busybee Writing Dream log

“Oh, hello, Ma'am,” she said, to the matronly elder, who was sitting at the table, a large bowl of what looked like fruit in front of her. “What did they bring us this time?”

“Don’t bother trying to eat none of this,” said the elder. “Might as well be eatin' from the toilet. It’s jus' gonna make you sick, and Doc still don’t know how to make anything work right.”

She picked up what passed for a fork — a slender spear with wiggles of tines at its end — and poked it into a piece of melon, and took a very careful whiff of it. “Smells fine to me,” she said.

“Suit y'self,” said the elder.

She took a careful little nibble, and after a few seconds, took a pained turn to the side as her stomach evacuated itself onto the floor, a miasma of bile and bug parts. She wasn’t even sure how the bug parts got in there. Perhaps the leftovers of the previous meal provided by her benefactors.

She stepped back into the simulacrum of the outside, hungry, but knowing it made no difference. This space appeared, at a glance, to be a river valley, but it was not quite right. The grass did not sway, as there was no wind. The water did not flow. The sky was a constant dull gray, not with clouds but with the lack of them, and it felt as if it was impossibly close, as if the whole world was only thirty or forty meters across.

She once again decided to find the edge of the world. This time, she opted to climb the hill to what she decided she would call “North,” and she soon found herself at the base of the hill to the South, the world on endless repeat, a treadmill that she could not escape.

A twisted distortion of a man floated into view to the West, wisps of what appeared to be flesh. A “benefactor.”

“Hello, Nancy!” he called out to her from above.

“‘Snot my name,” she said. “Not ever since you took it from me,” she muttered.

“Did you enjoy the fruit?” he sang. “It is what you wanted, yes?”

“What I want is to go home.”

“This is your home, now,” he said. “You should know that by now, with how long you’ve been here.”

“How long’s it been, d'you reckon?” she asked.

“What does time matter? You are here, and I ensure that you and the others stay alive and safe for as long as you are under my care,” he said. “And you do not want to go back to where you came from.”

“Ma'am and Doc ain’t happy to be here either,” she said. “They barely even come outside anymore. If y'can even call this outside. An’ we’re all hungry as all get-out. Can’t y'get us any real food, anything we can eat?”

“This silly obsession of yours, with ‘eating’ and this thing you call ‘hunger,’ it is so pointless. But I can see you are in a grumpy mood. I shall leave you until you feel better. Ta!”

And with that, he vanished, disappearing in a swirl of limbs and flesh.

She sighed, and took a seat on the hillside, looking up at the gray, unchanging sky, in this place with no time and where nothing ever changes.

If only she had listened to her mother; if only she hadn’t been so defiant as to step into that circle of mushrooms back home.