Yesterday's Gone: Season One

throat. “I don’t know how else to say this, so I guess I’ll just pour the words from my mouth and see how they fall.”  
    He faced the woman. “Ma’am,” he said, “I believe your daughter needs some help, and I’m quite sure that’s why we’re here.”
    The woman gasped, then nodded and burst into tears. She gestured for Will and Luca to come inside the lobby. Desmond, the leader man, put his hand on her arm and whispered in her ear. She nodded, then kept walking toward the makeshift bed where her daughter was sleeping.
    Will and Luca stood side-by-side in front of the girl. “What’s her name?” Luca asked.  
    “It’s Paola.” Her mom said, brushing the girl’s cheek.
    Paola.
    “Are you ready?” Will asked Luca.
    Luca said nothing, just looked at Will and nodded, then took a step toward Paola.  
    It’s just like when Mommy gets her haircut. The girl needs to be pretty so her energy will start working and make her better again. I know how to do it if I just do what I know, like when I don’t think about anything but hugging Mommy and then her sad spiders go away. She said I’m the best at that, and not just because I’m her little boy.  
    Luca placed his palms on Paola’s forehead and squeezed his eyes shut.  

    * * * *

PAOLA OLSON

    Paola had no idea how long she had been trying to figure out where she was, but it felt like forever. Time had definitely gotten weird. So had everything else.  
    The world was familiar, but... soupy.
    It was Daddy at the gas station, but something awful happened and he suddenly wasn’t Daddy. He did something bad to me... something to my thoughts... then he went away and left me... here.
    She was lying on the ground of the gas station for a while, until her mom and Desmond came to get her.   They drove her back to the hotel.  
    Why can’t they hear me? They just keep looking at me, worried.  
    She didn’t feel like a ghost, or like she imagined being a ghost would feel like. It felt more like she was standing on the other side of the looking glass in a Lewis Carol book. She could see her body, her mom, and Desmond in the vehicle, as if she were watching through a giant window which only she could see through. Paola pushed her hands hard against the world in front of her until the web of reality pushed back, seeping between her splayed fingers.  
    She gasped and fell a step back.  
    She looked around her again.  
    At the far end of the lobby was a giant oak door. It hand’t been there before, and couldn’t have been real since it was too tall to fit the lobby, with a small moat circling the front. A moat full of dead people.
    That’s where the kitchen used to be.  
    The door turned into a drawbridge and the moat multiplied 20 times in size. Paola started walking toward it. That dark thing that had pretended to be Daddy had promised her answers. It was probably inside.
    She stepped through the large oak door where the kitchen used to be, but no kitchen counters were on the other side. Just a black hallway with a small square of light at the center.  
    The hallway wasn’t long, but when Paola reached the far end and stepped into the light on the other side, she was obviously on some sort of never-ending road. And while it wasn’t yellow, it was made of brick. The walls around her had fallen away, replaced with flowing fields of grass for as far as she could see in every direction.
    Above her was the clearest, bluest sky she’d ever seen — an endless canopy hanging over miles of neatly bricked road which winded through a meadow, across a flower-carpeted ground, then up into rolling knolls of emerald grass where it vanished at the horizon.
    The road was a thing of fairytales, but something about it was scary. False like the thing that had pretended to be her daddy. She turned back around, but her opportunity to return to the hotel vanished, along with the door and the entire hotel. Nothing but grass. And the road.
    She took a step forward, and then another.
    Paola kept walking for what felt like years, in that way that time seemed to sometimes stretch in dreams. She desperately wanted to run into the thick, tall forests that had cropped up on either side of the meadow and see everything she could not see.  
    It was wonderful where she could not go; she just knew it. That’s where the Fantasy lived, all the make-believe her mind had ever made, frolicking free, away from the memories and hard textures of truth.  
    But I have to stay on