DeadGirl - Some random shit and there's like a theatre or something?

((FROM LAST TIME (i remember REALLY NOT LIKING THIS AT ALL and there are a lot of notes about how awful it is LOL)))

He led me outside. It was chilly, and the hairs on my arms stood up, but I wasn’t uncomfortable. We skirted the edge of the lake and took a rocky path up and around the mountain. The path was narrow and blocked by short shrubs. The rocks come away underfoot and I slipped more than once. It was steep as well, and I felt as if I were bent parallel to the mounatinside to keep from toppling backwards. I wasn’t winded or tired as I might have been in life though; my muscle made no complaints. Mariano, as usual, proved to be much nimbler than I and waited for me at the top.

“Oh wow,” I said when I caught up. Below us, but higher than the lake on the other side, was a valley. It was much greener than the scenery on the lake side, and a deep blue stream curved and pooled lazily around it. I imagined it emptied into the lake, though I doubted the afterlife needed such sensical details.

We walked along the ridge of the mountain for a bit, two worlds laid out on either side of us. It wasn’t level, but the walk was easy enough that I kept up with Mariano. After we’d skirted around the new valley, we came to another slope upward and I marvelled at how the larger-than-life mountains could be even taller. The path here twisted around itself so we weren’t headed straight up hill, and Mariano decided it was time for conversation.

“Have you thought at all about what you’re going to do?” he asked.

“Not really,” I answered, struggling to stay two steps behind him. “I wish people would stop asking. It’s making me feel like an unambitious bum.”

I felt that I should be panting. I wasn’t. Not needing to breathe had its advantages.

“Well, I had a thought,” Mariano said. He paused, then clambering up a slope to where the path continued, like skipping from the middle of a Z to the tip. (WHAT DOES THIS EVEN MEAN, ME) A shower of pebbles slid away under his shoes.

“What is it?” I asked, eyeing his short cut dubiously. “And will I die again if I fall off the mountain?”

He kneeled and held out a hand. I took it and managed to scramble up the slope, my feet slipping about beneath me. For an instant standing safely on level ground again, I thought I could have done that without help, but then I turned and looked down at the spot where we’d been standing. It seemed too far down from us, and the valley itself seemed dangerously far away. I felt myself sway with vertigo. Mariano put a hand on my shoulder.

“Do you have a fear of heights?” he teased.

“No, just a fear of falling.” I looped a finger under his and moved his hand from my shoulder. I pushed past him and continued along the path, sticking my tongue out at him from over my shoulder.

We went up a few more twists in the path before Mariano started talking again.

“Anyway,” he said as if there had been no pause at all. He was right behind me and I could almost feel him straining not to step on my heels. “I was thinking that you would make a good herald.”

“A what?” I asked. There was a rock on the side of the path– the side not looming over a fatal plunge– and I stepped on top of it so he could go around me. Instead, he stood in front of me, looking up at me with his hands in his pockets.

“A herald,” he repeated. “Someone who guides others and has a good control over gates.”

I stared down at him. From this angle he looked like he was right on the edge, and the little stream was so, so far below, and he was just staring up at me with his back to it all, as if he weren’t aware that if he took one tiny step back he would fall–

I started scratching behind my earlobe, right below the edge of the hole through my head.

“No, that doesn’t seem particularly inviting,” I said. His hands were in his pockets so if he fell he wouldn’t be able to do anything. “I’d really rather just go back to school and figure it out from there. Could you please move?”

Mariano shrugged and continued along the path. It started to swoop back up another mountain and I straggled yards behind him, squinting in the harsh sun. He stopped abruptly and turned to frown down at me.

“Heralding people would be a lot of fun, you know,” he said. I rolled my eyes and kept forcing my legs up the mountain. “You get to know people, you’d get to know places, and you’d get really good at handling gates. Which, you know, you kind of suck at right now. A lot.”

“I just don’t want to, okay?” I said. I paused and looked for something to distract him. Noticing mountainside above us was dotted with little yellow dots, I waved ahead of us and asked, “What’s with the itsy-bitsy yellow polka dots?”

“Oh, those are flowers,” Mariano said and ran up the slope. I followed him and the same heaving pace as before.

We crouched down around the flowers, which were no bigger than my thumbnail. Their petals, yellow with red tips, folded up and met together over the flowers’s centers to create perfect little spheres. They sat nestled in their leaves like Easter eggs.

“Mellon baller flowers,” I said.

“Mellon baller butter flowers,” said Mariano.

“With strawberry jelly,” I added.

We stared at each other. Not taking his eyes from mine, Mariano plucked a mellon baller flower and flicked it at me. It hit my nose.

“You should really think about heralding,” he said.

“Maybe,” I answered. We were still staring at each other’s eyes. “After high school.”

We moved on. We scaled one slope after another until the land finally flattened out. Giant, sea urchin-like balls of spikey leaves began to appear.

“What is this?” I asked, stopping in front of one. It was as tall as me and wider than my armspan.

“A tree,” Mariano answered brightly.

“You’re kidding me.”

But he was not, and as we continued along the leaf-urchins grew thick, brown-green stalks that made them look exactly like upside down palm trees.

We had been discussing random things, with me very carefully holding back from questions about Menesthesus and him surely holding back from an interrogation on my reluctance to pursue any sort of post-death career. It must have been hours before he finally broke.

“We should climb up this boulder, and you should tell me why you don’t want to be a herald.” The casual way he said it made those two suggestions seem related.

“Why?” I asked after a pause. It was a response to both statements. The boulder he’d indicated sat next to a pool of water that looked exactly like every other pool of water we’d walked by. It was large and block-like, with one side carved out like a stairs. It looked so unnatural I concluded it was a sloppy human-addition to whatever real-world canvas this place was based on. It also looked slippery, and I could see no reason to climb on top of it.

Somehow, Mariano managed to dragged me up the unnatural steps, rambling about sediments and minerals and reflecting light.

“Oh,” he said with a note of disappointment when we got to the top. “Usually the light’s better.”

I peered over the edge at the water. It was perfectly still and clear, deeper than I expected. The mud lining the bottom was a rainbow of orange-browns and red-browns and even a few hints of blue-green. No fish or plants blocked the careful pattern of waves and swirls.

“Normally you can see more colors,” Mariano said, almost anxious.

“It’s beautiful,” I assured him. “Is this what you wanted me to see?”

He grinned. “No, just a side trip.”

We sat in silence for a while, staring down into orange-red-green mineral mud. A sudden breeze sent ripples across the water’s surface and the colors swirled as if they were the fishy inhabitants of the empty pool.

“So...” Mariano finally said.

