The trashcan

Randall had been trying for nearly an hour to get the stupid printer to function. Out of nowhere it had jammed, refusing to print a single thing, and he had cleared it out a dozen times trying to get it running again. He was sick of the damn thing. Always crushing paper for no reason, always beeping, always flashing. This wasn't the first time it had happened, either. It worked fine most of the time, but whenever something big had to go through, it would just seemingly die. It infuriated him to no end.

In a seething rage, he lifted the printer off of the desk it rested on and carried it to the trashcan, prepared to throw it in. But as he went to do so, he noticed something strange. The trashcan was empty, as it always was. But he had spent the last hour throwing crumpled paper after crumpled paper into the can in blind anger. He knew he had. And it had to be this can, because it was the closest one. He set the printer aside and examined the can.

There was no hole in the bottom for the paper to escape through, not as though it would have had anywhere to go from there regardless. It wasn't particularly large or unwieldy, so there wasn't anywhere inside the can that it could have gone. And no one had come by during the time that he had been working on the printer, at least not as far as he saw, so it couldn't have been emptied out.

He pulled yet another scrap of ruined paper from the printer and threw it into the can. He stared long and hard at it, but it didn't move. It just sat in the can like any crumpled piece of paper would. Randall felt like it was mocking him. He turned in anger to grab the printer once more, and when he turned back to throw it away the paper was gone.

Now he knew something was wrong. He tossed the printer aside with a crash, unconcerned about whether or not it broke, and stuck his hand deep into the trash can. His hand hit the bottom, which was not what he was expecting, and he yelped in pain at the sudden and abrupt contact with the metallic bottom. He clenched his eyes in pain, and in doing so he felt the bottom of the can give.

With his eyes still closed, now thinking he understood what was happening, he pushed himself into the can. Unlike before, he reached no bottom of the can. He kept moving down, until he could feel his legs swaying in the air for a brief moment before he fell, landing on top of a large pile of crumpled up papers.

He opened his eyes to look around. He was in a place unlike any he had ever seen before. The sky was a deep purple, and there was a grass underneath the pile of papers that was crimson red. He got up, his feet unsteady on the papers. He made his way off and looked up towards where he had dropped from, but saw no hole or trashcan.

He had made it through whatever strange portal was there. But now he didn't know where he was, or how to get back.