text: This happened last year. About five days each week, I walk to my favorite coffee shop and order an iced latte, regardless of the weather. I take the same path - wait for the slowest traffic light in the world, cross the street, cross another street, walk about a mile, walk through a park, then take the shortcut behind the Hampton Inn to get to the shop. The coffee is heavenly, and I sit in the same seat by the window every time I go, then I take the same path home. One Saturday morning, however, something had changed. There was a fountain in the middle of the park. Normally this wouldn’t be strange, but up until that day the park had only been a grassy rectangle like a sports field for people to play frisbee and football. Curious, I walked directly to the fountain instead of following the sidewalk around the park’s edge like I usually did. Without thinking, I fished a penny out of my pocket and threw it to the fountain’s center - an old habit from childhood - before an odd feeling crept over me. Though I’m not from here, I had lived in the city about three years before this happened, and I’d walked by this exact spot often enough to know something was wrong. It was a nice day, and a weekend, but there were no people out walking their dogs and no children playing. Given that half a million people live within a few miles of here, this park was usually crowded. And the fountain itself was wrong, too - cities install fountains all the time, but this one was old, but not old enough to be nice. I guessed it was from the 80s. Rust leaked through its concrete, leaving brown stains, and many pennies within it were caked with blue. Dried leaves sat on the fountain’s surface, despite the fact it was late spring and all the trees were green. I stuck a finger in the water. It was cold. I shouldn’t have touched it. I didn’t know how it wasn’t frozen, being that cold, but then I noticed the first signs of ice creeping around the dried leaves, delicate crystals that shouldn’t have been there. I pulled away from the fountain, deciding the city had simply moved one of its older fountains to this location, and made my way to the coffee shop. I only saw two people during my journey the rest of the way, which was about a half mile. Again, this was weird, because this is a densely populated area. I arrived at the coffee shop, which usually had three or four baristas working, but there was only one. She was one of their only full-time employees, so I knew her by name. “Hi Sarah,” I said. She smiled. She always made an effort to be nice to regulars. “The usual?” she asked. I nodded. “The usual.” The coffee shop had a small bar by the cash register, and I sat there so she could just hand me the latte directly when she was done making it. I opened my phone and checked my social media, surprised I had no notifications on Twitter or Reddit. Sarah stood across the bar from me and held out the iced latte. “I don’t know how you aren’t freezing without a coat.” “What do you mean?” I took the latte in one hand and looked outside. It was still a bright spring day. “With the storm coming,” Sarah said. “The temperature’s dropping.” “Really?” I asked. I hadn’t heard about a storm coming. I tried to look up the weather forecast, but it wouldn’t load. I didn’t have signal - that made sense. I turned off wifi and tried again on data, without luck. “Do you have any reception?” I asked Sarah. She patted at her pockets for a moment and shrugged. “Must have left my phone in the back, sorry.” “Thanks anyway,” I said. I took a sip of my iced latte, then pulled my head back in shock. It wasn’t my usual at all - it was an iced chai tea latte. “Ah,” I said. “I think you made me the wrong thing. I’ll drink it, so no worries, but usually I just get the, uh, coffee kind of latte.” Sarah cocked her head to the side. “You’ve come here almost every day for the past ten years and ordered an iced chai latte. I even ordered you that fancy chai from India six months ago.” Ten years? Ordered fancy chai from India? I shook my head, confused. I’d only lived here for under three years, and could count on one hand the number of times I’d drank an iced chai latte. Sarah must have mixed me up with someone else. “What’s my name?” I asked after a moment. She said my name, then added, “only one S.” That was wrong. I spelled my name with two. Fearing I’d lost my mind, I pulled my drivers license out of my phone case, where I kept it. What do you know - only one S. My mind raced back to that weird fountain. “Did you see that new fountain in Victory Park?” I asked. Sarah, who was drying glasses with a rag, paused. “Oh yeah. Threw a penny in it yesterday on my way here. It’s kind of ugly, don’t you think?” “Very.” I thanked her, got up, pushed my chair in, and left. She was right about the storm. The air outside was freezing now. It might have been bearable without the wind, but all I had was a t-shirt and jeans and the wind blew right through them. It was an aching cold, the kind you feel in your bones. I thought about going back into the coffee shop, or getting an uber, but getting home would only take me a few minutes if I ran. Plus, I still didn’t have signal, so getting an uber was not an option. There was not a single car on the road. By the time I reached the fountain again, my muscles cramped from the cold and I had to slow down. Snow