TWO POEMS

I sort of hate poetry but it's okay in Spanish for some reason?

--

I want to write something...

That will put tears in your eyes
That will light a fire in your chest
That will make you the only person in the world

You will feel the saddest
You will feel the most passionate
You will feel the most alone

There will not be more in you
There will not be hallows in you
There will not be an end in you

It will be all you want
It will be all you fear
It will be all you hate
It will be all you are

And I will stop the sun from setting, only for you...

--

I am so tall that
Mountains tremble
When I pass by,
Trees are
Only a forest,
And birds cannot
Fly above me

I am so large that
Bears cry
When they see me,
Lakes hide
In my footprint,
And cities are a painting
In the nail of my finger

I am so strong that
Rivers stop
When they hear my name
The wind is not
More than a sigh
And earthquakes are
The echo of my scream

I am so me that
The world does not care
That I am short
That I am small
That I am weak

I am tall, large and strong

The Day It Did Not Rain (again!)

THIS VERSION CONTAINS:

1. Twice as many words!
2. Vague references to MacBeth.
3. Bees.

--

He had been there for he did not know how long, bathing in the heat so thick it twisted the landscape up like a stained napkin crumpled on an empty plate. The land was flat here, and he could see forever, if forever ended in a hazy blue-beige line.

At his back he thought maybe there were rocks or pebbles or grains of sand, something pressing up against his shirt, starched by the salt of dried sweat. He thought his hat had fallen somewhere over there, just out of sight along with the newly painted sign for a town hidden behind the forever-blue-beige line. He thought maybe his feet were bleeding, but how could that be, when the sun baked everything lifeless, slowed everything thing down to such a sluggish pace that not even blood would flow?

He had sand in his throat. Or maybe his throat had turned into sand– sand oozing from the walls of his windpipe like water condensing on the side of a summertime glass. Maybe the air was sand, and he was breathing it in with every ragged breath, but it got trapped in his chest and all he puffed out was stale carbon dioxide that could barely stir the breezeless afternoon.

He didn’t think he still had his arms. He could feel something scratching at them, but he could not move them. Maybe he had forgotten them, left them behind at the last sign he had seen for the town that was so close, so close like black clouds so heavy one could taste the thunder in the air.

He told himself he was almost there. He told himself he only had a little further to go, just a bit, like he had told himself at the sign before and the sign before that. But his legs were over there, and his feet were back there, and his face was squinting at itself far over there, and the rest of him was here, melting away into the hungry ground. His skin sizzled like a good, hardy breakfast, and he could hear his wife putting water on to boil, plip plip plip. He was shaving right now, letting the water run free from the faucet, all shimmering and cold and completely wasted, all of it, what the hell was he doing?

He shut off the faucet and finished up and went into the kitchen. He greeted Sylvie with a kiss and she giggled and ran her fingers over his newly shaved jaw, eyed his lips like they were candied almonds, and handed him a plate with three strips of fat bacon and a boiled egg, cut neatly in half. For herself she made the smallest bowl of cereal and another egg, and they sat down and they feasted.

“Has the paper came yet?” he asked.

And she said, “No, it’s Tuesday.”

“And the mail?”

“It’s Tuesday, sweetest.”

So he took her arm and pulled her naked body down onto the bed with him, eggshell white and clammy, and he held her so close like she was the only piece of the earth left. She smiled with her snowflake teeth and he kissed her eyes and she took a bite of his shoulder, crunching it like fresh watermelon.

“It’s a bit stringy,” Sylvie said to his mother.

“It’s can’t be helped, the meat just comes like this,” his mother replied. “Here, try this.”

His mother cut the top of a lemon off and passed it across the table to Sylvie. Sylvie squeezed it, juice flitting over her fingers and dripping all over his thigh, cut to tiny pieces on her plate. His mother was working his hand with a knife, and wet red pieces fell from the bone like rain slipping down a bus window while a girl in his third grade class stared out at her house, so far up the driveway, and the weather beat at the roof and she wouldn’t go, she didn’t have an umbrella, her art project would be ruined.

It was raining and he walked home with nothing but an extra shirt over his head. It was thin and blue and water seeped through and dribbled down his face, down his back, like Sylvie massaging away all those tense knots, but he was thirteen and his mother scolded him and drew up a warm bath, and he lowered himself into it.

He towel-dried his hair and it was messy, and Sylvie laughed at him but it sounded like wind chimes in the sea breeze, and they walked down the beach holding hands because they were young and they were in love. There were white shells and he picked them up to give to Sylvie, but she was gone so he piled them up like office papers.

“Working late again?” Carla asked, coat over her arm and car keys already in hand.

“Yeah,” he answered. “I have a few more papers to get through. Just a few more.”

Carla leaned over and picked the top paper off the pile and flickered her eyes over it like a viper licking the air. She shook her head. Her plastic-sapphire earrings clinked. They were almost the color of Sylvie’s eyes, which were clouded over with tears and he could hear her crying and her finger nails were scattered across his desk like broken bits of seashells.

“Why don’t you love me?” she screamed, her face filled with creases and grief and blood from where her fingers had bled on her cheeks. She squatted hunched over in the corner of their bedroom, the bed sheets wrapped around her like a miserable blue robe. He tried to hand her a tissue, but it was a seashell and she threw it back at him.

“The bed is cold!” she yelled, her blue eyes spilling over and out like burning sugar. “It has been cold since Tuesday!”

Tuesday was their first anniversary so he bought her violets because he knew they were her favorite. She took the bouquet, plastic wrap crinkling and snapping, and she plucked the petals off one by one, running them over her bare chest, collar bone defined and skin like whipped cream. They left chalky blue trails on her skin, swirling and twirling and whirling, like bees or birds or a hundred one-winged butterflies slowly falling. He reached out and traced one blue path with his thumb and it smeared over her smooth skin like water spilled across the floor.

He kneeled with a handful of paper towels, trying to soak it all up before his mother found out, but there was too much and the paper towels melted into a soggy mess, unable to pick up anymore, simply moving the water around as he scrubbed away. He tried to sop up the spill with his hands, but they transformed themselves into a wet mush as well, and then his arms, and then his legs up to his knees.

His mother found him curled up on the floor, crying and limbless. She made an impatient tic noise like Sylvie’s clock that ran too fast.

“Can’t get up more, can you?” she asked. He whimpered. “Go on, try. It’s a mess in here.”

And there was only a little puddle left, just a tiny one, but he couldn’t clean it up, he’d already lost too much of himself, like the dregs of coffee sinking to the bottom of the mug.

Sylvie was terrible at making coffee. It was always too weak or too strong, so bitter it made his gums tense up. When he complained she watered it down with milk and the coffee faded into an ugly beige color in his blue mug. It still tasted awful, but he only had a little bit left, so he squeezed his eyes shut and tipped it down his throat.

He opened his eyes to look at the bare stage. He sat in an uncomfortable chair in the high school auditorium, the rest of his sixth grade class buzzing around him and quivering like yellow jackets. Then the lights went down and they fell quiet and three witches appeared in a nightmare on stage. He understood the words but not the meaning, so he tighten his jaw and pretended he was somewhere else.

“Look at the sky!” said Sylvie and they looked up, and it was all around them. It wrapped around them and they were floating, laughing and holding each other. The sky flowed and gushed and surged and buffeted them around and they clung to each other, too transfixed with one another to notice that her hair was tangled and his shadow of a beard was scratchy and itched her lips as they kissed.

“Until death do us part,” Sylvie purred in his ear and the best man slapped his back in congratulations and his mother was crying.

His mother was still crying when they got home from his graduation. He tossed his royal blue cap and gown onto the easy chair and they tumbled off the side in a river of synthetic fibers.

“Oh, Mom,” he groaned and she bent to pick up the discarded gown, tears dripping from her chin and hands shaking with grief as she folded it, smoothing out the wrinkles she could not remove from her face.

“You’re a man now,” she said. “And soon you won’t need me– you won’t need anyone.” And she bawled and bawled and he cradled her head to his chest and thought that yes, she was right, he could be whatever sort of man he wanted, he just needed a little experience, a little time.

Her tears began to sting his skin so he pushed her away. But the burning sensation continued, somewhere deep in his bones, so he dipped his fingers into the skin of his arm and pulled it back, and then pulled away all the muscle and veins, and there were bees nesting in the honeycomb of his marrow.

The bees buzzed and swarmed and stung the remains of his skin, so he swatted at them and flailed and ripped away more skin and sinew. When he tore apart his chest, the queen sat humble and bulbous on his sternum. He pounded at her with an open fist and when she burst venom slid over his ribs and stung his heart and lungs and he collapsed onto the bed.

“Up?” Sylvie asked groggily as he switched off the alarm.

“Yeah,” he grunted and rubbed sleep from his eyes. “I’ve got a plane to catch.”

“So early,” Sylvie whined and rolled over to look at him. The blankets tangled around her form like something majestic trapped in a fishing net and her hair splayed across the pillow like sea foam. “You said you didn’t have to do this anymore.”

He stood and stretched and padded toward the bathroom. “I said I only had a few more,” he clarified. “Everything else is taken care of. Just a few more. Then we can do whatever we want.”

Sylvie sighed dreamily and sank into the bed like flowers putting down roots. “Good.”

He let the water run as he shaved. Through the window he could see the first sliver of the sunrise, like the dying embers of a man’s final cigarette.

He smoked a pack a week for six months when he was nineteen, and his voice hadn’t been the same since. But he was still in good health, he still had a job, Sylvie loved him, his parents loved him, Duncan was dead and he was trying hard but Sylvie loved him. When he got to the town behind the forever-blue-beige line, he would call Sylvie, tell her he was alright, he was fine, he could make it, just a bit more.

He kept walking.

When he sat down to take a break, he remembered he was lying in pieces in the sun and his eyes felt like dried figs even when they were closed. Forever was a blue-beige line he could never reach, and behind that was the town that was so close, and he could call Sylvie but he couldn’t.

The sky was above him, was blue like the ocean, like so much water splashing around him. His pores sucked it up, he was a sponge, unfit to move but still living until he was in someone’s shower, and he would still suck up water but he would be dead. The sky was so beautiful, like Sylvie’s eyes, like the screen before the movie plays, like new sheets, like the plastic wrap around a bouquet of violets, like the sky.

As he lay dying, he tried to swallow the sky with his eyes, one bit at a time, for it was all he had left.

“Ah,” he thought, marveling at this one last gift to him, just for him. “It’s a good thing it did not rain.”

--

Pointing out typos would be good, yes?

This is how I think. I guess. D:

Reading an old Spanish short story, I came across a phrase which approximated with "streets running with gold." I immediately thought of Winnie the Pooh.

I don't like real honey, but I like the honey Pooh likes. It makes me think of liquid gold. It doesn't ooze so much as slowly puddle and lazily drip from your fingers. It's a warm yellow, which gold really isn't, but it should be. It must taste like mango nectar and lemon sorbet and sweet milk that comes in yellow cartons.

There is a city in Spain called Granada, which means "pomegranate." Pomegranates are permanently linked to this image I have of Persephone, wife of Hades, who has long dark hair and white skin and a sharp chin but the pink cheeks and kind smile of her mother Demeter. When I think of Granada, I think of the underworld. But nowadays when I think of Lord Pluto's kingdom, I think of Granada at night, or at least Granada they way I think it should look, as I have never been there. Granada is mostly how I imagine Europe in general: old ornate buildings with columns and statues, cobble stone streets, well dressed people in dark coats wondering about without much of a rush to get anyone, save one woman with her head down, carefully sculpted curls hiding her face as she dodges around pairs of leisurely chatting men. But a little bit of the city has come to be more like the Spain I know, a Spain which might not be anything like Granada: palm trees and vibrant green birds, fountains bubbling from the middle of chaotic traffic circles, school children huddled on a corner. And all at night and tinged blue, as the Underworld should be.

