RAVONSKI

Mortimer had taken to counting the freckles on his arm. There were over a hundred, he’d guessed, but probably less than a million. Anything more specific would have to wait until after the count.

He worked in stints of forty minutes, after which his eyes would fail to focus on his arm, let alone individual freckles. A rest of ten minutes generally reset his faculties and the count could continue, one smudge of melanin at a time

At the one-thousand-three-hundred-and-forty-four mark, Mortimer felt he’d broken the back of his epic task. “That has to be over halfway,” he sighed, gazing at the constellations of imperfections stretched out in the galaxy before him. He strode on.

“Two-thousand,” he mouthed, pausing as if waiting for a buzzer to indicate he’d won. There was no sound but the metronomic thud he’d become accustomed to. 

“Two-thousand-one-hundred-and-eighty-one,” he whispered, twisting his arm in hope of an expanse of milk-white skin. His face fell as the sea of undiscovered isles came into view. They seemed to laugh, peek-a-booing from the underside of his arm like a playground of mocking children pointing at the wet-patch of his metaphorical shorts.

“Two-thousand-nine-hundered and… three.” Mortimer was losing it. The number of arms in front of him fluctuated between three and seven. The pattern on his jumper was dancing like a Chinese dragon in a post-office. His freckles had un-docked from their moorings and were flying in v-formations around his temporary spherical home.

He furrowed his brow, forcing his eyes to see his spots through the pain of a pick axe scraping across his skull. Tears streamed down his face through effort until suddenly all physics collapsed and the spherical shell around him shook with a thunderous cacophony of noise as it fell from the table. Yuri Overmair had taken a three-point lead in the quarter final.

Mortimer awoke in relative stillness. The rhythmic thud had returned.

“Three-thousand-and..”

He cranked a handle in his head.

“Three-thousand-and..”

Plumes of smoke billowed from his ears.

“Three…”

His mind spluttered and it was gone. Mortimer fell to the curved floor, his hard drive corrupted by a sea of ink and tar. He rolled onto his back and stared directly at the white dome above him.

“Perhaps it’s for the best,” he said, blinking his moist eyes at the bright ceiling. “I should probably try to get out of this ping pong ball anyway”.

And with that, he resumed his search. A door, a weakness, a secret panel… there must have been a way out of that ball.