Miranda Myers. Dispose.
The room tilts. Begins to turn.
She uses both hands to cover her face again.
Because it can’t be. Because Miranda is alive, she’s standing next to the table.
Not in that bag.
Something touches her hair.
She jerks back. A coil of wire dangles on a hook suspended from the ceiling, a needle attached to the end, pointing at the table.
Pointing at the bag.
She shakes her head, backing away. The room is dusty. The counters are covered with open journals and stacks of books, scattered pens and paper clips. A chair lies on its side. The computers are dead.
Except for the one across from the tables.
The one with the green light.
Her heart thumps in her throat. Ears ringing.
She’s hardly breathing when she reaches down, touches the green light. When the monitor flashes.
Two photos appear side by side, separated by a column of data. One is an image of an old woman, liver spots on her puffy cheeks; her eyes, saggy. The gray hair is thin.
The other is a young girl with blonde hair and a fair complexion. It’s Miranda. But that’s not what the name at the bottom indicates.
Sandy, it says. Crossover complete.
The young girl is Sandy. And the old woman has a name, but Miranda doesn’t read it. She knows what it says. She knows who she is.
What she’s done.
“This is the Fountain of Youth,” Mr. Williams had said.
For Sandy, the place is the River of Death.
Suddenly, the house feels like a coffin. The walls are tighter and thicker. The world, heavier.
She drops her hands, willfully inhaling the scent of death. Accepting it. Gagging on it.
Staggers into the hall.
Into the front room.
Hand on the window. The glass is so cold.
The empty world is cloaked in eternal winter.
60
Time is erased by pain.
There were trees and rocks, hills and valleys. And snow.
Cyn is draped over Kat and Mad. At times she’s limp, her feet dragging behind them, carving a line in the snow. Fever rages inside, makes the shivering more violent. Her bladder swells with urine, but she resists the urge to let it go. What does it matter now?
Roc keeps an eye on the old man, who is following behind at a safe distance. Cyn guides them, but she’s not sure. It’s hard to think, her thoughts flowing like molasses. And everything is white.
The trees creak overhead, the branches waving, occasionally snapping. The storm batters the valley as they exit the forest. The girls sway like the trees but keep their balance. Cyn rests her chin on her chest, concentrates on each step, looking every so often.
She’s just not sure.
“There.” Mad says it. “Look at that.”
They force Cyn to stand taller, pulling her arms across their shoulders. At first she only sees a canvas smudged with whites and grays. She blinks heavily, licking her lips.
A hill.
A tree.
The branches without needles. Without snow. An artifact, of sorts, resisting the winter storm, not of this world. A gate to another.
She tries to turn her head. The girls turn her to see the old man emerge from the trees, Sid at his side. Mr. Williams looks up.
He sees it, too.
He knows.
“Go,” Cyn says. “Remember…to fall.”
“We’re not leaving you,” Kat says.
“I can get out, don’t worry.” Lie.
The old man says something. Sid lets go of him.
And the girls are running, pulling Cyn up the hill. Roc plows ahead of them, hopping through the knee-deep snow. Kat shouts, but Roc doesn’t slow down, bounding for the exit with a wolf at her heels.
The girls struggle to breathe.
Cyn’s head bounces; the world falters.
She’s slammed through the snow and into the ground beneath, the frigid fluff falling over her. The shouts are muffled. A dull thud of a boot on her in the back.
Her head cracks beneath another boot. Lights sparkle.
Pressure on top. Someone holding her beneath the surface.
Suffocating. Drowning.
The weight rolls off. She pushes up, her face in the wind, gulping air. The world is blurry. Spinning. An animal is devouring Kat and Mad.
Not an animal.
Sid.
His long arms are flailing. The girls covering up, screaming. They’re too far away. Cyn crawls, but she can’t reach them, can’t help them, can’t stop the animal thrashing— Another crash.
Bodies tumble down the slope, slamming into her. Arms and legs, elbows and knees. Screaming. Roc growls like cornered prey, slashing at Sid’s face. Sid rolls over to get leverage, falls into Cyn’s lap.
She locked her arms around his waist.
She latches her hands together, clasping each wrist. She wills her arms to clamp her dead fingers down. Sid throws his weight backwards and they roll down the slope. She comes up for air.
“Gooooo!”
She can’t see them.
But she feels them hesitate.
Feels them bolt for the top of the hill. For the gate.
And then she closes her eyes. She buries her head against Sid’s back, avoids the wild elbows, resists the twisting and rolling. Her fingers slip but don’t release.
Down the hill they go.
She only hopes that the girls fall.
All the way back to reality. To the truth.
Her arms are empty.
She doesn’t remember letting go.
A shadow passes over. She looks up, snow melting on her lips. Mr. Williams is looking down. Sid is holding him up, blood streaming from both nostrils and dripping from his chin.
Mr. Williams clutches his chest, leaning against the boy.
“Wait…until I’m gone,” he wheezes. “Then finish her.”
“You’ll leave him here?” The words are long and slurred on her slow tongue. “He’ll go back to the Nowhere.”
