Mushroom Cloud

“But i thought you just said we were fighting this thing to the end? Whatever happened to, ‘Nobody’s giving up on my watch?'”

He sighs and flops back on the giant mushroom. “That was before, Mila. Before…”

“Before what?” she demands, exasperated. “Before Mister butterfly came along and reminded you of some stupid old dead-end ethics class question?”

“I don’t want to argue..”

I don’t want them to either. The sea is starting in my stomach again, like back on the yacht, or at so many family celebrations that ended in disaster, in doors slamming and elbows elbowing and elbow macaroni splattering to the floor in a great crash of cutlery and ceramics. In poor Davis the butler and me cleaning things up, to avoid me totally trembling like an earthworm out of the soil, pink and doomed-meat. Those family conversations practically ended in mushroom clouds, themselves.

I’m wanting to open my mouth and say something, but I feel frozen, like not cold kind of frozen, just room-temperature, glued to the half-egg boat I’m floating on, unable to sit up. Though part of that’s probably my lack of core strength, but whatever, I can’t. I just — can’t —

“Well, I don’t care if you don’t want to argue, I’m gonna. I don’t know about you, Damon, but I for one think any life is better than no life. And if you aren’t going to fight to give us all a chance at that future, then — then I’m just going — to, to –”

“To what? No one can win unless the whole team works together.”

“So, so, so what? You just abandon us because of your selfish, lazy –”

“STOP IT!!!!”

Everyone looks around for a moment, it’s hard for me to comprehend that the sound that just rocked our ground came from my voice. It was me. That’s why Damon and Mila both are now gaping at me in a mixture of awe and annoyance.

“Chaz? What’s wrong?” Mila looks ready a little to melt. It’s not enough.

“Why can’t the two of you stop arguing?”

“Chaz, are you –” she reaches toward my cheek. I flinch and she flinches back from my flinching. I like the red dress on her, but this is no time for —

“Don’t. They’re probably acidic, everything else in me is poison.”

She backs off.

I wipe the wet from my eyes onto my jacket sleeve. “You guys sound just like my parents, you know that? You know what happened to my parents?”

“Uh… they got super rich?” Damon’s freezing anger slips like a masquerade mask as his curious eyebrows turn on.

“Yeah, they got super rich and super miserable. And now they’re getting super divorced, and based on the recent news regarding their coordinates, they might be super exploded into a pile of nothing in the middle of the ocean.” I swallow salt. “And I — don’t want — to be left — alone, like — that — again.”

There is silence. They both look at me, and from my eyes the reflections of their respective glances ricochet and hit in the middle, sort of so they make eye contact with one another without really. Like I’m a prism the light goes through without touching. I like it when nothing touches me.

The thread snaps with Mila’s voice. She glares away at Damon. “See? We got carried away fighting, and now Chaz is in a state of pre-adolescent regression that will probably take at least twenty-four hours of intensive therapeutic meditation to unwind.”

“Are you blaming me for his emotional issues?”

“Uh, guys, I’m right here.”

“Right.” Mila takes a deep breath. I am a little worried she will inhale one of those little glowing fleas from the air, but luckily she breathes out without incident. She blinks her eyes slowly before looking back at Damon, her hands open at her sides. “Please, Damon. I’m sorry I upset you. I just wanted so bad to get a chance to live again, and I guess I felt — threatened, that you wanted to give up, because that would mean –”

She falls into his arms and he catches her. I didn’t realize they were standing close enough for that to happen — up until this moment, I thought they were at least eight feet apart, if not on separate eyelids of an opening rift in the earth.

He kneels down and rests her on his knee. “I’m not gonna,” he says, his voice cracked like the last ruins of the prison on Alcatraz, such a quiet whisper I’m sure she didn’t hear him. She is not crying but she is very close to the ground. I think the grass wants to make love to her skin. I can see her shoulders shaking. I can see his shoulders slowly rise and fall as he takes a deep breath, shakily, now another, shaking less, forcing the feelings down and away. I can see them rippling the earth just a little as they explode underground without a sound. “Okay.” he says. “Okay, okay.” I expect him to say more. But right now, it seems that one word — and what does it mean, anyway? — is all that’s forthcoming. It’s enough. I can see the word enough, on the tip of Mila’s tongue, though I can’t currently see her tongue… it must be the tongue of the monster coming up over the hill, green skin bubbling, stench approaching…

Wait a second…

“Uh, guys? I know you’re kind of having a moment, here, but –”

Damon glances up just in time to see the monster’s slimy flagellum pound down towards where he and Mila are. He catapults backwards, bounces off the mushroom, and into the egg-boat. Without any words, he and Mila start paddling. I shoot fireballs at the monster to hold it off as we begin to move away. But there’s a problem. In front of us is not so much more river as there is a sudden drop-off, into a deep trench, a waterfall into a cloud of… nothing.

