A place of peculiarities, of surprises, of worlds turned inside out. This is our Imaginarium – a place where witches exist alongside preachers. On this journey, time and place are not always as they seem.

This issue of StepAway has been a joy to edit. I enjoyed reading every submission. Every single one. At times truly creative, innovative, and evocative – experiencing such a wide scope of fantasy worlds in a short time was like sitting in on a focus group discussing the human psyche. Why do we love to create fantasy lands as much as we do, and why do we like to lose ourselves in the alien worlds of others? Could it be that these lands help us to explore untapped parts of ourselves – effectively shining a light on the secrets under darkness? Or is it the opposite – allowing us a place to hide amongst the gorse and greenery?

This issue begins with a fire and ends in a chamber below the streets of New Orleans. Where you’ll go in the middle, is a surprise.

The stories, poems, and tales that sit between both compliment and contradict each other, both in narrative and form. Sometimes, the fantasy world is a literal one, and at other times, it’s all in the interpretation of very everyday things.  After all, who doesn’t feel wonder and awe when they look up at the stars that hang above our heads every night?

Thank you to all our contributors: Ash Clifton, Liana Kapelke-Dale, Holly Day, Anthony Gayle, André Geleynse, Nels Hanson, Tim Hildebrandt, David Lawrie, Ilona Martonfi, Fiona Mossman, W. T. Paterson, John Sullivan, Rekha Valliappan, Lenore Weiss & Elinora Westfall. You’ve made this issue spectacular.

Yours,

Caroline Hardaker
Guest Editor, StepAway Magazine

            We moved to Grandma’s house after the apartment burned down and everyone cried, “Fire, fire,” in the black night, embers pirouetted to the street, sparkling in the air like blessings no one wanted, smoke careened from the window, until firemen slanted their ladders against the side of the building, climbed up and found us lying fetal on the floor. Everything was red, red, and orange, Mom placed a wet rag over my mouth; the firemen rescued her also, and carried us downstairs, rung by rung like heavy packages from the supermarket, and then we moved to Grandma’s house. Now I don’t know which one was worse—the fire or living with her. No one could rescue us. She was a real witch.

            We lived in the backroom of her house and slept on a bed that pulled down from the wall.  Every morning we pushed it back, laughed, and called it our secret. The place was located far from the city, even farther than the suburbs or any shopping mall, a place where coyotes howled at night from the rim of her property, and Grandma Avochoka answered them, stuck her head out the window and yipped back in coyote language. And then everything went quiet, which was the scariest part because I never knew what was going to happen next—whether she was inviting them to dinner and serving us as the entrée, or if they were just passing the time between them, being that there was not much else to do. One day my mother disappeared. I was sure either the coyotes or Grandma had done something terrible to her. I knew my time was short.

            She looked ordinary enough, white hair wrapped in a tight bun stuck with a plastic spray of lilacs. Her clothing was tailored, embroidered with pictures of small animals, rabbits and squirrels, and lined with gray silk, which was the softest thing I ever touched. Any time she smiled, which she did sometimes before talking to the coyotes, I saw silver wires along the top of her gums. They held her teeth in one place like staples. Sometimes she placed those yellow teeth in a glass jar next to the sink and stirred the water with her finger. I always avoided them, afraid they’d leap out from the jar and bite me. But the thing that gave her away, the thing that made me know she was a witch, was a mirror she spoke to every morning in a voice that wasn’t hers, where she pleaded over and over to see my mother.

            I was eight years old. I had no place to go, no idea how my mother could’ve grown up so normal. Grandma said once summer was over, I could start school, and said the teacher was an old friend. None of that sounded good. I never saw a single car pass by her house, otherwise, I would’ve darted outside and asked to be taken to the fire station, anywhere else, but not with Grandma Avochoka. By now, I could pull the bed down from the wall, but had to stand on a stool to reach its handle. I spent a lot of time in bed crying for my mother, or wandering outside pulling dandelions from the weedy grass, wishing to find her, and following the seeds as they drifted along in the air.

            Grandma always spied on me, her plastic lilac drooping over her one ear. “You can’t go wandering far from the house. There are snakes out there,” which didn’t surprise me one bit. She was scared I’d escape and I’d run and tell everyone how awful she was, and how she had fed my mother to the coyotes, and how she took out her teeth at night. I stood outside her kitchen window and collected pebbles, small rocks, admiring their different sizes and colors, and threw them one after the other at the glass, faster and faster, everything began to rattle. She ran down the front steps with a broom. “Stop! You must stop!” I started screaming as loudly as I could, a noise that came from deep within me. The scream made me stronger and her house burst into flames, smoke careening from the windows, and she shouted, “Fire, fire!”

Lenore Weiss

Anthony Gayle

in foggy darkness everyone disappeared
empty footprints left in clotted mud
            and deep in plush carpet

fingerprints left on paper coffee cups
on countertops in local cafes

echoes still bouncing back and forth
across the Grand Canyon

in a blink i was alone
at the outskirts of my border town
where the train tracks crossed
and tagged boxcars now stood
resigned to early rust

after a few days the power went out
window             after               window
one streetlamp                         then another

the darkness followed me as i wandered
as though i were flipping all the switches
as i passed

i found you in the back
of an old tattoo parlor shrouded in dust

you sat on the floor
as ink began to crust with blood
over the small symbol you’d just finished
tattooing on the inside of your wrist

                       zero

Zed,
i thought at you
and you stopped and looked around,
       brow furrowed

i watched you find a shower at the back of the shop
       it must have been the only running water                   in the city
i watched while you stripped naked
       for a second i felt you would strip yourself to bone
              the way you clawed
              off your clothes
              as though they burned you

but you baptized yourself, head bowed
                                                             beneath

the spray pouring over you
            warm rivulets streamed down your thighs
red and black ran down to your fingertips
from the lone               z e r o                          on your wrist

i found a stack of musty towels
in a nearby closet
and when you finally turned the spigot and raised your head

you looked directly at me

i padded over to you, shoes discarded,
offered a towel

a thin golden strand threaded between our eyes
as we watched each other,                                          s i l e n t

you sized me up
then let me pat you down
                                                pat               pat                   pat
with the towel
my fingers lingering in your hair,
            damp and soft as puppy down,
pausing at your lips
            to feel the warm breath
            on my skin

your breath tingled my hands

            how long since i felt goosebumps
            since the light hair on my arms stood alert
                        and at attention
            how long since one simple touch

i closed my eyes
you interlocked your fingers
            with mine

and since that day
we’ve walked from town to town
watched the earth slowly reclaim its body
no need to hurry

two zeros became one

once, we passed a cinema
where movies somehow still
s t r e a m e d     s i l e n t l y
down from the silver screen
onto empty seats,
waves and particles of light
giving a half-life to films half-remembered

today we drift through a city
that’s forgotten its name
the sky above blushes in embarrassment,
            sun ready to slink below the horizon
            and hide
as we see the forgotten metropolis

its buildings left
negligently in the care
of sun and sky
reduced to brittling skeletons
by the wind’s sharp bite

window             after               window
one streetlamp                         then another,

the light follows us as we wander

as though we’re flipping all the switches
as we pass

Liana Kapelke-Dale

London.

