Your Dimension Or Mine?

by Cynthia Kimball

  For over an hour, she answered their questions, laughing constantly. When the screen popped up Complete, she was almost disappointed. Feeling tipsy and yawning like crazy, she turned off her computer and went to bed. Maybe tomorrow the weather would be nice enough so she could run off the alcohol. That would work, she thought as she drifted into a sleep filled with men who had multiple arms, legs, and other appendages.

  Chapter Three - Interdimensional Dating Service

  Somebody was pounding on her head. Groaning, Ari tried to open her eyes only to find that her eyelids seemed sealed shut. Cautiously, she reached out with her left hand, trailing her fingers across soft cotton sheets. When they reached open air, she stretched further until coming into contact with a smooth surface. Letting her fingers continue, she ran up what she assumed was a leg until she reached the top of what was undoubtedly her side table. The moment her hand made contact with the shot glass Cory bought her the last time she went to Vegas, she knew where she was.

  “I’m definitely in my own bed,” she murmured, wincing as each word pounded against her brain. Ouch! Memories came to her, opaque and clouded with some sort of fog. Dating services. Wine…drunk…hangover.

  Groaning again, she rolled over and buried her head into her pillow. Why had she drunk so much? She hadn’t done that since the day she received her bachelor’s degree. Now she was glad she had not been able to open her eyes. That was a level of pain she did not want to add to her already overwhelming headache.

  Bam! Bam! Bam!

  “Ow!” she yelped, accidentally opening her eyes, which made the pain so much worse. “No!” she cried as she closed them again. Why was someone pounding on her door at what must be an unreasonable hour?

  The pounding continued until she crawled out of bed and made her way toward it. Using her hands to guide her, she finally found the door. Opening it with a jerk, she spat, “Stop that!”

  “You look like hell.” The amusement in her friend Denise’s voice made her growl. “Hungover, huh? Well, stick out your hand. I’ve brought a lifesaver.”

  Blindly reaching out, hope sprang up as a warm cup touched her hands, spreading its warmth at the knowledge about what must be inside.

  “Back up a step so I can close the door. It’s so sunny, it would probably kill you if you opened your eyes.”

  Ari backed up two steps, then brought the cup to her mouth and sipped. “Mmm,” she moaned as the chocolate and espresso passed her lips. “How did you know I would need this?”

  Snickering, Denise grabbed her elbow, leading her to her favorite chair. “A little fairy told me. Now sit and rehumanize.”

  Sitting back, Ari sipped at the wonderful concoction, aware when the banging let up a little in her head. Cautiously, she blinked her eyes. The room was dark which helped tremendously. Looking around, her eyes fell on a blurry version of her friend, sitting across from her holding a bottle.

  “A bit early to be drinking, isn’t it?”

  Chuckling, Denise put the bottle down. “Considering this was sitting by your computer, I assume you drink blogged last night?”

  Frowning, Ari tried to remember. “I don’t think so. I remember laughing a lot, though, so who knows?”

  A small smile came to her lips as she remembered her first few blogging attempts back in college. They were considered dull, boring, blasé, until she got drunk one night after a bad Jane-date. When she was drunk her filter did not exist, and what spewed out was as real as it could get. Her drink-blogging became a campus hit.

  “Wait! I remember. I was filling out an online dating profile.”

  “And that made you laugh? I tried that once. Made me want to pull my hair out.”

  Chuckling as she started to feel human again, Ari nodded. “I got an agreement from Jane that if I joined three online dating sites and kept up with them she would stop dive-bomb dating me.”

  “Oh! Do you think she will actually keep to that agreement?”

  “I hope so. She has such bad taste.”

  They chatted for an hour and by the time Denise left, Ari was able to open the blinds without wincing too badly.

  After a long hot shower, she pulled on a pair of jeans and a sweater before turning on her computer. While it started up, she rifled through her fridge and freezer, trying to decide on lunch. She was so intent on her task that when her computer dinged to announce new emails, she jumped.