“See?” I put a hand on each of their shoulders. “This is how we’re supposed to be functioning. As a team. Good old Team ChaDeeM.”

“We’re not calling ourselves that!!” They both yell, but you can hear the grin in their voices, and by the end of the chorus I’m chorusing along. By the time we tip over the edge of the waterfall, I can hear Damon and Mila making up in the back of my head. As we fall impossibly lengthily down the vertical whitewater drop, I feel my left hand seized tight. Mila, on my left, grinning that grin of, wherever comes next, we’re going together. And Damon’s hand, strangely the softer grip of the two, warm and sure, at my right. I watch the terror on his face peel into an eye of the storm that says, forgiven. Everything is. And now —

Splash! But it’s ok, because I know I’m not alone. Mommy and Daddy aren’t exploding anymore. Nobody’s going to give up until we find the answers. And not even then.

~

Note: This is a quick-write inspired by season 2 of the Netflix Original Series The Hollow.

Release of the Monster, Part 2

So every midnight, just to make him wrong, she would snaff-shuffle out in the padded darkness in her primordial straitjacket of sea-silk and polyester shawls. Her hand deep within the layers, clutching against her chest, the glass vial. Inside the vial, the red liquid, not so complacent you could quite say it wasn’t alive, itself, a strange in-between thing swirling with demonic dancing curls that by some observations resembled the sly grins of dragon barons up in their caves. Caves on the cliffs, from which they might well be looking down right at this moment, as she piddle-patters along the dust-dusky path with the smiling red secret draped tight in flesh-bone-fabric-glass, hurrying toward the spot where the rocks kiss the falling white seafoam as it breaks just near daylight. She does not hurry out of fear that he will awake and, finding her bedcage empty, will roar his mountainous earthen roar and come pounding down the path to find her with his fists, his rage. She does not hurry out of hope to escape the chill-wolves biting at her ankles even beneath the layers of cloak and cloth. She does not hurry to chase the sun or to outrun the wicker-waxing moon. All that matters now is the almost-living thing, twisting and whisping within the glass vial. At the moment when the sea is beginning to forget perhaps why it came to be kissed by the rocks, at the corner between the woman’s own inspiration and exhalation, this is where she lets the vial be thrown, jettisoned widely, an arc faster than the bands that wed rain to sunlight after an early-spring storm. The glass hits the rock and immediately becomes irrelevant. The churning, almost-real thing unfurls now out of the space where glass un-outlines the shape of a prison-jar. The redness — not quite liquid, not quite light, almost a feathered metal yet translucent against the waning night as it rolls intowards day — the grateful (or is it gluttonous?) glurp, the slurp of smoky substance into air, sky. Nothing remains to testify the occurrence but the relieved face of the wrinkle-browed woman (now irrelevant); no trace of the almost-thing tells its story but a pink sort of sponginess to the nearest clouds, as if they had absorbed a slight lacing of angelic vampire blood.

a distinct lack of being left behind

“But it’s okay now.” A smile, slight nervousness shining through like early sunrise the morning the Ark sailed out of the port. “I’m okay. Now. Really.”

“Promise?”

“As much as one can promise anything.”

My left jaw tightens, though you are smiling. “Cross your heart and hope to die?”

“Is that a trick question?”

I flaw forward with a sound that might be an emotionally-charged hiccup, a laugh, a sob or a sneer, maybe all at once. My head is in my hands to cover my eyes from looking at you and that sandy-beach smiling face. I thought I wanted more than anything to see you happy. Why is it that now it hurts to look?