“I don’t like sheparding people around,” I said before he could ask, “because that’s all I ever do with my brothers. I’m like the family chauffeur. I actually died avoiding driving them around.”

“Why don’t you like driving your brothers around?” Mariano asked.

I mulled the question over for a few moments. “You,” I said, “are obviously an only child.”

“What–”

“I can only spend so much of my time on my brothers’ demands before I start going crazy,” I said. “And I don’t mind helping Mom out once in a while, but sometimes it seems like I can’t do anything I want because Logan or Matthew or Chris need to have their needs catered to more than mine. It’s the curse of being an older sibling, I think.”

“Sounds like the curse of responsibility,” Marinao countered. I frowned and dropped a pebble in the pool, the splash momentarily ruining the colors.

“I try so hard to be a responsible person,” I said. “But it’s not fair that I get shouldered with more of it just because I happen to be born first.” The pebble hit the bottom on the pool, sending up a cloud of brown silt.

“I wonder,” Mariano murmured, “if your mother feels the same way.”

I stared at him. “But… but Logan’s barely a year younger and he doesn’t have to…” I trailed off. The silt cloud settled, and he stood up and stretched.

“So what are all these things you want to do but can’t?” he asked.

“You can’t get off that, can you?” I answered, half outraged and half amused. I stood and followed him down the boulder. “Honestly, if I had all the free time in the world, I would probably just sit around and talk to friends and read things on the internet and eat cake. Maybe go on a bike ride every once in a while, or hiking.”

“Congradulations,” Mariano said, “you do have all the free time in the world! Did I mention this water was carbonated?”

I gawked at him, not so much surprised that the water was carbonated as that he produced a small plastic cup from his pocket. He knelt by the water and filled the cup, handing it over to me. I sniffed it.

“It’s perfectly safe,” he said. “Amoebas don’t make it to the afterlife. Plus, it’s supposed to be good for your skin.”

I rolled my eyes, and before taking a gulp said, “I don’t think good skin or parasites matter much, as I’m already dead.”

“Yet you still talk about your family in present tense,” Mariano observed.

I nearly choked.

We reached another mountain and climbed higher. The plant life disappeared and we only had lose rocks to hang on to as we scrambled up the mountain. Well, I scrambled and Mariano strolled along like rocky mountainsides were grocery stores. It seemed like we’d gone too far for how little time had passed, but I thought maybe time had just gone quickly because I couldn’t get properly tired and even though Mariano’s stories tended to be long-winded, they were usually interesting and he had a never-ending supply of them. But then I considered Mariano’s complaints about people getting the perspective of landscapes wrong, and thought maybe that was it. I tried to work this out and managed to give myself a headache.

“…when I start boring you so much you stop paying attention,” my ears registered Mariano say, “You can just tell me to shut up.”

“But talking makes you happy,” I muttered.

“Ha,” he said.

“How along have we been walking?” I asked.

“Long enough,” he said. I pouted. “Honestly, we’re almost there.”

The vegetation waned from a carpet of grass to a few patches to the occasional, sad little clump. When there was no more grass, the earth left over was dull gray-brown. Ahead of us was another peak, but this one had a peculiar outline, like a row of long, jagged teeth against the horizon.

When we’d climbed up it (I was really sick of climbing at this point), I realized the mountain-teeth were little towers made from stacking rocks, one on top of the other, like the chimneys of old houses.

The closest one came to mid-thigh and I squatted down to admire it.

“They’re called apacheta,” Mariano said. “It’s Quechua. Look.”

I stood and followed him to the very edge of the peak. Looking down, the other side of the slope was the same dull color, but I gasped in surprise anyway.

The little towers– the apacheta– covered the mountainside like a modern city in miniture. There was no order to them: they were arranged randomly, some clumped together here, a wide space for no reason, a lone tower here. They were all different sizes, short, fat ones sitting next to tall, slender ones that looked like they’d topple over at any second.

“People built these?” I asked in a whisper, suddenly feeling this place was very improtant.

Mariano nodded. “Tuki told me about them,” he said in a normal volume. “They’re– they’re sort of like spiritual towers, I suppose. I think the general gist is that, as you build them, you think about where you’ve been, and where you’re going. And you can ask for help.”

I stared down at them. “Help from who?” I asked cautiously. We were already in the afterlife. What else was there?

Mariano shrugged. “From yourself, I guess.”

“Have you made one?” I asked. He grinned half-heartedly at me.

“No,” he said. “Let’s make one together.”

We wandered around the mountainside, picking up rocks. I tried to focus on a particular shape (large and flat), but Maraino seemed to be picking up every stone he came across. We dumped them in an unstructured pile by where we wanted to build our apacheta.

When we deemed our rock pile large enough, I sat down next to it, cross-legged like a child. Mariano squatted next to me, and we set about building the tower in silence. I’d pick out a rock and put it down, and Mariano would follow. Despite his indiscriminant choice of rocks from the mountainside, he was much more selective when picking out which ones to add to our column.

With every rock I put down, I thought about a specific person. This rock is for Mom, I thought. And then this one is for Dad. This one is Logan. But as I was picking out the rock to be Matthew, the apacheta collapsed under Mariano’s third addition to the column.

“Your journey!” I cried, dismayed. Mariano snorted.

“We’ll just start over,” he said.

“Maybe we should make a bigger base?” I suggested.

We tried tried forming more of a pyramid structure than just stacking one rock on top of another, but the end result was an apacheta that grew out instead of up.

“I don’t like it,” Mariano stated.

“Picky,” I teased. We dissambled it and tried stacking again.

This time we were more meticulous with which rocks we picked. We picked out the biggest one we could find for the base, and Mariano separated out all the weirdly shaped ones from the pile. I added one stone for all five of my immediate family members, and then one for Grandpa Barry. After I added it, Mariano leaned back on his hands and looked the apacheta up and down. It was about as tall as we were sitting.

“You done?” he asked.

“Hm, wait a moment,” I said, getting an idea. I picked up a pebble– one that hadn’t even been in our pile of building stones, and carefully balanced it on top of the tower. For Serenity.

“Okay, now I’m done,” I said.

We decied to sit on the mountainpeak for a while, knee-to-knee between two apacheta, looking down at the city of stones.

“When I was a little girl,” I said after a while. Mariano peered at me in interest. “I used to tell everyone I wanted to be a ballerina.” He smiled. “But I didn’t. I just thought that’s what my mom wanted me to be.”

“Oh,” said Mariano.

“My parents bought me a car, which I thought was really generous,” I continued. “But then I realized they only bought it so I could drive my brothers around. I was actually biking… on that day… because I let Logan have the car. So, you know, it’d be his responsibility.”