  Laughing at her own nervousness, she closed the fridge, grabbed some crackers, and went back to the living room. Sitting on her desk chair, she put the crackers down and pulled up her email account. It took several seconds for the number of new emails to hit her.

  “One hundred and fifty-seven? I’ve never received that many emails total in this account!” Sure, she was being spammed, she opened her inbox.

  “Oh.”

  Only seven were spam messages, the rest were notifications from the three dating services. Some were notices that she was “liked.” Whatever that meant. Others seemed to advertise guys she might like. Then, there were the messages from men.

  Well, she hadn’t gotten a master’s degree in library science for nothing. Setting up new folders and rules, soon the emails were separated and catalogued. Now she could focus on what was important. Her eyes drifted to the trash making her snicker. “If I do that, Jane will find out and set me up with another loser.

  “That reminds me.”

  Opening up a new message, she quickly sent an email off to her sister.

  Jane,

  Hope you are having a lovely Sunday. I am looking at 150 messages from three different dating sites. That should cover at least a couple months.

  Just as a reminder, you still owe me the money for Jay.

  See you Friday!

  Ari

  Snickering at the disgruntled expression that would most likely appear on her sister’s face when she read it, she looked once again at the messages. Methodically, she went through each one, deleting the uninteresting ones, blocking the losers, and sighing at the tenth time she saw the same opening line. When she got to the last email and hit delete, she was exhausted. Looking at the clock, she could not believe she had just lost four hours.

  “Well, that classifies as at least two dates,” she grumbled, stretching and turning off the computer.

  The rest of the day she found herself a bit restless. She went for a run in the park, and when she got home, she felt a pull toward her computer she had never felt before. Usually, she would turn it on maybe once a week, and then forget it was there.

  “Must be all those emails. I don’t ever want to go through that many at once again.”

  The next day was a free day. How she loved holidays. And she and Denise were going to the Reid Park Zoo. Denise was a supporter of the zoo, donating money to become a parent of one of the animals every year. On a monthly basis, she dragged Ari to ooh and ahh over her adopted pet. Ari hadn’t minded when she supported the lion or the tiger. She even thought it was cool when Denise supported the lion-tail macaque. But this year, her friend supported the Visayan warty pig.

  “A pig?” Ari moaned as Denise dragged her toward its pen. “Couldn’t you have just gone and bought a ham?”

  Denise let her go long enough to slap her arm. “Don’t mention Dakila and ham in the same sentence! I don’t want her to know I eat pork,” she whispered, grabbing Ari again and pulling her forward.

  As much as she teased Denise about it, Ari had to admit the pigs were rather cute. “I wish they had a male so we could see what they looked like.” Males were reputed to have large manes that stuck up like a mohawk. She would love to see that.

  After thirty minutes of oohing and ahing over Dakila, though Denise wasn’t exactly positive which of the three was her pig so they raved over all three, they went to the gift shop and bought a few items for Ari’s nieces and nephews. Ari wondered what the kids would think of the stuffed pigs.

  After lunch at the Bamboo Club, Ari’s favorite restaurant, Denise dropped her off at home. W
hen she walked in the door, her eyes were drawn to her laptop and she chuckled. “Fine, obviously I must have some interest in this whole online dating thing as I can’t stay away from the computer!”

  After turning it on, she put away her leftovers and placed the bag of stuffed animals in a chest she kept for kiddie gifts. When Jane brought the little rugrats over, she hoped that would keep most of them busy. The problem was some of them were too old for stuffed animals. And the boys wouldn’t be thrilled. “Oh well, maybe they can watch sports,” she murmured, going over to sit down.

  Pulling up her email, she watched as email after email went into its respective folder. Ninety-two new emails of which only one was spam. “This is crazy,” she muttered even while recognizing there was something rather exciting about having so many men contact her, even if they weren’t her type.