He looks up the slope, trying to catch his breath. “He doesn’t know any different. A blissful idiot.”
The old man rustles the boy’s hair, mouthing the words good boy. He starts the climb, falling twice. It takes great effort to get up, to find his balance. Cyn holds out hope he’ll tumble down, that he’ll lack the strength to reach up, that somehow he’ll freeze to the ground like a stone.
He slips only two steps from the gate, resting on his knees. He looks up, a ghostly supplicant raising his head to a false idol, a dead tree, his only hope of escape.
One foot. Then the other.
He stands.
Grasps.
And becomes translucent. She sees the tree through his fading body. Sees sleet and snow blowing through him.
And then he’s gone.
But so are the girls.
They made it. They’re waking up. And so is the old man, but in whose body? His is dead.
She knows. “Finish her,” he said.
Once again, a shadow passes over her. Sid kneels. His fingers are like cold steel on her throat. Her lungs burn, but she doesn’t resist, even when all the oxygen is used up. She doesn’t feel much as the world fades.
Warmth fills her.
And winter is gone.
Winter is gone.
61
Sleep so deep. Dreamless, beautiful sleep.
A place inside that’s warm and cozy. Like an infant pressed to her mother’s breast, curled up and safe. Melting in a loving embrace.
No boundaries.
No lies.
Everything exposed. Present.
Nothing rejected.
Mmmmmmm.
She’s not aware she’s sleeping. There is no ‘out there,’ no ‘me,’ and no ‘you.’
No ‘this’ or ‘that.’
And she rests in that moment. That eternal moment.
Having been
nowhere, there is nowhere to go. Just here.
She’s not sure when she became this. There are no thoughts, no memories.
Images arise.
Nothing she sees; it’s just pictures, like she is the dream. She is all of it. She is the hills and trees, the wind and snow.
There is beauty and joy, cold and pain. Warmth and pleasure. And great sadness fills the heavens, tears falling in great, salty drops, becoming snowflakes in the frigid loneliness.
It’s all there, all contained in this perfect moment where it all makes sense. Where it’s all perfectly flawed.
Nothing to be changed.
She is this. And she smiles.
She expands, feeling endless and eternal. But there are boundaries. There is a line at which she stops, a great circle that envelops the wondrous wilderness. There is a tree in the middle, one with barren branches, smooth and rippling, a tree splitting a granite boulder.
A boy sits on the hillside not far from it.
He’s next to a girl. She lies so still, her vacant eyes staring into the gray sky.
Me.
She inhabited that body. She left it, became this…this…she became this. And the boy, he did it. He held her down, pressed his thumbs into her windpipe until her bladder released and her lungs contracted.
Her heart beat its last note.
This is all a dream.
The scenes shift, her focus turning to the north, soaring through the trees, beneath the hills, and emerging above the cabins.
Miranda sits in the brick house, one sock hanging from her foot. The other is bare. Music blares, but she doesn’t hear it. She sits cross-legged, muttering nonsense.
The walls growing closer. The air thinner.
Outside, the snow ceaselessly piles atop the roofs, growing thicker and heavier. The remains of the bunkhouse topple beneath the weight. The dinner house door is wide open, winter’s breath frosting the table, snow filling the corners.
The garden is summer’s graveyard, the crops long dead and buried. It is the final resting place for another body, a lump in the middle, its brown skin hidden beneath winter’s blanket along with the reprehensible things the old man did to it.
Where are you, Jen?
Safe.
It’s a word. It doesn’t echo. It’s a thought permeating the land. Jen is safe, it says.
Jen is safe.
Deep in the woods there is a small cabin. Inside, an old woman is withered and dry. She won’t die. She can’t.
She is this world.
She is the one that holds them, the one that imprisons them.
Why won’t you let us go?
There is no answer.
Only the slow rise and fall of the ancient woman’s chest.
But images unfold.
She sees the old woman’s life. She knows her past. Her life. She sees, she feels and knows what is Patricia Ballard.
She was not a happy child. She could not see the difference between thoughts and reality. She struggled with dense emotions, a contracted life, and tortured thoughts. She was diagnosed as mentally ill, her adult life immersed in the psychotropic haze, of dry mouth and dull eyes.
Numb emotions.
She cut herself to feel alive. She plucked her eyebrows to punish herself for being so broken. She cried and screamed. Laughed.
Her life frayed, the edges quickly coming undone.
In her sane moments, she demonstrated brilliance. She painted vivid portraits, wrote stunning poetry, and conducted tearful sonnets. But the malaise of insanity washed those moments of genius from her, left her empty.
Reality was harsh. She couldn’t accept it.
She said no.
She was a vortex of emotions spiraling into itself.
Until her husband saved her. Her husband bent reality to fit her warped identity. He gave her a universe, made her a goddess. The memory of the needle piercing her frontal lobe is parched and faded. She hardly remembers it.