Mariano shifted next to me. I couldn’t tell is it was because he was uncomfortable or not. When he spoke, he sounded perfectly calm, “So that’s why you don’t want to be a herald.”

“Yeah,” I said. I pulled my knees up to my chest and hugged them. “But I don’t know why I said that stuff about being a ballerina…”

He chuckled. “I told you I wanted to be a counselor, right? Well, when I was a kid, I wanted to be a cop and fight bad guys.”

I giggled.

“But then one day,” he went on, “my dad got a speeding ticket while I was in the car. And I thought, ‘My dad isn’t a bad guy!’ And so ended that dream.”

“How old were you?” I asked with a half-smile.

He shrugged. “Seven, maybe? My point is, responsibility is a burden, but it isn’t a bad thing.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Your conclusion doesn’t follow your premise,” I said. “Like, at all. But I mean, I didn’t mind taking care of other people. It’s just… here, I don’t have a direction. What am I supposed to do?”

“What did I just tell you?” Mariano countered. “You help yourself.”

I stretched my legs back out, avoiding an apacheta with my foot.

“Can I ask you a personal question?” I said.

“Sure,” Mariano answered, smiling amiably.

“How did you die?”

His face went blank and his body tensed. I immediately regretted my question. That story about the speeding ticket was the most I’d heard him talk about his personal experiences that I thought maybe he was openning up to me, but it seemed I was wrong.

“Y-you don’t have to answer,” I stuttered quickly, fearing I’d broken something in our friendship. “Just tell me something– any one thing– where are you from? How old are you? What’s your full name?”

He slowly turned his head back toward the sea of apacheta. And, ever so slowly, the corners of his mouth crept back into a little smile.

“My name is Mariano Vega,” he said. “I’m from California. On my eighteenth birthday, I was shot in the head.”

I gulped. I reached out and took his hand in mine, because it seemed like the only thing to do.

After a few moments he squeezed my hand back and grinned, and the dark atmosphere discipated in an instant.

“You’re pretty swell, Juniper,” he said. “Did you know?”

“Every morning,” I said in as serious a voice as I could muster, “I look at myself in the mirror and say, ‘Damn girl, you so fine.’”

Mariano grinned and got to his feet, pulling me up with him. “Come on,” he said, “let’s go back. I think I’ve sequestered you for long enough.”

“Okay,” I agreed, throwing one last glance at the apacheta. I’d come back to this place soon, I thought. Then I followed Mariano back down the barren mountainside.

Halfway back to HQ, the sky filled with black clouds. It took only a few minutes for the mountains to go as dark as night, and only a few more for the rain to begin to pour. Mariano grabbed my hand, and we ran down the mountain, slipping and sliding in the mud, and laughing the whole way. I was too filled with the rush of running and the warmth from Mariano’s hand in mine to worry about falling off the mountain (which we did, once, but it barely hurt at all and we kept running). There is nothing like running without tiring.

It was so dark I couldn’t make out any of the spindly shadow people creeping around the entrance to the HQ. We burst in with a fit of giggles, water going everywhere. It rolled off me like rain down a windshield, but Mariano as drenched from head to toe. I laughed at him.

“Here, I’ll get you a towel…” I offered. We went to the elevator, him making the splerch-splerch noise of wet sneakers and me making the smack-smack noise water slapping tile.

Mariano refused to enter my room wet, so he waited out in the corridor for me to grab my towel.

“This is filthy,” he observed but dried his hair with it anyway. His curls were a mes and I giggled some more. He joined in, rubbing the towel across his face to try to cover his own mirth up.

“Well, aren’t you the happy couple,” a voice drawled from the elevator. The doors opened and Tuki entered the corridor, followed closely by Pandora. Her eyebrows were raised.

“I wondered where all the water came from,” she said.

“Oh, yeah, sorry…” I mumbled.

Tuki eyed me suspiciously. Aside from the mud all over my pants, I was completely dry. “What, did he gallantly loan you his umbrella or something?”

“No, I, um. I seem to be waterproof…” I trailed off and there was a very long moment of silence in which Pandora and Tuki looked nonplussed and Mariano tried his hardest not to laugh at me, burrying his face in the towel some more.

Finally, Tuki shrugged. “That’s fine. Pandora forgot her bellybotton.”

“HEY!” Pandora yelled and slapped his arm at the same time I said, “What?”

“People forget things all the time,” Mariano supplied.

“But your bellybotton?”

Pandora turned red. “It’s not like I think about it all the time,” she said. “I probably died suddenly and didn’t give it much thought when I put myself together…” The last part was mumbled. Tuki cleared his throat.

“Anyway, we came up here to find you two. Menesthesus had an idea for some field work.”

He explained the job briefly and Mariano nodded while I pretended I knew what he was talking about. Apparently, they were aiming to pick up some “supplies” from a man named Xavier, who I gathered had some sort of personal link with Mariano. Then Tuki turned to me.

“You’re pretty much useless,” he said. Mariano’s face faultered and he started to blubber something I hope was defense of my personal utility, but Tuki cut him off with a wave of his hand. “But we’d thought you could check out some schools, since it’s a pretty big city.”

“And,” Pandora cut in, “you could get experience and be less useless.”

“Does picking up things really require experience?” I asked, puzzled. They exchanged looks and I had that odd, cold feeling of being an outsider again.

“You’ll see,” Mariano said.

--

((LOOK AT ME, GOING EVERYWHERE THEMATICALLY. But anyway, then I started skipping around...)

--

Pandora led me down to the first floor, but instead of heading toward the main exit like I had expected, we found Tuki and Mariano idling in front of the supply closet. I stared at it for a proportionately long time before I realized the closet must also serve as a gate to wherever we were going.

“You guys can’t do anything normally, can you?”

Mariano smiled. “It’s not like we built it. The gate just came like this.”

Tuki knocked on the door twice and Mariano muttered in my ear that that was how to signal where you wanted it to open. I leaned over to rub my knees, then remembered I was wearing gym shorts. Tuki swung open the door. A mop fell out.

“I know you like ruining things for people,” Pandora said, exasperated, “but this is work. It requires competence.” I twisted a lock of hair nervously.

“It wasn’t me,” Tuki defended. He shoved the mop back into the closet with his foot and closed it again. I concentrated very hard. He reopened it to the closet on a different floor.

“Juniper,” Mariano sighed, pinching his nose.

“I’m trying,” I stressed back at him. “It does help that it’s labeled ‘janitorial supplies.’”

Tuki stared at me, then looked at Mariano’s face of vague disappointment, then fixed me with a sneer that very clearly said, I told you you were useless.