  After going through each of the emails and deleting them all, she stared at the IDS folder she had created for the Interdimensional Dating Service. There was still only one email from them. Wondering why there was so much response from the others and not from them, she opened up their welcome email.

  Miss Reynolds,

  We thank you for joining the Interdimensional Dating Service. Only once before have we received an entry from your quadrant. As we want to make sure it was you who entered the profile information, please click on the link below and check the information. If you submitted and approve it, hit the approve button. It will become live within ten hours. If you did not, click the button that says delete. Your profile will be deleted immediately, and you will not be troubled by us again.

  Interdimensional Dating Service

  “Oh!” She hadn’t gotten a response because they were waiting for her to approve the profile. Well, that made sense. Many websites did that nowadays. The way the note was written was still strange, but now the language seemed more formal, rather than having been written by someone who did not know English. And quadrant? She chuckled. They hadn’t received anything from the southwest? How small was this site?

  Clicking on the link, her screen flashed three times before settling on her profile. “Dang power,” she sighed, knowing she was well overdue for a power outage.

  Her profile surprised her. It was not anything like the others. On the other two sites a picture of her was plastered in the upper left corner and then all her information was displayed on the right in a question/answer type format. IDS obviously did things differently.

  She had even been given her own URL and menubar. “That’s shnazzy.” The background looked almost like a picture of the mountains that could be seen from her living room window. Her photo looked as though it had been professionally altered. She looked really nice. They had even gotten rid of the small scar that marred her chin. And instead of a list of questions and answers, the profile had been separated into sections: Physical characteristics. Likes/Dislikes. Intelligence. Preferences. Cross-Dimensional Compatibility.

  “I must have been tired when I started filling out the questions,” she said as she looked it over. “Or it was the wine talking.” None of her responses were written in question/answer format. Instead, each section was written out in a narrative, making her come alive. Whoever wrote her responses out in such a way had a wonderful, dry sense of humor, very much like her own.

  After looking over the entire profile, she clicked the Accept button. Almost immediately, the urgency she felt about being on the computer seemed to leave. After turning it off, she went about her business. With only a four-day workweek ahead, plus the fact she needed to get caught up on all the lost hours from Friday, her life was about to get hectic.

  Tuesday proved to be more than chaotic. From the moment she got into work at seven, she spent her time in front of her computer trying to enter the serials information she had not been able to complete the previous Friday. Unfortunately, while the network was just fine, she was not. To her utter annoyance, she kept typing the wrong items in, misspelling codes, and entering data into the wrong fields. Groaning, she turned off her monitor at lunch and went for a run. “Maybe a run will help my mind wake up.”

  When she left work a little after seven that evening, she just hoped the next day would be better. “A whole day of data entry down the tubes,” she grumbled, wishing she could erase the entire day. Once she got home, she could not settle down, so instead of her normal Tuesday evening routine of dinner and reading, she changed into her workout clothes and went for another run.

  It was already dark outside, but she made her way to the park and ran around it four times anyway, trying to wear herself out. It wore her body out, but her mind still churned madly away. Jogging up to her apartment, she was surprised to see a box sitting at the foot of the door. “I’m not expecting anything,” she muttered, grabbing the box as she unlocked her door.

  Once she got inside, she checked to make sure it was at the correct place. Yep, it was addressed to Miss Arwen Reynolds. “Definitely for me.” Her eyes scanned the front of the small box, settling on the area where the return address would be. Instead of an address, some symbol was stamped there. She turned the box around several times, but could not make out what the symbol was.

  Placing the box on the coffee table, she took off her jacket and shoes and went into the kitchen to make herself some hot chocolate. A box like this needed hot chocolate. As she poured the milk into the pan and pulled out the cocoa, her mind was on the box. What was in it? She wanted to go out and rip the box open, but she had never been spontaneous and was not about to do it now without her ritual.