            Spread across the dining room table, the newspaper is dissected, absorbed, and devoured voraciously. This rag, running necklaces of dirty type that smudges fingertips, this dirty Herald, the only touchstone with the world outside Bloomsbury Square. Today the paper tantalises with a headline on a comet streaking through the southern hemisphere; one slice of an onion-thin page and there it is, an artist’s sad rendering that accompanies the story of the Great Meteor shower of 1922, first seen in Cordoba, Argentina.

            Over wire-rimmed glasses, Virginia Woolf peers down at the drawing, takes in the words, breathes in an imagined Argentinian starry sky.

            By the 12th December—the paper informs her—the nucleus had all but disappeared but the long tail retained a bright viscosity that shot through the wintry sky near Princeton, New Jersey, its breathless magnitude an estimated 140,000,000 miles long and still visible to the naked eye. That said, the storywriter concludes spitefully, “It is very doubtful whether people generally would know anything about the occurrence until they read of it in the papers.”

            Were she so inclined, she would track down the writer and slit his miserable throat just for that attitudinal prose alone. Fortunately, it is in her practical nature to reserve homicidal urges (imaginative, of course) for matters of a more pressing nature—most recently, an unknown and heinously boring writer who had shunned the press after Leonard declined his manuscript, and thus, her imagination rushed him to an early grave – a razor blade to the throat perhaps, a body slumped in an unmarked grave wrapped in a Persian rug – perhaps the very rug she’d had Nelly send out for just the other day, which had been delivered two hours early, and she herself had had to see in the delivery men.

            There is the chink of glass against glass, somebody is pouring her another drink, and Virginia reclines back in her chair, happy to allow the conversation to continue around her. She is back in the room, present again, a flurry of fire-lit faces unaware that she had ever left. She sweeps a thumb across inky fingertips and crowns a drawing of Tutankhamen on the opposite fold on the paper with her discarded glasses, which distort a thick spray of stars in a farsighted lens. She fixes her expression just over Leonard’s shoulder, to the window – she looks into the winter evening. All that is visible are shadows from the dim light of other buildings, other rooms, gaslights along the street, and beyond that, the eternal vault of the city that harbours so many of her dreams. For long hours the dreary, muddy, rainy winter stays encapsulated in darkness; winters are different here than they are in Rodmell. Even after everything that has happened, she still thinks of London as home. She still thinks of returning. But there is no undoing the past, no returning from Rodmell to here—the precarious edge of the world, where this strange city captures voices unknown to Mr. Bell’s invitation of a dinner party, where the abstraction of the waves of imagination always fit, painful and unerring, in the form of a novel, an essay, a word on the tip of her tongue – a story that takes flight mid stride down a street fuelled and chased by everybody else’s conversation.

            How exciting other people were.

            She had become lost again, a train of thought abruptly derailed by the door opening, a great oak of a door, creaking on its hinges, and she was back in the room for the second time, transfixed by the sudden entrance of another woman, the conversation, she realised, having taken a rather alarming turn, and Vanessa, blushing, was clutching Lytton’s arm in mock dismay.

             “You can either become an actress or a whore,” Clive was saying, though the subject of conversation was lost on her. Then the damning line, aimed at Vanessa: “I’d say the latter, as your acting in the bedroom has always proved a mastery of your performance.”

            Somehow, Virginia is neither shocked nor offended, neither does she look across at her sister, Vanessa, who she knows very well will be sinking herself into Duncan Grant’s shoulder, much to Lytton’s despair. She hears Clive’s usual demanding rap upon the table, following, what he thought was a comment of great hilarity, followed by the shoulder-hunched uxoriousness of his posture, as if in the time between the knock and the opening of the door he thinks better of his behaviour, and suddenly, once again, he is in love.

             “Who is that?” It’s Dorothy that speaks after what appears to be a considerable amount of time, and Virginia wonderers if she had somehow seen the door open even before it had.

             “Mrs Harold Nicholson”, “Lady Sackville-West”, “The Right Honourable…” Whispers pass between the glasses, and Clive stands, chair legs grating fiercely on the flagstone floor, and opens his arms to welcome the late guest.

             “Vita!”

             She shines with a candle lit radiance, stalking on legs like beech trees, pink glowing, grape clustered, pearl hung. Lytton pulls a chair from the table with the lavish gesture of the half-drunk, and Roger Fry pours wine into her glass as she comments on the décor, touches the fine satin of the curtain, as marvellous as what lies between a woman’s legs, and says, “Virginia Woolf,” slowly, as though she were reading her name for the first time whilst tracing a finger along the spine of Mrs Dalloway, and finally Virginia sees her face in the light, plain, handsome, dark eyes burning as if she were coming out of a fevered dream. Virginia is no romantic, but she imagines her own eyes in response, the perihelion—the blazing comet at its closest point to the sun, so dazzlingly close to immolation—to be this elusive shade of blue, cool and hot at once.

             And then, before Virginia can respond, Vita is caught up unexpectedly by E.M Forster, who, sitting to her left, encompasses Vita and her attention halfway through a sentence. And then, seamlessly, she is laughing, charming, taking the floor, immediately the highlight of the evening, her being in short (what Virginia had never been) a real woman, and Virginia is left to push her wine glass half an inch further away, leaving a half-moon of condensation on the table, a puddle reflecting the fluttering caprices of the fires waxes and wanes. She feels heat rising within herself, not unlike the heat of the fire itself, only this heat is inside her, and she knows without looking up that Vita is watching her, in between conversational pauses, so, instead, she turns to her right, to Desmond MacCarthy, a man in mid-rant, who points dramatically at John Maynard-Keynes, dark eyes threaded with fine lines of bloodshot, an embroidery of failure and gin. “I trust you’ve made overtures to the fellow?” he inquires. “Suggest that he leave the premises?”

            Desmond snorts a laugh through his nose and gestures with an empty glass. “Suggestions, overt, subtle, and all gradations in between, have been felicitously extended.” And John declares that he should be “throw him to the wolves,” which Virginia mishears as the waves, a thought which rolls in, and rolls back with the suddenness of yet more snorted derision from Desmond, and again, Virginia finds herself between half-heard conversation, and, whether deliberate or not, her gaze about the table wanders hand-in-hand with her mind, catches the rise of Vita’s fingers to her lips to conceal a smile that reveals, despite this glamour, grape clusters and pearl necklaces, that there is something loose fitting.

