by Jason Gurley
Mea is not accustomed to feeling such a thing. She feels as if her insides have been troubled, stirred up by a force she cannot identify. She discovers senses that have rested dormant for what feels like a thousand years. Longing rushes through her like a toxin. Despair forms itself into a hard bullet in her middle. Mea has lived like a cloud, like a vapor, for so long that when this story awakens her feelings, it is as if her feathery form has begun to solidify into rigid shapes. Mea begins to feel… restrained.
This is not right. It isn’t the way that Mea is supposed to feel. Mea isn’t supposed to feel at all. She is not expected to care about the stories, about the deep memories of existence that she swims about in. She is only expected to observe, to see.
In the darkness, Mea trembles, and stops fighting her way upstream. The darkness carries her as it carries all memories, and she tumbles in the blackness, wondering what is happening to her. She passes other memories, ones that she has already observed—memories of fragile beauty, for all life and being is fragile, memories of warm suns and symphonic stars and clouds and babies and oceans and fire. These memories occupy tiny voids within the darkness, their stories contained in tenuous little bubbles all their own, and as the stories come to their ends, the bubbles collapse, and the darkness rushes to fill them like water into so many perforations.
This is how the darkness is. It knows nothing else. It fills crevices, pushing into the finest, narrowest corners, ascribing no meaning to the events that it carries, but birthing and then swallowing them again as they expire.
Mea cannot escape this troubling story that she has discovered. The darkness embraces her, pushing her deeper and deeper into the story, until a flicker of something catches Mea’s notice, and she finds herself at that precarious membrane again, pressed against it while the darkness rushes up against her, holding her there. Through the membrane she sees movement, and realizes that she is peering into the story that she has discovered—that the story has expanded until it is world-sized itself, and Mea lingers at its boundaries, staring into it, drinking in the things that she sees.
Like the red-haired girl who is walking toward her.
She is darkly familiar, but Mea cannot understand why.
Mea pushes against the membrane, unaware that she is doing so, and the thin wall stretches and becomes taffy-like, until it seems that Mea will burst through and escape into the world that she can see on the other side. But this doesn’t happen, for the membrane cannot be broken. Mea feels something welling up inside her, a sensation of yearning that she has never felt before, and she reaches for the red-haired girl.
If Mea cannot escape, she will pull the girl into the darkness with her.
“There and back, and hurry,” says Mrs. McDearmon.
Eleanor hides her eyes, feeling them begin to spill over with the ache of everything. She is humiliated by her breakdown in front of Jack, and embarrassed by the way she has treated him since that moment. He is, after all, only concerned for her. It isn’t as if Jack is inexperienced in these matters. Hasn’t he told Eleanor often of his mother’s departure, of his father’s depression and alcoholism? Isn’t it funny that their lives should be so similar now? Except in Eleanor’s case, the genders are reversed. It is her father who has left, and her mother who has caved inward like a black hole.
She can hear Jack’s voice through the din of the cafeteria, just one voice among the hundreds of gossiping, chattering teenagers, and she tucks a strand of short red hair behind her ear not because it is loose but because it will project a certain appearance; it is something to do, and if Eleanor is in the act of doing something—anything, even tucking hair behind her ear—then she can be forgiven for not hearing Jack, and for leaving the cafeteria without acknowledging him.
She will have to apologize, of course. But she will wait until later, when she doesn’t feel like such a jerk.
This is not a new problem for her, and she understands why it keeps happening. Every time she feels Jack close to her, she allows herself to feel him, to submerge herself in that closeness. And every time that happens, she recoils from it, not because she doesn’t long for Jack in that strange and unfamiliar and non-platonic way, but because she knows nothing of such closeness, and Jack is the closest thing that she has to a true and lifelong friend, and risking that for some romantic construct that probably wouldn’t last anyway—that’s too great a risk for her.
Eleanor is fourteen, but she is an old and lonely spinster in her heart.
So she ignores Jack’s voice now, and she walks through the cafeteria doors, and at the very last moment before she enters that doorway, she feels something subtle and strange, as if she has become a magnet and something is tugging her toward it. She feels the tiny hairs on her arms and neck lift up, and there is a sharp smell and a sizzle in the air, but it is almost instantaneous, and before she has a moment to truly consider what she feels, she steps through the doorway—is frankly almost yanked through it—and then Eleanor is no longer in the cafeteria, no longer in her high school, no longer even in Oregon at all.
Back in the world, Jack sees her disappear, and stops cold in the middle of the cafeteria, bewildered.
The first thing she notices is the change in temperature, and the smell, and then she looks around and realizes that the tiled floor of the high school’s common room is not beneath her feet. She turns around, only a little confused, and does not see the cafeteria doors or Mrs. McDearmon or the crowd of talking students or Jack behind her, and then she becomes very confused.
She does what she learned to do as a little girl. When lost, stay where you are.
Eleanor looks around her and sees a tree stump and sits down on it, grateful for its existence. She decides that she will sit here and collect her thoughts and try to understand what has just happened to her.
“Okay,” she says aloud, relieved to hear her own voice. “Okay. Okay.”
