Foreverland Is Dead

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