The woman with the small children and the large shopping cart looked up in despair. As they always were, the diapers were on the top shelf, but this time she had a baby in her arms and couldn't just climb up the empty bread racks until she reached her goal. Nor could she place her son in the child storage area of the cart, because his twin sister was already occupying it, and although the mother had never been a physics whiz, she was pretty sure that there was no way to fit both babies in the small area.

Ordinarily she could have scaled the first couple of racks to give herself sufficient altitude to reach her prize, or she would have leapt the couple of feet. She tried the second approach, but her son immediately raised his voice in protest. "Shh, shh, there, there, Tory, it's all right," she murmured soothingly. "It's okay, Mommy's here, everything's okay." To herself, she muttered, "How on earth did I end up with a child who's afraid of heights?"

Just to make things a touch worse, as if they couldn't get that way on their own, the ripe smell coming from the area of the cart told her that her daughter had guaranteed the further depletion of the diaper supply. Not only that, but she had the horrible feeling that she didn't even have a spare to relieve the grossness.

A shadow fell over her suddenly, quite a feat considering her height and width. "Need some help?" a heavily accented voice asked. The mother blinked, blinked again, then finally got her arm up to point at the diapers.

Margo Dydek reached up, plucked a large package from the shelf, and put it in the still shell-shocked mother's cart. "Are you all right?" she asked.

"Somebody tell me I'm tripping," Natalie Williams groaned. "Please, someone tell me I managed to get on something and I'm just seeing things. Goody and those freakin' headbands were bad enough, but this is just too damn weird."

Margo looked at her, plainly puzzled. "What is this 'tripping?'" she asked Natalie. While her command of English was fairly good, sometimes contemporary slang went right over her head, at least metaphorically.

The comment was too real for Natalie to believe that this was anything other than what she knew to be reality, and therefore she emitted a small sound halfway between a mew and an eep. "Am I the only one on this entire team who doesn't have a second job?"

"I do not think Jennifer has one," Margo replied. "Oh, Sydney!" She got down on her knees to greet Natalie's daughter. "Well, hi there. Hello there, cutie-pie."

Natalie watched in a state approaching horror as her teammate for the last five seasons, a center with an on-court demeanor that terrified small children, baby-talked Sydney into happy laughter. The whole scene was intensely surreal, and Natalie still thought she had half a chance of waking up. Absently she cuddled Taurasi in her arms until she could work up the urge to say, "Margo, would you please stop talking gibberish to my daughter?"

"It is not gibberish," Margo pouted. "I am teaching her Polish."

"She doesn't even speak English yet. Everything's gibberish at this point. Thanks for the help, but I've got to get cute and cuter home before something bad happens. I'll see you later, right?"

"Of course, Natalie." Natalie pushed the cart away one-handed as she balanced Taurasi.

Margo stood watching them for a couple of moments. While proper narrative flow would have dictated that she see them out the door, she only had a few seconds before someone came over the loudspeaker system and called out, "Margo, go to aisle three, Margo to aisle three." With a sigh, she readjusted her nametag and took herself away.