When I think of New York, a city I've actually visited, I don't think of the normal sites. The first thought isn't a thought at all, but rather a twitch of the nose as I remember the smell of too many people, too many cars, steam drifting up from the subway and something sweet and rotting. Then comes the slap of sunlight and noise as you rise out of the depths of the subway– you're here, you're in Manhattan, no one cares, they just walk by and the day is bright. Then the heat on the sides of the tracks of the subway, someone's sad violin notes drifting down for the stairs, and it's so hot that you're sweating and there's nowhere to sit. And then up again, standing at the to of dirty stairs in a restaurant. The sign promises there's a bathroom down there, but it's dark and the walls are scuffed and there's a mop, and you feel terribly unwelcomed to someone else's basement.

And when I think of these things, I think I should write them down, but then I think of writing artistically, which is different from normal writing. Normal writing is sitting at a desk with a computer, squinting at a thesaurus and googling pictures. Writing artistically is standing in front of a toilet, a glass bottle in each hand and more on the floor around you, making prison wine. From one bottle you pour cigarette smoke, from another vodka, another gasoline. Or maybe you try a sweeter recipe, with vanilla and soapy bath water and mist over mossy rocks. I imagine myself pouring random amounts into this think-basin, clunky headphone over my ears and twisting my hips to an old hip hop song, and then later I will come back with a pitcher and pour my fermented wine onto a blank page.

The Day It Did Not Rain

I BLAME YOU, DALÍ.

-

He had been there for he did not know how long, bathing in the heat so thick it twisted the landscape up like a stained napkin crumpled on an empty plate. The land was flat here, and he could see forever, if forever ended in a hazy blue-beige line.

At his back he thought maybe there were rocks or pebbles or grains of sand, something pressing up against his shirt, starched by the salt of dried sweat. He thought his hat had fallen somewhere over there, just out of sight along with the newly painted sign for a town hidden behind the forever-blue-beige line. He thought maybe his feet were bleeding, but how could that be, when the sun baked everything lifeless, slowed everything thing down to such a sluggish pace not even blood would flow?

He had sand in his throat. Or maybe there was no sand and his throat had turned into sand– sand oozing from the walls of his windpipe like water condensing on the side of a cool, crisp glass. Maybe the air was sand, and he was breathing it in with every ragged breath, but it got trapped in his chest and all he puffed out was stale carbon dioxide that could barely stir the breezeless afternoon.

He didn’t think he still had his arms. He could feel something scratching at them, but he could not move them. Maybe he had forgotten them, left them behind at the last sign he saw for the town that was so close, so close like black clouds so heavy one could taste the thunder in the air.

He told himself he was almost there. He told himself he only had a little further to go, just a bit, like he had told himself at the sign before and the sign before that. But his legs were over there, and his feet were back there, and his face was squinting at itself far over there, and the rest of him was here, melting away into the hungry ground. His skin sizzled like a good, hardy breakfast, and he could hear his wife putting water on to boil, plip plip plip. He was shaving right now, letting the water run free from the faucet, all shimmering and cold and completely wasted, all of it, what the hell was he doing?

He shut off the faucet and finished up and went into the kitchen. He greeted Sylvie with a kiss and she giggled and ran her fingers over his newly shaved jaw, eyed his lips like they were candied almonds, and handed him a plate with three strips of fat bacon and a boiled egg, cut neatly in half. For herself she made the small bowl of cereal and another egg, and they sat down and they feasted.

“Has the paper came yet?” he asked.

And she said, “No, it’s Tuesday.”

“And the mail?”

“It’s Tuesday, sweetest.”

So he took her arm and pulled her naked body down onto the bed with him, eggshell white and clammy, and he held her so close like she was the only piece of the earth left. She smiled with her snowflake teeth and he kissed her eyes and she took a bite of his shoulder, crunching it like fresh watermelon.

“It’s a bit stringy,” Sylvie said to his mother.

“It’s can’t be helped, the meat just comes like this,” his mother replied. “Here, try this.”

His mother cut the top of a lemon off and passed it across the table to Sylvie. Sylvie squeezed it, juice flitting over her fingers and dripping all over his thigh, cut to tiny pieces on her plate. His mother was working his hand with a knife, and wet red pieces feel from the bone like rain slipping down a bus window while a girl in his third grade class stared out at her house, so far up the driveway, and the weather beat at the roof and she wouldn’t go, she didn’t have an umbrella, her art project would be ruined.

He smoked a pack a week for six months when he was nineteen, and his voice hadn’t been the same since. But he was still in good health, he still had a job, Sylvie loved him, his parents loved him, Duncan was dead but Sylvie loved him. When he got to the town he would call Sylvie, tell her he was alright, alright, he was fine, he could make it, just a bit more.

When he sat down to take a break, he remembered he was lying in pieces in the sun and his eyes felt like raisins even when they were closed. Forever was a blue-beige line he could never reach, and behind that was the town that was so close, and he could call Sylvie but he couldn’t.

The sky was above him, was blue like the ocean, like so much water splashing around him. His pores sucked it up, he was a sponge, unfit to move but still living until he was in someone’s shower, and he would still suck up water but he would be dead. The sky was so beautiful, like Sylvie’s eyes, like the screen before the movie plays, like fancy paper waiting for a fancy message, like the sky.

As he lay dying, he tried to swallow the sky with his eyes, for it was all he had left.

“Ah,” he thought, marveling at this one last gift to him, just for him. “It’s a good thing it did not rain.”

DEADGIRL. ALL OF IT. AGAIN.

I did some SLOPPY EDITS to what I had before and ADDED SOME MORE SCENES. Brilliant, I know.

(also I like testing blogspot's word limit)

(also no i'm not bothering to edit in italics THIS IS OVER THIRY PAGES DAMMIT)

--

I woke up face down in a river of sewage, and that is not a pleasant experience, let me tell you. The fact that I had my face submerged in murky water filled with God-knows-what, however, didn’t bother me nearly as much as the fact that I could smell it. Underwater.

I floundered around a bit before getting my feet on the slimy ground at standing, wiping the God-knows-what from my eyes. The water was about hip-deep and stagnant. Even though I had just been in the open air, a low cement ceiling was above and damp walls loomed over me. There were a few dim lights overhead and I waded over to a narrow walkway I could make out along the side of the putrid river.

The smell made me want to hurl, but I was extremely confused about where I was and how had I got there and why I could smell underwater, and I had this massive headache, and it felt like ants were gnawing circles in my temples. So I sat down. It was then that I realized I was not wearing the paint-stained shorts and a band T I had thrown on that morning, but rather my lucky jeans and a teal button down shirt over a white tank top, which were all somehow dry. I pulled my collar away from my chest to confirm that, yes, my bra had also miraculously changed.

This was all very perplexing.

Messing around on a construction site had probably not been a good idea. But it was our favorite less-than-legal hangout place, and it was Independence Day at midnight, so we’d done it anyway. I could rationalize that perhaps the ground was unstable, and perhaps six teens stomping around had made it collapse. It would make sense that I could then fall through into a sewer, but I couldn’t think of any excuses for the smelling where one should not be able to smell or that sudden wardrobe change. Or way there wasn’t a gaping hole in the ceiling with everyone else yelling down to me.

Mentally grasping for rational explanations for impossible things made my head throb even more, and it felt as though it was steadily getting heavier. I groaned and raised my hands to knead it with the base of my palms. Except my hands instead found something metal and tubular protruding about six inches from either side of my face. I pulled on it gently with one hand. The headache instantly went from bearable to dizzying and the ants gnawed harder. I choked back a scream and squeezed my eyes shut, waiting for it to subside. It took a few agonizing moments but was back to normal before I lost it and started whimpering.

I had learned two things from that mistake. One, I had a pipe going through my head. Two, I shouldn’t touch it.

I did scream then, poking at the flesh around the pipe, wondering where the blood was and what part of the brain I’d damamged– I was thinking just fine, and standing fine, and other than the headache I felt alright, just very, very confused. It occurred to me that it didn’t make very much sense that I was still alive. But a lot of things right now didn’t make very much sense, and I decided it was best to push those questions aside until I figured out where I was. There was no use panicking, I told myself, and set about grabbing chunks of hair and molding them into tiny braids and untangled themselves as soon as I let them drop. This was how I usually kept myself from throwing a tantrum at my too crowded house full of roughhousing brothers.

I started to walk along the concrete ledge.

I didn’t know much about sanitary systems, but I assumed that I would eventually find a ladder up to a manhole or something like that. My footsteps made smacking noises as I went along at a casual pace. I wanted to hurry, to break into a run, but I forced my body to at least pretend it was still calm. I focused on my footsteps: right, left, smack, smack.

After about twenty minutes of walking, I was starting to shake with suppressed panic. I hadn’t encountered anything but barren walls, not even a connecting passage or a pipe bringing new waste. The sewer water was still stagnant, unmoving. No matter how hard the hopeful part of me was trying to stifle, the logical piece of my mind insisted that still water meant that there was a good chance there was no exist. My finiking hands were starting to yank hairs out by the roots, and I had to stop braiding my hair. There was nothing leading out of here, no pipes moving the sewage along.

Just the one in your head, I thought in mild hysteria. I didn’t know what to make of the pipe. The panic at the idea that I was trapped in a sewer was overpowering the headache and overriding my worry for much else. I was caring less about the fatal injury in my head and more about the fantasy of throwing a super-powered punch at the wall and breaking through to daylight.

I bent over and brushed the knees of my lucky jeans, the way I did when I wore them bowling or to take an important test. Even if I was wearing them inexplicably, I might as well indulge in a calming superstition. Just brushing them didn’t help, though, and I starting manically beating at my knees with my knuckles. A few seconds of this made me feel better, and I continued walking, albeit at a much brisker pace.

After a very long time and two more goes at beating up my knees, I was reduced to trudging along the seemingly endless sewer, shoulders drooping pathetically. I wished I hadn’t asked Sophie to hold on to my cell phone and keys in her purse. Not that I would get reception down here, but I would have at least been able to figure out how long I’d been down here. I decided to take a break.

Careful not to hit my pipe against the wall, I leaned back into it. Dampness pushed through the back of my shirt, but I didn’t mind because, along with my feet, my back was growing sore from so much walking and I wanted to give it a rest. I sat idly wondering silly things, trying to cheer myself up. I wondered about if maybe I could get a deal with drainage company, being in advertisements and talking about how I could use the pipe in my head to clear my sinuses. I wondered if my lucky jeans were just my old shorts in disguise and that’s why they weren’t being so lucky today.

I was snapped out of my thoughts when I heard voices. They were far enough away that I could just make out the owners’ silhouettes in the half-light the weak lights provided, and I scrambled to my feet and ran toward them.

“I’m not sure we can use this one…” As I approached them, I began to make out clear sentences, and four or five dark figures appeared ahead of me.

“Look, another one!” Someone called. It was a boy’s voice, cracking on “another.”

“I love when they just come to us,” a woman murmured, her lips turning up at the corners in a Cheshire cat smile.

I could make out her face then, covered in bold make up to hide newly forming wrinkles. She was wearing a fury stole and a grand, sequined purple dress. She stood in a loose circle with three other people, none of whom seemed to belong to each other. There was a gangly freckled boy who seemed around fourteen, dressed in a tuxedo and baseball cap. If that wasn’t strange enough, the huge, burly man next to him had a full sand-colored beard that went to his chest and appeared to be dressed as a Viking. The only normal looking person in the group was a young black woman, dressed in a fitted University of Georgia T-shirt and denim skirt. She fiddled absentmindedly with gold bangles on her wrist as the circle of strange people assessed me.

