aesmael

I noticed the world floating away.

I noticed the hope floating away.

I noticed other things.

I noticed my raft.

I noticed me.

I did not expect it to work so well. I did not expect it to go so badly. Yet here I am, alone.

I made the pattern, said the words, did my part and the world faded like a dream, spread away in every direction so swiftly it might have been a puff of smoke. All that was left was my raft, the little nest I had made in my basement, and my plummeting heart.

What I had wanted was a safe place to watch the world from, my own cosy cocoon. I never felt I belonged there, however much I loved it. The book offered me that, so why not take it? So long as I could observe I would be content.

It did work. I can step to the edge of the endless dark and cast my gaze wherever I wish. It is like peering through a film of milk. There is no wind now; what a funny thing to miss. There is no world, no connection. Not any more, Only images.

I left the book outside, such a foolish mistake to make. So that's it. I am to be a castaway. That's why I wrote this note. I wonder if any message in a bottle has ever travelled too far. If anyone ever finds it.

Robin Greer

Black and white fell away to faded yellow and chestnut hair. She dropped the name Magpie. She drifted here, and there, but never to her island. She was lost.

She did not dare speak to any one. She did not dare visit any familiar space. The sickly falling sensation she felt in her belly would not vanish

But she could not maintain her listlessness indefinitely. Inevitably she found herself drifting the way of things which might have held her interest. Inevitably she found her eyes watching with curiosity, idle first, but growing in attention. She could not divorce herself from the world no matter how she tried, or stop herself from considering it.

One of those things which caught her interest was a recreation of a rather famous story, made available for others to tour and explore. It had been built in great detail and, had she still been a magpie, she would have been thrilled to see so many ideas she could use.

Instead she explored, with little heart, a frozen moment in which the hero watches light flash upon a hill he will soon occupy. She walked around the characters' camp to look from all angles she could imagine, every thing so still it may as well be dead. In this place she could as easily step across to that hill, many miles away, as walk in the usual fashion and it seemed oh-so-briefly amusing to very deliberaely not do so.

A stick cracked under her shoe. She smiled. Such attention to detail. It had been so long, so long since she had touched. Since anything had felt real to her hands. But they were not real either, so why should it? She stared at her palms, marvelling at their ephemeral substance and longing for... something.

Such attention to detail, yet they had forgotten that when time stops, so should the ability to interact. Perhaps she should not have that power at all, not being a part of this story. She knelt beside the protagonist and her smile grew sadder. 'I could take it from you,' she thought. 'It would do no good, of course, because this is not real, but I am sure it would be very symbolic. I wonder what of?' She paused and followed his gaze to the hilltop, the light.

“You thought you were nearly done, didn't you?” Despite being alone, her voice was a whisper. “You thought you could carry it so far and be done. Leave it to others who would know better what to do. You had no idea how large it would grow or what it would take.” Jayde – for that had been her name, and would be again – hugged the figure quickly. “I am sorry. I never particularly empathised with you before. Not cool enough. Even the best of us can be blind and that is not I. Thank you. Haha.”

She thought it appropriate that she fly now, so that is how she left. Her island was not yet done.

Whenever she visited the place she had made she did her best to add detail and impart a sense of life to it. Here, a depression; there, a hillock; now a meandering groove which might have been meant as a dried riverbed. The solid was made brown and just earthlike enough to be clear it was not. Much of it she turned green, so that now it did not look like grass rather than not like dirt. This was variety.

There still was no sky or any thing beyond her island. To look anywhere beyond this patch of solid was to be confronted by the raw absence of anything. This bothered her, more and more as time passed until finally it was like daggers stabbing into her brain and she could not bear to look up. So she fenced herself in with blue and dotted it with cotton-puff clouds, above and below.

Clouds below, they fascinated her enough that she wished to spend hours watching them, if only they were not so crude. She did her best to make them fluffy, to make them change and drift like clouds should. They came not a bit perfect, but far better than before, so she fixed up the clouds above too.