“Aw, come on, Janessa,” I hear your voice flow out like chocolate from a warm shadow. You sit us both down on the alabaster bench amidst the purple roses. It’s the least comfy bench I have ever experienced, but somehow without even touching me you give me home, with your eyes, a drowning-in-gold space, a pillowed couch. Just by looking.

“What’s really the problem here?”

I uncurl my body a little to sit up straight and look you straight-on. Take a deep breath. What if — “I don’t –” What if you interrupt me? I look. You’re still patiently watching my lips, my eyes, no intention of moving words. Another deep breath, then I try again. “Reymond, I just don’t want to be one of those women from the folk ballads, the left-behind damsel whose lover-boy went away to seek his fortune or some shit like that and never returned. I mean, those damsels — don’t they usually end up cutting off all their hair or drowning in a river or selling their soul to a witch or something?”

The smile on your face opens like a morning. I don’t feel mocked, but rather like smiling in harmony. Maybe it is okay.

“Yeah, but you’re not one of those damsels. You know why?” You stop, really waiting for my answer.

“Umm… because they were from earth and wore a corset?”

“Well, that’s probably also true. But I was thinking you’re also different because of two important things.” You check to see that I’m listening, like a teacher. “For one, your ‘lover-boy’ isn’t going to just disappear like that. I’m not going anywhere.”

“Except the X-Quadrant..–” I start to mutter.

“And, more importantly,” — your eyebrows are raised, very teacherly, to emphasize this point — “You are not some ‘left-behind damsel.’ You’re a 3-dimensional person with your own volition, your own destiny, free will, a fiercely independent mind, and a distinct lack of being left behind.”

“Really? You’re taking me? But… I sort of don’t want to go anymore.”

“Same here. Can we go to Frozo’s?”

“I sure hope they have chopped walnuts this time.”

Not exactly riding off into the sunset, but it works for me. Just striding unnoticed down the sidewalk, grins hand in hand.

One Porpoiseless Drive: Antilogue

We’re hiding in a sofa-bedsheet cave. Jil is there and not there. If I hand him my sketchbook or a pencil, he takes it in his hands, solid with knuckles and tendons and skin. If I try to pat his shoulder or take his hand, my hand passes right through and I start to see the floor beneath, the motorcycle jacket and blue striped pajamas transluminating as my real-world fingers fish around in a fog of almost-somethingness, uncomprehending. Why can’t I reach him?

“Trev,” his voice says, slightly out of sync with the movement of his lips. His voice sounds like electricity fizzling out a hole a mouse chewed in a cord. “I need…” A flash of electric eelsky mixes up his features for a second, turning his face and upper body into a swirling series of blue dust-liquid puddles. When part of his face comes back on, between cracks like eggshell doll, he says, “I’m not real.”

“It’s ok,” I say as calmly as possible. “I figured it out months ago.”

A genuine surprise flashes across, solidating him into the tangible realm for a split second before he goes out again like a TV with bad reception. “Why… didn’t… you…?”

“What, tell our parents? Sick the anti-falsehood force on my own brother?”

“Thought… you didn’t…”

“It doesn’t matter now.”

His hand is reaching for the sketchbook again. I try to hand it to him without letting our fingers brush. Not because I have a problem with bromance but because I’m afraid contact with real-world matter is part of what is destabilizing him.

When his hand closes around the book’s spiral spine, both the hand and the sketchbook flicker in a jagged takeback-nevermind. The next moment, he’s totally changed position, sitting cross-legged like a mirror of me, with the sketchbook in his lap, along with a pencil I lost to the void a week ago. He is drawing an intricate shape, a butterfly that wants to peel off the page and fly. In each of the butterfly’s wings is a window through which a face peers out. The first face I recognize, it’s some actress who died when we were born. The second face is a severe-looking kid a few years older than me. The third face, an elderly person so distorted by time that I can’t distinguish the gender. The fourth face, in the lower right corner of the wing — is my brother’s own face. Carved in graphite and paper fibers, it is more constant on the page than it is in real life, now flickering, now melting, puddling, electrifying. He rips the page out and hands it to me.

“You can find us in the inbetween,” he says, and for a moment the expression of true-to-tears confession flashes on his face before it clouds again into the carpet. His molecules are spreading ever farther apart; I start to hear the reverse sigh of the clouds as they pull him bit by bit through our bedsheet roof, then the tile one of the room we’ve shared since we were little boys. “You’re real, Trev. We’re imaginary. We can fix most of the universe. But we’ll need your tangibility to anchor it.”