“What’s wrong with Juniper?” Pandora asked with a hint of worry.

“I, uh. Have a problem,” I said. “With gates.”

“You’re just full of inconvenient problems, aren’t you?” Tuki muttered. We ignored him.

I explained my issue with gates to Pandora. “My subconcious tries very hard to make sure everything makes sense,” finsihed. “Doors that open to strange things baffle it.”

“Hmm,” she said. I couldn’t tell if it was a noise of annoyance or just a sign that she was thinking. “I’ve heard of something like that… but how did you make yourself waterproof, if you’re so concerned with rationality?”

I shrugged.

“I’ve been getting around it by tricking her into going through them,” Mariano piped up. “But we’ve been practicing and I’d thought she’d gotten over it…”

“It’s just that I’ve seen the inside of that closet so many times,” I huffed. “Let me try opening it. If I’m engaging with it myself, and I can give myself time to visualize the other side, maybe I can switch it on my own.”

--

“What,” Tuki deadpanned, “is this?”

We’d stepped out onto an empty, dimly lit stage. It seemed fairly run down– the black paint on the floor was ripped up in several places and the back curtains had several large, gapping holes in them. I squinted out into rows of seats in front of us, all a burnt bown-orange color. Several had missing cushions.

“It’s a theatre,” I said.

“Obviously,” Tuki drawled back. “But we were aiming for a post office. Nice going, by the way.”

“There aren’t any doors,” Pandora observed.

“We still might be close,” Mariano reasoned. “Wasn’t there a threatre near the–”

“No doors,” Pandora said, louder, “as in no gates.”

Both Mariano and the usually stoic Tuki looked alarmed. I rubbed the back of my calf with my other foot nervously.

“That can’t be right,” Mariano said finally. “Everyone, look for a door.”

He said everyone, but only Tuki went off searching. He disappared behind the winds of the stage, and later we heard the thudding of his boots crossing the stage behind the back curtain. Mariano used the excuse that he was “unnaturally good at finding things” and Pandora stretched her arms.

“No sense of direction, though,” she added.

After a while, Pandora sat down on the edge of the stage and Mariano started telling me about a play he’d been in in middle school. I listened attentively, as he was talking about himself for once.

“It was The Wizard of Oz,” he said. “I was the Scarecrow because he had the most lines…”

I took to pacing as he talked to me, circling him while twirling my bag in one hand. When he got to the part about having to make his own costume because his parents were too busy to help him, he started following me in the circle. We must have looked ridiculous, because Pandora was watching us with a mystified look on her face.

Before Mariano could finish opening night, there was a scream from stage left. It wasn’t Tuki’s.

Before my mind could fully register what was happening, Mariano was disappearing into the wing of the stage as well. Pandora dropped her backpack and we both chased after him. Offstage was completely dark except for a light coming from a staircase leading down below the stage. I nearly tripped owver Pandora’s heels rushing down it. There were more screams.

The room at the bottom of the stairs was well lit. It was a large space, but it was completely covered in junk. There were moldy couches stacked on top of each other, a pile of unused carpet, and props and customes scattered around in unorganized heaps. Tuki and Mariano were wrestling with something in a pile of ruffly dresses.

“Lemme go!” it shrieked. “Maledictions! Maledictions!”

“Calm–down–” Mariano grunted, floundering with the thing’s ankles.

“Yeah,” Tuki sneared. He has behind it with his arms under it’s shoulders, ignoring its flailing arms. “Or we’ll cut off your tail.”

The thing froze. Mariano dropped its feet. “That’s better.”

The thing had the basic shape of a person, but its body was too narrow and its limbs were too long. It was dressed in a deep purple body suit and its greenish feet were bare, revealing long, yellowing toe nails. On its face it wore a glaring red mask, with a downturned mouth cut wide enough to see through it it snarling thin lips. Through the eye holes I could see large eyes as yellow as its toenails. It was completely bald, but had the ornate, heavy horns of a ram. All of its fingers had filed yellow nails and were the same length. It had a cord like tail, which hung limply behind it.

“Let me go,” it repeated. Its voice was oddly high and nasaly.

“Your not going to go biting anyone again, are you?” Mariano questioned. I noticed puncture marks on Tuki’s wrist.

I could just make out its eyes narrowing. “No. I promises.” Then it said, “Maledictions.”

Tuki dropped it and the thing leaped nimbly onto the back of a couch which had been propt on told of another one. It sqautted, animal-like, and stared down at us.

“So,” said Mariano. His voice was candid as always and his posture was relaxed, but I could see the outline of his fist clenched in his pcoket. “Who are you?”

The thing shifted, straightening its back.

“I am Melpo, Lord of the Theatre! I am saviour of the Room of Green! Proprietor of the Upstage and Downstage! Master of the Lights! All is arranged to my whim, all is set where I desire and nowhere else!”

I wanted to ask, “What are you?” but thought better of it. I scooted closer to Pandora (away from Melpo the Thing), who was whispering frantically with Tuki.

“Would you mind telling us where we are?” Mariano asked. “We’re trying to get to the City that Smells of Oranges.”

“YOU WILL GET NOWHERE!” Melpo screamed. “You have entered my kingdom which has no escape, and now you are all my slaves!”

I calmly began to braid my hair.

“Marinara,” Pandora said with fake sweetness, “would you mind coming over here for a private chat?”

Mariano moved over to them, and I scooted closer as well. We huddled together like a sports team, but Pandora kept her head up and her eyes trained on “Melpo.”

“I didn’t find any way out,” Tuki whispered hoarsely to us. “Pandora was right; there are no gates. I checked everything twice just to be sure.”

Pandora snorted. “More like you got lost.” Tuki ignored her.

“It’s definitely a deadend,” he said. “Maybe– hopefully– a puzzlebox house. I didn’t get to check properly because that thing jumped me.”

“What is it?” I asked. “Is it a built thing?”

“Stop calling Melpo a ‘thing,’” Mariano whispered back. “He– or she– is a person.”

I glanced over my shoulder at it. Melpo had the posture of a bird and the strange, fixated gaze of a cat. Its tail twitched behind him. “But how–”

“Sometimes,” Mariano explained, “People started to lose sense of themselves. And when you think you’re someone you’re not, your appearances changes.”

“This place was built with no exits,” Pandora said, her dark eyes still locked on Melpo. “It’s what we call a ‘deadend.’ He must have been here a very long time, all alone…”

We were silent for a moment. All alone for so long, and he had begun to think he was this creature.

“Then what’s a ‘puzzlebox house’?” I asked.

Tuki rolled his eyes, “I’m going to check and see if I can find anything else.” He broke away and Pandora followed, saying soemthing about keeping him from getting lost. Mariano took a step back and slipped right to lecture mode.