She lay on the brown solid, head down over the edge to admire her handiwork and found her perception abruptly shifted. All at once it was not the clouds moving but her island, carrying her along with it to unknown destinations. The unexpected sense of motion made her feel suddenly nauseous and afraid to fall. She had to scramble quickly inland and focus on something still to keep her lunch – though she had none to lose.

After a short while she recovered and began to felt quite proud of her work, and a little silly. “You have had this canvas with which you might have made anything,” she said to herself (for she was very much the sort of person who spoke to herself), “and all you have done is build for yourself your own little corner of mundanity. What a small mind you have! At least this bit of whimsy will go some way to make up for it.”

So for hours after she watched her island plow through the clouds and made herself a captain's hat to wear, which fluttered in the breeze when she remembered that it ought to.

The ground here was rugged, pocked by uncounted craters, exposed directly to the vacuum of space. The temperature swung wildly as the great, burning sun slowly rose and set and the sky was always black. One feature, unmoving but always changing, hung perpetually high in the sky – a blue-white ball.

Now there was something new in the sky. An intermittent flare of light, descending swiftly. It came from a fragile metal container bearing emissaries from the strange world above.

The vessel lands in silence. The two creatures it carries climb out, pausing on their way down to transmit home what will be the second most historic phrase uttered during this mission.

They spread out to explore this new world, moving further and further from their vessel, exploring – or is it play? Eventually one rounds a large boulder and stops, stunned by what is revealed. For there, hidden until now, sit the remains of a craft not their own, surrounded by the splayed bootprints of its passengers,still preserved after the better part of a hundred million years.

The weather phased in and out of rain all day.

Lucy pulled the hood of her anorak tighter, glancing briefly up at the mist-shrouded sky. The rain was thickening again, the sky fading. She ducked under a tree, not quite low enough, and for a moment droplets rattled in her ears.

Another quick look showed her the sky was still darkening. Lucy ducked under the fence, really no more than a metal bar meant to keep people like her out of the park, and tried to make a short cut across the corner to Liege St. She was halfway across when the rain came in again, surrounding her. Her foot slipped on grass already slick from earlier and tipped her onto her rear. Water smeared her glasses and dripped into her mouth.

She pushed herself back to her feet, swallowing and wiping grass and soil from her pants. Lucy was careful not to slip again before reaching the opposite corner of the field. The rain continued to thicken, until it would have been almost impossible to see even without water smearing her glasses, and the only sound was the rattle of water on asphalt, leaves and concrete rising in sweeps with every gust of wind. She unchained her bike by feel. There was no chance of riding it in this.

So she walked, bicycle by her side, rain pitter-pattering all around her and the chill wind blowing through her clothes to lay its touch against her skin. She walked quickly and encountered no one else in town.

The rain faded slightly as Lucy passed through the outskirts of town, enough to make her destination faintly visible. She smiled to see the familiar vine-draped structure atop its hill.

By the time Lucy reached the path to her door the rain had faded as much as it ever did. It still fell, continuously, transparently, a dozen faint drops passing through Lucy's hand when she held it out a moment. It was possible to see, now, out past the aging tower Lucy called home and far, far over the edge of the world until the rain turned everything to grey haze. Only the merest hint of movement at the edge of her vision suggested something might swim this endlessly falling sea.

If she had waited and sheltered beneath a shop awning she could have ridden home now.

She waits alone at the end of the platform, her arms resting on the fence that marks its edge. No breeze stirs her hair. There are no stars, no clouds, no sky above her. Only blackness. The night air is not cold, and yet she shivers.

Her gaze is fixed back the way she came, a wasteland of jagged grey stones and rusted iron. All paths delineated by bars. There is light to one side, harsh and orange and masked by trees. It does not illuminate.

A wind rises now, blowing in from the wasteland. The shadows of trees dance in front of her like the ebb and flow of sunlight over the sea floor. She trembles, her expression momentarily ecstatic.

Two lights approach from the distance and she finds she cannot look away. A train, dulled steel making its next stop. She knows how easy it would be to step off the edge. In a moment, in one trivial action she could place herself in its path. She has no desire to do so and yet, because it is in her power, she is tempted.

Her hands grip the fence tightly, in case, and she sobs. Just once.

Doors open, time to go.