I’ve never been chosen for any special universe-saving role before. The very fact that I’m not imaginary is supposed to make me irrelevant to the crisis in which my twin brother is apparently instrumental. But I don’t have time to protest before most all of him is sucked up through the ceiling into the star-sequined winds.

It isn’t until the last drop of quasi-tangible matter disappears that I realize I have an investment in this thing now too: all but one page of my sketchbook have been sucked with my imaginary brother into the perpendicular dimension. I have to get it back. Who knows what could happen if my drawings peeled off the page and came to half-life?

I’m Trevor Lemmington of Porpoiseless Drive. I am real. Some of my best friends have been imaginary. I’m going to bridge that divide, even if it gets me grounded for life.

Release of the Monster

Thirteen scally teenagers on the salt spray rocks at night. A dropped glass bottle, a smash, a splash. A choir of screams, not all of voices familiar to this earth. A seeping of dragon smoke, a form taking shape against the purity of blackest night as the human screams-footslips-mishaps-chokings decrescendoed into nothingness on the sand and beyond — the known world, where they belonged. The thirteen-year-old seawitcher boy who nabbed the amberish bottle from the second-to-highest shelf of his grandfather’s medicine cabinet had no idea what murky forests he was plunging his hands into blindly, no idea what monsters he was awakening. The monster you see here, cracking her knuckles and cackling wild as seafoam, ribboning her way out to the high seas, drinking lightning and bursting fronds of blue and violet light out of the fins on her back, is not the monster. She is not the danger the boy has beaconed to himself and his village. Though she may appear monstrous, the true danger is yet unseen, shrouded in the Egyptian crystal salt of an hourglass standing tall as a luxury hotel tower in deepest desert. As far as one can possibly be from the ocean, the beast of beak-ink-and-scale stirs amidst sand grains, counting the tiny particles as they fall into place to form the picture. When a wind comes breathing, the monster flicks it away from the precious sand sculpture with one perfectly manicured claw.

Fired Up

Cheer up, Jamekka. I’ll be back. I promise. And when I come back, I’ll be bringing the volcano sun and enough mercenary credits to buy us a safe place in the city of trees. I’ll be bringing home peace and liberty and all that good stuff, along with the other soldiers.

But I don’t want peace and liberty and good stuff and other soldiers. I don’t want a safe treehouse, I don’t want credits, and I don’t want our sun back. I just want you. Here. With me. Now.

Jamekka. You sweep me diagonally in your arms so I look up at your face the way I used to look up at my father’s when he held me as an infant. Your smile gateways into a more serious look, almost stern, but I sense no blame and my defenses don’t go up. My parrot-child, I want to be with you too. More than anything in the world. But I can’t really be here, knowing there’s a battle raging and innocent people being held prisoner and flagellations scarring our world every day — if I stayed here knowing there was something to fight out there, it wouldn’t be all of me. You see? I’m whole. You love me because I’m whole.

Almost whole.

You grin. Set me on the countertop amidst the various failed dinner plans. Akkhi meows and clambers across my lap before going to lap at the sink faucet. You love me because I’m whole. And for me, being fully myself means doing what I can to free our world. She purrs as you scratch under her chin.

But what if you don’t come back whole, Viregan?

What — your face sets colder as you comprehend. Losing an arm or a leg or two isn’t as destructive as losing a part of one’s personal integrity.

I know soldiers who came back missing more than an arm or a leg, Viregan.

The question is on your face in twisted eyebrows.

No, I don’t mean the loss of genitalia, though that’s also a very damaging and life-changing traumatic experience. I mean PTSD, guilt, shame, this eternal alone-ness, these dreams that will follow you to the ends of the earth and back down to hell and hold you around the throat until you sign over your soul to the dark thing that beckons from some fallacious yet very real under-realm between your third eyelids…

Shell-shock?

Viregan, I know you think you’re very brave and strong — I catch you frowning and it would almost make me laugh the little-boyish ‘who-says’ on your pouted lip — and you are brave and strong. But can you really kill someone — perhaps multitudes of someones, on the battlefield, in cold blood, just because they find themselves on the wrong side of this mess? If you slit the thread on people’s lives, won’t that take away from your personal integrity just as much as being a bystander would? What about the part of yourself that believes all life is sacred, that every animate thing owns itself, that killing without renaissance is a form of deep internal suicide? Will you be missing that part of yourself when you come back? (If you come back, but I don’t say it.)