“A puzzlebox house,” he explained, “is an enclosed space that seems like a deadend, but it has a hidden gate. There’s a trick to finding it, and usually there’s a clue or two laying around to help you. They started as games, I think. Like a corn maze, you know? Of course, some people think it’s funny to make an unsolvable game, but. Well.” His eyes flicked to Melpo, who had laid down across the back of his couch, head propped up on one hand.

“Harlot!” He screeched when he noticed me looking at him. “You shall rot of malaise!”

I stuck my tongue out at him and turned back to Mariano.

“Can’t we just make a gate?” I asked.

He thought about it for a long moment. I could hear Tuki and Pandora arguing about if the shelves of shoes in the back were important. Tuki was insisting she put on a pair of heels for some reason.

“It’s possible in theory…” Mariano said slowly. “But making a gate from nothing is hard, Juniper.”

I shrugged. “What’s the worse that could happen?”

These are, I should note, what they call “famous last words.”

Mariano and I sat down on a couch as far a way from Melpo as we could, and he began to explain to me the theory behind making a gate.

“First,” he said. “You have to understand the concept of builing.”

(“I swear these are different,” Tuki was saying to Pandora. “These are children’s shoes,” she was arguing back.)

Building, Mariano explained, was all about visualization and perception. You had to picture something– something in very minute detail– and then so utterly convince yourself it was so real that it became a reality. It was difficult to tell which was more difficult: imagining every last detail of what you wanted or projecting it into physicality.

“Well,” he said, going off into one of his tangents, “I think they go hand in hand, actually. You can’t really convince yourself or anyone else something’s real if you can’t see it perfectly in your mind, you know? And then, if you do imagine something up so strongly, then it’s easy to think maybe it’s real. Do you get it?”

I narrowed my eyes at him and answered, “You’re a builder, aren’t you?”

He seemed taken aback. “I… well, yes.” He scratched his cheek. “How did you know?”

“Just a hunch.”

He stood up and looked around, as if seeing the room for the first time. Melpo hissed something about descent into melancholia.

“Let’s explore.”

One one side of the greenroom where two doorways marked as male and female dressing rooms. Oddly enough, the actual doors themselves had been removed. They were filled with piles of even more costumes and masks and wigs. One the other side was an archway into the shop: partially constructed set pieces were strewn around in piles of sawdust. Power tools laid about at random. In the very back, however, was the one clean part of the entire theatre. Melpo had apparently made his own set piece, a wall painted to look like the brick side of a house. It had painted on windows and outside he had arranged plastic flowers to look like a garden. When we poked out heads in through the cut-out door, we found a tiny, ornate bed (probably meant for a very little girl or a large doll) with a T-shirt neatly folded across it as a blanket. Next to it was an upside down crate decorated with a ceramic rabbit, a china plate and a brass clock that wasn’t working.

Red painted letters across the back wall read, “MELPO IS KING FOREVER.”

It hurt to look at. “Can– can you finish telling me how to make a gate now?” I asked Mariano. He nodded solemnly.

We backed away from Melpo’s “house” and sat on a bench that had apaprently been abandonned in the middle of a paint job.

“Places usually have gates built in,” Mariano said. “It’s basically a space you give the idea of allowing exit or entrance. And then someone can link up where that gate goes to. I suppose you can think of it as a specialized form of building. What you’ve been doing so far is altering the pre-set destinations of gates.”

I nodded. “I’m a modifier.”

“Right. But to make a gate out of something that hasn’t been designated one is… it’s like violating the entire concept of building.”

“I’d have to overpower whatever willpower went into making the boundaries, right?”

“Yeah…” He twisted too look around the shop again. “It’s especially hard in a place like this, since who ever built it was specifically thinking that there shouldn’t be a gate.”

“Reenforced walls, huh?”

Mariano opened his mouth to reply, but Pandora’s yell from the green room cut him off.

“Cut it out, you little demon!” This was followed by some crashing noises.

We went back to the green room. Melpo was trying to pry from Pandora’s hands one of the little shoes Tuki had wanted her to wear. It was dark green and sparkly, with a short heel and a little pompom on the toe. Tuki was trying to Melpo away from her, and I could see the other shoe sticking out of his back pocket.

“Melpo,” Mariano said in the same way one might chastise a small child. He rushed over and helped Pandora pry his little green fingers off the shoe.

“Maledictions!” Melpo screamed. His trashing tail knocked over a stool. I hurried over and righted it again without quite knowing why. With some effort they dettached him from the shoe and Pandora backed away sulkily.

“Melpo,” said Mariano very calmly, clapsing the strange little person by the wrists. Tuki let go of him disgustedly and went to join Pandora. “Would you like to leave the theatre?”

“Melpo is theatre lord is king!”

“Yes, of course,” Mariano agreed. “But wouldn’t you like the option of leaving?”

Melpo was quiet. From this angle I couldn’t see through the holes in his mask, but I could imagine his in human face curling up in suspicion. At least, I would suspicious.

“Melpo misses Madame Soleil,” Melpo muttered.

“Madame Soleil?” I repeated. What weird term was Melpo using that that had translated into French of all things?

Melpo was visibly calming down, his tail falling limp behind him and his muscles relaxing. Mariano let go of his wrists.

“Madame Soleil was Melpo’s beloeved wife,” Melpo said softly in his nasal voice. “But Madame Soleil’s jealous sister threw Melpo into fires. But Melpo became king of fires and now Melpo is Theatre Lord. Melpo is mighty but miss Soleil– Soleil is warm.”

How much of that was true, and how much of that was a story Melpo had constructed to keep himself sane?

“Melpo,” said Mariano quietly. “This girl is Juniper. She’s going to try to help us get outside.” Melpo’s face snapped toward me. His tail twitched. “But Melpo,” Mariano continued. “She’s going to need a door.”

“There are no doors,” Melpo muttered. “There never are doors. No doors, not ever.”

“Alright,” said Mariano patiently. “What about a cubbard or a vanity? A box with a lid a person could fit into?”

“All broken, always,” Melpo answered.

“Are you sure?” Mariano asked.

“What?” Melpo screeched back. “Curly man think Melpo has not tried this? Curly man think Melpo choose to rot in Great Theatre? Melpo is not imbecile!”

And with that, the little man hopped onto the make up table, climbed on top of a make up box, and grabbed hold of one of the pipes lining the ceiling. He swung from it with the skill and grace of a monkey, propelling himself back to the shop.

“Well then,” Mariano said, looking stunned at– at what? Melpo? His own failure to communicate? “I guess we’re doing this the hard way.” He turned to Pandora and Tuki and called over, “Found anything interesting yet?”

