Read the Prologue:hereWordcount: 583 Part: 2/ongoing
Between Water and Sky
I thought I saw it as I jumped off the pier into the lake.
The air was already cooling as afternoon slid into evening. Summer doesn’t last long in Dreamscape. I tossed my towel off my shoulders and ran down the weathered dock, my bare feet pounding the weathered gray boards as I sped toward the horizon. The wind thundered in my ears and my hair tossed against my sunscreen-slathered shoulders. My skin was rough with goosebumps. The water would be cold, but I ran faster. Faster! This might be the last dive of the season. Go!
My feet left the end of the pier and a sudden silence rushed around me. I was flying, launched into the air from the sheer energy of knowing the whole sky was watching, waiting.
High, high above and many miles long, it trailed on and on toward the west. The cars flashed back the reddening sunlight as it coasted faster and faster over the curve of the sky. Away it went, and I hit the water.
The roaring chaos of the broken surface gave way to the humming jingling teal-black depths. I plunged through the shock of the cold to a dark secret world. This world calls me, too. It always disappears when I touch the soft oozing sand at the bottom and kick off. I was bound skyward again.
My face erupted into the biting breeze and lapping waves, and I dragged my hands across my blurry eyes. A seagull screamed and I searched the sky. It was gone.
For a while I swam around under the pier, weaving in and out between the slimy supports and the zebra-mussel reefs like an unglorified mermaid. I watched the others with only my eyes above the water. They would be cold soon. We wanted to stay until sunset, but we would see.
Maybe it was strange for a girl my age to care so little about what her friends were doing. But they never talked about the train. They never really talked about what they wanted to do. I was ambitious. Or something. I’m not sure what it was. I just knew there was music in my head, always changing and building. I was bound for somewhere.
Even if I never left Dreamscape.
Mom picked us up and drove us home, letting the others off at their houses along the way. Then finally, it was just me and her in the car. I told her about the train.
“Why do I see it?”
“Everyone does, honey.”
“But nobody talks about it but us.”
“Nobody dares to hope. Most people seek security in other things. Hope…it’s too hard to control.”
I let my hand ride the wind outside the window. “I suppose I’d better focus on this last year of school, so I can have something to hope for, myself.”
“Hard work is good for you,” she said. “All your dreams are there to get you out of bed in the morning. But outcomes can be chaotic in this world. So much that you can barely claim the credit or take the blame. Do your best. Make your plans. Don’t give up. But at the end of the day, if it helps at all, try to remember everything this life has to offer can be gotten by accident.”
Synopsis: Jasmine discovers a strange, lonely world and meets a frustratingly mysterious entity in a hooded cloak.
Wherever I was, I was completely alone there. Overhead, the huge sky was stormy and still dark. The ground was cold under my bare feet, but not wet like ice. Otherwise, it looked more or less like ice. It was smooth and flat. Several yards from where I had fallen (if I had fallen) there was a fine white seam, like a stress fracture. I walked over to it carefully, easing one foot at a time. I needn’t have bothered. The ground, I found out, was perfectly solid. I placed one foot on each side of the crack. Here, I could see—almost–how far it went down. The ghostly seam extended deep into the crystal blackness, down, down, until either it or my vision dwindled. How thick was this sheet of glass? Or maybe, I had been transported to a glass planet. Perhaps it was solid glass all the way down.
And the sound was still there. It was louder now, but even harder to define. It was some perfect, eerie cross between music and thunder—maybe the way thunder would sound in a place like this, resonating off the endless glass. I stared up at the sky. Lightning frisked between the patchy black fleece and the midnight-blue that seeped through it. My eyes swept down and around the horizon.
Well, whatever this crazy place was, there was clearly nothing to do here but wait around until you got struck by lightning. And if it didn’t kill you, you would have to wait around until it happened again. In the mean time, I decided to follow the crack.
How long I traced it, I have no idea. Looking back, I don’t think there was any reason it might not have been eight to ten hours. This place had absolutely no landmarks, it seemed, and likewise I began to doubt that my mind or my body still processed time. I’m not even sure if I had any thoughts all the while—not until I started to rationalize what it could all mean.
I had to either be dead or in some kind of an altered state. Remembering back to my last few moments in the backyard, and up though the point where I fell through to this place, it all seemed impossibly unnatural. I don’t think the ground was what shattered at all. Something had happened to my mind, or my nervous system. Maybe I lost consciousness. Maybe I was struck by lightning again.
My eyes jerked up and I stopped. I’d been enveloped suddenly by an uncanny feeling. I felt like someone was asking me a question in a voice I couldn’t hear. I scowled and looked around me. Was there breathing? No. But there was someone. Should I say something? What was the risk? If no one was there, no one would think I was crazy. If someone was, I wasn’t crazy. “Hey, uh, what’s going on around here?”
