Foreverland Is Dead

loops. Cyn pushes back on the bed, grabs a pillow. The man folds the belt over and snaps it. She squeals.
    He grins. “You deserve this.”
    The belt stings the tops of her toes. She crawls back, hiding behind the pillow. He snatches her foot before she can yank it away. Grips her ankle like a vise.
    She hears the zipper.
    Feels the full weight of the man. His chest in her face. The smell of his armpit. He uses his knees to open her legs. She feels so small.
    So young.
    She feels the pressure as he pushes inside her. Like a pipe.
    “You deserve this.” He thrusts.
    She tears.
    Screams into the hand cupped over her mouth .

    The gray moves in and she’s back in the woods.
    She scuffles across the soft needles, back in to the world without color. Her eyes wide with panic, afraid to look down, afraid to see a red stain spreading between her legs.
    A memory.
    Her stepfather had done that to her in a trailer outside Cleveland. He raped her for years…until she left. She wasn’t old enough to go out on her own, but she was smart enough to leave.
    Why do I remember that now? Where the hell am I?
    It’s coming back.
    She feels it rumbling like electricity, a storm stampeding from out there, a battering ram plunging forward. She starts to get up, begins to run deeper into the trees, away from the cliff—
    Asphalt scuffs her cheek. Something drips and echoes.
    Her face is fat and numb. Her body like wood. There’s pressure in her arm.
    “You did it,” someone whispers. His voice echoes. “You killed her.”
    Somebody weeps.
    Footsteps splash away.
    Cyn bats open her eyes, heavy like coins. She wants to run, too. She can’t feel anything. Her chest rises and falls, involuntarily. She wants it to stop. There’s something bad, something rotten inside her. She wants to flush it out, to get away.
    For it all to end.
    She moves her arm, the pressure spikes at her elbow.
    A syringe. A needle filled with red. Stuck in a bulging vein.
    She just can’t get away—

    Cyn sobs into the ground. The memory is a dead weight on her chest. She starts crawling away from the memories. Away from her life. I don’t want to remember, I don’t want to know! Stop this…please, stop.
    The needles begin to thin. She feels a clump of grass.

    She’s beneath an underpass—

    Running from the police—

    Swings her fist, her knuckles meeting the soft flesh of collapsing nose—

    It’s so hard to crawl.
    The memories pile into her, filling her like liquid metal, sluggish in her veins. Heavy on her heart.
    Cyn closes her eyes.
    She crawls deeper into the trees, further away.
    Clutching more grass, fewer needles. Hand over hand, like pulling out of hole. She feels a breeze. The wet tickle of grass on her cheeks.
    Her legs are dead.
    She rolls onto her back. The gray turns to black. And stars sparkle. The moon brightly smiling in a clear night sky.
    Cyn lies on the slope. The trees below her.
    She made it out of the clearing. It’s not an escape, just another fence. Another nightmare.
    But the entire day has passed. Night has arrived.
    She doesn’t attempt to get up. Sleep, as it always does, arrives like a hammer. She hears herself whimpering, fearing not the wolf’s howl, but her return to the gray.

23

    Miranda sits back, binoculars up. Her eyes ache, but she continues to scan the horizon, a landscape void of life beyond trees and grass. The snowy mountains pale in the setting sun’s dying light, appearing after so many days behind gray skies.
    Cyn has been gone all day.
    The girls have been outside. Jen cleaned out the garden, harvesting the last of the vegetables. Kat’s in the barn, Mad is in the kitchen. And Roc came to eat.
    But no Cyn.
    It’s getting late.
    Candlelight flickers inside the dinner house. Miranda turns the binoculars to one of the windows, adjusts the focus. She sees Jen with a plate in front of her. She bows her head for a moment before scooping up food with her spoon.
    Dinner is over in less than a minute.
    Jen licks the plate. Miranda imagines the others are doing the same. The girls move past the windows, wiping the table and gathering the plates. Except Roc.
    She goes back to bed.
    Miranda slices off a piece of cheese she found in the back of the pantry. She was eating it with crackers earlier, but she needs to save those. There are only four boxes left. She figures if she eats ten a day, they’ll last four months. It’s been hard holding back. Sometimes she wonders if it’s easier to have