Your silence emboldens me to go further. What if we just let go of this whole no-win situation? There are other worlds.

Sounds like avoidance to me.

Well, war sounds like murder to me. And potentially suicide. And breaking my heart. And lots and lots of killing. So it’s between avoidance and violent confrontation. What do we choose?

If we leave the wound festering here, the sickness will spread across the galaxy. There won’t be a single star remote enough to be out of its reach.

I’ve got you now.

So you’re saying all of life is a trap. There’s no way to just live a peaceful life, free of war and disease, abstaining from the conflict less enlightened life forms throw our way?

It’s satisfying to back you into a corner. I don’t get to enjoy it long before a thunderous explosion crashes through our house, breaking all the windows, sending furniture blasting like petrified trees spilling goosefeather guts and purple fabric bleeding all around us in a watercolor cloud.

Sounds like the official summons has been issued, I say grimly.

I’ve always wanted to travel to the farthest reaches of the universe with you.

I don’t quite understand the connection until you run excitedly to the rocket, fire up the thrusters, and start running around the house grabbing what wasn’t destroyed by the summons blast: clothes, snacks, weather gear, books, maps. When it finally comes together, the puzzle on my face clicks into a smile I can’t push away. I start rummaging too, for my father’s old toolkit, my mother’s jewelry collection. When our glances next glue upon each other in synchrony, we find our mirrored smiles like two halves of the walnut shell and they seem to grow brighter, warmer. The threads between us singing as we get ready to abandon everything we know we’re supposed to do in favor of a reckless and probably stupid but very alive course of action. When the rocket is ready to take off, you twirl me through the door. I pull it closed. We lean together and kiss as the flame shoots us up into the air. Who needs a volcano sun?

The Mountain

“Uh…Iiiii’m a little scared,” Junye admits. The consonants and dissonance of her voice bounce like the rocks that ricochet uncertainly from under her feet and tumble into oblivion as we sidle along the narrow side of the twisting mountain.

The Something in the hole of light above us rumbles again, ominously.

“Okay, okay! I’m a lot scared!”

Out of the corner of my eye, I can see her flattened against the steep wall, her face pale as a ghost and sweating so much I can’t tell if there are also tears running down her cheeks from her squeezed-shut eyes.

“Jeremiah, I am scared to death right now.”

“Good.”

She opens one eye to shoot me an asymmetrical-eyebrow glance. “What?”

“I’m glad you’re scared.” A pause for dramatic effect. “It means… I’m not alone.”

A smile reliefs across her face like sun over an embattled kingdom in deep forest. Though she is still ghostly pale, her eyes relax open a little bit before squeezing tightly shut again.

“Well,” she laugh-choke-whispers. “I’m glad too, then, I guess. I didn’t think you were scared of anything.”

A slight breeze that could be wind or the chill breath of the Something, sweeps around us. Her knuckles go white clutching slight irregularities in the wall. Her eyes are closed again. I only realize my jaw is clenched like crazy when she says, “Yep. Literally scared to death here.”

“Junye,” I flash a grin at her slitted eyes. “I don’t think we’re going to die from this.”

Another roar, accompanied by a gust of the cold wind. The whole mountain trembles. A big chunk of the rock beneath our feet suddenly tumbles into oblivion, leaving the front halves of our sneakers hanging out over the emptiness.

“Intriguing hypothesis. What makes you say that?”

Okay, the hardish part. I muster up a can-do Rosie-the-riveter-in-boy-format grin. “If you’re willing, Junye, I’m going to ask you to take a leap of faith and –”

“I’m not leaping anywhere, you nutty nutcase!” The slits close completely like rocket doors and I can see her mind taking off, flying far away from me and the not-so-solid ground beneath half of our feet.

“Nobody’s leaping. At least, not literally,” I say in my most reassuring voice. “Bad choice of metaphor. But here’s what I’m thinking we’ll do. Remember how you got that mud puddle to open up so we could get the amethyst back?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t remember talking to a mud puddle.”