She says the word a few times. It is the only familiar thing around her, and so she talks to herself, allowing the sound of her words to ground her. If she can hear her own voice, then the world cannot be too far off its orbit.
“Okay,” she says again, sitting on the tree stump.
Unfolding around her in all directions is a warm green meadow. In the distance she can see fences the size of staples, and barns the size of Monopoly game pieces, and tiny moving dots that look like insects but are probably horses or cows or sheep. Then one of them seems to grow taller, and she realizes that whatever it is simply has a long neck, and then she says, “Alpacas. Or llamas, maybe.”
She looks up and sees a blue sky and fat, happy clouds, and the sun is even higher above, orange and round and warm, and she says, “Okay, so I’m not on Venus or something.”
Then she decides to stop talking to herself, because she feels silly doing so. She’s clearly not on Venus, or in any other strange place. She’s on someone’s farm, or in between several farms, because as she turns she can see other distant white houses and red barns and small, moving dots. She can smell fresh, clean air like she has never smelled before, and feel a soft breeze, and hear it rustle through the sheafs of—what is that, corn? wheat?—whatever that is in the distance. The sound reminds her of the ocean. It even has a sort of undulation to it, just like the sea.
She misses the ocean. Her father sometimes takes her there during visitation weekends, and they sit on the pebbly ground and sweep the rocks away from themselves, exposing the wet and brick-colored sand beneath. He shows her all sorts of interesting ways to build sturdy castles that will stand up to the surf, most of which involve packing small round rocks into the walls and foundation of the castle, and they make bets about whose will last the longest, and then the winner buys ice cream. She’s too old for these sorts of excursions with her father—all the other girls her age have their dads drop them off at the mall or the movies, or go to each others’ houses and smear blush on their cheeks and glop candy-colored polish onto their nails and speculate about blowjobs and who in the
ir class has given one—but Eleanor doesn’t care too much. She knows why she craves these moments. She was robbed of a true childhood, and now, as a teenager, she happily regresses whenever given the opportunity.
She is her own psychologist.
She told her father this theory once, and his eyes filled up with tears, and so she didn’t tell him things like that anymore. He had wrapped her up in a fierce hug, and she had felt guilty, as if acknowledging her fractured childhood was somehow accusatory. But he had to know it was true, didn’t he?
Eleanor climbs up onto the stump to see a bit farther, but it doesn’t offer much benefit. She can see a tiny bit more of the landscape, of the near-microscopic forests that seem to lie beyond the farms, and now that she squints so far she can see an almost invisible mountain towering over the whole scene, snow-capped and dusty against the sky, as if it is a scene that has been painted and then laboriously erased, and all that is left behind is a ghost of its shape.
“Where am I?” she says aloud, forgetting her decision to remain silent.
She aims for one of the white houses and starts walking. The grass is long and soft beneath her feet, which she notices now are bare. This startles her. Her shoes have been taken from her. She turns back and looks at the tree stump and the earth around it, but her shoes are not there. She looks down and realizes that she isn’t wearing her school clothes, either, but a yellow sundress with slim straps.
She doesn’t own a yellow sundress with any sort of straps.
Eleanor stands still for a moment. The wind ruffles her hair, and she reaches back to knot it behind her head, and stops with a fistful of red hair—and is paralyzed by the realization that her short hair is not short anymore.
This, of all the things she has just experienced, scares her the most, and Eleanor begins to run. The white house in the distance rocks on the horizon like a sailboat on a violent sea, and Eleanor runs until her lungs burn and she cannot run any more, and then she stops. The horizon levels out again. She bends over, hands on her knees.
When she looks up, it is because she hears voices. They are small and very, very distant, but she can hear people all the same.
“Hey!” she shouts.
The voices do not seem to have heard her at all.
She starts walking again, this time toward the voices, which seem to be to her right, away from the white house. Her feet find a mostly overgrown road, one that hasn’t been used in probably ten or twenty years. Two deep furrows in the ground, set apart at a distance not unlike the distance between a truck’s tires, have sprouted vivid pink and yellow flowers. She bends over and looks at them closely.
They look like flowers from Earth.
“Definitely not Venus,” she mutters again.
Despite herself, she finds herself slowing to a stroll. The sun warms her skin, and she discovers that she likes the sensation of being nearly naked under a thin dress. The breeze that cools her shoulders also flutters the hem of the dress, tickling her pale thighs. She closes her eyes as she walks. Her breath comes and goes in deep, fluid swallows, and her heart rate slows. She enjoys the feeling of the long hair on her neck, a little, but then it reminds her of the accident all over again, of Esmerelda’s hair caught in broken glass, and Eleanor pushes the thought away, unwilling to spoil this strange new experience with the worst of her memories.
Her mind drifts to how she arrived here, but the results are inconclusive. She was in the cafeteria, and then she wasn’t. She had told Mrs. McDearmon that she was going to the principal’s office—though that wasn’t her intention at all—and then she had walked through the door while Jack was calling her name, and there had been that strange suffusion of static or magnetism or whatever that was—
And then she had found herself here, in Iowa or something.
The voices are louder now, and she can tell that they aren’t directly ahead, but off to the side of the road. The grass is very tall there, and slim white trees form a thatched wall, and she can see no way around them but straight through, so that’s where she goes.
