She woke up the following morning to find that the picture on her dresser had tipped over, not quite shattering the glass, but sounding like it might have.

‘How strange,’ she said to herself, but after a while thought nothing of it.

Her room was a splendid perfect square with five feet to each wall from either side of the bed. Well, from three of its sides anyway. Her head always rested comfortably against the wall. She didn’t like space behind her.

Before her, there was the window. A beautiful view of an urban setting as picturesque as urban settings go. In front of the windowsill stood the dresser with the fallen picture frame, and against the walls to her sides stood two chairs, a coat hanger and a door that lead to the hallway.

This wasn’t one of her most pleasant mornings, she had to admit. She had had an awful evening, a sleepless night and headaches. She had the day off, though, so she could act upon her fatigue and so decided to stay in bed a while longer in the company of a book.

Three pages later she looked up from behind it and perused the walls around her. On the walls to her sides there hung four paintings, two from each, and they had hung there since she had moved into her room. But for some reason they seemed closer together now than they had done before. She was mildly myopic, though, so there was no cause for alarm as far as she was concerned.

Her myopia was precisely what directed her next action, namely, to reach for her glasses that she had placed on the dresser the evening before, just before she went to bed. They weren’t anywhere to be found, though. She perused the surface of the dresser, raising the fallen picture frame as well and scouring beneath, as though a pair of glasses could possibly squeeze into the millimetre of vacuum between the perfectly flat glass of the picture frame and the nearly as perfectly flat surface of her dresser. Finally, she located the spectacles. On the floor.

‘How on earth could they have gotten there?’ She wondered, but was distracted by the beauty of the view from her room.

Laying in bed, however, she found it to be even more beautiful. From underneath the covers, she could see her neighbourhood; the brownstone that continued to the left and out of view, the office complex that housed an amateur theatre and that had a great big billboard on its façade soliciting the attendance of passers-by, and, just barely, the treetops from the nearby park.

She went back to bed and resumed her reading.

Half a chapter later she was startled to find the picture frame having fallen down again. At first she thought there might be something wrong with it, but then she noticed that something else was entirely wrong as well, which took precedence.

The book resting on her chest, she could hear the merry chirping of a family of birds frolicking in their nest just a few feet short of the very top of one of the trees. There was nothing wrong with that, to be sure, except she had never noticed it before. In fact, she felt confident in thinking she had never seen that much of the tree before at all.

She smiled awkwardly and embarrassedly to herself and looked about the room in search of an audience that may have caught her temporary hysterics and thus had reason to belittle her. She was pleased that there was no one about, but rather perplexed when she looked at the pictures that hung from the wall to her left. They seemed somehow to hang even closer to one another than they had done before.

Another three pages deeper into the novel that was intended to take her attention into custody, she heard a noise that lead her to throw the volume down onto the foot of her bed and never pick it up again. Why never, you wonder, and the answer is simple enough. The book never landed on the bed. As she threw it aside, she could almost catch, in the corner of her eye, as the bed somehow manoeuvred its way around it in a way that had it land on the floor instead.

Sweat was forming on her brow as she looked around in a melange of bewilderment and madness. She felt constricted in a way she had never experienced before. Her breathing became harder and she grabbed the covers with her fists as though at any moment a torrent would attempt to pull her out of the safety of our world.

The two pictures to her right crackled as they bumped against each other and fell to the floor, sending chards of glass and splinters from their frames in all directions. The view from her window was now quite different. The birds could be heard chirping just above her frame of view now, and she could no longer read the billboard she had awoken to each morning since she moved here a year ago.

She could hear people in the hallway just outside her room now and felt a desperate urge to leave it and join them, not that she would have told them what was going on, what her senses had been registering, or what conclusions she was drawing now, for new theories had already started forming in her head. But she was going to join them, for they sounded cheerful somehow in they ordinary conversation, at least by comparison.

Leaping out of bed, she found new evidence for her theories. The door that had been a few steps away from the bed was now already practically pressed against her front, or vice versa, and in a fit of panic she pulled with all her strength to open it. But it would not budge. The frame of the door had shrunken too severely to allow the door contained within to move an inch in either direction. She could see it was so. The white paint of the door had cracked under the pressure of constriction and had left a collection of debris on the floor that stuck to the soles of her naked feet, a reminder of what was taking place.

She banged her fists against the door, screamed, begged for someone to come take her out of there, until her hands were numb and her throat dry. The people in the hallway heard her cries and someone asked from the other side of her door if everything was all right. Then someone, perhaps the same person, clutched the handle and tried to pull open the door from the outside.

‘It won’t open. You need to unlock it,’ he said.

‘It’s not locked,’ she thought to herself, apathy and acceptance starting to take over her disposition.

She turned to face the room when the foot of the bed suddenly touched her calves, and it was plain to see now that her room was so much smaller, so much more constricted.

Once again, she found it hard to breathe.

Laying in bed once again, bundled up in it, as it would no longer really fit her, she looked around the room. It felt like a tomb to her now. Was she hallucinating? Was this but a bad dream?

The people in the hallway had now congregated by her door and were trying to calm her, but what was the use? Her room was now only about as big as the bed, which in turn was no longer as spacious as it had been the night before.

She could hear horrible noises all around her now; planks of wood creaking and snapping in twine, cement breaking, dried paint crackling under the strain of being pushed into itself.

She stretched her arms outward, but couldn’t even keep them straight while her palms pressed against the walls to her sides, and the room was still getting smaller.

Tears wouldn’t stop running down her cheeks, and, looking at what was left of the window, perhaps a quarter of its original size, she could see people outside the theatre, in costume, waiting for the next show, smoking cigarettes and chatting about life.

One of them stretched her arms as high up as she could, no doubt as part of some acting exercise, then brought them back down, pulled the cigarette from between her lips and released a cloud of vapour into the air. A breeze picked it up and carried it away, past the nearest treetop and the nest just below it. One of the baby birds flapped its wings, for the first time with confidence, and leapt out of its nest, soaring at first slightly downwards but soon getting the hang of it and gliding in a circle around the stem of the tree holding up its home and birthplace.