There are moments when my mind misses a beat. I find myself, in mid-step or mid-breath, feeling as if delivered abruptly into my body after a long ab… - Greg Egan

On his eighteenth day in the tiger cage, Robert Stoney began to lose hope of emerging unscathed.

The Extras were as clean as they'd ever been in their lives, and their hair - and beards in the case of the older ones - had been laboriously trimmed, in styles that amusingly parodied the latest fashions. Gray had almost gone so far as to have them clothed - but after much experimentation he'd decided against it; even the slightest scrap of clothing made them look too human, and he was acutely aware of the boundary between impressing his guests with his daring, and causing them real discomfort. Of course, naked, the Extras looked exactly like naked humans, but in Gray's cultural milieu, stark naked humans en masse were not a common sight, and so the paradoxical effect of revealing the creatures' totally human appearance was to make it easier to think of them as less than human.

The Universe may be stranger than we can imagine, but it's going to have a tough time outdoing Egan.