“I don’t know if it was actually, I don’t know, cognizant of me. Maybe it was just a coincidence.”

“How many times have you seen puddles coincidentally change their shape right on cue to reveal submerged objects?”

A chunk of earth beneath one of her feet falls away completely, leaving her wobbling for balance.

I try to offer her my hand, though I’m not much better anchored.

She scrambles somehow to a slightly higher spot where the ground isn’t quite as gone yet. “Yeah. Okay. Looking like an idiot is slightly less scary than dying. So what exactly –” She glances at me. “Wait a second. You think I can talk to the — Whatever That Is?” Her eyes roll up towards the sky.

The Something lets out a roar with a twinge of whininess to it.

“Not exactly. I’m wondering if you can talk to the mountain.”

“Oh, so you think I speak dirt?”

“You’re an Earthspeaker.”

“How the heck do you know all this stuff?”

“I read part of the manual,” I fib. It’s not quite time to let her know the truth yet about my role here in this wacky world. “Can’t you, like, I don’t know, maybe ask it to stop crumbling, for starters?”

“Have you ever stopped crumbling upon request?”

Suddenly I’m standing on nothing, and a fraction of a second later, I’m falling, a gasp with gravity in the air. Someone is screaming — either it’s Junye, or me in an impressive falsetto. Out of instinct my hands reach out and claw at the dirt wall. I get one hand grappling-hooked in, the other still scratching uselessly at the wall as I try to dig my toes in.

“Mountain, please don’t let us fall!”

The trembling of everything hesitates, as if considering her ask.

“Dear strong mountain, thank you so much for carrying us this far. My friend and I would very much like to live to see the view from your excellent summit. Would you be so giving as to honor our wishes, with, say, a stable path capable of supporting two smallish people with several inches of personal space in between?”

There is a sigh from the ether, but it could be the light.

“Please?”

The sigh again, louder. It’s the mountain expanding. The dirt crackles as it paunches out, opening up a comparatively luxurious shelf beneath my anchored hand.

Standing on her two feet, Junye reaches her hand down to offer me, well, a hand.

I’m afraid if I take her hand, I might pull her down instead of her pulling me up. She is even smaller and weaker than I am, after all.

She beckons with her outstretched fingers. “Don’t worry, this boy won’t let me fall.”

It takes me a second to realize she’s talking about the mountain.

“You, on the other hand, he isn’t so fond of. So grab on, I’ll pull you up. Don’t worry about dragging me down.”

My fingers are screaming. I don’t have much choice. I reach my less-anchored left hand up to meet hers. With one hand she pulls me back onto solid ground. Her other hand is holding into a crevice in the earthen wall — not gripping with claws like I did, but rather holding gently in the manner of a parent and small child learning to walk.

The path, just as she’d specified, is now wide enough for us to walk and breathe easy. I smile at her, my eyebrows knitting above my eyes just a little. “I hope you realize that was pretty awesome,” I say, happy to be talking at about eye level. I don’t even realize I haven’t let go of her hand until she gently but indisputably releases mine.

She chuckles. “Thanks.” As we advance up the mountainside, she never quite lets go of the earthen “hand;” it seems to follow hers smoothly as a bump in the wall beneath her fingers.

“So…”

She turns back, a questioning glance combining harmoniously with the smile that still hasn’t left her cheeks. Her eyes have sunshine; sunshine behind her is opening like a great cosmic sunflower, I can’t tell in the purplish light if it’s rising or setting or what but she doesn’t look like a dirt-oriented person to me, from this angle, she looks almost ethereal. “What?”

“So,.. the mountain’s a boy, you say?”

She grins.

“What’s his name?”

She turns and flashes a flippant hand as she begins to walk ahead of me. “Relax, Jeremiah. In mountain culture you don’t do names until the third date.”

“Huh?” I actually can’t tell if she’s joking.

Until she doubles over with laughter, a laughter wracking her body like the kind I’ve only ever seen up till now on manic prisoners and jubilant children. For a moment I’m afraid she will laugh herself off the cliff, she seems so unbalanced. Then I see her hand gently clasped in the earthen grip of the one I can’t see. And I know she won’t fall. And probably also, the joke is funnier if you speak mountain. There’s a whole side to this I’m not hearing.