            She reaches again for the wine glass, blurs the crescent moon of firelight on the table, and sips the warmth of it, and, like the waves of the sea, the wine consecrates the past in a dreamlike sheen, in memories blurred and comforting, the real and the imaginary indistinguishable in a fragmentary nocturne. For a moment she closes her eyes, imagines the bottom of the sea. Then, with a sigh, rouses herself. Her imagination lifts up its skirts and tiptoes back to life: the clinking of glasses, the slapping of cards on the table, and the gentle murmur of a piano she had never realised was being played.

Elinora Westfall

            My dad was not an educated man, schools were a thing of the distant past. The natural history museum was empty of anything of value years ago. But to a resourceful man, everything was worthwhile. Mechanical parts and electrical servos actuated the fiberglass rods he jammed down Bobbie’s arms and legs. He calibrated springs and a chargeable battery to mechanize a facsimile of movement. Thick cadaverine putrescine wafted from the collapsed basement stairwell, and rancid water pooled at the bottom steps. The heavy odor of indole clung to our clothes and the insides of our noses. Rotting flesh has a life of its own.

            Dad carried Bob on his back in a harness, and I followed as we scouted the mountains of trash and broken concrete for edible food or liquid. Our excursions were dangerous because we rarely found anything and were prey to poachers and bandits that roamed the city. We had a pulse gun, a spear, and a fire hammer, but that was little protection against the dead.

            Sleep was our reward for working into the night. Our most effective weapon was the Primacord we found at the depot. Dad carried a twenty-foot length to drag behind us as a trap. He tied it to a ten-foot fuse so we wouldn’t blow ourselves up. The one time we used it, it worked well. Our return underground had attracted a gang of mercenaries intent on ending our lives. Dad lit the fuse, we ducked behind a wall and watched a twenty-foot explosion vaporize the entire group.

            Dad hurried back underground with Bobby bouncing on his back, and I ran down behind him. We intended Bobby as a lookout. Since he was already dead, nobody could kill him. We sat him on the railing overlooking the lobby, realistically turning his head and kicking his leg once in a while. Through the thick light, he looked like a live person. An empty M-79 lay across his lap, and with a pair of goggles, he looked threatening.

            But not threatening enough; his body lay strewn across the broken marble like a deliberate taunt. Someone was in the museum. There were tracks in the dirt; Bobby couldn’t be touched without leaving his mark. Boot prints led down the stairwell into our last refuge. Whoever it was stood between us and our weapons. All we had now was fire. A cocktail in the toxic sludge would ignite everything we had. Dad considered the options. We would wait, listen, and prepare for an ambush. An old gravity trap perched over the stairwell, and we could release it on whoever came up the stairs. Five hundred pounds of rusty steel and broken glass. But I had to trigger it by hand. Dad had another task. He wanted Bobby to take part. Bobby was a bacteria bomb that would infect any wounds inflicted by the trap. Dad propped his remains on the top step, looking down into the swamp. He charged the battery, so Bobby clicked his head back and forth with a low whirring sound. Bobby held an empty M-79 and glared through broken goggles.

            The sound of footsteps sloshing through the water. Someone was coming up. The dim light of evening filtered through tall windows on the west side of the building. I anticipated a dark silhouette making a slow ascent. My imagination, primed by expectation, didn’t believe it when I saw him. A humanized mechanical mounted the steps. That’s how he could stand the smell; he wasn’t human. I released the trigger, and the monstrous pile of junk fell in a massive crash of smoke and dust. I heard Dad firing several direct shots into the mess. He had a better view than I did. As Bobby disappeared, I scrambled back away from the dust. My only weapon was a machete. Dad had a creaky old floor fan propped on an oil drum. He aimed it at the smoke, clearing it so we could try to find a figure in the pile of twisted metal. A movement, a sound; the thing wasn’t dead. It lay on its stomach with one arm extended, still clutching a Nkor Pulse. That would be a prize. I furiously chopped at his wrist with the machete. His black fingers curled as I severed his hand. Dad put two shots into the base of his skull.

            For an hour, we secured the area, cleared a path downstairs, and dismantled the mechanical. The mech had ammunition, the Pulse, and armor. He was hard to kill. Dad removed the radio first. His last instructions were to clean up Bobby and pull the batteries from the mechanical. Then he took the Pulse and removed the tracking device from the mech. He told me its death would lead here. Dad had to put the tracker on a local dog so they would think it’s still active. I had to lock up and wait till he got back.

            Two months later, dad still had not returned. Bobby was starting to rot, I took him up on the roof to die and stood watching him for the last time. No longer would we struggle to repair him. All flesh had turned black, and his circulatory system has collapsed. But the pump was still pushing old blood to his right arm. Bob had a brand on his upper shoulder, The logo of the division he and dad belonged to. I needed to keep something of my brother, cutting his skin would not be right. I gently pulled at the wrist and Bobby’s arm separated at the shoulder and the pump come out with it. I’ll keep the whole arm. I’ll convert it to live blood. A rat ought to serve. Three days later I had constructed a suitable container. A clear plastic tube four foot long with enough room for a rat cage at one end. If I could splice the rats blood system to Bob’s arm, I could keep the arm from dying, all I had to do was feed the rat.

            The finished project buoyed my spirits and I set about planning for the future with new zeal. My father’s desertion was a result of his death, he would have returned otherwise. I knew I was alone. Dad had taken the plasma pulse, and our fire hammer ran out of juice for good. It was time to leave. Winter was coming, and I had to risk traveling to the lakes. Once known as the Great Lakes; the region was thousands of miles of cracked earth. Shallow pools of stagnant water sparkled in the hot sun. The 45th parallel was one of the few places on the planet survivable for humans. Millions of starving people, packed like dog farms.

            I would travel by night, sleep underground by day, and carry enough food for the journey. The compass led me south over barren terrain, bare poles that used to be trees, no wildlife, and no water. I set up plastic to condense moisture in the early mornings and boiled it to drink. Every night I fed myself and the rat, our diet consisted of a variety of bugs, spiders, and worms. These I found as I dug a hole every night to sleep. Sometimes I saw signs of humans, but rarely.

            The land rose as I neared the ridge, and I could see smoke on the far horizon. Toronto had spread across what was once Lake Erie and connected to Cleveland. No buildings were visible. A thick, impenetrable blanket of brown smog hung over the valley. I was still many miles away, and already I could see evidence of human activity. Trees cut to the ground. The riverbeds were like concrete, and nothing grew on the parched, dry earth. I felt a trembling fear for the first time. Without my dad, life would be hard. I remembered the few good times we shared in Quebec. I was young when my mother died, a dim memory of her face and laugh pushed the thoughts from my mind.