My voice stopped in the air. I turned fully around, twice, I think, before I started to feel silly. Nobody was there. My mind was playing tricks, because I had fallen through to a world where nobody lived and had no way to ever get back. How stupid of me not to assume that right away. People have the hardest time recognizing total solitude when they’re thrown in the middle of it and can’t get back out. They start imagining other presences.
“Help!” I screamed at the horizon. The figure standing in front of me started back.
“I was just right about to answer your question.” The face in the dark hood crooked an eyebrow and shook his head a bit. “A little patience never hurt anybody. Hey?”
I stepped back a bit and looked him up and down. The prairie’s atmospheric drone crackled, and in a lingering flash of lightning I could see his face clearly for a full second. I was so sure I recognized him, the name almost twitched off my tongue, but it was gone before it came. “Well?” I said, shaking it off.
“First off, I assume you came looking for the bird,” he said.
I raised my eyebrows and looked around at the sky and then back at him. “Bird?”
“You know, if you’re going to pretend you didn’t see it, we’ve got a long way to go.” He turned and looked back over his shoulder. “Let’s go find it.”
I could hardly see him in the lighting when he turned away, but I could make out his cloudy shape moving at a good pace when lightning flashed. I sprinted forward a few steps. “What is this place?” I asked. “How did I get here?”
“Same way you’ve always come,” he said.
“I’ve never been here before.”
“That’s what you think.” I stopped and he turned around. He sighed. “It’s called Echoland. You’re here because you had questions about the bird. You’ll see it in a few minutes. Might not be a great deal to do before morning, though.”
“If you’re worried that I might get bored here, I think I could suggest a few more immanent problems.”
“Boredom’s a problem, Jazz,” he said.
“Kind of like a thousand miles of open land during an electrical storm, I suppose,” I said. “And don’t call me Jazz.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Why?”
“Because it’s my name, and I haven’t told you that yet.” I tucked my hands into the pockets of my jacket and followed him for a few minutes of quiet. The wind rushed across the openness, and I couldn’t help but search the land and sky for any sign of the bird. There weren’t many places to hide out here. I came up to walk abreast with my hooded companion. He was moderately tall and appeared to have dark eyes, but it might have been the lighting. I couldn’t say anything else for sure about his coloring, it was too dark, and his hair was hidden, along with everything else, by his mantle. “Are you going to explain to me how I got here?”
“No more than I’m going to explain how I got here. You’ll figure it out. You’ve done it before.” “I haven’t either,” I said. “Stop for a minute. I’ve never been here before. You must be mistaking me for somebody else.”
“Somebody named Jasmine who looks exactly like you and is looking for the bird.”
“And I’m not looking for any birds. I don’t know why you think that. I really just want to get back home. I don’t care about birds.” Either my eyes were adjusting or the clouds were thinning as we spoke. Now I could clearly see the expression on his face. He seemed to think whatever he was thinking about was clever, and he was clearly not thinking about my argument.
“You’ve been looking all over the sky ever since you got here.”
“Because it’s a weird place with nothing else to look at.” My eyes lost anchor and my vision spun in confusion. “Where’d you go?” I yelled into the empty landscape.
“Talk to the thunderbird.”
“Huh?” My eyes lifted to the sky again. There was nothing but clouds up there, matted, flickering, cumulous clouds. There were as many birds up there as there were hooded ghosts down here. My head whipped around as I searched one more time for my disappearing friend. I was alone again, and his voice, disembodied though it had momentarily been, offered no further assistance. “Further assistance.” As if he had been any help at all.
I noticed a mist was beginning to rise off the glass prairie. All this time, in spite of the clouds and the thundering, there hadn’t been a drop of rain. I had been able to see for miles in those conditions, but now the dark horizon was growing fuzzy. The thunder died away and the humming filled in, taking a slightly different timbre as the mist thickened over the land. The breeze pulsed through my hair. It wasn’t a cold breeze, but it was becoming wet. I pulled my jacket around me and looked up at the sky. No birds.
Last night I climbed out onto the roof outside my bedroom window as I almost always do just before sunset late in the summer. I’m holding onto something. I realize this.
School will start in a couple of weeks. I’m seventeen. I have to go back one more time. I wanted to see the clouds and wonder at the way they catch the last of the light as the sun slides over the curve of the earth. Last night they were soft and feathery, but some evenings they’re solid mountains, glowing with the color of the inside of a barely-ripe peach. I love to watch the jets glinting along their soaring courses to somewhere…I don’t know where they’re going. They always pass high over Dreamscape. They don’t know this town exists.
Few do. Dreamscape hangs suspended in a misty netherworld between now and the future, between hope and whatever comes next. Few stay here as long as I have. But it’s such a beautiful place. Especially in the evenings in late summer when the last dreams of the season are beginning to fade again.
The feeling sets in. It didn’t happen this year. Next year, maybe.
