It was inflating, and fast.
"PUFFBALL! RUN!" a woman in the crowd screamed.
At first, only she and I could see it. The others looked around perplexed. Moments ago we had all been standing placidly in a rather small room full of exotic animals in glass walled cages, watching the captives eat grubs or insects or, in the case of one snake, a bit of nice, raw, juicy, red meat.
My vegan wife looked away, disgusted. "Ugh! They should feed these animals after hours!" She couldn't see the puff ball either.
The woman and I began to inch away from the growing thing, closer and closer to our respective walls opposite each other. One by one, the others started to see the impossible puffball mushroom, and to fear it. They too pushed themselves back away from the growing object, now waveringly visible to everyone. The humans were behaving very strangely, terrified and writhing in fear up against their walls.
Except my wife.
"What on earth are you all doing? Is this some kind of performance art? Where am I, in Congress, where nothing ever makes sense?"
Well, I snapped out of it then, thank goodness. The vision disintegrated in front of my eyes, and I found myself once again in a room at the zoo.
The others though. They never realized that what they were afraid of was imaginary, and remain in that room today, stupefied, petrified, and permanent.
This story was also my entry to @mariannewest's daily five minute freewrite challenge on Hive. The prompt was inflation.