I noticed what they had circled around, and I screamed.

It was a little boy, a horrific little boy. He was standing there, blinking at me, confused as I was, but every inch of him seemed to be covered in blood. His right arm was missing from the elbow down, little strings of flesh dangled from it, a huge chunk from his left shoulder was missing, and the front of his thighs were shaved away so that pieces of were visible. A flap of partially removed scalp caused fuzzy black hairs to wave at me as he tilted his head to look me over, dark almond eyes fixating on the pipe through my head. His once-yellow shirt had a picture of a cheerful frog on it, with bubbly Korean script going across the bottom. He was probably six or seven.

When I screamed, the black woman giggled and the Viking rolled his eyes. The woman with the purple dress grinned excitedly.

“Oh, she must really be new!” she cried.

I thought about asking questions like Shouldn’t we get him to a hospital? and Who are you, why are you dressed like that, and why are you in a sewer? However, no one seemed concerned about the terrible injuries, not even the little boy, and the second one seemed awfully rude.

Instead, I asked, “Where am I?”

They all laughed then. All of them excepted the boy, who whined, “Everywhere is itchy,” and scratched the stub of his missing arm. I cringed.

“This girl’s kind of dumb, yeah?” the teenaged boy in the tuxedo said. He reminded me of my brother Mathew, but all rude little freshmen reminded me of Mathew, and anyway you’d never get Mathew in a tux, so I brushed the thought aside.

The black woman smiled and shook her head in the way you would at a kitten’s antics. “Honey, where do you think you are?” she asks.

“Uh… in a sewer?” I tried. Various degrees of condescending amusement appeared on their faces, except the Viking man, who just looked annoyed. So I tried again. “Am I dead?”

“Bingo,” the woman in the purple dress said, grinning manically at me. I smiled nervously back, wondering if she’s been sipping the crazy juice. Then she adds, “Just look at how perfect she is!”

“Hey,” the black woman interjected. “She’s too young for you. If anyone takes her, it’ll be me.”

“What about me?” the teenaged boy protested, scowling at them both. “I’ve never even been up.”

The continued arguing like this– I wasn’t really sure what they meant by “taking” me, maybe taking me up out of the sewer?– but I stopped paying attention. I was dead, according to that woman. And that made sense. Sort of. It explained the pipe, and could possibly explain everything else, although I wasn’t too familiar with being dead, so I couldn’t be sure. It certainly explained the poor little boy in front of me, scratching away at his itching wounds.

“Look, she’s the perfect match for me,” the black woman was saying. “Only a few years younger, she looks American–”

It all just seemed so surreal.

“Only a few years older than me, and I bet she’s Canadian–” the teenaged boy interrupted.

I knew I should feel sad, missing my family and friends, but I felt a dreamlike haze wash over me instead. I was dead. I had a pipe in my head. The afterlife was a sewer. It just made so little sense I couldn’t convince myself it wasn’t some kooky hallucination.

“She looks like a Toronto girl,” he continued. “Yeah, Toronto.” The black woman tapped her foot impatiently.

“And she’s a girl,” she finished. “You’re not nearly mature enough to go parading around as a sixteen year old girl.”

Wait, what?

“I’m seventeen,” I muttered. “And I’m from Pennsylvania.”

They ignored me. The woman with the purple dress pursed her lips.

“I speak English perfectly well, you know,” she said. “I lived in London for two years.”

The black woman rolled her eyes. “Yeah, but your accent is some weird, French-British hybrid. No one would ever believe you.”

“And Tisha has a Southern accent,” the teenaged boy piped up, pointing at the black woman. None of them had an accent. I almost pointed this out, but then he said, “Even if she says it’s faint, some chick in Philly isn’t going to magically gain one, but me– me, my accent is neutral.” He smiled triumphantly at the two women, as if he had won whatever this argument was about. The Viking watched silently with a peeved scrunch about his thick eyebrows, and the little boy picked at his frayed ears.

“I’m not from Philadelphia,” I said dumbly. Their conversation was making warning bells go off in my head, but they were probably my best bet for getting out of the sewer (If there’s a way out, I thought, panic prickling in my brain again. What if this sewer is the entire afterlife?), so I told myself I was just being paranoid.

They stopped arguing and stared at me, and the little boy suddenly asked, “When are you taking me to my mommy?”

The woman in the purple dress gives him a rueful sort of smile. “Right after we show this nice lady the way out of the sewer,” she said.

“So there’s more to the afterlife?” I asked, hopeful.

“Of course, sweetheart,” the black woman, Tisha, said, bangles jingling as she put her hands on her hips. “It’s just that, for some reason, lots of new arrivals end up down here. Like Min-jun here.” She waved at the little boy, who asked for his mother again.

“So… then how…” I motioned upwards. “How do I get out?”

“Just follow us,” the woman in the purple dress said, Cheshire cat smile back. I felt my feet taking a step back from her, only to have the Viking grip my arm. His huge hand wrapped all the way around my elbow easily. I tugged away from him, but he held me effortlessly, that same perturbed look on his face. The teenaged boy grabbed my other arm.

“Don’t worry,” he said, smirking at me. “Being dead is great… you could even say, to die for.”

I couldn’t believe he’d tried for a pun that corny, but I also couldn’t believe I was being mugged in an otherworldly sewer. Or kidnapped. Or killed again somehow. How lame would that be?

I struggled against them as hard as I could. I kicked the teenaged boy in the knee. He yelled and I managed to yank my arm from his hands. But know matter how hard I kicked and pulled, the Viking just glared down at me, stoic and utterly unamused. The woman in the purple dress snorted.

“Don’t even try, Pennsylvania,” she advised. “You don’t have a chance against Asgrim here.”

My headache had exploded from the struggle, but I stood tall, glaring at the hateful woman. She just smiled back at me like a playful cat. The teenaged boy reattached himself to my other arm. Tisha was pointedly ignoring me, kneeling next to Min-jun and stroking his bloodstained hair. He seemed about to cry.

The two males frogmarched me down the sewer after the woman, who exaggerated the swing of her hip as she walked. Tisha followed, leading Min-jun by his remaining hand. The blood, which was still oozing out of various injuries, didn’t seem to bother her. Without warning, they stopped, and the Viking gripped both my arms and threw me into the wall.

I hadn’t been expecting it. I screamed and tried to cover my face with my arms before impact– but there was no impact, at least not with the wall. Instead I went right through it, right into blinding daylight. I fell to my hands and knees in grass that seemed too green to be real. I stared down at its unnatural vividness, hand and knees stinging and head begging to let me just lay it down and rest. The woman’s shiny black stilettos appeared in front of me and I forced myself to my feet, ignoring the headache.

“Stupid girl,” she said, clicking her tongue. “You ignored the gate.”

I looked around shakily. I was in a field dotted with small trees and bright pink flowers– unnaturally pink, just like the grass. A high stone wall snaked through the field nearby, identical circular archways present every few hundred feet. While the two men expertly flanked me again, I watched Tisha and Min-jun come through an arch directly behind me, through which I had surely been thrown. But there was no sewer on the other side, just more of the too-vibrant field.

I gaped at the stone arch. The teenaged boy, who wasn’t holding my arm nearly as tightly or uncomfortably as the Viking, chuckled.

“Really? You can’t see it at all?” I had no idea what he was talking about. “Even the kid can see it. But I guess he’s too young to know any better, yeah?”

I didn’t know what to say, so I kept gaping. I knew I should work on getting away from these people, but to where? Could I get the pipe treated at a hospital? Was there any point in having hospitals in the afterlife?

I really wanted to brush the knees of my lucky jeans, but I supposed it wouldn’t matter. And the boy and the Viking had my arms, anyway.

“Come on, we need to hurry,” the woman said, suddenly on alert. Her eyes darted around the field. “There will be more guards around here.”

She lead the way along the wall, her arrogant stride not in the least bothered by her impractical footwear on the soft ground. I was forced to follow, but the teenaged boy paid little attention to me as he and the Viking dragged me along. He was staring at the arches as we passed.

“Are we going to my mommy?” I heard Min-jun ask.

“Of course we are, sweetie,” Tisha answered softly.

The teenaged boy seemed too fascinated by the field on the other side of the wall. It was pretty, and reminded me of some digitally enhanced field a gleeful couple might frolic through, but it wasn’t that interesting.

So I said, “They remind me of Chinese moon gates.”

“What’s that?” the boy asked, not looking at me.

“They’re used in gardens, I think,” I said. I’d done a project on them years ago in middle school. I thought they were pretty. “I think they’re symbolic, or the architecture of them is, or something like that. I don’t really remember details, sorry.”

“Hmm,” he said, not paying me much attention. “Yeah, those are gates.”

A few more moments passed as he continued to oggle the arches. I cleared my throat awkwardly.

“I’m Juniper,” I said conversationally.

“Yeah, I’m Kevin,” he mumbled, still staring at the wall. After a couple moments, he realized what I was getting at. “Oh! Yeah, I’m Kevin, he’s Asgrim, she’s Madame Lefevre…” He pointed to the Viking on the other side of me and the woman, who was sauntering along in front of us, in turn.

Before he could go on, Madame Lefevre cut in, turning her face to frown disapprovingly at us. “It doesn’t really matter who were are, does it?”

“I guess not,” Kevin answered, looking doubtful as he turned his head back to the wall.

Unfortunately, Who are you, exactly? was going to be my next question. So I asked, “Where are you taking me?”

“Also doesn’t matter,” Madame Lefevre called over her shoulder. “At least not to you.”

I thought it mattered very much to me.

“What are you going to do to me?” I asked quietly, not sure if I wanted to know. I thought of being beaten for someone’s sick pleasure and being used as a guinea pig for freakish science experiments.

Madame Lefevre just laughed harshly and Kevin looked away, guilt written all over his face. I thought of girls kidnapped and sold as slaves and people getting knocked out and waking with missing kidneys. I shuddered and refocused on escape.

It seemed that direct questions weren’t going to get me anywhere. I spent a few silent minutes trying to see what Kevin was seeing and failing. Behind me, Min-jun was chattering happily to Tisha. I wondered if he was in as much danger as I appeared to be. Tisha seemed to be genuinely trying to comfort him, but she was also obviously lying about taking him to his mother, if we were really all dead. I decided to include him in my escape plan.

My escape plan involved going out on a lot of limbs, since I wasn’t really sure what was going on. I thought I had a good idea though, if I went by the logic of a world where a pipe through the head only caused headaches, missing limbs only caused itchiness, and one could walk through walls that were really moon gate arches in a field.

I suddenly dug my heels into the ground and bugged my eyes at the arch we were passing. “What is that?” I cried. I, of course, didn’t see anything but grass and flowers and a tree, but I reasoned everyone else must be seeing something, otherwise Kevin wouldn’t stare. At my shriek, Kevin was startled enough to drop my arm, and Asgrim grunted and pulled me along, trying to keep up with Madame Lefevre, though she just laughed at me.

“Finally starting to see the world, Pennsylvania?” she said. Min-jun commented on my outburst to Tisha, who giggled.

“I don’t understand,” I said because I wasn’t really sure what else to say. I twisted my neck to stare back at the arch as we moved on, hoping I wasn’t being too dramatic.

“It’s just a grocery store, jeez,” Kevin said, reaching for my arm again. I jerked it away and pointed at another arch as we approached. I could still only see the field.