“Just shoes,” Pandora answered in distaste.

“These are special,” Tuki insisted. “I can feel it– there’s something different about them. Important.”

“Yeah,” Pandora agreed snidely. “The rest are for adults, and these are for a little girl.”

“If you’d just try–”

Mariano took my hand and led me away.

“You’re going to need a– oh, what do you call it–”

“A substrate?” I provided.

“Yes. You need something to work on. What type of door do you want to make?”

“Um,” I thought back through all the gates I’d been through. I remembered my first one. “How about just a blank wall?”

We moved aside the pile of carpet pieces so that I had a decided sized partion of wall to stand in front of.

“Okay,” said Mariano. “Do your thing.”

“What?” I asked. “What thing? I don’t know how to do this.”

“I told you everythign I know,” Mariano said. “If I knew all the details of building a gate, don’t you think I’d try it myself?”

I frowned. “What happens if this doesn’t work?”

“Then we help Tuki and Pandora. Or we try harder.” He paused. “The key is, you know, to go into this thinking that it will work.”

“Right, positive thinking.”

I stood in front of the wall, feet apart like I was about to do some heavy lifting. (That’s how my Mom always said it, I remembered with a jolt of nostalgia: “Stand like you’re going to do some heavy lifting!”) I put both hands on the wall and pushed. Nothing happened.

Mariano watched me, arms crossed. He said nothing.

On the other side of this wall, I decided, was an ice cream shop. I imagined that, since it was a otherworldly ice cream shop, the walls could be made of ice cream too, and I should be able to melt right through.

Nothing continued to happen.

I recalled what Mariano said about visualizing all the details, so as I glared at the grain of the painted cinder blocks I imagined the porous surface of a scoop of ice cream. I was working on convincing myself that the wall was very, very cold when my hands started to seep through.

I could almost feel Mariano tense up behind me. The going was very slow; it felt more like pushing my way through styrofoam than the half-melted dairy goodness I was imagining. When I was about elbow deep, I realized soemthing was very wrong. My arms weren’t coming out anywhere. If I had indeed made a gate, it didn’t seem to go anywhere. And, with this sudden spike of panic, I must have lost hold of something, because suddenly I was unable to push forward or pull backwards.

“Uh, Mariano? I think I’m stuck.”

I tried to wiggle my arms. I could not move my wrists or fingers at all, nor could I change the angle of my arms in the concrete. Yes, I was definitely stuck with both forearms in the wall.

“Just keep doing what you were doing before,” Mariano said calmly. I turned my head to look at him. His face was completely blank, but his shoudlers were squared in such a way that I thought I had probably just doomed myself to being stuck in a wall for all eternity.

This particular thought was extremely distracting, and now my brain was refusing to imagine ice cream and was instead demanding that I yank on my hair or scratch my arms or do something besides uselessly stand there thinking about ice cream. I kneed the wall.

“Ow,” I said.

“Why did you do that?” Mariano asked, bewildered. He came up beside me, staring down at my knee as if it had done that on its own.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I didn’t know what else to do.”

Mariano raised his eyebrows. “You hurt yorself when you’re frustrated?”

“No,” I defended myself immediately. “I was hurting the wall.”

He crossed his arms and again and leaned his shoulder against the wall, eyeing me warily. “Juniper, if you had meant to hurt the wall, you would have kicked it like a normal person.”

“I am a normal person!” I scowled back at him. “You better watch it, or I’ll try kicking you.”

He smirked. “Normal people don’t have holes through their head.”

“That’s a cheap shot.”

“Normal people also don’t get stuck in walls.”

“That’s an even cheaper shot.”

There was a flapping sound behind me, like paper rustling. I craned my neck trying to see behind me. Mariano stood up straight again.

“Melpo, what are you doing?” He asked.

I couldn’t see properly, but it there were little booklets being thrown around– scripts? Programs?

“There are bugs and cockroaches and crickets and spiders,” Melpo muttered. “Cockroaches and cickets and bugs and spiders.” He continued repeating this list, although never quite in the same order.

“But what are you doing?” Mariano asked again.

“What happened?” Pandora’s mildly concerned voice came from the other side of the room. I craned my head in the other direction, seeing her and Tuki emerge from the men’s dressing room.

--

The other three dragged a couch over next me and sat down so we could discuss what to do.

“If it is a puzzlebox, there’s a good chance there’s a theme to the solution,” Mariano said.

“One would hope,” Tuki said. “Although if I made it, the answer wouldn’t be that easy.”

“If you made it, you would have a solution,” Pandora snorted. “Besides, just because it’s a theme doesn’t mean it’s easy. Can you think of any theatrical traditions?”

There was an very uncomfortable silence. Tuki looked thoughtful, but I was sure Mariano was thinking the same thing as me, as his face was quite taken aback.

“Um,” I said. “Aren’t there a lot?”

Tuki and Pandora looked confused.

“I think you should remember,” Mariano said politely and carefully, “that they did not exactly grow up with Western theatre.”

Tuki rolled his eyes. “Which makes us stupid. We know.”

Mariano looked very uncomfortable and Pandora covered her mouth and made a noise that was either a stifled giggle or a very strange cough.

“So what are some theatre things?” I asked. “I know you’re supposed to say ‘break a leg’ instead of ‘good luck’ because… uh.” Okay, so I didn’t really know why one said that.

“A bad dress rehearsal makes for a great opening night,” Mariano added. “Whistling is bad luck too. And getting flowers before the show. And, oh, something about wearing blue on stage…”

Tuki and Pandora were staring at him with faces that I interpreted as, What madness has your modern society created?

“What about ‘MacBeth’?” I asked. “Isn’t saying ‘MacBeth’ in a theatre–”

There was an unholy screaming and suddenly Melpo– who had appeared from nowhere– was clawing at my legs.

“THOU SHALT NOT SAY IT!” he was screaming as loud as he possibly could. My ears were ringing. I wanted to ward him off, but being trapped in the wall was greatly hindering this. Mariano and Pandora lept up to help subdue him.

“HARLOT!” Melpo was screaming, trashing around and trying his best to get out of Mariano and Pandora’s arms. “THOU SHALT NOT SPEAK OF THE SCOTTISH PLAY!”

He was flailing so violently Tuki had to chip in as well.

“What,” he grunted, grabbing Melpo’s furious tail and wrapping it around his wrist, “in the name of all that is holy, is Macbeth?”

Melpo went stiff as a board and let out one long, high scream that deterred any further words. Pandora dropped his hands and covered her ears. Mariano and Tuki quickly mimicked her. I tried to mash my shoulders up against the stubs of my ears, wondering how they could hurt so much if they mostly weren’t there.