Patricia has resided within the confines of her own mind longer than the outside world. She created these landscapes, this world. She gave life to her own reality, the way she wanted it to be. She developed stars, created Heaven and Hell, God and Devil, and all the entities in between.
She lived in a lush paradise, an endless beach with tepid waters. She savored the sun’s kiss, the moon’s caress. Eternity was hers, as she wished it to be.
But loneliness crept into her universe.
She craved another’s voice, the touch of a stranger.
She created cities with buildings and streets, cars jamming intersections and cafés with coffee, bars with whiskey. She walked among the people who lived in the skyscrapers; she acted like them, talked to them. But no matter how many came to the city, she knew they were just illusions.
They were just thoughts.
And the loneliness howled like winter.
Until her son came for her. He took her away, linked her with his own mind. Her son! She was no longer alone. And soon there were others. Children came to play. They came to the island.
Foreverland.
There were boys on the island. And the girls went to see them, spending day and night with them, wanting so badly to escape the reality of the cabin, to go to Foreverland.
Forever.
Patricia’s loneliness dissipated.
Joy reigned. Filled her like the sun.
But she knew what her son was doing to the children. She could feel their identities fraying into the gray void, coming apart at the seams torn from the fabric of their souls. They dissolved.
They never returned.
But there were always more. Always new children to experience. And she was so happy. She had never had this, not in the real world.
And when he disappeared, when her son blinked out of existence, the sadness, the loneliness returned like a scornful god. It struck her long and slow, a cold blade slinking deep into her soul, cutting her over and over.
Forever and ever.
Her universe became cold and isolated, absorbing the details of the real world. Her reality was as harsh as the outside world. There was nothing she could do to stop it. Patricia spiraled into madness once again.
Snow falls in frozen tears.
It piles onto the roofs. Buries the land.
Let us go, Cyn thinks.
And day follows night.
Day follows night.
The snow falls. The weight buckles the dinner house.
The wind harvesters fracture under the weight.
The solar panels become lumps in a frozen land.
Miranda is driven mad with loneliness and guilt. She no longer eats. No longer moves. Frost covers the windows. When the end arrives, she goes to the bedroom and dresses in shiny black shoes and a striped dress. Her foggy breath streams between her chattering lips as she applies eye shadow, smacking her lips with red lipstick.
She walks outside, into the bitter world.
No coat.
Just a wish for the end.
She’s numb within minutes. Her skin blue. The snow up to her waist.
She makes it to the meadow, where she falls. Where the dimness creeps in.
She is the last of the girls, and she goes to sleep in death’s eternal grip.
Let us go, Cyn asks again.
I’m sorry. Patricia’s voice tearfully echoes. She answers, No.
Cyn experiences the warmness, once again. The lovely embrace of eternity. Feels the old woman take her to her breast, their souls merging.
Loving.
And night falls on the world.
But she will live to see the sun rise again.
62
The rising sun on us, day beginning.
The sky collapses.
And consumes us all.
The rooster is crowing.
He pulls her from a deep sleep. She struggles to open her eyes, the trace of the terrible dream still glowing.
The sky collapsing on a gray world.
Something vibr
ates in her throat, a moan escapes her lips. She doesn’t recognize it as her own. Her eyes flutter open, her heart matching the alarm. Wake up!
It’s dark. She can’t see. But she feels the bed, feels the pillow cradling her head. She stares ahead, wondering where she is and how she got there.
There are rafters. There are beds with smooth blankets and empty pillows.
The rooster beckons.
She pulls her sheets back, slowly sits up. Eyes fully open, searching. The scuffed floor is gritty and cold. She stands up, wearing a long t-shirt that reaches to mid-thigh and reeks of hard labor.
There’s a small table beneath a window, an empty bed on the other side of it. Her reflection in the glass looks like an apparition. It must be very early morning; a hint of light illuminates massive white posts with churning blades. Horse hooves thunder in the distance.
She stubs her toe on a pair of worn boots, the tongues pulled out. Her feet fit snugly, the creases stiff and biting. They clop on the wood floor—
“Who’s there?” someone says.
The girl freezes.
Something bangs the table. “Ow.”
The girl stares into the back corner, sees a small figure bend over to rub her knee. She reaches out. The tip of a match flares, tossing shadows into the rafters. A candle holds the flame.
“Who are you?” the girl in back asks.
The girl in boots doesn’t answer. The candlelight is reflecting inside a tin shield, directing it away from the girl holding it. The girl in boots lights a candle on the table in front of her.
The cabin glows warmly.
The girl in the back steps back. Her hair is black and shaved; her t-shirt down to her knees and smudged with dirt. Her skin is dark.
“Who are you?” the girl asks again.
“I don’t know,” the girl in boots answers.
She swings the candle around. There are boxes under the bed and slashes carved into the wall. She steps closer, leans over the bed. The marks are gouged into the wood, bundled in fives. The last several marks are thin and weak, like they were scratched with a fingernail or a butter knife.
There are voices outside.
“Dammit,” someone says. “Hold still before I box you one in the ear.” Long pause. “You said this ain’t real.”
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