Different existences, connected by a giant central staircase.

The bottom left.

A coffee shop, the kind where people get ideas on dry days.

People in the middle spend their entire lives sitting and thinking. They travel in their minds, hopping from thought to thought. They move occasionally to discover the thoughts someone else left behind.

The coffee shop is in the sub-basement of a building so old that no one remembers when it was built. A father drinks coffee and his son drinks hot chocolate.

The father was just a man alone when the man in the middle sitting at the fountain thought him into existence. Then the man alone thought about a child, his child, drinking hot chocolate.

When he was alone, the father would have stayed in the coffee shop forever. Now, he hungers for travel. Looking at his son, he thinks: we’ll go up the stairway, to The Above.