“Where’d the field go?” I asked, my voice pitched high not because I was freaked out by a grocery store or a sewer or whatever was there (and I hoped it wasn’t the field, otherwise I’d just revealed my folly), but because I was nervous about what I was about to do. Kevin frowned in irritation.

“A canal. They’re probably trying to copy Venice or Amsterdam or something,” he said.

“Control her,” Madame Lefevre hissed. Asgrim tightened his grip on my arm and Kevin tried to take my other one again, but I was sick of this game. I wrenched it away from him.

“Why is there a canal there?” I demanded, half-shouting. I had managed to stop the whole party right in front of the gate with my little show. Min-jun started whimpering at all the racket I was making. “This doesn’t make sense!” I steeled myself for what I was about to do. “Who are you? What do you want with me?”

And as Kevin was raising his hands in front of him as if to defend himself from my yelling, I rammed the side of my head into Asgrim’s arm as hard as I could. The pipe dug into his skin, and he bellowed and let go of me. My head was searing, and I was seeing black dots, but an adrenaline rush kept me afloat enough to spin around and for my foot to meet the Viking’s crotch. He bellowed again and dropped to his knees.

Madame Lefevre was screaming for everyone to control me, standing several feet away from us and shaking her fists. Min-jun started crying. Asgrim stretched an arm toward me, his other one bleeding from the pipe and cradling his injured privates. I stumbled away from him and tried to make a leap for Min-jun, but Kevin tackled me from behind. I wrestled with him for a few moments, Madame Lefevre still screaming in the background and not moving herself. Asgrim huddled over himself several yards away, looking epically pissed.

Kevin let go of my hair when I jammed my elbow in his neck. He spluttered, momentarily unable to breathe, and I jumped up, grass stained and panting. My head throbbed and my peripheral vision was blurry, but I spotted Min-jun cowering behind Tisha. She was glowering at me, gaze hard.

Our eyes locked, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to get by her. Even if I did, Min-jun would refuse to go with me, and in the time I’d lost getting around Tisha, someone else would have gotten up to stop me.

Feeling terrible, I turned on my heel and sprinted toward the arch. Asgrim managed to get to his feet and lumbered after me, and I dove through. I couldn’t run anymore– either I’d land in the canal and float to safety, or there’d be people to help me, or I’d be caught and dragged away.

But as I gracelessly thudded to the ground, I saw nothing like what Kevin had described. I was still in the field, looking up at the tree I’d seen through the arch. I sat up and turned, expecting to see Asgrim lunging toward me, Madame Lefevre urging him on and Kevin close behind. But there was no Asgrim chasing after me, just the other four staring at the arch.

I gulped and scooted back, knowing Madame Lefevre would send Kevin or Tisha after me. They didn’t seem to notice me.

“Where’d she go?” Kevin asked, gawking at me, or at least the general area I was occupying. I sat there, staring back, but he didn’t seem to see me.

Madame Lefevre tugged at her dark curly hair in frustration, saying, “How could she have learned to manipulate the gates so adeptly? She’s new!”

I had no idea what this meant, but evidently no one could see me. I held my breath, wondering if they’d notice if me if I moved. Then Asgrim reappeared under the arch, his back toward me and heading toward Madame Lefevre as if he’d just walked through from my side.

“Did you see any sign of her?” Madame Lefevre asked, her eyes narrow and her painted lips in a neat little frown. Asgrim shook his head.

“We all saw her disappear,” Tisha spoke up. “She must have switched it right at the last moment, and we didn’t catch it. Classic escape strategy.”

“She couldn’t even see them at first, though,” Kevin said, kicking at the grass.

“She must be cleverer than we thought,” Madame Lefevre said, glaring intently at the arch. Even though I knew she couldn’t see me, her eyes seemed to be searching for me, and I kept as still as I possibly could. I was still holding my breath and my lungs weren’t complaining at all. Apparently dead people don’t need things like oxygen or brain matter displaced by pipes.

“I guess that whole dumb blonde routine was just an act, huh?” Kevin said.

I couldn’t help but feel pleased that they all thought I had outwitted them so brilliantly. In actuality, I thought for sure that I’d end up in plain view of them, but at least in a different place. My plan had been just to get through an arch and to pray that something on the other side could help me– a place to hide, some people to scare them off. By sheer dumb luck I had ended up exactly where they couldn’t see me. Mentally, I thanked my lucky jeans.

They spent a few moments discussing where to go next, an argument I couldn’t follow because I was unfamiliar with all the places they were rapidly listing off. I slowly curled my hands into fists, not wanting to move too much until they had gone.

“What about my mommy?” Min-jun asked, loud and clear.

“We’re taking you to her, it’ll just take some time,” Tisha replied kindly.

“Oh, shut up,” Madame Lefevre snapped. “We obviously can’t use him. He’s too far gone and too young.”

Tisha shoved the boy behind her protectively. “We should find him a mom,” she said. “Or at least someone to take care of him.”

Kevin groaned and muttered something about soft spots and little kids. Madame Lefevre took a threatening step toward Tisha and Min-jun.

“This is about that little Paraguayan girl, isn’t it,” she said, her face twisting up in a cruel smirk. “I left her in the desert and you couldn’t find her. She was useless, and so is that like brat.” She pointed a bony finger and him, and Min-jun winced.

Tisha held her ground and stared coolly back at the older woman. “I didn’t agree with you then and I don’t agree with you now,” she said. “Asgrim will back me up. He helped me look for little Rosita.”

Madame Lefevre’s smirk shrank, and she looked over at the looming Viking. He just shrugged, neither confirming or denying Tisha’s words.

“Why don’t we just take him to an orphanage?” Kevin asked impatiently. “There’s one in that town near the swamp. The swamp’s full of newbies– we might as well go over there and–”

“That place is for German kids,” Tisha said, squaring her shoulders and crossing her arms over her chest. “He should be somewhere where he can get familiar food and hear familiar stories, not schnitzel and the Brothers Grim. And I’d rather him go straight to a real family.”

“Fine,” said Madame Lefevre, crossing her own arms. “You go find him a family, and we’ll stake out the swamp. We’ll give you three days. And if we find anyone while you’re gone, we’re not saving them for you.”

Tisha nodded and took up Min-jun’s hand. “C’mon, sweetie, I’m going to take you to your mommy.” She lead him away, out of my line of vision. Madame Lefevre said some very rude things after her and marched away in the opposite direction. Kevin and Asgrim followed.

I finally took a gulp of air. I didn’t need it, but not breathing for several minutes felt very strange, stranger than smelling sewage underwater. I very slowly got to my feet and, when no one jumped out at me, I starting walking.

At first I followed the wall. I went back and forth through the arches, hoping I’d end up on a street or that grocery store. But I could only see the field, and that’s where I ended up whenever I passed through. So I walked away from the wall, heading toward some pleasant looking hills on the horizon. I figured if there was nothing interesting over there, I could always get back to the wall by walking with the hills to my back.

After what seemed to me to be about an hour of walking, the hills didn’t seem closer at all, and I took a break by laying down in the shade of one of the trees dotted sporadically throughout the field. They all looked almost exactly the same: not too tall, dark ovular leaves, and rough pinstripe bark. The only difference was that they had different types of fruit growing from them and littering the ground around them. This one had pears, and the scent was heavy around me.

I wondered why there were no animals around if there was so much food. Was this place only for dead humans? Why no ghostly insects swarming around me and the rotting fruit in the grass?

I was glad that Min-jun would be okay. I was glad I hadn’t taken him with me, too. Unlike Tisha, I wouldn’t have known where to take him. I would have just had him follow me around and block out his whining for his mother, the way I did with my youngest brother Chris.

I felt stab of guilt in my chest. Up and until now, I hadn’t even considered my family, what it would do to them when they found out I was dead, when they found out I had died sneaking around that stupid construction site. My fingers creeped back up into my hair. I started forming messy, uneven braids. I had been so stupid and selfish. I was such an ungrateful child, laughing about playing in dangerous areas, encouraging my friends to follow me.

The braids full apart too easily in my limp hair. Too easily, I needed to make them faster.

I imagined waking up and finding out this was all a dream. I imagined telling Logan, who had always been bigger than me even if he was a year younger and liked to wrestle me for stupid things like taking the first shower or the last piece of cake, that I had beat up a Viking. I imagined telling Mathew about having a pipe through my head and listen to him snicker about it over dinner. I imagined telling Chris about Min-jun, then I imagined Chris as Min-jun, and I sat bolt upright.

I started twisting at my hair then, not making real braids, just knots that broke off in my hands. I was so selfish, unworthy– I hadn’t lostmy family, they had lost me. I was the stupid wayward child they would cry about. Tears pricked at the corners of my eyes. I had done such a cruel thing to them, not to mention my friends. I was dead, they had been there, they had seen it.

Through blurry eyes I looked down at all the hair I had ripped out, woven around my fingers. I pulled it tight, cutting off the circulation to my fingers. I took a deep breath, calming myself down as I watched my fingers change colors. I focused on that, not the guilt twisting my insides up into impossible shapes.

I got up and, on the tips of my toes, I picked a pear. Hairs fell from my fingers, and I ignored them. I took a bite and focused every bit of my mind on the taste. It was the sweetest, most savory pear I had ever had. I finished it quickly, dropping the core and picked another one. I ate this one more slowly as I continued toward the distant hills, still focusing on the taste with everything I had.

As I chewed, I realized my headache was fading. It had gone from painful to an annoyance I could easily ignore. I let my mind wander form he pear.

I wondered if, as a dead person, I would get properly tired. I had gotten sore feet from walking, but I had yet to feel real weariness– no sleepy yawns, no shutting down of the mind, no heavy limbs commanding me to lay down and take a break. I wondered if there was even a night here. The sun hadn’t moved through the sky at all.

My last question was quickly answered a few minutes later, when the sun disappeared just as if someone had flicked a light switch. I blinked, and suddenly there was a full moon and thousands of twinkling stars overhead.

I decided to keep going, since I still wasn’t feeling tired and the sky was definitely bright enough that I took see well enough. But the moon and the stars were so spectacular I quickly changed my mind and laid down right where I stood to stargaze. I had lived in a crowded little subdivision all my life, and light pollution had never allowed so many stars to shine through as here.

The stars were so numerous and packed together, I imagined the black sky choking on them. But I knew that even though they seemed to close together to me, they were all impossibly far apart. Yet they burned so strongly their light could reach each other, light-years away.

“Burn so strongly,” I murmured to myself. I would be strong, and I would burn brightly, and even if it took years to reach them, everyone would be able to feel my love a universe away. My hand drifted up and I went back to making little braids, telling myself that that thought was the truth, not a pathetic attempt to comfort myself.

My moment of serenity was ruined when someone answered, “You don’t look burned.”

I started and rolled away from the voice, pushing myself up onto my knees as quickly as I could. I wasn’t going to let myself get captured again.

It was a boy, probably about my age. He squatted near were I had been lying, head inclined as he too looked up at the stars. Unlike the group I had met earlier, he looked completely normal. A T-shirt, dark jeans, and a digital watch that was obviously wrong, because it said 3:00 p.m. He had lightly tanned skin and light brown hair that did an interesting series of waves and flips against his scalp.

“I’m sorry, did I frighten you?” He asked softly, carefully, as if I might bolt away like a spooked horse. I narrowed my eyes at him, sizing him up. I would be less riled by his condescending tone if he didn’t happen to have a very nice face and pretty hazel eyes, because the stupid teenaged girl in me cared about his opinion of me just that much more.

“A ‘Why hello there, my name is so-and-so,’ would have been nicer,” I told him snidely, “but no, you didn’t frighten me.”

He chuckled. “So you just jumped out of your skin because you wanted to, then?”