began to fall around me. My fingers were numb, my toes were numb, and even thinking had grown difficult. None of this made any sense. By the time I reached the fountain, I could barely walk. I dropped to my knees, arms wrapped around the fountain’s lip to support myself. This was bad. I was dying. I was freezing to death in the middle of May. Only, it wasn’t May anymore, it couldn’t be. The fountain had frozen over completely, even the parts that were supposed to have moving water, so I knew it had to be brutally cold. I tried to trace my steps back to how this all started as my thoughts grew increasingly fragmented and panicked. I couldn’t make it to any of the storefronts, though I had a feeling that if I did, the doors would be locked. A darkness spread across the sky, and not a single light was on in any of them. This all started when I threw that penny into the fountain. Sarah said she had thrown in a penny, too. When we did that, we must have triggered something, or maybe been thrown into another dimension. What a stupid thing to think - and yet, this gave me an idea. I plunged one stiff, dumb hand through the ice and frantically searched for the penny I threw in, as if I could tell it apart from the others. I took sloppy fistfuls of pennies, quarters, and dimes, some new and some old, and flung them onto the gathering snow. I remembered - I threw my penny near the fountain’s center, the deepest and hardest part to reach. They said people panic and do wild, illogical things as hypothermia sets in, and it must be true because I thrust my whole upper body into that water, grabbed a handful of coins from the center, threw them onto the snow, and and- “Hey.” It was a child’s voice. My eyes were shut, and I was lying on my back. Someone poked my face with what must have been a stick. An adult’s voice answered. “Ravi! Get away from her!” “But-” “No butts, get back here,” the adult said, then cursed about drunks and the city going to shit. I opened my eyes, and couldn’t help but smile. The sun kissed my skin, and I was laying in the middle of the park, again an open field. A dog came up to me and sniffed my face. “Are you alright?” a man, likely the dog’s owner, asked. I pushed myself to my feet and took a few seconds to balance as the feeling returned to my legs. “Yeah,” I said, brushing the dirt off my jeans and searching for a logical explanation of what had just happened. “I think I had a seizure, or a stroke...” The man came over to me. He said he was a doctor (there were three hospitals within two miles of here, so lots of people living in this area are doctors). He shined his phone flashlight in my eyes, then helped me to the nearest emergency room. They checked me out, even squeezed me into their MRI schedule, but they couldn’t find anything wrong. The doctors told me to follow up with a neurologist, and I agreed. But I knew that whatever had happened was not of this world. That distorted world I was transported into had no medical or natural origin, and its source was probably something beyond what I was capable of understanding. The next day, Sunday, I stayed home. I didn’t even make coffee and instead just accepted the inevitable withdrawal headache, then spent the day binge-watching my favorite anime from high school. It was calming, since it reminded me of a better time and kept my mind off the horrors of the previous day. But still, every time I shut my eyes, I relived the sensation of half-diving into the freezing fountain, numbness spreading up my arms as my dumb hands searched the depths. Monday, I was feeling a little better. Though I hated the thought of walking by that park again, for fear of seeing the fountain, I was curious and also wanted my usual iced latte. Slowlyl, I traced my regular path to the park. The fountain was gone. I continued, taking the shortcut behind the Hampton, until I reached the coffee shop. There was something plastered in the window. It was a typical “missing person” sign you see stapled to telephone poles or pinned to poster boards in the front of Walmarts all over the US, but what shocked me was the person on it. It said: Missing Sarah \[censored\] Last seen: May 27, 2022, 5:45 am It was Sarah. But I’d seen her the morning of the 28th. A darkness settled over me, and I knew that something had happened to her. She was still in that strange world I had escaped from. I wondered if every penny in that fountain represented a person trapped and thought that if only I could find that fountain again, I could get her out. I got on the internet and went down the rabbit hole, so to speak. I searched every forum and paranormal sight until I found someone mentioning the fountain. However, it was a thread from ten years ago, and the profile had been deleted and the comments frozen. I posted around until someone else said they had seen the fountain. They had even taken pictures, but the pictures looked... wrong. Realistic in some ways, but also fake, distorted and with the perspective slightly off. Another person had sent him pictures, which he shared with me, but these were both blurry and in black and white. Almost a year later, I’m still trying to find the fountain and figure out what it is, where it came from, and if there are others like it. But whatever the case, if you see a fountain where it doesn’t belong, think before throwing in a coin.