These stories do not describe exceptional events. They describe the moment when ordinary reality ceases to be readable in the way it had been read until then.
Every story begins from a common situation: a place, a gesture, a relationship, a body sleeping the wrong way around. There is nothing extraordinary in the source material. The exceptionality, if it exists, lies in the gap. In the precise point where what happens and the way it is recognized cease to coincide.
There is no fantastical element, at least not in the conventional sense. No parallel world. No declared rupture. Only a progressive pressure on perception, until the structure that lay beneath becomes visible.
That structure has always been there.
This is, perhaps, the hardest thing to accept: not that things change, but that they were never what they seemed. The cage does not appear. It reveals itself.
And the difference between the two is everything these stories are about.