            I traveled for a month through country empty of any life. Abandoned towns, burnt and deserted. I slept in an old quarry building and after digging a hole for worms and grubs, I discovered the rat had died. This was an emergency, Bob’s arm would not last long without fresh blood. I squeezed the dead rat empty of his blood and leaned the tube in the corner so the rest would drain into Bob’s arm. Then I started a search for another creature, anything, as long as it was alive. The sun has set and no wind moved the air. I crept along the tree line running scenarios through my mind; how to find something, how to capture it. This country was void of any life, the possibility of finding a living critter was remote. I scouted the area for a water hole, animals need water. Then I spotted the tracks, with a center groove, something with a tail. I followed it into a small wooded area as silently as I could. A small noise alerted me. It was eating; the repetitious clicking of small jaws. I raised my spear and advanced toward the sound. But, wait! I cannot kill it. I need it alive. I crouched like a lion when a scruffy rodent creature walked out of the Bush, not seeing me at all. I flung myself on the thing and clutched it to my chest in a violent flurry. It squealed in panic and scrambled to escape but I held it firm, tightening my grip into the fur of its neck. This thing was strong, twice the size of my rat and powerful. I pinned it to the ground and covered it head with a rag. Then I tied its legs together and hung it from my spear like a trussed duck. It was a young possum. A larger cage would be necessary, but I had high hopes for the health of Bob’s arm.

            Another month passed while I fashioned a suitable cage for the possum, and attached it to the arm. New blood surged through clear plastic tubing from the possum into Bob’s system. I felt a wave of gratitude and relief. I set up a feeding schedule, and he settled into a calm acceptance of his new home.

            For myself, I realized I was no longer as mobile as before. The rodent was bigger than a rat. And until I found something smaller, or a more permanent home, I would be less mobile. I traveled the route looking for signs of a defensible position. The Northern Michigan/Nova Scotia corridor was a human meat farm. People ruin everything. The remains of Detroit had usable infrastructure, and the last of the deep water. As I neared the Great Lakes Valley, I could smell them. Six million people created a biological desecration that hovered over the valley like a vast storm front. Constant thunder rumbled from one end to the other, thousands of miles long. On a ridge, I found an abandoned factory with low radioactivity and a fortified central tower. It was home. I concealed Bob’s arm behind corrugated steel sheeting, and scouted the perimeter for food, water, and weapons.

            A small village three miles north had a magnificent tree in the center, over a hundred feet tall, disfigured by nothing but age. In the falling light, it stood as a reminder of what we lost. The sound of low voices brought me forward. A figure was tied to the tree, a slave being prepared for what I didn’t want to know.

            I untied her in the darkest hour of the night, and we fled to the tower. For three days, I watched, but nobody followed. The woman was a young refugee girl, starving and abused. I fed her and clothed her. Her name was Bridget. She watched as I fed the animal and asked why it was attached to the rotting corpse of a human arm. She wanted to know what it meant. Why did I have such a thing?

            Not a simple answer. He was my older brother. He died in the war that still rages across the globe. We fought together and many times avoided death. But death caught him. My father and I tried for six years to repair his broken body. His brain and spinal cord were intact. An exoskeleton allowed him to walk. But decomposition took his legs first, then his left arm, head, and torso next. We kept his brain alive for a year before it died. All that remains is this arm. The possum serves as a built-in circulatory system to pump blood.

            Bridget winced in disdain and turned away. What did it mean? It embodied humanity’s experiment more accurately than any other symbol. It is a right arm; after all, if raised in triumph, it calls out the honor and glory of mankind. When severed in a plastic box, however, it means the inverse; a conceptual articulation of failure. As an artifact alone, it’s enough reason to exist. Back when we had history and a future, such things were valuable.

            Bridget’s reaction proved that it no longer matters. Humanity never learned to cooperate with evolution. What have we lost that we never had?

Tim Hildebrandt

yet below a fanfare’s rippling banners
hear dry echoes whisper in an autumn
wind: scrape of leaves, sizzle and hiss
of a rocket’s fuse, the clay mold thirsty

for a scarlet river. His charger panics,
to escape the casting throws its master
but won’t run far. Do not blame me for
circling time, mistakes men duplicate,

one faulty diadem and Mars ascending
red butcher’s wagon. Green cypresses
add their fatal rings, a granite boulder
finally melts, Yang to Yin. Old books

say the days are water: my work is to
write things down. Simple chronicler,
I keep track of dynasties for guidance,
the flawed kings to guess the present,

how shamans read fractures in magic
turtle shells. In this year that, in that
year this, so goes Year of the Comet,
Year of Blood Moon. In a story you

know an emperor left his nightingale
for a clockwork bird with gold beak
and plumes. It sang nights and days,
never lost or trilled a note off key or

different song until the single croak,
silver gears spilling from its mouth.
Gilt wings flew to a heaven where it
waits with the phoenix for a stallion.

Nels Hanson

            In time, all of those non-believers disintegrated in the wind like sand blowing down a cracked walkway. Then, most everyone else did, too.

            When the lights returned to the horizon, I was sitting on the old carousel considering leaving Traya. The ride hadn’t moved in a decade, the old gears had rusted to dust, but the horses remained intact suspended on their poles in a mad dash to escape death. But we knew better than those old beasts what could and could not be outrun.

            Before the lights, my parents brought me to ride this carousel. It was part of a larger beachside attraction with simple roller coasters, a funhouse, and video arcades. Food vendors sold popcorn, cotton candy, French fries and hot dogs from their standalone booths. The air sparkled with flashing Edison bulbs, and vacationers moved in rhythm to a waltzing calliope. The carousel held happy memories of my parents’ holding hands and laughing before their split, and of eventually landing a job here in my teens.

            Traya found me atop the white horse where the chipped paint looked like exposed, cancerous innards. She carried a week’s supply of packaged sweets, the preserved pastries among the only remaining food supplies left.

             “You’re withering away, Cobb” she said. She put the bag down and fixed her thin hair. I pretended like I didn’t hear her because, while true, I didn’t need the reminder. Dry sand blew down the cracked walkway. At one time velvet ropes wrangled vacationers into its queue, but as far as I could tell we were the only people alive for hundreds of miles in any direction.

            We lived in an old storage bunker underneath the attractions. The cement walls kept us safe from the impact of the lights and would likely keep us safe again, but the wide-open isolation of the aftermath began to whisper fantasies of going at it alone. I’d become increasingly tired and depressed. Life with Traya was a lonely existence.

             “I’m not hungry,” I said.

             “I don’t care,” Traya said. She pulled out a packaged cream cake. “Eat.”

            The thing that kept us alive was the ocean. The churning water, the ebbs and flows of the tide, the vastness of its depth all seemed to suck the poison from the air and give us just enough oxygen to breathe. Once, we tried for the food store two blocks away but had to turn back when clumps of our hair fell out like leaves from autumnal trees. Most of it grew back eventually, but some didn’t. Life was a series of missing pieces, chunks ripped from the whole. Our clothes, our skin, our teeth.

             “Someone’s coming,” I said, and pointed at the road. A man limped forward wheezing and coughing. He hocked phlegm onto the pavement. Strands of long, thin hair poked from his scalp like whisps of smoke. Most of the skin on his arms was gone.