When we finally reach the summit, we come to a giant nest full of painted eggs. Is this the nest of the Something? A screech and a shadow from above. A jade-feathered bird swoops down and settles onto the eggs, flashing us warning glances. The rumbling hasn’t ceased. The Something must be up above, out of the cave. We have to climb out into the sunshine. I have a grappling hook in my satchel. But first, let’s just stand here a second and let the sun drip over us before we dive against gravity all the way into it. It’s one of the few peaceful seconds we’ll get on this journey, and we both seem to know it. She closes her eyes to savor it. I keep mine open to watch the golden light falling on her eyelids. I don’t speak light, either, but it looks like a pleasant feeling, so I let my eyelids come down over my eyes too. Sparks of down-drifting light tickle at my eyelashes like warm snowflakes. I breathe in deep.

Phlemigan Almost’s Registry of Magical Objects: the Dreambubbler

There’s a bottle of bubble soap as old as the last kraken; it’s probably hiccuping alone somewhere in one of my Gramma’s cupboards (the bottle of bubble soap; krakens don’t hiccup or fit into my Gramma’s cupboards.) This is no ordinary archaic plaything. The bubble wand is an upcycled monocle frame from the eccentric Professor Francis Chump, whose nineteenth-century experiments in intra-retinal rainbow teleportation remain a trusted resource for researchers in this field today.

The bubble soap is made from the tears of mermaids, which wasn’t as hard to get as it might sound — uncle Francky was half-mermaid, and his father was prone to unleashing the waterworks whenever the disappointing progeniture came over to discuss his disgraceful career as a professor of intra-retinal rainbow teleportation. (Grampa may have had a supernatural voice and glowing turquoise fingernails, but he still didn’t believe in magic, and couldn’t understand why a son raised by such reasonable parents could have turned out so irrational.)

With the bubble-tears and the monocle-wand, a skilled bubble-blowing champion can create dreams of all kinds, just as easily as a clown churns out balloon animals. You see, a traditional dreamcatcher has a web stretched over the frame to snare intruding nightmares. But the Dreambubbler is just the opposite: it projects nightmarish notions out through the microfiber web of the bubble frame and sends them to colonize the sleeping brains of continents. With it, the right kind of evil person could control international law, strike terror into the hearts of terrorists, and force a harem of sexually appealing persons to convincingly replicate love out of fear. In other words, someone who knows how to use this thing and has few qualms about it could be a kind of god.

But my little brother Tommy got his hands on it instead.

Besos en guerra

— Geez, Ellie, relax. I promise I’ll be ok.

— How can you possibly…?

— I can’t.

— So you’re a liar.

— I may stretch the truth a little bit.

— …

— But — here, listen, Ellie, know this. You’re my princess. You’re my Jerusalem-butterscotch birthday cake with confetti and jeweled syrup raining down on top. You’re the first woman I’ve been concerned about pleasing since maybe my second-grade teacher. I want to be what makes you happy. If I know not coming back won’t make you happy, I won’t not come back.

— But you can’t control exactly how the arrows fly in the insects’ complex. You can want all you want and still not get.

— …

— Jesse, —

— I know, I know, it’s not perfect! Dammit, you’re such a spoiled brat! Why did they have to make you so damn perfect and then stick you with me?

— It’s a conspiracy to make you feel inferior and break my heart in little ways every day as you let the world erode at you. I… I see you prettier than you see yourself, Jesse. I see something I want to protect, to take care of.

— And my going out to fight the insects will help ensure that we can both protect what’s really important for years to come.

— I know. You’ve convinced me. I’m resigned that you’re going.

— Then…

— Just be careful, okay?

You sweep her down the treehouse stairs Tarzan-style and land in a puddle of flowers. A few thorns pierce your skin and hers, but not deep enough to draw blood.

— Okay, my friend. I will.

The mild pain makes you both smile and wince at the same time. You notice as you lean in to kiss her laughing face that the tears rolling down it are tinged with hibiscus sunset — a strange mauve mixing with the clarity of salt-blue to produce an effect almost as sharp as blood.