It can hardly be called a forest. A woods? A grove? If the trees were fruit-bearing, she might call it an orchard, but they seem like a smaller cousin of the birch tree, their branches deep green with leaves that haven’t yet begun to turn with the seasons. Which means that here it’s summer, wherever here is. The ground is different here, littered with old dry branches like bones, the grass fading, replaced with cool, peaty earth. It’s soft and refreshing beneath her feet, except for when she steps absently on one of the old branches.
The voices grow stronger as she makes her way through the grove. The trees become more interesting, distracting her from her quest. She comes upon one that has been carved with a knife, its narrow trunk scarred with words that have healed just past the point of readability. But there are more, she notices; now that she has spied the first carving, they seem to be everywhere. They are clearly the work of children. One reads boogerman getcha, and she cannot tell if that is a misspelling, or a sincere threat made by a man constructed of boogers. There are more—sleep with your eyes open, reads another; dont tell your mom im gonna getcha—and Eleanor is amused by them.
Then she comes across one that is fresher, and with a different tone altogether.
J loves E 4ever
The tree is too narrow for the words to be wrapped in a heart, so a smaller heart has been carved beneath the words.
She stares at it for a moment, and the carving speaks to her, or seems to, but she cannot understand what it might be saying. She touches it with her fingertip. The exposed inner wood is damp and smells of green. Eleanor looks down and sees curls of bark at the bottom of the tree. She bends over and picks them up, feels their softness. The carving is fresh, maybe only a few minutes old.
She turns in a circle, studying her surroundings, but she cannot see anybody else around.
Instead, she spies a treehouse, small and well constructed. It rests in the lower branches of a short tree, its doorway reachable from the ground. It is painted yellow, like her unfamiliar sundress, and it has a tiny roof and a tiny window that look like they were borrowed from a real house—wood shingles, blue shutters. Beneath the doorway is a three-step ladder, and Eleanor smiles at this.
It’s a treehouse for children.
She walks over to it, sidestepping more dead branches, and peeks inside. The wooden floor is dusty, and it appears that no one has been inside for a very long time. A bench has been built from two-by-fours and is attached to one of the walls. Stacked on the bench are books—Hardy Boys mysteries, plastic binders open to reveal transparent pages full of baseball cards, Archie comics. There is a dartboard on one wall, but the treehouse is far too small to enable accurate throws. She can see a cardboard box labeled Club Secrets, and she steps up one more rung on the ladder to peer inside it. There’s a plastic spatula, a tin flute, and a baseball.
The voices are a bit louder now, and have clearly separated into a boy’s voice and a girl’s voice. Eleanor climbs down the ladder and looks through the trees. She can’t see anybody yet, but the edge of the grove is near. She picks her way through the trees and comes to the edge of the grove and a scruffy wall of azalea bushes. The bushes are pink and flowering, and bees and hummingbirds float around their blooms.
Eleanor frowns, and looks for a way through without being stung.
She spots a gap between two bushes and heads for it, ducking low to avoid a bulbous bee the size of her big toe. She plunges through the bushes and emerges into a beautiful meadow, surrounded on all sides by the narrow white trees. It is as private a place as one might hope to find in the middle of farm country, Eleanor thinks, and as perfect a place as one might long to ever find anywhere.
There is a black pond in the middle of the open space, and even from the edge of the meadow she can see dragonflies flitting over the water and cattails bending inward. Someone has built a small footbridge over the water, arching from one side to the other. There’s an umbrella post in the ce
nter of the bridge, and a huge yellow parasol stands in it, casting a wide shadow over the water.
Beyond the pond she can see short grass, well cared for, and benches, and a makeshift baseball diamond with lovely white chalk lines and a bright, clean home plate. She hears the voices, closer now, and suddenly two children burst out of a thatch of shrubs on the first base line, and Eleanor steps back into the azaleas without thinking. She stands there, bees buzzing around her, and watches.
They are young—no more than eight, and perhaps even younger. The boy is rambunctious and silly, and has a full head of unruly brown hair. He is shirtless and tanned, and while not yet gangly, full of that promise. He will be tall and lanky by thirteen, and grow into his frame by seventeen, and in his twenties he will be well-built and make men in their forties wish they still had his metabolism.
The girl twirls along the line between the pitcher’s mound and second base, her red braids spinning like propellers, and—Jesus, Eleanor thinks. The girl is me.
Which very obviously makes the boy Jack.
She stares at the children from the privacy of the bushes. Her legs feel weak, but if she sits down she won’t be able to see the children clearly, and she is captivated and horrified by their very existence. She can feel her stomach turn, and a cool sweat breaks out on her arms and neck, and she cannot put into words how she feels.
Except she thinks this might be Venus after all.
The boy—Jack—explodes into motion, running the bases once, then twice, then making it a third time around second base before taking a spill and sending up a cloud of red-brown dust. He laughs and laughs, and the little red-haired girl—Eleanor—runs to him and slides to her knees. Even from the edge of the meadow Eleanor can see the grass stains that appear on her young doppelganger’s dress.