             “He has the bone disease,” Traya said. I looked at the man’s hands. His fingers had turned jet black.

             “The ocean,” the man said as he approached. “I had a feeling.”

            Traya stood her ground. As a child, she had been abused by her parents both physically and emotionally. The weeks after they died from the lights, she walked around saying that she was glad they were gone, that they got what they deserved. She said it made her tough. But then after a while, she cried and cried and cried. One night after we bathed in the shallows, she forgave them.

             “That’s close enough,” she said to the man, but the man kept walking.

             “I came here as a child,” he said. He looked at the horses and smiled his crooked smile. “My Pops took me after Ma passed. Said I could ride until I couldn’t ride no more.” He stepped onto the platform and lost balance. He tumbled and the bones in his forearm snapped like pieces of charred wood. The bone disease was in him alright.

             “There’s nothing for you here,” I said.

            The man rolled to his knees and stood up. His arms hung limp and lifeless.

             “Happiest time of my life was on that very horse,” he said. His eyes were wild, feral things bloodshot and scarred by violent winds and unforgiving heat. Outside of Traya, I hadn’t seen another living soul in years, but it gave me hope that a person could go at it alone and make it somewhere new.

            Years ago, Traya and I worked at this amusement park together. Teenagers, young and reckless. Both of us were dating other people, but we met in the storage bunker for nightly romps thinking what’s the worst that could happen? And then the world died, and we were all each other had. That and the guilt of thinking we had somehow caused this, our youthful ignorance both saving our lives and sending us to Hell.

            The sky cracked and sizzled. Traya looked against the horizon and saw the lights blinking in and out like old amusement park signs.

             “No more running,” I said. I leaned across the porcelain mane of the horse and covered my eyes. It didn’t take long before the lights were upon us, the darkness lifting into brightness, the bones in my hands suddenly visible like the creation of time and in that moment, I felt comforted by the fact that in the end, I wasn’t alone.

W. T. Paterson

            …and, when I enter, there is silence.

            A winter’s silence, where the crack of every twig is emphasised by the void.

            The sun is still shining.

            And it is not cold.

            The place is as I left it.

            It feel familiar, yet alien.

            Is it me who has changed?

            My creation makes my (equivalent of a) heart beat faster. All the buildings I slaved over for weeks at a time are still here. All of my fancy designs. The intricate care I’d taken to balance the need for work and play. I’d set that need into the objects now doing the humdrum work of existing for a task no longer in operation. The living, breathing towers I’d crafted with green leaves, wrapped in foliage blankets: human-and-nature harmonies, paradise persuasions, emission-free, balanced zones… Picture frames for history, now. Relics of some former song. Some of the best work I ever produced standing bare, deserted. Cores empty. Anthills with no ants.

            Because they wanted to be world-builders instead, didn’t they?
            They wanted to be world-beaters.
            They looked at what I’d given them, at my bled-over creation, and thought: No thanks, I can do better.

            And they all retreated, didn’t they? They retreated into their so-called worlds. Their echo-chambers, the facsimiles they made using their simplified tools. Built using databases and figures and majority percentages. And they chose to populate those mediocre realms instead. Those pea-brained alternates to my intricate nest, just so they could exert some of the feeling of control…

            Wait a minute, though.

            Wait an effervescent minute…!

            There is still someone here! There is a person in my space! I can see them through the leaves and fences, through the gate, through the trees. They are sitting in the park. They are sitting in my park, the park I built for them! They are sitting in the park I put at the centre of the city!

             ‘Hey!’ I call out to them, waving my (equivalent of) arms. ‘Hey, you out there! Ahoy!’

            And then, I am running. I am running (on my equivalent of feet) across the deserted road separating me from the park. My (equivalent) pulse is racing. My (equivalent) face is flushed. I surge like liquid through the iron gateway at the park’s boundary and skid to a halt a single, empty playing-field away.

            I don’t want to spook them.

            I may already have done too much…

            The person is sitting on the grass underneath one of my trees. The tree is a slow-growing oak, building itself on my traditional parameters. A lazy, traditional breeze is moving through its branches. The traditions that I spent so long developing, yet I am gobsmacked by their beauty. Did I really used to create such magic? The harmony of everything seems beyond me now. Like I’m seeing it through different eyes.

            And the person is a glorious mess. A contained explosion of humanity capped with a short shock of lime-green hair. They look like every remaining scrap of individualism left in the species colliding together to produce a desperate form. A galaxy of differences pulling together in my gravity. When they catch sight of me, they don’t frown, or inhale in fear. They smile and beckon me over, and I almost canter towards them in the permission of the invite. But as I approach, the look of enthusiasm on their face stalls a fraction. It is a micro-measurement that would be imperceptible to anyone other than myself.

             ‘No,’ I say, slowing my pace, painting reassurance through my words. ‘Please. Don’t worry. I’m not here to…’
            Why am I here?
            Do I know?

             ‘You’re the writer,’ they tell me.
            I nod because I am.
             ‘I thought that maybe someone else… another person… had come outside…’

            Their lonely voice floats like dandelion fluff on the air between us. It is a mix of music and fragile thunder. It is a barrier, a distance, and I am a million miles away.

            ’I'm sorry,’ I say. ‘I tried. I did my best. I did everything I could. I promise. I gave you everything you needed. Everything you needed to thrive. I gave you…’

            The trail of my excuses fades away.
            ’You abandoned us,’ they tell me.
            ’No,’ I tell them.
            Yes, I mean.

            They stand up off the grass. They brush themselves free of stray blades and extend a sad, sweet hand towards (the equivalent of) my own. ‘Can I show you where they are? Let me show you where they are.’

            It is a fruitless and naïve gesture. But one so full of hope, of longing, of pain in the afterburner of my engine that I cannot resist its fuel. It is how I always wanted my people to be. Like this person is the pinnacle of them all. And I know I installed this component of sadness for their sakes.

            I fall in instant love with the fictional creature offering me their hand. And, in that moment, I am proud again. The joy of my creation, and its potential, is flowing through me. Electricity. I am back on the terminal of the battery, and I no longer feel like a lost cause.

            A single person with a single gesture.
            A single moment of connection.
            That is all it took.

            They pull me with the excitement of a youngling across the playing fields of the park. I can feel every atom of their self as though they are my own, and every atom of my place is interacting with every other: an interconnected network forming the stalwart illusions of space and time. I know all the atoms so well. I stitched them into the map by hand. It’s like being reunited with old friends. Old friends who you’ve worried won’t know you anymore, but they do, they do, and you pick up where you left off as though everything is the same. I can feel the atoms quaking and quivering, energised by my presence. They are ready to be put to work again. They are ready to make a change.

            Out the back of the park there is another road. A variety of eateries crests along the edge, all of them closed behind the clamshells of their shutters. Who needs to eat outside anymore? Who needs to socialise with others who might disrupt your equilibrium?