I repressed a sneer and instead coolly raised my eyebrows. Well, I hoped it was coolly. “Just surprised,” I said. “I haven’t seen a hint of anyone around here. Except for of course the Viking I had to fight off.” I decided not to mention that I had done so completely underhandedly.

The boy blinked at me, startled. “You did what?”

I ran my hand through my hair, which was difficult because there was a pipe in the way. It undid all the remants of braids. “Some shady people were trying to drag me off to God-knows-where, and I had to escape.” I raised my chin and let my lower jaw jut out, an expression that all my brothers knew meant “I can and will kick your scrawny little butt.”

Instead of being intimidated and backing off, the boy just looked horrified. He reached for me, saying, “Oh, Juniper, I’m so sorry, I should have gotten here earlier–”

I smacked his hand away and stood, glaring down at him. “Who are you and how do you know my name?” I demanded.

He stood too, but he kept his distance. “Do you want the official spiel, or just a summary?” he asked.

I scowled. I was so sick of this, of having people yammer on in front of me while I didn’t have a clue what they were talking about.

“Whatever will explain this better,” I said, louder than I had intended. “And you better have a good explanation.” Because this complete stranger just appearing and knowing my name was pretty creepy.

“Hm,” he said, putting his fingers to his chin in a thoughtful manner. “The official spiel is pretty good, but my version might have more information, though a bit unorganized…”

I felt a tick go in my eye. “Look, I’m new at being dead, I’m apparently not seeing what I’m supposed to be seeing, some weird people tried to capture me, and I have a freaking pipe in my head! I’d like it if you just hurried up and told me who you are.”

“My name is Mariano,” he said flatly. I glared at him, waiting for more. “I’m your peer advisor.”

Well, that was about the last thing I expected. “What?” I said blankly.

“Your peer advisor,” he repeated brightly, as if that might clear it up.

“So, you…” my mind reeled and I forgot I was angry with him. “I’m dead,” I said. He nodded. “You’re dead.” He nodded again. “You’re going to advise me on how to be dead?”

He laughed good naturedly. “Yeah, pretty much. Too many newbies go wondering around getting into trouble, so the higher ups implemented a program to help them out.”

So, so many questions. “The underworld has a system of management? Is there like, a king of the dead running the place?”

He laughed again. Apparently my ignorance was hilarious.

“No, no Hades. Although the official name of this place is Elysian Fields Four– every once in a while someone thinks it’s clever to make one. I think there are twenty-six up and running right now.”

I blinked, digesting this. “So I suppose there’s also six or seven Valhallas?” I asked, thinking of Asgrim.

Mariano actually groaned, though still managing to keep a grin on his face. “Try seven hundred and forty two.” I stared and he laughed yet again. “Yeah, they’re much easier to maintain. Elysian Fields keep getting built over.”

This actually made sense in the context of everything else, so I decided to move on. “Then who are the higher ups?” I asked.

Mariano looked back up at the stars as he answered. “There’s no official government, but there are several large organizations that people pretty much respect as authorities. They help set up orphanages for kids who die without their parents, help set up places like this one, replica cities, new cities. They also train guards to keep peace.”

His face turned grave and looked back at me. “Your friends from earlier are an excellent example of why people support the guards.”

I swallowed. So I really had been in peril. “What did they want?” I asked, remembering all my horrible theories about them. Mariano’s face set into a deep frown.

“You’ve noticed you’re not too badly banged up, right?” he said. I reached up and very gingerly touched my pipe. Little tendrils of pain went across my temples.

“I don’t see how this isn’t serious, but okay,” I said. Mariano shook his head.

“No, it’s really not,” he replied. “No brains and blood oozing out, the rest of your head is fine– it’s a perfectly tame wound. Your living head is probably salvageable.”

“Uh, alright,” I said. “I don’t think I’m following you. I don’t understand how a pipe through the head is ‘salvageable.’”

“I mean your actual body probably doesn’t really have a pipe through its head,” he explained. “Whatever you have down here is just your mind’s explanation of what happened. Sometimes you know how you died, and so whatever you’re like down here is spot on. And other times you’re not really sure, so you get something ridiculous like a pipe through the head. It’s a symbolic wound.”

I chew my lip as I processed this. Kind of weird, but I thought I understood it. I suddenly thought of my lucky jeans. “Is that why my clothes changed?” I asked, looking down at myself.

He smiled, the cloud lifting from his face. “You catch on quick. Yes, when you get down here, your mind has to put you back together. When it asks for clothes, you don’t always respond with what you were wearing beforehand. For whatever reason, you mind decided on the outfit you’re wearing now.” After a beat he added, “Just be glad you grew up with mirrors– you know pretty well what you look like. Some people get down here and mess their entire face up.”

I almost laughed, but then I realized how sad that actually was. “You still haven’t told me what those people wanted,” I said.

The dark look on his face was back. “If the body’s still in tact, there’s still a way to get back to it,” he said in such an ominous tone that it sent chills up my spine.

“They wanted to…” Suddenly their conversations made much more sense. “They wanted to come back. As me.”

He nodded.

I still had what seemed like hundreds of more questions. “But why–”

“I think we should find somewhere better to have a nice, looong conversation,” he interrupted, a cheery grin back on his face, obviously trying to change the subject. I mashed my lips into a thin line.

“Why not here?” I asked.

“Oh, you know,” he said vaguely, eyes darting to the side like he was worried about something.

“No,” I said. “If your job is to explain things, explain them now.”

“Do you want to get rid of that pipe?” It was a good distraction technique. The train of questions parading through my mind came to a halt.

“You can do that?”

He smirked, arrogant. “Of course. I’ll just pull it out–”

He reached for it and I backed away defensively. He cocked his head in question.

“That’s going to hurt like nobody’s business,” I explained. He shrugged.

“Then keep it,” he said. I frowned. The pipe was annoying, and even a slight touch boosted my headache, which was still there, though subsided.

“Will my headache go away?” I asked, wondering if I could stay conscious while he yanked the pipe out. He eyed the pipe in a calculating manner.

“Most likely,” he said finally. “I’ll do it fast, like ripping a band aid off.”

I took a deep breath and weighed my options. I wasn’t sure I could trust this boy, but he was being infinitely more helpful than Madame Lefevre and her crowd. And I certainly didn’t want to put up with a headache for the rest of eternity.

“Let’s get to a town or something first,” I said decisively. If he turned out to be a creep and tried to take advantage of me while I was blinded with pain, at least there would be people nearby. And if we went by a hospital or clinic, well, I’d just get my head checked out there. “And I’d like to see some proof you are who you say you are,” I added as an afterthought.

“Fair enough,” he said. He produced a wallet from his back pocket and handed me a laminated card. It a picture of him smiling closed mouth at the camera, and confirmed that he was a peer advisor working for something called “COMPANY NAME GOES HERE.” It had a fancy, semi translucent logo printed across the text and part of his face. If he was a conartist, he was pretty good.

“Okay,” I said, returning the card. I would play along with him for now. “How do we get out of here?” I hoped he wouldn’t take me back to the wall of arches because I didn’t think I could use them as an exit.

“Follow me,” he said, turning and heading toward the hills I had been aiming for in the first place. As we walked, he explained that the hills had doors in them going to all sorts of places. I guessed it worked just like the arches, and I filled with dread that these too would not walk for me.

It should have been romantic, walking under the starlight with a cute boy. The field was pretty, he was pretty, and apparently having a pipe in my head wasn’t nearly as terrible as I thought it was. But I could barely pay attention to him as he blabbered on about his last advisee, some college guy form Cairo who wouldn’t take Mariano seriously because he was younger.

“Although he kept saying he was so impressed with my Arabic,” he was saying, doing an exaggerated roll of his eyes. “Wouldn’t listen when I said he was just perceiving it as Arabic. That’s how it works here, you have to listen really hard to hear what anyone’s really saying– I could switch to Spanish right now and you wouldn’t even notice.”

I nodded to show I was listening, but I was worrying about my “advisor.” If this had been home, I would probably have trusted him in a heartbeat. But I had just been attacked by the strangest people, and I had no idea how to even tell who I could trust. At the same time, he seemed friendly.

“Before him, though, I had this Russian girl who drowned in her swimsuit, and she wouldn’t take the charity clothes we offered…”

I smiled weakly at him. “You couldn’t just take her to a store?”

He chuckled. “Well, you have to learn how to barter, not much in the way of money here…” And he launched into a tirade of exchange rates, what you could get for a nice shirt, what you could get for jewelry, for fruit.

Then he started telling me a Chinese man he once knew, who started with a peach and ended with the largest house in a famous Shang Hai replica city, right between the palaces of two old emperors.

“He was great at talking down prices, that Mr. Wu. Did a fairly good job of ripping me off.”

I pretended to care about Mr. Wu and asked if he shared his huge house with anyone. Mariano beamed a started listing off all sorts of people who had rented rooms from Mr. Wu, even given me biographies of most of them. I was getting the impression Mariano talked too much. Perhaps he was one of those people who couldn’t stand silence and so his rambling was an attempt to make up for my lack of conversational prowess.

“You know what, Mariano?” I said.

“What?” he asked, turning to me and flashing me a dazzling smile, looking truly happy to be talking to me. My inner thirteen year old squealed, and I kindly told her to shut her face.

“You’ve told me about so many interesting people,” I replied, “but you haven’t said one thing about yourself.”

His smiled stayed in place, but it gained the feeling of being forced, fake. My inner thirteen year old pouted.

“Oh look, we’re almost there,” he said, pointing ahead. “I swear, whoever designed this place had no depth perception…”

I grinned at that. He was right; the hills hadn’t seemed that far away at all before, but it had taken us a ridiculous amount of time to get this far. Now we could see the doors he had told me about– they were wood, painted blue, and had gold Roman numerals pinned to them. The hills looked manmade, all neat humps in the ground and evenly spaced. Each one had four doors ringing it.

“Welcome to Four Door Hills, where the names are even less creative than Elysian Fields,” Mariano joked.

“Okay,” I said. “Which one?”

“I think you’ll like number ten…” Mariano answered, leading me around hill after hill, examining the doors. Apparently we had come in on the wrong side of them, because the closest one read XXXVII.

I imagined that when we got to door ten, we would open it up to find a whole other world inside, like going through a wardrobe and coming out in Narnia. Or I would find a dismal, tiny cave in the hill or a wall of packed dirt while Mariano walked through into his own little world and I was stuck. I focused on Narnia: a snowy forest with trees that could spy on you, talking animals everywhere, a goat man. That’s what I would see, I told myself.

Mariano stopped so quickly I almost bumped into him.

“Would you like to do the honors, milady?” He asked, half bowing and gesturing grandly at a door marked with an X. “Or shall I be a proper gentleman and hold the door for you?”

A placed my hand over my heart and mocked offense. “I dare say I can open a door myself, good sir.” He grinned teasingly at me and took a step back so I could open the door. I turned to gold a knob and flung it open to find the snow covered forest suspiciously close to the one I’d been imagining as Narnia on the other side. It was daylight there, the sun glistening and reflecting on the snow, and suddenly the moonlit hills seemed much darker.

“Huh,” Mariano said, squinting in the sudden light. He looked as bewildered as I felt. “You did something,” he said. I glared at him– how was this my fault? “I don’t think you meant to, but you did.” He pinched the bridge of his nose and I started preparing myself to tell him off. But then he said, “What were you thinking about when you opened the door?”

Oh.

“Narnia,” I admitted. “Specifically, Narnian forests.”

He looked completely dismayed for a moment, but then a smile crept back onto his face and he let out a single laugh. “You try to take a girl to Paris, and she switches it out for children’s story.”