Then the lights went out.

Melpo’s scream stopped abruptly, and all was very still and very dark. I could still feel ringing in my ears.

“Never mind,” Tuki finally mumbled. “I don’t want to know.”

There was a little point of light from the corner of my eye. Mariano had turned the illumination of his watch on, and the blue like cast a ghostly sheen across his face.

“Melpo,” he said very calmly, kneeling next to the little man, still stiff as a board on the floor. “Melpo, what just happened?”

Melpo did not answer. I could only see his silhouette, and it did not so much as twitch.

“I have a flash light in my backpack,” Pandora said. “But I left it upstairs. I’ll go get it.”

“I’ll help,” Tuki offered. I could hear their foot steps moving away, then the creak of the stairs. There was a thud like someone had tripped, but neither of them said anything.

“You know,” said Mariano, “I bet there’s another flashlight or a lamp or something around here. Juniper, can you watch Melpo?”

“Sure,” I replied automatically. The light of Mariano’s watch retreated quickly toward the shop. “Wait, how am I supposed to watch him if I’m stuck in the wall and can’t see anything?”

Mariano didn’t reply. I couldn’t see the light of his watch anymore; I couldn’t twist myself around far enough to see into the shop.

“Mariano?” I called, louder. My voice hung in the air eerily, they way loud noises do in the dark. There was a rustling noise near my feet.

“Hey, Melpo,” I said, squinting down into the dark where I thought he should be. “Whatcha doing?”

There was a horrible clanging noise from upstairs. The little blue light reappeared and headed for the stairs, banging noises following it as Mariano bumped into furniture.

“Be right back!” he yelled at me.

There were more clanging noise, but then they vanished and were replaced by a conversation I couldn’t make out. The rustling at my feet continued. When the rustling started comeing from both sides of me, I realized there was no way it Melpo making the noise.

“Mariano?” I yelled, pointing around with the tips of my feet. I found Melpo’s body– it definitely wasn’t moving. He didn’t even move when I nudged him. “Pandora? Tuki?” My voice was beginning to gain a hint of panic.

Something creeped along my ankle. I screamed and smashed my ankle against the wall. More things creeped up my other ankle.

I didn’t know what to do. Things were creepy up my legs. Light little things, like hairs tickling my calves, but they most definitely were not hairs. I kicked at the wall and wiggling my body, tryign to throw them off. I yelled for the people upstairs. Nothing helped.

When something was tickling my neck, I turned on Melpo, kicking him as hard as I could.

“MELPO!” I screamed. “Help me!”

“Maledictions,” Melpo’s voice came from the darkness.

“What’s happening?” I hissed. I didn’t open my mouth all the way, as I was having horrifying thoughts about the thing on my neck crawling into my mouth. I twisted my shoulder and tried to smash the creepy thing between my neck and shoulder. It didn’t work, and it crawled onto my cheek. “Melpooooo.”

“They are the spiders and the bugs and cockroaches and crickets,” Melpo breathed from somewhere around my knees. His fingers dug painfully into my arm and her crawled up me, picking the things from my body like a chimp. When he plucked whatever it was on my face away, I managed to relax.

“Melpo,” I said. “What’s happening?”

He poked me hard with his jagged nail. “The harlot called the name of the Scottish play.”

“Right, right, and I’m sorry for that,” I said, hoping he would get ot the other creepy-crawlies before they got much further up my legs. He was hanging from my shoulders. “But why did that make the lights go out? And could you stop calling me ‘harlot’?”

A bright light appeared at the entrance to the stares. I squinted at it, and Melpo jumped from my back and scampered away. The creepy-crawly-whatevers rustled away into the pile the carpet pieces next to me.

The silhouettes of Mariano, Pandora and Tuki appeared. Pandora had her flashlight out, and Tuki was carrying a large kerosene lamp– the type an old sailor in a horror film might carry right before the sea-ghost got him.

“Look what we found,” Mariano announced cheerfully. I must have looked extraordinarily pained, because he and Pandora immediately both asked me at once if I was alright.

“I think so,” I answered in a very little voice. “You didn’t hear me?”

“Did you call for us?” Mariano asked.

Apparently, I had been able to hear them, while they had not been able to hear me screaming.

“Oh, it’s not important,” I muttered. “Just don’t mess with the carpets.”

“What’s wrong with the carpet…?”

“Why did the lights go off?” I asked. “Melpo wouldn’t tell me anything.”

Mariano shrugged. “Operating under the assumption this is, infact, a puzzlebox house, we must have broken one of the rules.”

It was probably the most obvious of any rules that might be set in a supernatural theatre. I felt extremely embarassed and hoped no one could see me blushing in the dim light.

“What was all that crashing?” I asked.

“Trying to get the lamp down,” Pandora explained. “It was up on top of a– scaffold, I think you call it? A big metal thing to get to the ceiling lights. But it kept wheeling around and things kept falling off. So me and Tuki held it still for Mariano, and he went up with my flashlight… and then Tuki” –she shot him a dirty look– “decided he needed to grab a story book of all things.”

Tuki did indeed have a thin book tucked under his arm. He was staring off at something that wasn’t Pandora sulkily.

“And that made crashing noises because…?”

“Because it was half way up the scaffold, and he went after it with no warning. And next thing I knew– runaway scaffold!”

--

((and what is this scene i don't even))

--

The city, Mariano said, had once had a river running through it. But someone said it would flood, and so it was moved. But that some one else said that the river was an intrinsic part of the city, and how could it flood if they didn’t let it flood?

The problem was that at this point, the space that had once contained the river had been completely replaced with gardens and fountains and playgrounds and even a few cafes. It was a beautiful escape from the urbanity of the city. The city, therefore, was divided on its relative advantages to the river.

The comprimise was not one I would have come up with on my own. The put the river on top the parks, floating in the air like glass. Light filtered through the clear water in twisting patterns, with built fishing leaving the same shadows as built birds. Personally, I would have made the park the floating part.

“Because that would be awesome,” I told Mariano.

Because the park occupied the space left by the river, it was considerably lower than the steet and had several bidges going over it. You had to take stairs down from the road to get to it.

We were standing one of bridges going over. Its railing was wide, stone, and you could stand on it and reach up and trail your fingers through the belly of the river. Mariano was demonstrating this to me.

“But then,” Mariano said, hopping back down onto the bridge, “you couldn’t take a paddle boat ride through the sky.”

“But you could ride your bike through the sky,” I said. “Which I frequently imagined while biking. You know, until it killed me.”

