Foreverland Is Dead

front door.
    Jen looks at her plate. The food completely untouched.
    “Eat your breakfast.” Cyn forks eggs into her mouth. “If not, the rest of us will. But they won’t, Jen.”
    She eats.

34

    Cyn limps towards the barn, trying to keep the crutches from chafing her underarms. The sleet is sticking to the walls, wet on her face. Kat waits in the open breezeway. Mr. Williams is at the other end, looking at the mountains.
    “Want me to stay?” Kat asks.
    “No. Watch the boy, he’s in the bunkhouse.”
    Kat steps aside. Cyn slows, careful not to slip. She leans the crutches against the stall. One of the horses pokes his head out, nibbling on the end of the crutch; his eyes are large in his skull.
    Cyn takes a moment, then slow, limited steps down the middle of the breezeway.
    “You did the right thing,” Kat says.
    Cyn stops, looks back.
    “He’s up to something and we ain’t got time,” Kat adds. “Hunger’ll make anyone talk. You did the right thing.”
    She leaves her to go alone. Cyn doesn’t want to admit it, but she’s relieved someone understands.
    “Quite a sight.” Mr. Williams doesn’t turn around. “Rich and detailed, not a thing missing. It’s beautiful.”
    Cyn refuses to sit on the bench. She stands next to him. She’s already sweating.
    “You’re cold and hungry.” He looks at her, nostrils flaring. “You have an infection, you’ll have a fever. It’s all very convincing.”
    “No more games.”
    “I wanted to see the brick house before having this talk. It’ll make more sense once I see the inside.”
    “I get the feeling you won’t come out.”
    He looks across the pasture again. A gust of wind hits the wind harvesters.
    “None of this is real.” His expression is flat. He’s no longer enamored with the view.
    “I thought you would take this seriously.” She turns around, wishing the crutches were closer. “Let me know when you’re hungry.”
    She makes it to the first stall.
    “You dream about the gray world at night.”
    She stops, hand on the wall.
    “You dream of static, of fog and haze. You dream that something is out there in that nothingness, but then you wake up. You realize it’s just a dream.”
    His voice is stronger.
    “But then you went to the edge and discovered it wasn’t a dream. You stepped out of the cold, out of this world, and saw the nothingness that is in your dreams. You went there, you peered into the gaping gray sky, the world of the Nowhere.”
    Cyn scratches the old wood. Not finding something to grab, she collapses on a bench, leaning back.
    Exhaling.
    “Where did you go?” he asks. “Where did you find the edge of this world?”
    “Two miles out, straight south,” she mutters. “There’s another fence.”
    “That’s not a fence, not like what’s around the brick house. That is the limit of this world. You stepped out of it and into the Nowhere.”
    She turns her distant gaze to him. He’s a fuzzy silhouette, the snowcapped mountain a bright, white backdrop. Her stomach turns.
    “That gray void of nothing used to be another illusory world like this one, only it was tropical and lustrous and exotic. You won’t remember this, but you and the girls would come visit it, but that was a long time ago, before it collapsed and Sid and I became homeless souls.”
    He steps closer.
    “Our… identities …if that’s what you want to call them—our true Selves—are frayed and dissolving. I don’t think there’s any way to truly express what it’s like to be lost in the gray, Cyn.”
    She twitches. He smiles.
    “You only came for a visit; we live out there. Imagine what it feels like to be pulled apart, piece by piece, and set loose on the wind, randomly mixed with so many other disintegrated souls. Sid and I were doomed to waste away, becoming thinner. Becoming less. Our souls bleached lifeless.”
    He laughs without mirth.
    “But then you peeked into the Nowhere, you shone like a beacon. Suddenly, I knew this world still existed, that there was something out there besides the Nowhere. We were able to draw out of the miasma of despair.”
    He looks at his hands, turns them over like he still can’t believe it.
    “Sid, my boy, didn’t transition as well as I did. Part of him is still out there.”
    “The world doesn’t end, Mr. Williams. You don’t walk two miles and drop off the edge.”
    “In this one you do.”
    “No, but someone did insert something in our necks that gets triggered by an electrical fence.