I shrugged and said, “Paris is overrated anyway.” Not that I had ever been.

“Try this one, then,” Mariano said, motioning to door XII. “Victorian London with indoor plumbing and tropical beaches.”

I opened it, and there was the forest. A branch collapsed under the weight of the snow and fell to the ground with a thud.

“Oh, you’re stubborn,” Mariano said, slightly amused. “Maybe you should let me try.” Smirking, he went around to door IX and threw it open. “Tada!” He announced, proud of himself and looking over to me, expecting something more that my annoyed face.

“It’s just the same forest,” I said. His face fell.

“It’s El Dorado,” he said faintly. “You know, legendary city of gold?”

“I still see Narnia.” It was the arches all over again.

Mariano groaned. “Juniper, you locked all the hills on Narnia for yourself.”

I felt extremely disappointed that I could not go visit Victorian London with indoor plumbing and tropical beaches. “Am I broken?” I asked, staring dejectedly at what should have been an ancient, golden city.

The teasing look returned to Mariano’s face, his eyes twinkling at me like the stars above, but much more mischievous.

“Yep, this has never absolutely happened before,” he said, waltzing around me back to door X. “No one has ever died before with quite this problem.”

I knew he was trying to be funny, but it wasn’t helping. “No, really,” I said. “This happened before. What’s going on?”

“Well,” Mariano said, staring through door X as if trees were the most fascinating thing he’d ever seen. “Any gate– those are doors like this, that don’t quite make sense– any gate can be switched. They’re automatically set on one place, like Paris, so that navigation isn’t too much of a hassle, but if you really concentrate you can switch where it goes, since the construction of anything here relies on people’s mental abilities.”

I was beginning to think I should ditch the normal way I thought about anything and switch to that state of mind you have to use to understand a sci-fi movie.

“So, like…” My mind grasped for a good analogy. “A train switching tracks.”

“Hmm, I guess.” Mariano shrugged, then went on. “Some people– usually newly deads– are so set on seeing everything the way they think it should be, their mind sets them on whatever they think should logically be on the other side of the gate.” He frowned thoughtfully at the forest. “Usually here, they’d just see the inside of the hill… I don’t know what you did.” He put the emphasis on you as if I were doing this on purpose.

I laughed nervously. “Actually, that’s pretty much what just happened.”

He raised his eyebrows incredulously at me. “You think Narnia is located inside hills?”

“Shut up,” I mumbled, blushing. He turned back toward the door.

“Well, might as well,” he said and grabbed my hand. Laughing at my startled expression, he ran through the door, dragging me along. “Maybe we’ll met Aslan!” he called.

The snow wasn’t too deep, even if it was piled heavily on on the trees, and it crunched udner our feet as we ran. Mariano had no problem leaping over snow drifts, which I had to kick my way through. Even though my jeans were damp up to my knees, the forest was just as pleasantly warm as the field had been.

“Do you know where we’re going?” I managed to get out between heavy pants. While I didn’t strictly need to breathe, when I did bother with my lungs, they worked exactly like they had when I was alive.

“Nope!” he answered, grinning like a lunatic. I stopped running, tugging at his arm so he stopped too. “What?” he asked, dropping my hand. He was breathing just as heavily as I was, but aside from that he seemed utterly affected by our run through the forest. I contrast, I was sure I had several twigs in my hair and a rather frazzled expression.

“Running makes my headache worse,” I explained, rubbing a spot right in front of the pipe.

“Oh,” he said, concern filling his eyes. “I can take the pipe out; that should help.”

I stared him in the eyes for a few seconds, and he looked genuinely worried.

“Okay,” I consented. “Don’t freak out when I scream.” I smiled but didn’t mean it. I was terrified.

“Alright, how should me do this?” Mariano said more to himself than to me. He spotted an ice covered boulder nearby at waved toward it. “Sit there,” he commanded.

I did. I sat primly, right of the edge and with my hands clasping my knees so I could rub them for good luck. Ice was cool in contrast to the air, but not comfortable. If Mariano noticed me massaging my knees, he didn’t say anything. He came around to stand a little behind and to the right of me.

“I’m going to hold your head and then pull this way, okay?” he said. “Try not to move.”

I heard the crunch of his boot as he put his leg up on the boulder behind me. His warm, firm arm wrapped around the top of my head, his hand against my forehead in a rather uncomfortable hold. He pulled my head back into his shoulder.

“Don’t squeeze so tight,” I said with a grimace.

He didn’t loosen up. He placed his free hand on the pipe, and I hissed in pain. He whispered, “Like a band aid.”

The world went black and I could hear horrible, deafening screaming in my ears. I wanted some nice, poetic words for the intensity of the pain ripping through my skull, but all I could think was It’s like childbirth, but from my head.

“What?” A voice asked.

Colors blurred around me as my vision gradually returned. Belatedly, I realized the screaming I’d heard had been my own. Mariano’s face appeared; his hands were on my shoulders, holding me up, and his hazel eyes were searching my face with a peculiar look in them.

“Childbirth from your head?” He asked in that teasing tone that was steadily becoming quite infuriating.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, leaning away from him and scooting back on the boulder. I spied a rusty pipe abandoned on the ground a foot or two away. Mariano bent over and picked it up.

“I guess it makes sense,” he mused. He tossed the pipe high in the air, and it twirled a few times before he caught it with his other hand. “Childbirth is supposed to be one of the most painful things a woman can go through.”

“My mom had four kids and never complained,” I said, my fingers roaming the sides of my head. “What the hell?”

I’m not big on swearing, but those were the only words to express my befuddlement. On either side of my head was a huge, gaping hole. It didn’t hurt to touch, so I prodded at the insides. The walls of the hole were squishy and full of bumps, but not slimy or in any danger of falling apart. The texture reminded me the rubber arch supports I had to use. Interesting.

The teasing look on Mariano’s face quickly turned to horrified disgust. “Don’t do that!” he yelled, recoiling from me as if the very thought of being near me while I explored the hole in my head was too repulsive to stand.

“What do I do about this?” I asked, sticking my whole hand in to confirm the hole went all the way through and that it was as huge as I feared. “I can’t just go around with a hole in my head!” Although, I realized, the headache was gone.

Mariano shuddered and turned away, dropping the pipe. “There’s nothing you really can do,” he said. “Look, apples!”

He scampered over to a tree as if hoping I’d drop the entire subject. I removed my hands from my head and pushed myself off the boulder.

“But I don’t want a hole in my head!” I called after him. Why were there apples there anyway?

“The best thing about the afterlife,” Mariano said, ignoring me, “is that the fruit’s always ripe, even in winter.”

“Can I go to a hospital or– or something like that?” I asked desperately. I didn’t want to look like I’d been sloppily lobotomized for all of eternity.

Mariano continued ignoring me. He jumped and caught hold of a sturdy branch, snow showering the ground. He pulled himself upward into the full canopy, and I stormed over to the tree.

“I don’t think you understand the gravity of the situation,” I said, pointing accusingly at him. He looked down at me from his position on the tree branch.

“Well, we won’t starve,” he said, picking an apple and tossing it to me. I caught it with both hands. It was yellow with little flecks of green, and it had a squishy bruise right where my left thumb was.

“That’s not the most pressing issue,” I fumed. “In case you haven’t noticed, I have a hole through my head.” I stuck my arm through it to prove my point. My hand waved up at him from the right side of my head.

“Stop that,” he said, wincing. “Don’t play with yourself in public.” And he dropped a few more apples to the ground. He then did an impressive leap from the branch and landed smartly next to me. I leaned over to whap his shoulder with the hand through my head, which was quite difficult and I only managed to graze his sleeve. My point got across though, and his face did an interesting grimace where one side went up and the other side went down.

“Okay, okay,” he said. “So you bring new meaning to ‘in one ear and out the other.’” I quirked an eyebrow at him and removed the offending arm. I didn’t even have most of my ears left. At least he’d pulled the pipe out.

I took a bite of the apple and chewed with noisy defiance at him. He watched me imploringly. When I swallowed, I started on my rant.

“First of all,” I said. “We’re not in public; you’re just squeamish.” His eyes darted over the right side of my head and he flinched as if reliving terrible memories. “Second, both you and I know starving isn’t an issue. We’re not going to get an deader than we already are. And finally, I really do think treating a ginormous hole in the head is important– what if something got stuck in there? What if I got it all cut up and got an infection? Then it’d have pus and blood all over the place.”

I paused to take a breath.

“Wait,” I said, realizing something. “Is starving an issue?”

Mariano didn’t answer though, as at the word “pus” he’d turned a pale shade of green and looked as if he was trying very hard not to vomit. Satisfied I’d made my point, I went over to the pipe and picked it up, thinking it would be a souvenir. Or a weapon, in case I ran into Asgrim again.

I swung it over my shoulder and asked, “Where to?”

It took Mariano a few moments to clear the sick look off his face. He cleared his throat with a tad too much drama. “The hole will heal by itself eventually, just keep it clean.” His eyes did a wobbly sort of thing, probably imagining me cleaning out the hole. “Everyone goes back to normal eventually. You’ll notice only newbies have missing legs and things.”

“Okay,” I said. “No hospital, then. So where to?”

He flashed his teeth at me. “This is Narnia, right? We just have to find the wardrobe.”

Mariano gathered up the apples and shoved them in his pockets. They all fit without leaving a lump, so I guessed he had some sort of magical dead people pants. He then led me confidently around trees, though I was sure he didn’t know where we were going anymore than I did. He told me about all sorts of strange natural parks that existed in the afterlife.

“I don’t understand the appeal of flowers that smell like sugar cookies,” I said when he’d told me about Baker’s Park, made by someone named John Baker.

“It’s about the same as scented candles,” he answered.

“Could you eat the flowers?” I asked.

He laughed. “No, but that’s a good idea. If you ever learn how to build, you should look into that.”

“Build?” I asked. He nodded.

“Creating things from scratch. I told you you recreated yourself with your mind, right? It’s the same concept, but infinitely more difficult. Some people have been practicing for centuries and still can’t get it.”

I considered all the silly fantasies I could bring to life: I WILL COME BACK TO THEE, EXAMPLES REQUIRING IMAGINATION.

Then I remembered the doors earlier. “Wait… this place– it looks exactly like what I imagined earlier. Did I…?”

He laughed at that shaking his head. “No, someone already made this place. The gate just matched what you were imagining to this.”

“Oh.” I felt somewhat disappointed. “Do you know how to build?” I asked.

“You should name your pipe,” he said, then abruptly turned left. I bit my lip as I followed; he was avoiding talking about himself again. “I like ‘Sisyphus.’”

I made a face. It sounded like a disease. “Are you serious? That’s a terrible name,” I said. I looked down at my pipe. Despite being lodged in my head for the better part of the day, it was free of blood or brain goo. “Pipe,” I announced, holding it regally before me, like King Arthur drawing Excaliber from the stone. “I christen thee Minerva.”

“Minerva?” He repeated as if I had just made the greatest joke in the world.

“Better than Sisyphus,” I answered. Mariano ignored me, stopping to examine a tree. He then turned and started heading back the way we came. I didn’t follow him this time, instead jutting my hip out to one side and glaring after him. “Do you even know where we’re going?” I asked.

“Of course I do.” He paused, waiting for me to follow him. “We just have to find that lamp post, right?”

“And do you know where that is?” I didn’t mind wondering around at random; I just wanted him to admit that’s what we were doing. His assuredness was driving me up the wall. “Do you even know where the exit would be in relation to the lamp post?”

I watched his shoulders begin to sag. “It’s usually right by it…” He trailed off, glancing around. He pointed off to his right. “We should go this way,” he suggested.