Note: Partly inspired by the music video “Besos en guerra” by Morat and Juanes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oeD2m2UQAI&list=PLNSq3oknt61BvjhxBJxf1Vinp0vYhyVtQ&index=27

Images in order of appearance:

Pin uploaded to Pinterest by Carey Fogle, via Surf Shack Arcadia, Japan, cited on https://backyardmastery.com/37-luxury-tree-houses-youd-like-to-move-into/24/

Thabametsi Treehouse by MORE in Marataba, South Africa, found on https://www.marataba.co.za/thabametsi-treehouse/

Child of the Reef

“Yah — I require a certain amount of patience. No one ever said I was low-maintenance.” Her eyes roll back while glittering. “But I’m worth it. In the end.”

My mouth smiles to be devoid of words, though it is infuriating, in a way. I hold the door open for her, this strong independent woman of five feet even, as she rejects a call from her father with one hand while the other dances her chopsticks into her plant-based Samovar Saffron Tofu Quinoa Bowl. I’m just struggling to not drop my foil-wrapped falafel burrito on the floor as I watch her multitask. I know if she wants, she can do even more — up to eight things at once. I don’t know whether I’m miffed about this or if it makes her the most awesomest girl I’ve ever come in contact with.

Shrugging the platinum-sequined cardigan off her shoulders in the summer night, she turns her head to flash me one of her signature mismatched-eyebrows looks. “You coming?”

“Uh — yeah, yeah.” I let the door to Semi-Nuclear Fusion swing-bang shut behind me. I watch her face carefully. The slight twitch of the lower eyelid lets me know the sudden loud noise has activated her startle response. I shouldn’t feel proud of this, but can you really blame me? When you’re dealing with a girl who can show you up like that and still look appealing, you have to take your victories where you can get them.

We walk and eat and listen to the newest PyroDelusional album on streaming, one earbud per geek. When we reach the edge of the quarry by the docks, we sit down in the wild grass. I’m licking my fingers, Max is still dancing her chopsticks in a half-full bowl. With her other hand, she plucks the earbud out of her ear and gives me a scandalized look. “Oh my gosh that’s it. I just can’t listen to this shit anymore.”

I press pause on my phone. “What? I thought you liked it.”

“I did… until that totally codependent line they literally just put in for the rhyme.”

I happen to like the song “Edit Me,” so I try for a half-second to come up with a sophisticated evidence-based retort. The best I can come up with is “Huh?”

“Didn’t you get that vibe? ‘Your heaven-sent red pen sends me two-dimensionally back to where I came from when I didn’t know you yet. You’re heaven-sent, detrimental to my health, and yet I know that now I know you I can’t live without you.'” She glares at me as if I’ve said these words to her.

“Um… you memorized the lyrics on the spot?”

She quiets, turns her blush cheeks down into her shoulders a little. “I might’ve… heard this song a couple times before.”

“There are so many questions.” So many — how could she possibly have heard the song before when the album just came out today? why would she have memorized the lyrics? why is she so hair-triggered by the evocation of codependency in a PyroDelusional song, when she knows their whole gimmick is the sick-teen-love trope? Why doesn’t she hear what I hear in the song — a plea for freedom, a glistening of hope like a small drop of dew on a parched leaf just hanging over the lagoon, almost bent enough to taste the water?

But I don’t ask any of these questions. Instead, I settle for: “You and me should write a song together.”

For a second, her indulgent grin warms up our corner of the night, and I know I’ve won. Something. Not that I have any idea how this is going to go. But the more I think about it, the righter it seems. If we can make a song together, despite our differences, maybe we’ll finally start speaking the same language — it’s tantalizingly close.

Then a mildewy shadow crosses between our laps in the grass. I glance up at the ghost ship, draped in all its rotting-seaweed regalia, wooden rib cage of a brig groaning with the weight of resurrected monsters and stolen appliances. I raise an eyebrow in wry defeat. “To be continued,” we say at once of our conversation. Then we stand, quickly twisting gadgets and metamorphosing respectively into our truer, louder forms. She shoves our leftovers in her backpack as I spread my manta wings and prepare the rocket boosters in my boots for takeoff. I want to leave her in the grass, and I’m not sure if the feeling comes from an urge to protect her from combat, an urge to get away from her, an urge to prove I don’t need her help, or a fear of the way I’m starting to feel like we’re part of the same instrument, like I’m bow and she’s string and without her I can’t make any sound.

Maybe she was right about the codependent song being stupid.