Peer

She had forgotten to open the window. The room was hard and stale when they arrived though they remained incredibly gracious about it, so it was put afterwards. She should have been well-regarded, having spent whole afternoons drawing a line that demonstrated a third dimension despite the angle constantly muddling between second and fourth, with harsh sunlight streaming in all lead-tin yellow.
They merely noticed the absence of flowers, reducing her to an abstract state of feigned memory loss: how they laughed when she confused theremin with thermidor, unaware of their own absurdity because there was no one willing to point it out which meant it didn’t exist.
We were supposed to be travelling through time by now, hopeful that the version of ourselves meeting them would be the ones who were philosophical about the whole thing, not the ones who bit their thumbs and heard themselves talking about the idiocy of musical lobster like that was a perfectly reasonable thing to do.