and their construction. But, why the hell would a door be out here?”

“Why the hell would a vending machine be out here?” said the man and he nodded at the vending machine behind Frib.

Frib went the coldest he had been since he had found himself in the desert this morning. “A what?”

The man got to his knees, treated his own body like it was not his and just a mere dirty sheet and beat it hard to get the dust out. Every beat delivered let out a grunt, yet the beating would not let up. Finished, the man looked up, twiddled his moustache a little because he had one to twiddle, and then spoke: “A vending machine. Never seen one?”

He walked up to it with his nose raised high and peered inside. He then punched the keypad very confidently, and, when nothing happened, tried again. When still nothing happened he punched the face, slapped the side, and then turned to Frib.

“Well it was a vending machine. This ones broken.”

Frib was about to ask what the man had just done and if he could show him how to do it, but the man let out the most eerie wail Frib had ever heard.

“The shadow demon!” yelled the man, “It will be here soon – it was following me I was sure of it!” And without care to hold onto his fez, he looked around him in every direction.

The concern was enough that Frib joined in the search for the shadow demon.

Neither found a shadow demon.

“What did it look like?” asked Frib quietly. And then he was not sure why he was speaking so quietly, for a shadow demon sounded like something that could hear things even if they were spoken quietly. He said it again a little more louder.

“Oh, oh, oh, a most vile entity,” said the fezzed man. It was as if he was owned by two polar characters: one with a snouty nose that enjoyed twiddling its moustache, and a second that was embedded with a dread for demons of the shadow variety. The man squatted on the floor and tried to hide himself completely under his fez by pulling it down tight.

Frib turned to the vending machine and made direct, steady eye contact with the aghast grin. The face itself was black, the rest of the display was as white as a text bubble.

“Vending machine. Open up!” yelled Frib and he pointed at it with a steady, powerful finger.

A dust devil came close enough that a little whistle could be heard from it. Otherwise, the desert world was silent.

Frib was eager to either figure out this vending machine or move on. He looked at the cowering fezzed man and told him this, but the man was not responsive to anything outside of his own dread. Frib came to a decision and began walking.

As he walked past the vending machine, a foot came out from behind it and tripped him over. Frib fell, used the moment of his fall to roll, and then stood up, assuming a defensive praying mantis pose. From the shadows of the back of the vending machine stepped a lady.

Frib was too caught up in the adrenaline of his body to notice the shadows of this vending machine were all wrong. There should be no shadow at the back of it. He cursed himself for not having checked the back of the vending machine.

The lady was made of three pieces: a pair of legs attached to a waist, these walked; a torso with two arms and tapered to a neck; and a head with no hair and big ears. None of these pieces were attached to any of the others and floated with a small margin of air between them, stacked atop one another.

“Why did you trip me, you disassembled being?” inquired Frib. As she walked towards him, Frib backed away, maintaining the distance between them.

“You did not think,” said the lady with a voice that sounded like gravel and gravy, “to look behind the machine.”

“You mean the vending machine,” corrected Frib with an eyebrow raise to adorn what he thought was a clever correction.

The lady stopped and her head – totally independent of the body – tilted to face the ground and spat. It seemed to struggle to righten itself back up, like a buoy that had fallen over in the sea. The arms came to its aid, straightening up the head.

“Ha. You think that is a vending machine,” said the lady. She made no effort to change how her face looked while she talked. She just gesticulated with her arms, but whatever she gesticulated about seemed disconnected to what she was talking about.

Her left arm waved in the air while her right one reached forward as if to shake a hand.

“Your naivety is beyond cute, it is simply put stupid and painful. Before us is no machine that can vend in any capacity whatsoever. You are before something far greater.”

“It’s broken,” retorted Frib, insulted.

Again the lady spat while her arms to do dance. They were doing the wave as she said, “To call something broken, when you do not even know what it is, is to call a stack of pancakes tasteless, just by looking at them. This,” and her head spun around behind her, leaving the body and legs behind, “is a bending machine.”

Frib did not hear what she said, for he was trying to comprehend the fact that on the back of the head was a second face, identical to the first but its mouth pinned in a frown. This one had said the “bending” part of the sentence, and in a milky, pattering tone, like rain on a drain.

“What are you.” But Frib did not want to know the answer to this.

“Frib, have you ever considered your purpose in this world? Have you considered why, for example, you found your way into a desert this morning, despite having just left your flat to pick up oranges from the grocers? How it never, once, occurred to you that you might do best to tell someone how the hell a desert appeared at the end of your street where there certainly was not one before. Or why did you not consider, after taking your first step on the sand, to turn around and head home rather than continue on into the vast granular wasteland?”

Frib did take a moment to consider all of these points equally, and with only a little bit of a frown. Then he looked up and spoke, “No.”