It started slowly, a few black flakes that disappeared randomly. Soon it began to get heavier, and it started to lie. It was lying on...
That was the problem, it fell in what looked like the way that regular snow falls but it landed in a peculiar way. Two flakes that seemed to be near to each other when falling, for the want of a better expression, fell very far apart from each other. Or at least random apparent distances from one another.
The world soon looked like a haphazard lattice of black dots, above and below, near and far, moving and stationary. The snow was getting much, much heavier and I was losing the ability to discern individual flakes.
"You'll have to clear a path", a voice behind me said. I jumped and suddenly I was facing him about fifty feet away. Him was my ex-boss and he had an orange plastic-shovel in his mitts.
Next thing I knew he was beside me and the shovel was in my hands.
"But...how...?"
"Surely I don't have to tell you how to clear snow".
He was gone.
Great! I made a tentative poke at nothing with the shovel, there was a terrible smell and nothing that was black [or white] moved in the least.
"...", in frustration I slammed the shovel into where the ground would be if this was our world. It felt like I'd tasted an electric shock, I fell, or bounced, down hard.
I lay there sobbing. My legs felt damp, I was freezing, my hands...my hands felt snow! I raised an arm, my hand was covered in what looked like soot. Soot that rolled down into nothing.
I grabbed snow with both hands and rubbed them together. The soot was now on both of them, and behaving the same. So there was stuff that worked properly here.
Which gave me an idea.
