the cheesy bites pizza of babel
The universe (which others call the pizza) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite cheesy bites pizza from pizza hut. Which means it looks like this, but bigger.
In fact, it is only thought to be a cheesy bites pizza because it is pizza-like and has cheesy bites all along its border. It also has many delicious toppings and is always hot. Walking around it (being interchangable terminology, as it is no different from walking alongside it, with its straight edge), the walkers, as we call ourselves, sometimes meet each other and exchange greetings.
There are often heated debates among the walkers, some of whom say it is in fact a pizza-less expansiveness surrounded by cheesy bites pizza. These arguments can last a day or two and can involve livid accusations of surfeit and treachery, but eventually all parties must concede that there are no ways to make any one scenario more likely than another, and there is a tendency of the walkers to harbor desires in secret, most commonly that we are figments of the pizza's imagination, even while we publicly take simpler lines.
If it is round no one has ever been known to have circumnavigated it, and many men pass lifetimes in search of the mark they left so many years ago, a certain cheesy bite tilted in just such a way, or a series of them arranged so as to be recognizable. This drives some walkers to the brink of insanity, reduces once proud walkers into folded-down, gibbering shadows. Occasionally a walker will pass, or if he isn't paying attention, trip over one of these.
When in my youth, I realized I could turn around and go the other way, I did, then after every so often I would turn around again in confusion, but eventually it made sense to go the same way I was going at first. There are only two directions to go, pizza (on your) left and pizza (same) right. By this standard, and in the parlance of the walkers, I'm pizza right. Sometimes I pine longingly for pizza left.
There are really four directions including the seldom-discussed pizza in and pizza out, and at times one will hear stories of men who, mad with monotony, go in to the center of the pizza and can then never find their ways out again, and of those who, for the same reasons, travel pizza out too far and die and decay in the great gray plain beyond the visibility of the port-o-potties, which are spaced about a mile apart, about a hundred yards from the edge, and are normally well-stocked with high quality bathroom tissue. There are rumors of nighttime raids on the port-o-potties, but no walker I have asked has ever seen one so much as out of place by the width of a cheesy bite, nor, for that matter, have they (or I) ever determined what criteria can be used to distiguish day from night.
Walkers tend to see each other only once alongside the pizza, because one walker tends to pass another going in the same or in the opposite direction, and when they sleep, to do it pizza-away, just within visibility of one of the port-o-potties, where no one will accidentally bump into them. This is actually a very long distance, definable only as itself, usually in context (i.e. "I was potty away and resting when...")
Pizza aside, the directions up and down are so similar in the visual field, it can induce a nasty sense of vertigo in a walker, and it is thought that a person who is walking pizza out to his death will eventually fall asleep while walking, then look up, and confused by his apparent position in midair, will jump and tuck into a fetal position, then come down on his head and break his neck, rendering him permanently immobile.
No one has ever seen another walker's carcass, which raises some troubling questions. It is seldom-spoken of, nevertheless rumored that those who stock the bathroom tissue are custodians of the dead, and that they masquerade as walkers, when in fact they are anything but. No one likes to talk about this possibility very much, as they are afraid the person they are discussing the situation with will turn out to be a custodian, or that they will be another walker whose own suspicions will be unduly aroused by their own.
Most doubt that the nature of the universe will ever be understood, some more than others. Because of life's cycle, the jaded and the doubtful are replaced by fools, willful and energetic optimists who enthusiastically and unknowingly have conversations identical to those that walkers have had since the pizza was new.
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