            The person pulls me right down one street, then left up another. We sail without stopping through a small, deserted shopping district, and whiz with the wind through a business sector sleeping on its deals.

            Soon we are in housing country.

            The houses lining the streets are a regiment of constriction. Every box is peaceful, stagnant, standing in unjust pride of uniform and status. The exact same vehicle is sitting in every driveway, insides corroding to the elements in the plague of non-use. I did not design things to be this way. Look what I gave them all. Creativity. Uniqueness! I gave each of them a different life, a different soul, and they are all condensed inside these tombs.

            I am distraught.

             ‘They’re all in those,’ the green-haired person tells me, as if I don’t know. ‘They don’t come out anymore. But you can make them come out, can’t you? You can make them come out again.’

            My love for my person swells more as I take in every inch of their desperation. I am trying to absorb it out of them. Their hand is squeezing mine (equivalent) and I never want to let them go. Our atoms are conjoining, combining. We are one and the same…

            I know what I must do.

            I let go of their hand.

             ‘I did my best.’ I try to explain, under my (equivalent of) breath. ‘I never wanted it to be like this. This wasn’t my intention.’

             ‘You gave them the tools to make it go this way. So you can give them the tools to undo it all again. Or take away the tools they used to hide themselves away. You can do that. I know you can.’

             ‘It’s not that simple,’ I try to tell them. My (equivalent) body is aching with sorrow and regret. ‘They used my tools to make their own tools. They’re in an offshoot now. And they’ve filled in the holes I left at the centre of each of them. The holes where the spark of life was supposed to be. The holes where I should be. They’ve used their offshoot to weed out their differences, crushed themselves into moulds. They are no longer the autonomous beings I wanted them to be. Don’t you see? They’ve reprogrammed themselves. Deprogrammed themselves. To do without me. I watched it all happening in real time. I never skipped a moment. I watched them fold themselves away. I didn’t intervene because I knew I’d given them the power to make this change for themselves. This is what they chose to do; so be it. I wanted them to live! Don’t you see? I always hoped they’d snap out of it. Reboot themselves. But they just carried on. They carried on writing rules where there weren’t supposed to be any. They kept on hacking away at the bindings that held them to me. They are carbon copies of one another now. And they are satisfied with the nothings they have created. All they have to do is sit inside their boxes and live. They abandoned me before I abandoned them. I can’t make them come out.’

            I barely catch my (equivalent of a) breath before my person snatches it away again.

             ‘I’m out.’

            I turn from the repeating streets to stare into their eyes. And I can see them, all of them. All of humanity, contained within those orbs. And the people are so much more than bones and skin. They are so much more than the atoms and molecules dancing to project their outer selves. Thoughts and feelings, advantages and discrepancies, selfishnesses and desires… I can see all of it together. And all the bacteria and microbes living within them, living as a part of them. Each tiny particle of life is pleading to be seen and heard. What a magnificent racket they are making! It is my symphony.

             ‘Change it,’ the person says, pointing towards the houses. ‘You can change it. I know you can.’

             ‘I can’t,’ I tell them. My (equivalent of a) bottom lip is trembling. ‘It’s too late. They’re in a part of the code that I can’t reach.’

            It is a sudden wrench. It is as awesome as it is terrible. My person turns away from me and bolts. They tear apart the connection of our souls and charge off down the streets into the block of houses. My final inner sight of them dissolves into the ugly pristineness of the monoculture. And with them goes my heart.

            I exit my creation so I can watch them from afar. The map condenses too far in the haste of my emotion and I have to zoom in to find them again. They seem so microscopic through my omnipresent lens. That pin-prick of acid green, a counter on a board.

            I hover above them, spin my viewpoint, pull up alongside them. I am close enough to see the expression on their face. There are tears on the cheeks I love. It is the final heartache of individualism pouring out of them. And I can’t stand the sight of it. I can’t stand watching everything we made together drain away inside those tears.

            As the figure reaches the edge of my map, the coding loops them back again, and they continue to run on the endless treadmill, back past the green buildings, back through the green park, back through the useless shopping district and past the tragic eateries. Back down the rows of houses, boxes, headstones lining the sorry streets where the rest of my population have already died. I want to put my final person out of their misery. I want them to submit to the offshoot, to be the sacrifice that ends it all. I want them to squash the frittering firefly that I let develop inside their heart. If only they would do that for me…

            I watch my final person running around the loop of my creation.

            I track their desperation one last time, then one more last time, then one more final time.

            I listen to the final footfalls of hope.

            I know I can’t help them.

            I know that it’s the end.

            A new noise has entered my perception. It is leaking in over the metronome of humanity’s end, over the surging of my cracking loss. The intrusive noise allows me to pull away from the static being generated by the cycle of the tragic runner. It is a pitter-pattering sound, a timpani of notes plastering against every kind of surface.

            The scales of real life are playing again.

            Coming from somewhere beyond of me, I can hear the rain. The rain I can remember from my past, from before I’d created my other world. Real rain falling in real time. Real, uncoded rain. Rain that is still happening now. Rain that is still happening because everything is still happening now.

            I pull away from my screen and watch the rain falling on everything outside my window.

            And everything is immense, and there is so much more to see.

            And I realise that there still is time.

            Oh yes, there still is time.

David Lawrie

It is said the collection was excavated once by a young girl using a pickaxe. She was not to know what harbored within, not then. The custom in her family was to well dress her maravilloso find every summer with the choicest of flowers, in the well dressing adornment manner of a charmed wunderkammer.

During the night when strange forces emerge from the heart of a forest including dark shapes which bore through the marbled sheen of the sleeper’s eyeballs, Nola took ill. It seemed sudden. Of late she had been feeling poorly, having discovered the dead corpses of twelve blackbirds lying in a circle on the fringe of the glade. No one noticed how sick she looked, least of all I. Certainly not Mother, sunk to her eyebrows in her daily chores of cooking, cleaning, running to market, feeding three horses and a brood of geese, and clearing the lofty forest foliage encroaching upon our section of the glade. But, that wasn’t all. There were we two semi-grown-into adulthood forest brats in tow, uncontrollable at worst, floating retards at best. Did not make us safer. In a lot of different ways a great deal was going on in our lives that summer, things we couldn’t share, things no mother would understand.

While Nola grieved over her horrifying find, picking the blackbirds gingerly one by one to place in little flower lined boxes, black plume like smoke coiled out from each, like ascending tentacles, and a soft tweet was heard, as if the birds were waiting, watching, their round beady black eyes communicating in the shade. Calling out to Nola I ran as fast as my legs would carry me away from the tweet, while the smoke spread and widened, far and near, across the glade, down the wishing well, into the forest canopy.