I pointed in the opposite direction. “And why would that way be any better than this way?”

“Because the trees get thinner this way,” he said blandly. “We’re looking for a clearing.”

I balled my hands into fists. Not knowing anything about the geograpy of Narnia, I had no comeback to this. Pouting, I wandered over to him and let him lead me away. He seemed to sense my annoyance, because for once he kept quiet. He proved himself to be correct when we came to a clearing with that stupid lamp post dead in the center.

“Now what?” I asked bitterly. That teasing look was slowly returning to his stupid, pretty face.

“We look for a door, of course.” He started wandering around the periphery of the clearing, weaving in and out of the trees. I leaned against the lamp post and watched, not knowing exactly what to look for. When he’d gone all the way around twice, Mariano came over to stand awkwardly a few feet away from me, his face sheepish.

“It’s always right next to the lamp post,” he replied to a question I did not verbalize. “Well, almost always.”

I decided it was best to act nonchalant in this situation. I pretended to examine the tips of my hair. “Shouldn’t you climb a tree or something, then? Get a better look around?”

His face brightened. “Good idea,” he said. Then he added, “Dead people don’t usually have split ends.”

I dropped my hair quickly at that, not that I’d been doing much more than staring blankly at it. I almost asked about why that was, but decided I didn’t particularly care.

“You should look around too,” he said, so fast I could barely make the words out. The next thing I knew, he was pulling himself up into another tree.

Since I was still trying to make a point about how annoying he was, I was much more casual in picking my tree. I meandered around the opposite edge of the clearing, looking each tree up and down a few times before moving on. Most of them hand branches too high up to be climbed easily, or they looked too icy to hold to.

I finally stopped before some sort of pine which had a large knob at waist level. I brushed my knees, then gripped a branch half a foot above my head and used the knob as a foothold to pull myself onto it, psuhing snow out of the way as I did so. I gingerly stood on the branch, pressing my body against the trunk of the tree and clinging to a higher branch for dear life, figuratively speaking. I turned just in time to see Mariano throw himself into the canopy of a neighboring tree like some sort of squirrel.

“Do you see anything?” I called, turning back around and cautiously pulling myself up higher and higher into the tree.

“No,” he yelled back. I didn’t bother to look around to try and find his face– too busy concentrating on not falling– but he sounded frustrated. I felt my irritation with him fade.

I came to a strudy branch near the top of the tree and crouched on it, scanning the area. The tree to one side was too tall to see around, but I had a pretty good view of the area on the other side.

“All I see are trees,” I yelled.

“Yeah, that’s the problem,” he answered. Based on his voice, he had moved again.

“Well, what am I looking for?” I asked.

“A door. It’s…” his sentence ended in mumbling that I couldn’t quite make out.

“What?” I said, squinting at a shaking bunch of leaves nearby. Apparently, he was moving toward me.

“I said, ‘there it is!’”

I rescanned the area to see a narrow path that defiinitely had not been there before. Mystified, I yelled something about understanding (which I did not) back at Mariano and slowly made my way back down to the ground. Mariano was pacing impatiently at the mouth of the path.

“That wasn’t there before,” I said mildly.

“Of course it was,” he answered in a clipped tone that surprised me, deviating from his normal range of amused to teasing to downright cocky. Then he rushed down the path so quickly I had to run to catch up.

“What’s with you?” I asked, struggling to keep up with his long strides. He glanced over at me, and for a moment he looked pained. Then his face snapped into a wide grin.

“Okay, I confess: I’m not really sure where we are,” he admitted, eyes bright like he was about to start laughing again.

“Oh goody,” I said sarcastically. “Where are we even trying to get to?”

“Hmm,” he hummed, glancing up at the sky. He slowed his pace and, turning a bend in the path, we came to a solid looking door, just sitting in its frame among the trees.

“Where are we going?” I repeated. Mariano tapped the door handle, which was made to look like a giant bronze leaf.

“Could you turn around for a moment?” he asked. I rolled my eyes and crossed my arms, staring him straight in the eyes. Minerva dangled from right hand.

“Where are we going?”

“Turn around first,” he said, leaning against the door. I pursed my lips and he crossed his own arms. It was a stalemate.

“Fine,” I huffed, pivoting on my heel to face the opposite direction. “Where are we going?” If he was going to be stubburn about answering questions, I was going to be stubburn about asking them, even if that meant giving up an argument with him about turning around. Behind me a heard a click and the sound of something heavy dragging over snow, and I assumed he’d opened the door. I opened my mouth to ask where we were going again, but he he chose to speak up.

“We’re going to the library,” he said. “And– no, don’t turn around quite yet. Your perception of things might still be off.” There were more scrapping sounds as he presumably shut the down.

“Why are we going to a library?” I began to tap my foot.

“Libraries are very important for dead people,” he said as if that were a proper explanation. “You can look now.”

I spun around to fix him with a very peeved expression. He just smiled back, nonplussed. The door was indeed closed, and he leaned against it.

“Do you like haunted houses, Juniper?” He asked. I resisted the urge to smack my forehead. Could he get any more random?

“They’re okay,” I said. “They’d be better if they had less stupid themes, like clowns or undead pirates.”

“So you’re not bothered by them?” His face seemed oddly anxious about this.

“Um, no? Why are we going to a library?” I refused to let him distract me with the haphazard directions he liked to steer his conversations.

“You know how in horror movies, not everything really makes sense?”

My mind drew a blank. I wasn’t really following where he was going with this at all. I shrugged, not sure what to say to that. He went on anyway.

“So, you could open a door thinking, ‘Oh this goes to the kitchen,’ but really there’s a huge pit full of terrible monsters.”

I frowned. “We’re going to a pit of monsters?” Mariano threw up his hands as if I had just said something highly offensive.

“No, no, no!” he exclaimed. “Focus on the haunted house. You open a door, and frightening, scary things are on the other side.”

I focused on the froofy door handle. “That doesn’t look like it should go to a haunted house,” I said. “It looks more like we should meet a coven of elves–”

“No!” He was getting more exasperated by the second. “Just think about… creepy otherwordly places.”

I gave him a jaded smile. “Like death.”

He gave me this wry, understanding look, as if he had wanted to say it but couldn’t out of respect for the situation. “Like death.” He flung open the door.

I felt my breath hitch in my throat as I peered through the doorway. It opened to a dilapidated wooden porch, from which I could see a weedy yard filled with scrap metal and a dirt road. The whole scene had a dark, subdued look about it. It was still day, but the sky was full of black clouds, and the available light from an unseen sun was a jaundiced, murky yellow. I man in a dark cloak was limping down the road, dragging a large ax behind him.

“Huh,” I said, watching as the man slowly inched down the street. I noted that, on the other side of the road, there was a graveyard, and a stone angel with blank eyes and a missing wing was staring straight at us, arms wide as if welcoming, but mouth stretched open as if screaming.

“Do you need me to hold your hand?” Mariano had come up behind me as was peering out at the scene over my shoulder. He was teasing again.

“No,” I said, tightening my grip on Minerva. “This is just a typical country home.” I marched out onto the porch, boards creeking beneath my feet. The axman paid me no heed, and Mariano followed me out, closing the door behind him. I stared up at the house behind us, a dreary Victorian thing with the usual peeling paint and cracked windows.

“There are lights down there,” Mariano said, pointing in the direction the axman was headed. “Hopefully it’s a town. I say ‘hopefully’ because I’m not quite sure where we are, you’ve gotten us so sidetracked.” And he poked my shoulder and jumped from the side of the porch, ignoring the stairs.

I wasn’t sure what to make of the gesture, but I brushed it off, jumping off the side of the porch as well. I didn’t trust the sagging steps.

Mariano walked straight across the lawn to the street, hopping over stray pieces of junk metal. I carefully made my way around them, thankful for the practical footwear of Nike running shoes. The metal didn’t seem to belong to anything in particular, but it was all jagged and sharp. Broken glass crunched under my feet.

When he got to the road, Mariano jogged to catch up with the axman. The man conitnued trudging along without acknowledging Mariano’s presence, even when he tapped him on the shoulder.

“Excuse me,” Mariano said politely. The man continued to ignore him. “Hello?” he tried again, keeping pace with the man. I noticed he had a patch over one eye and an ugly dent in the bridge of his nose, as if something has smashed it in.

I caught up to Mariano, grabbing his elbow and pulling him aside.

“What are you doing?” I whispered harshly, leaning into him so the strange man wouldn’t hear.

“Oh, don’t worry so much,” Mariano answered flippantly. “He’s just an eccentric dead man. Or he’s not real.” He glanced thoughtfully back at the axman, as if trying to decide something about him.

“Of course he’s real,” I hissed, pulling Mariano further away from the man, who was limping along without paying us any heed. I dragged Mariano down the opposite direction of the road, back toward the house.

“He might not be,” Mariano said, craning his neck to stare more urgently at the man, although he did nothing to resist me. “Sometimes they build people for places like this. But he could also easily just be a weirdo.”

A gust of wind blew, whistling in the way no natural wind could. The shudders of the house banged and the entire building moaned. I shivered and took a step toward Mariano and his body heat, my hair blowing into his face. His nose twitched like he might sneeze.

“Oh, that’s creepy,” he said with a hint of excitement in his voice, and he pointed that the stone angel in the cemetary. It had moved about a yard forward, its face turned toward us. Its mouth was opened wider, and I could see the fury in its pupilless eyes.

Alright, I thought, that is creepy. And so was the axman, who had not moved much from where we had left him.

“Can’t you just– what did you call it? Switch the gate?” I dropped his elbow and jerked my head toward the house. “Make it go to a nice, warm library with good lighting?”

“Well, theoretically I could,” Mariano said, not taking his eyes off the stone angel. It was moving ever so slowly toward us, I noticed, although its feet made no movement, peeping out at us from beneath its floor length robe. “But the only library I’m familiar enough with is the main one, and that will be unbelievably crowded. Besides, don’t you want to see the town?”

He glanced down at me, and I gave him the most dispairing look I could muster.

“It’s settled then,” he said, clapping his hands and grinning. “To the town!” He waltzed off after the axman.

I followed him unhappily, giving the slowly approaching angel a wide berth as I passed. I could probably do a decent job smashing it to bits with Minerva, but I didn’t really want to find out what would happen if the thing caught up with me.

We quickly caught up to the limping axman, and Mariano swatted his arm as he passed. The man didn’t seem to notice.

“No, I don’t think he’s real,” Mariano said, walking briskly along with his hands in his pockets. What seemed to be his natural speed was much faster than mine, but I could keep up without much effort. It was like power walking. “He’s pretty well done, I think,” Mariano continued, the corners of his mouth upturned slightly. “This must be a top quality place.”

“As seen in the top quality upkeeping of their housing,” I commented sarcastically. Mariano laughed.

“You have to admit, the possessed angel was a nice touch.”

“If you like cliché horror movies,” I said back, trying to twirl Minerva over the back of my hand. I nearly dropped it. Mariano watched my hand with an amused light in his eyes.

“If you keep making fun,” he said in that infuriating, teasing tone of voice, “I won’t hold your hand if you get scared.

I let out a single laugh. “Normally I’m the one holding other people’s hands at Halloween.”

“Halloween,” he repeated whistfully. “Is that still big?”

I looked over at him, curious. “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, it is.” I paused. “Just how long have you been here?”

He pointed ahead of us. “When you think of ghosttowns, you don’t really think of stoplights, do you?”

We had come to an intersection. On the other side, the dirt road turned to pavement, and a handful of stout buildings with boarded windows and grafittied, vacant parking lots indicated the start of the town. There was indeed a modern, black stop light above us, looking very much out of place.