Mariano smiled in a crooked way that made me think this comment was uncomfortable for him. Feeling awkward, I coughed.

“So paddle boats?” I asked.

“Actually,” he said, turning away, “I lied. They haven’t figured out how to keep you from going off the edge yet.” I looked down at the park below, imaging a paddle boat falling from the sky and crashing into the orange trees below.

We left the bridge and walked along the sidewalk until we found a ramp down. I could see why one might argue that a park was unnecessary. The sidewalk was very wide, with frequent palm trees planted along it, each surrounded by an assortment of colorful flowers. A narrow bike lane was marked. The street itself was very wide as well, most of its girth due to a wide median which had its own tiny garden surrounded by benches.

The bike lane continued down the ramp. We walked along beside it, and occasionally a biker zipped by. Down in the missing river the smell of oranges was even stronger: there were even more trees here. There were also all sorts of palms and flowering trees and bushes. We did pass a grove of pine trees– which I thought was bizarre, all things considered– and there were quite a few couples hiding in the shade doing… well. I politely averted my eyes.

We also passed an open, paved area dominanted by a huge pool of shallow water. Several children had remote control boats that zoomed around on the surface, avoiding the periodic spouts of water. A group of women sat on the side, chatting loudly and watching a group of young boys– who I assumed were their sons– skateboarding.

“How do families work here?” I asked, nodding toward a man showing his daughter how the work the controls of their toy boat.

“Mostly like living families, I think,” Mariano answered.

“No, I mean, if no one ages… and you can’t have your own children…”

“Ah, well,” Mariano said, glances over at the group of mothers. They looked too young to have children as old as the skateboarding boys. “When children… die”– he said this word very carefully– “They usually end up in an orphange. Sometimes they eventually get reunited with their own family. But usually they go to people who want children.”

I thought of Jin-mun. “What are the orphanges like?”

Maraino shrugged. “I’ve never visited one. I imagine they’re pretty variable.”

“And then… do the families just stay like that? Forver?” I couldn’t imagine having a six year old for all eternity.

Mariano chuckled. “It is possible to grow up,” he said. “You just have to do it artificallly. If you can imagine yourself as an adult, you can make yourself grow up. Or you can get surgery.”

“But what if,” I said, “The parents get sick of the kid?”

Mariano, to my surprise, completely ignored this question. “So if you decided that you most definitely had green hair, your hair would turn green.”

There was no way he hadn’t heard me. I walked along in dumb shock, listening to him list off strange bodily changes one could make. I considered asking the question again, but it was so out of character of him to not give me an overly thorough answer that I was hesitant. Usually he only avoiding conversation topics if they related to him on a personal level.

“Oh, Juniper!” Mariano gasped suddenly. “Look at that.”

He pointed to a dog. It was a completely unremarklable, small gray mutt, I thought. We had seen lots of people walking dogs earlier, and the only difference that I could see between them and this one was that it wasn’t on a leash.

It was sniffing at a rose bush.

“That’s nice,” I said.

“It’s a real dog,” Mariano said, weirdly excited, and rushed over to it. The dog, of course, run away.

I watched Mariano chase the dog, both amused and confused. A ‘real’ dog? I supposed this was one of those extreemly self-aware animals he had mentioned when we first met, the ones that made it to the afterlife. The ones with owners present must have all been built. Was that why this one was all alone?

Mariano eventually caught the dog. It had dived under the rose bush and and Mariano had coaxed it out, offering his hand and making those silly noises people make at animals. The dog licked his hand and he picked it up and carried it over to me.

“Did you have any pets?” Mariano asked as I petted its head.

“We had a cat for a while,” I said. “But it ran away. I blame Logan– he pulled out half its whiskers one time.”

The dog started squirming and Mariano put him down. It sniffed around our feet.

“Did you have any pets?” I asked. “You seem to really like dogs.”

“Yeah,” Mariano answered. “I had a–”

But then the dog started barking, and it ran off. Mariano chased it, laughing. I followed after them, dogding around bushes full of red and yellow roses.

We went through another grove of pine trees and came out to a small pond with a large statue in the middle. Then the statue moved, and I skidded to a stop. The dog kept going, barking fearlessly, and Mariano followed.

“What the– you have got to be kidding me.”

There was a dinosaur in the pound. It was probably a lot smaller tha it should have been, based on all those dinosaur books Matthew had insisted I read to him. It was what I think the book would have called a ‘duck-billed’ dinosaur– the type that loped around on two legs and made mating calls with its horn. (I remembered that one because I had had to explain to my six-year-old bother what a ‘mating call’ was, which was really awkward and I think I told him something like, “How he gets a dinosaur girlfriend.”)

The little dog ran right into the pond, stopping when the water came up to its belly, all the while barking furiously at the dinosaur. Mariano stopped at the edge of the water and waved me over.

I walked over, eyeing the dinosaur in utter confusion. It ignored the dog, along with me and Mariano, instead focusing on nosing around in the water. I realized there were ducks in the pond too, and they completely ignored the dinosaur as well. Probably because they were ‘fake’ ducks.

“Why,” was all I said to Mariano.

“I don’t have the slightest idea,” he answered, and his face reflected his words perfectly.

We stared at the dinosaur for a while, the little dog continuing to bark dutifully at it. Then we heard yelling and turned around to see two men running up to us.

“Oy, Sorolla!” One of them yelled. The dog looked up and then ran over to them, wagging its tail. “Nice work,” the man said, kneeling to pat the dog’s little head.

“Hello,” said Mariano brightly, and he introduced us. “We were wondering why there’s a dinosaur here,” he said.

“It’s from the museum, of course,” the other man said, jerking his thumb behind him. My brain hadn’t fully registered it because of the dinosaur, but in the ditsnace was a domed, skeletal white building. “We have a new exhibit on the old lizards, but this one got away.”

“Luckily Sorolla was on the case,” the first man said. The dog– Sorolla– had rolled onto its back and the man was rubbing its belly.

“You have actual dinosaurs in your dinosaur exhibit?” I said faintly.

“Newly dead?” The second man asked, eyeing the hole through my head.

“Yeah,” I said. “Wait, it’s normal to have actual dinosaurs in dinosaur exhibits?”

The first man laughed and stood up with Sorolla in his arms. “You bet it is,” he said. “Makes it much more fun for guests. But we thought it would be nice advertisement to let one or two roam around outide,” he said. “You know, to get people excited and make them want to come in. But this one doesn’t get that it isn’t supposed to leave the general area.”

“Is the dog yours?” Mariano asked, reaching over to pet it some more. There were actual dinosaurs being kept in museums and he was excited about a dog.

“I wish,” the man answered.