  Grinning, she thought back to how this ritual started. Her second year in college she received a box from an unmarked source, though she had known who it was from. Interest and yet worry about what could possibly be inside kept her from opening it immediately. Instead, she made herself a cup of strong hot chocolate with some Bailey’s Irish Cream thrown in.

  Once warm and buzzed, she had opened the package only to find some strange artifact from Asia, nothing else. The packages always came that way. Plain box, strange artifact of some sort, usually a statue and nothing else. No note, no letter, no invoice, no nothing. But then again, Abigail Bryory Reynolds, her ninety-one-year-old grandmother, did things like that. For her sixteenth birthday, Ari had been sent a phallic prayer deity.

  Everything Abigail ever sent was tucked inside a chest in her closet, except for the deity statue. For some inexplicable reason, that sat on her night stand.

  After mixing in the chocolate, she poured the wonderful mixture into a large mug, topping it off with the first alcohol her hands touched. Rum. Once the scent of heated rum reached her nostrils, she stopped pouring and placed the bottle back on the shelf. Then she took a sip.

  “Yum! Everyone should drink hot chocolate like this.”

  Placing the mug in the living room next to the box, she went into her bedroom and changed into a pair of flannel pajama bottoms and a sweatshirt then went back into the living room. Taking the mug in one hand and the box in the other, she sat down on the sofa. Wanting to be buzzed enough for whatever Abigail sent her, she took several long pulls of her hot chocolate. “Mmmm,” she sighed, placing it back on the coffee table.

  “All right, Nana, here goes nothing.” A small smile passed over her lips as she imagined how Abigail’s expression would look if she heard Ari call her Nana. Her little gray eyes would get tiny and turn dark.

  “Look here, little girl,” she would rasp in a voice broken from too much screeching, “I can still bend you over my knee and spank your bottom. I don’t care if you are twenty-eight.” As long as Ari could remember, her grandmother had insisted she be called Abigail. She even insisted that Ari’s mother, her daughter Destra, call her by her given name.

  Grabbing the letter opener from the coffee table, she cut through the tape, making sure not to push the metal too deep. Whatever was inside should not be marked up. One day, Abigail would return, and if anything she sent Ari was damaged…well, Ari did not want to know what would happen.
<
br />   Jane and Cory were always interested to see what she got, because they didn’t get anything interesting from their grandmother. Instead, they got books, electronics, dresses, hats, and any tourist stuff she thought they might like. Ari was the one she sent her odd, sometimes pornographic items to.

  Placing the letter opener back onto the coffee table, she opened the box. It had been almost five years since she received anything from her grandmother. She could not wait any longer to see what she had been sent. Usually there would be tons of brown paper surrounding a brown paper wrapped package. Not in this box. To Ari’s surprise there was a small wooden box that was almost the same size as the box it was in. On top of it was a piece of thick 8x10 paper folded in half. Abigail included a letter?

  “She’s never included a letter before.” Picking up the paper, she opened it up.

  Miss Reynolds,

  We are thrilled you have joined the Interdimensional Dating Service. Your profile is live and is already being searched by thousands of males across the dimensions. Over the next few days, you may experience some of the following symptoms.

  Shortness of breath

  Nausea

  Tension

  Cold shivers

  Desire to return to your computer, again and again

  We assure you these are natural responses to being a member of the Interdimensional Dating Service. They are the result of the interdimensional shift. We suggest alcohol as a suitable drink to help calm those responses.

  As a thank you for being one of our female members, we have included a gift for you. Inside this box is an anklet made by the Faerce Jewelry Makers of Dimension Zeta. It was made specifically for you, and we promise it will bring you luck in your search.

  If you have any questions, please contact us.

  Interdimensional Dating Service

  The giggle started out slow, but by the time she had read the note three times, Ari was laughing hard. “Oh, these people have a wonderful sense of humor! So this small gift is supposed to make me feel good about the hundred and forty-nine dollars I spent for three months membership?” Chuckling, she turned the outer box over and shook it until the box inside fell out.