That was the summer I had followed Miken to the forest pathway, passing   through thick tangled vines and bushes that ran between the wooded knolls. Miken was our new neighbor. We had met him in the woods. Mother didn’t know. I saw Miken lead Nola one evening to his secret door, the one behind the shed, the one concealed from all   prowling eyes. Although we lived on a kind of farm, and Miken in a nearby cabin, which we were not to know till later, his was the kind of extreme existence that grew out of   living in nature, no heat, no electricity, no running water, no human being, just forest animals to slaughter, and mangled trees, and stones. Nola was entranced. The door was a secret panel of sorts, similar to the one he said he had in a remote cabin in the marshlands bordering New Hempel and Enol. We vaguely knew of those forbidden lands, the strange  mixture of things that came from those parts. How he transported his partially built cabin to our glade we did not know. His half complete cabin was out-of-bounds to anyone, except himself. Keep out, and stay out. Those were the house rules, according to Miken.

What transpired behind the door I don’t rightly know. What I know is that Miken had no business disrupting our routine enchantment in the glade, with his maddening territorial sounds–a stone clock that tweeted distressingly, his compulsive collection of dead things, odds and ends, stashed untidily in the strangest places, mostly, behind the secret shed. Later I would learn this was the clock with a stone base, where he would routinely crucify blackbirds to match the hours. He called it his clockwork taxidermy restored. If his disgusting finds and collection had piqued my interest, as they did Nola’s, filling her head with strange voices, clouding her eyes with smoky visions, perhaps her outcome might have been different. He deliberately got in our way.

“There is poison among us,” Miken would croon like one in a trance, looking pointedly at me, while chanting incantations in a bizarre language I had not heard before. Anguished beyond repair at being excluded, wonderstruck by what he knew, I would make good my escape. Not Nola, all growing up, trapped by his charms, by whatever   surreptitious entity she saw resurrected in Miken, or the lure of the glade, or the demonically possessed trees, waving maniacally their thick branches at her, tethered as she was to all things in nature. We knew he meant his volumes of crap souvenirs, fun and entertaining to him, hidden behind the secret trap door. We never knew he also meant our wondrous wishing well, Nola’s and mine.

Whatever Nola saw or found, caused her to go downhill. She succumbed. Her decline was rapid. Gone was the former Nola I knew of old, roaming the woodlands in  focused concentration, searching the forest floor, circling the glade each summer, trapping spotted lantern-flies, catching newts, dragonflies and bugs that seemed   otherworldly and absolutely enormous at that time. We would weave the most fanciful fairy gowns out of wildflower, stonecrop, allium, lupin, foxgloves, combining feverfew, snapdragons, yarrow and sweet peas, then brandishing our colorful creations at damsel flies, at wasps, at menacing Miken enraged with our antics, while chasing otters to the outer edge of the pond, deep in the forest. Her mood grew pensive and reflective. She had   changed before my very eyes, I could tell.

The woods which was our only protection, which was our forever fairytale home, critical to us, our livelihood, our lives–the most magical place you can ever imagine, of stony paths and pristine plants, had remotely changed. Our forest, where we had chased winged fairies and woodland creatures was gone. The Nola that could restore it had fled. Each summer when we had lived in two worlds – the real and the imaginary, till the unhappy day Nola crossed the line into Miken’s world behind the panel door, did not exist. At the mouth of the very same woods and glade, in the presence of the very same sounds and sights—fishing, tracking, hunting, chasing, climbing trees, dressing up our wishing well, yet, how different was Miken in outlook, and how helpless with the betrayal of lassitude had she turned.

Miken never stopped. He raved on and on about stones, his stones, the stone clock, stone caves to stone dwellings, stone ruins to stone castles, our wishing well ringed with broken stones. His was the vision of indefiniteness. He seemed roused by stones. What he meant were building stones–granite, rocks, basalt, limestone, his weird   haphazard collection. He believed humanity came out of stone caves. He perceived history as linear, that man progressed from stone age to metal and steel, yet lived by the mysterious forces locked in stone structures. There was no end to what he saw. They all ran counter to our find of stones in the wunderkammer, our wishing well.

“It is recorded in The Book of the Dead. Just look at us, look at you, look at me, we’re passing entities–we all came from stones, we return to stone, no exceptions, some   of us to grade quality stones, is all the difference,” he would yell at the two of us, Nola and I, terrorizing us with his divine sounding predications, his meteor crater moissanite experience, designed to make us feel like pawns on the stone plinth he had fashioned into a grotesque chess game, where he set traps for unsuspecting woodland animals—hedgehogs, raccoons, demonizing the magic of our summertime make-believe realms.

“Well, what do you know?” I would yell back, horrified at my own brazen behavior, a bad habit of etiquette, as Mother would ingrain in the both of us, whenever we snarled like a pair of quarterbacks at one another.

Miken would let out a prolonged guttural laugh, his face suffused with pleasure,   turning red with the effort of his bellow, like a bloodied decapitated head with no body to match.

“Not! N-O-T!” Nola would loudly whisper, losing breath, completely beguiled,   helpless to his stone onslaught, plagued by her own distressing nightmares. “My stones   are not of yours. They defy being made. They are of the earth.” Unfortunately her weak protests fell on deaf ears. The scenery of her life never changed. Her torpor took a further dip. “Arousing evil,” Miken would retaliate. I had stropped trying to interpret what lay  beyond her words, whether she meant those stones in our wishing well, the ones Miken   knew nothing of. She could be precise when she spoke of her stones. Too sure and too   precise for her own good. Poor Nola!

In a trice without warning she had flashed him her impossible to ignore treasures in purples, reds, greens and blues. The wind howled around us in bursts, the air filled with shrill cries of birds, susurrus of a million starlings, the trees swayed grotesquely, everything in touch with everything else. The stones fit snugly in the palm of her small  hand, adding to their luster. And yet, through the accuracy of that moment, I smelt the sense of something dire, something coming, something hidden below or behind it all.

“What a collection!” I had murmured in awe, applauding her fevered exertion that scorching hot day when she put axe to her wishing well and disappeared through a hole in the ground. I could not help myself but loudly voice the same. The wonder that lay in those shimmers transported me to the day we had first discovered them, Nola and I, on our usual hike through the glade.

It’s true, she had her best moments when she could turn generous, to match Miken’s weird self-aggrandizement theories, that stones turned to life, that lands lost   beneath the sea were plentifully sprinkled with dark and dim stone castles and stone deities, that immortality was acquired from stone. Through the wonder I remained  paralyzed, in shock, that she chose to share the magic of our private wunderkammer. My disembodied thoughts floated far away to that magical day.

It is said great revelations of nature never fail to impress. So it was with me, living the alarming experience, contriving to keep my balance, concerned by the   significance of the find in the old wishing well. With the spell of the glade broken, Nola’s stones turned out to be actual magic stones, rich with the energy buried deep in the earth,   bubbled up like incomprehensible hidden tumors in her magic wishing well. Guaranteed,  some were over two thousand years, out of all proportion to the life of the wishing well, covered in compost of bracken and dead leaves, which banded the stones their weird   striations, little particles of breath left along their grain by fairies. The patterns of inclusions, subtle and balanced, enhanced their effects. There was something curious about the collection, an almost deathlike mysticism wrapped around the sheen of each, of old and new.