In a deep, gravely voice, Mariano joked, “Once it turns red, it will never let you go.” He made one of the most ridiculous faces I had ever seen, attempting to glare at me seriously and bare his teeth at the same time. To my chagrin, a small titter escaped my lips.

A mist that smelled like rotting fish curled around our knees as we walked by abandonned building after abandonned building. Aside from a single car with tinted windows parked on the crumbling sidewalk, we saw no sign of any people. Small chunks on concrete rolled under our feet as we walked.

“When are things going to start jumping out at us?” I asked, eyes roaming over a post office with a collapsed roof.

“I want it to be soon,” Mariano answered. We stopped at a corner and he squinted up at a street sign with peeling letters. “I’d like to ask for directions. Does that say ‘Smiles Boulevard’?”

We stared up at the green sign, baffled. It did indeed mark the street we were on as Smiles Boulevard in some failed attempted at irony. We turned to look at each other, trying to see if the other found the sign equally ridiculous. We simultaneously burst into laughter.

“Maybe not so top quality,” Mariano mused after our laughter had died down. He continued to lead me down Smiles Boulevard. Then, with only an shallow inhale of beathe to mark the change in subject, he said, “Let’s get a cab.”

“Good luck with that,” I said and kept walking down the sidewalk when he stepped out onto the street and waved across the empty pavement. My feet come to an abrupt stop when from the decay-smelling mist, the car we had passed earlier emerged. It had gained a dimly lit triangular sign on its roof, marking it as a taxi. Mariano snatched up my hand and ushered me into the backseat, following me in and buckling his seatbelt.

“The library, please,” he said to the headless driver.

“You’re doing something,” I hissed. Mariano picked a piece of lint off his shirt. “With that path, and now this– this car wasn’t a taxi before.” I could have sworn it wasn’t.

“How does this happen to me, even in death?” Mariano asked, holding the puff of gray lint out to me. The headless driver sped through a stopsign, and I vaguely wondered how a man with no head could become a taximan in the first place.

“Is he real?” I asked, indicating the driver.

Mariano gave me a flat look and flicked the lint at the back of the driver’s seat. “No head. What do you think?”

I slouched back in my seat and didn’t answer because our conversation was rapidly becoming a series of questions neither side was going to answer.

The ride was not long, and after a few blocks full of empty buildings, the driver pulled over in front of a surprisingly well-kept building made of white stone. It stuck out against the dark town, looking as if someone had bleached it into the gloom. A short flight of stairs led up from the sidewalk, and a man’s corpse was strewn across them. His ragged face glazed blankly up at the clouded sky from the top step, and his bloated bare feet rested on the sidewalk. A scraggly, molting eagle sat on his torn open chest, picking away at his liver.

Mariano practically dove out of the cab and I followed him. He climbed the stairs three at a time, staying as far away from the dead man as possible, blanching as he glanced at the bird.

“Um, thanks,” I said to the driver as I closed the door. He revved the engine and drove off imediately.

The wind blew again, the stinking mist absent in this part of town. Instead, the air was crisp, cold and made me think of walk-in freezers full of butchered meat. I brushed my knees and ran after Mariano, who was waiting for me at the door, looking everywhere but at the mutilated corpse. He muttered incoherrently to himself as he pushed open the heavy brass door.

The atmosphere of the library made no sense. The doors opened into a small room with an old and warped wood floor. Stands of yellowing news papers were crowded between a handful of chairs with moth-eaten velvet covers. Mariano was already pushing through another set of glass doors, which led into the main part of the library: a vast, open space with vaulted ceilings and towering, sagging shelves of moldy books. Everything indicated age and rotting and must, but the air was just as clean and chilly as it had been outside.

I shivered and my fingers worked their way into my hair, wrapping hairs around themselves until they snapped off. The only sounds were my breathing and Mariano marching off through the rows of books.

The shelves were not arranged regularly and reminded me of a maze, but it was easy enough to find a check out desk against the back wall. A woman sat staring expresionlessly at a dust covered, boxy computer. Her skin was as gray as her hair, pulled back in a tight bun.

“She’s fake too,” Mariano whispered to me as we approached. “Look how she’s not breathing for fidgeting or anything.”

I rolled the hair I’d pulled out earlier into a ball with one hand and tightened my grip on Minerva. The town outside had been mildly creepy, but this place made my stomache twist for reasons I couldn’t quite articulate.

“Please state the nature of your request,” the woman said in a flat tone when we got to the desk. Her eyes did not move from the computer screen and her lips did not move more than what was necesarry. The flow of her words was unnatural, with pauses and inflections in all the wrong places.

Mariano seemed uneasy as well, the corners of his lips pulling up into a nervous, uneven smile. “This is Juniper. She’s new and needs to be registered.”

The woman’s hands machanically moved from her lap to the keyboard, jerking strangely. “Full name,” she said.

“Um,” I said and Mariano looked at me expectantly. “What am I registering for?”

“This location only offers registration in the obituaries,” the woman said, eyes still fixed on the computer. “Full name, please.”

“I’ll explain later,” Mariano said to me. “Everyone does this.”

I shrugged and said to the woman, “Juniper Marie Gard.”

She went on to ask me my birth and death dates, where I had died, all relevant cities and neighborhoods I had lived in, martial status, and the full names of my siblings and parents. Her fingers flew over the keyboard, though nothing above her wrists moved, save her mouth.

“Current residence?” she finally asked.

“None yet,” Mariano answered for me. “Can we look at the directory?”

The woman typed something, then stared blankly at the computer as it made the humming noises of a machine trying to keep up with its owner’s commands. “Registation complete,” the woman finally said. “Directories are housed in the annex.”

He asked where that was, and she pointed to an open doorway in the far off corner, her arm creaking painfully as she unbent it. Her face did not follow where she was pointing, and the rest of her body remained unmoved.

We hurried over to it– Mariano never seemed to take anything slowly. “What was that all about?” I asked.

“You register yourself in the obituaries so you can be put in the directory,” he said. “The directory is like an address book. It helps you find people.”

We came to the doorway, and the tiny room on the other side had lower ceilings and was empty save a granite podium bearing a huge leather bound book. The scuffed white walls were decorated with famous quotes from literary works. Mariano led me up to the podium, ignoring the sentences scrolled across the wall in looping, inky script. He opened the book, not without effort, as it was easily six inches thick.

“Any dead friends or relatives you’d like to visit?” He asked, grinning over at me.

I thought about it, letting my eyes rove over It was a dark and stormy night written on the wall. I’d never had someone close to me die before.

“I’ve never met my grandfather…” I ventured, tugging at the bottom of my shirt. He died when my mom was a kid.” Mariano grinned faded into a small, sympathetic smile. “His name was… Barry Palmer, I think. Or maybe– no, that was definitely it.”

Mariano made a noise in the back of his throat to indicate he understood and started flipping through the book. I peered over his shoulder and watched him stroke his finger along the edge of the page. The text scrolled up just like on a computerize document. Each entry was in tiny print and indiacted where they lived currently, where they had lived while alive, dates of living, and important family members.

“That’s a neat trick,” I said as Mariano flipped the page and started scrolling down that one as well. Apparently there were a lot of Palmers. “Why isn’t this computerized too?”

Mariano sighed and turned the page again. “It’s too new. Too many older people are against it.” He paused as he’d finally reached the Barrys, frowning down at the list.

“I can take over,” I said and pushed him out fo the way before getting his consent. He didn’t seem to mind, though, and he expressionlessly watching me scan the page, scrolling slowly as I’d seem him do. The print beneath the names was impossibly tiny and I had to bend over the book and squint to read it. After a few minutes of Mariano quietly humming to himself, I finally found an entry that matched.

“Here!” I said, stabbing it with my finger triumphantly. Mariano leaned over to see, his shoulder brushing mine. He leaned his face in close, eyes studying the tiny print intently. I could feel his warm breath on my hand and, blushing, I pulled it away.

“I know where that is,” Mariano said finally, standing up straight again. “How interesting.”

“Where is it?” I asked.

“It’s a beach,” he said. “It’s… a bit exotic.” I pictured tiki huts and coral reefs, and the thought made me smile. Maybe I could move in with him. Mariano turned back to the book.

“We better take this in case we forget the address,” he said. Before I could protest, he ripped the bottom half of the page from the book. At first, nothing happened.

“What are you doing?” I splutter as he folded it up and slipped it into his back pocket.

“Nothing,” he answered defensively, already heading toward the doorway. “It’ll replace itself. It’s fine.”

I looked down at the book. It made no move to repair itself, no regrowing of the torn page.

“C’mon,” Mariano whined from the doorway. Then the looping print of one of the quotations– All the world’s a stage– uncurled itself from the wall and surged at Mariano like a viper, hooking itself around his neck.

“MARIANO!” I screamed and he let out a surprised gurgle as more print lifted itself from the wall and began snaking itself around him.

I rushed forward, dropped Minerva and clawed at the words wrapped around his neck like thick roped. Ink came away on my hands as I struggled to free him. Since we were already dead, strangualtion was not a concern, but the way he winced as it wrapped tighter around his neck frightened me.

Something about rosey-fingered dawn was unwinding from the wall and it snapped at my legs, knocking me over and wrapping itself about my knees. I knocked into Mariano’s shoulder as I fell, and he stumbled away from me before falling on his bottom. He was completely bound by the quotation now, different words wrapped about different parts of him.

I pushed myself up and started yanking on the words around my legs. They were making my lower legs feel numb. Minerva was close by, and I reached over and grabbed her. There was a gap between my knees, and I wedged Minerva into it. Using my leg as a fulcrom, I pushed one side down, the the part beneath the quote lift up. The words resisted and my leg screamed complaints as I pushed the pipe against it. The all at once, the quote burst, showering me with ink.

Not wasting time, I crawled over to Mariano’s fallen form. He was still sitting, every muscle tense and his face screwed up in pain. I frowned in concentration and used the same method to free his legs and arms pinned to is side in two places, ignoring how he winced and how we both were soaked in ink. I could do nothing about what was wrapped so tightly around his neck.

Something grabbed at my foot, and I yelled and beat blindly at it with Minerva. It burst too, leaving a slick black stain.

All the walls were coming alive. The words undid themselves like snakes and reached out from the walls like worms. Mariano, now free, grabbed my arm roughly and dragged me toward the doorway. The words didn’t follow us out, but the woman from the desk was standing at the door, watching us.

I yelped. Mariano pulled me along, his other hand yanking at the rope still around his neck. His eyes were fogged over in pain and he was having a hard time walking in a straight line.

“Damage to public property is prohibited!” the woman called after us in her inhumane voice. Her joints creaked like old machinery as she started to follow us, one small step at a time.

Mariano was leading me toward the exit as qickly as he could. He wheezed out something I couldn’t understand and banged his elbow on the side of a bookshelf. I bent to brush my knees, but he jerked my arm.

Right. Crazy fake librarian following us; no time to stop.

Mariano stumbled along and I tried to keep him from walking into more shelves. I kept checking over my shoulder for the woman, but she was still moving incredibly slowly, rows and rows of books behind us. Mariano stubbed his foot and I tripped over his leg.

At the little entrance room, Mariano let go of my arm and flung himself at a water fountain I hadn’t noticed before. He pushed the bar down and stuck his head under the stream of water. Ink melted from his neck, pooling in the baisin of the fountain.

“I swear,” he said in a half-choked voice, looking up at me. Water dripped from his nose and caught in his eyelashes. “They usually don’t care if you rip up books. Some encourage it.”

I didn’t care. “Can we leave?” I asked, already at the door.