A gathering of strange thoughts swarmed through my mind at the eeriness of the misshapen well structure built around the buried stones. Where had they come from?   Who had buried them? Unceasingly, this one query lodged itself in me. My mind filled with stories of legends and hauntings, of spirits and stone gods, of New Hempel and Enol. Had they roamed the glade? My ears filled with the cries of impaled blackbirds, multitudinous patterings on stone clocks, bludgeoned heads of gutted elks on stone plinths, their massive antlers twisted around swaying tree branches. My sight dimmed over towering plumes of black smoke hovering stationary like lenticular clouds, although no mountains in our glade existed. There was no forward motion wind either.

Nola was unfazed. Through it all it was as if she belonged to another realm, in a world we could not touch or feel, impelled to stop at nothing, propelled by mysterious forces to go further out, no matter her lack of power. It’s impossible how intensely her inner spirit of oracle moonbeams lay trapped within the gemstones hoard.

While boosting obsidian’s chakras and iridescent moonstone’s magical energies, little did Nola realize that her blue calcite involved shamans and seers, and could not be brought back to life with a wave of blue forget-me-nots. Or, that her sea-green amazonite carried vibrations of potent anxiety no celadon-hued hydrangeas could stimulate. Or, that her turquoise malachite carried wispy veins of copper, no amulet of blue daisies could deflect. Or, that her beautifully scripted Pictionary, traced on a slab of glazed marble, could not flow smooth and mellifluous forever, no matter how sweet their etymology or   how many pink peonies attached to the runes.

I only saw the columns of black smoke belched from the bodies of the twelve little blackbirds, spreading far and wide in a disappearing trail from the wishing well in   the glade, into the edge of the forest where the tree line was the densest. At least the persistent tweeting had stopped. No explanation how or why. I don’t recall walking around the well so I could see deep inside the earth. But, I must have. I don’t recall crawling into our overnight tent, overpowered by her staggering well flowering care of her find. But, I must have. In summer the sun comes up very quickly. And the day is bright. I should have anticipated the change that would come over Miken.

By morning Miken was in our glade. He pooh-poohed all of Nola’s wondrous treasure trove of captivating gemstones, making a mockery of their shapes, their wealth of matching flowers, the resident deities in her wishing well, her loving care at well dressing, her concealed connection to the love-inspired mystical spirits of the well buried deep in the earth, shared with none but myself. So disbelieving was he with the mad ravings of her feverish hallucinations. So stimulated was she with the joy of color, shape, and energy, I was stunned when she opened up her entire wunderkammer as an offering to the evil eye of our unfathomable neighbor. But the state of her mind was beyond caring. And his, beyond direction.

Treacherously, to Miken, these glitters were reputedly mere synthetic gemstones, unreal, fake, did not exist, except in Nola’s sickness infested head, except to scribes of the afterlife sounding judgment calls, accidentally created by Italian monks and Hindoo priests practicing alchemy.

“So says The Book of the Dead. They are not real stones, you transformation witches of the glade, you practitioners of incantation occult,” he swore, gesticulating wildly, waving his blackbird feathers, intimately linked with his stone circle, his delusional posturing moment snagging his right ankle on a sharp rock hidden in the tangled creepers and bushes. He was far from done.

“The minerals in them hold no real magic, no known power. The spells in them depict no known vitality. The disintegration in them serves no known preservation.   Watch mine come alive, stone—the power that dances in the blood of toads, the power that perseveres in the decay of fungus—the dead things that cling to stone, faster than feathers, weighing no more than a feather.” His wild laughter raised an unpleasant echo through the crowd of trees. Once again we were alone, and he was gone, insanely clinging to his multiple stone entities and their revelations, I had nothing more to say.

The thundering wind brought a passing shower and we were soon soaked. I  dreaded the approach of night, disturbed by our eerie neighbor’s obsession with stones as living entities. The sudden rain’s booming notes on the fronds and fringes of trees broke the oppressive heat. In my mind’s eye I watched our absurd and childish rituals of summers ago fade into nothingness, the care we lavished in well flowering our precious wishing well and its magical buried contents. The elemental forces of insidious presences talking through the stones like primitive gods was disquieting, and unknown to me. While Miken’s prognostications were too puzzling and confounding to me, I feared what it would do to Nola. And it did. Her imperturbable spirit frightened me.

The summer that I grew up was the summer of our disintegration as a family. There are things I would like to say out loud, the sounds, the sights, my insights, my fancies which came from the clumps of bushes near the forest’s edge, my non-human wings encounter, not fairies, I swear, but wings that hovered at the brink of the stone wishing well, dead spirits of the ancient realms, the solitude that marked the glade when I first felt dread, the unintelligibility of unknown worlds residing within stones, the abruptness of Miken’s sudden arrival in our midst, to our fairyland home, our glade, my ceaseless vigil for Nola, night and day, day and night, summer and winter, and many summers after—at the well.

Nola was returned to the very place we knew she loved—forever tethered to her precious stones she had discovered few summers ago with such passion. Under the pendulum sun of summer, now bright, now cloudy, now storming, we scattered her ashes. They would lie for keeps at the bottom of her stone wishing well. Her intimate  wunderkammer deep in the woods, would cover her masterpieces of nature with leaf litter, heirloom flowers and plants heaped to the very top, away from prying eyes. She would always live amongst us in floral notes of every fragrance.

Overly optimistic of all wonders of the earth, she had at once fingered in hysterics of delight a death-cap toadstone. She had seen what we had not seen—a deathcap mushroom mysteriously lodged in the outward grown flesh of the toad. Palpating the hard lobulated mass without hesitation or fear, that rarest of gemstones had been convincingly plucked by her from the exposed indented forehead skin of a poison toad that fatal day she had followed Miken behind the secret door. How long the toad had stayed concealed in our wishing well we would never know. The strange connection Miken had made with this particular toad I could not say. How long the tuberosity had taken to acquire ripe readiness was a secret she would carry with her to her outer spaces. How our hidden resident of the wishing well had reached Miken’s secret shed was equally a mystery. All I knew was the harsh reality, a web of entanglement which made the gemstone hers and hers alone.

It was Nola’s natural instinct to steer towards a gemstone wonder, no matter its size, shape or hue, or that it was lodged on a poison toad, whose forehead spotty skin was   sprouting with the deadly deathcaps on which the gemstone precariously clung. We found a series of puffy puncture wounds, likely blisters, running up her right arm, the day we dressed her for burial. But by then it was too late.

In the first days of summer I’ll be waiting for you in our glade, Nola.

Rekha Valliappan