Fiction Short Story
From Adam to Atom
The frustration in Evalyn’s eyes was changing colors. She dangled, feet to the wind, beneath a plume of parachute. “Jonathon!” She tried to kick his apathetic limbs but couldn’t reach. He looked at her with a smile and joked about the loss of her shoe. “I’m serious, man. We’re stuck!” “Look, Evalyn. They told us […]
The frustration in Evalyn’s eyes was changing colors. She dangled, feet to the wind, beneath a plume of parachute. “Jonathon!” She tried to kick his apathetic limbs but couldn’t reach. He looked at her with a smile and joked about the loss of her shoe. “I’m serious, man. We’re stuck!”
“Look, Evalyn. They told us they’d be back in a few hours. Besides this is just a drill. No enemies below,” He giggled and pointed his middle fingers downwards and then up at her. “And none above.” He tossed a pack of trail mix to the man dangling nearby. She had forgotten his name but didn’t care to ask. They seemed oblivious to the drop but she couldn’t stop staring down. Fifty feet? Sixty, maybe? Guesswork at best. There was no way to see past the foliage below. How tall could trees be?
“How tall are these trees?” she asked, quieter than she had been a few seconds ago. “How tall?” She got no reply but still she stared. It seemed to grow darker below. Perhaps the sun was fading. The leaves bristled lightly. Waved beneath her in Samsaric ecstasy. Calling her name. “Jonathon?”
“Yeah?”
“That’s a pretty long fall.”
“Well,” he laughed. “Better hope it’s a nice view on the way down. If you’re gonna drop for that long you might as…” His voice faded out. She squinted her eyes as this white drone filled her ears. The black water below was tidal, moving and shifting in ways water never had before. Unconsciously, she reached her hands up to the buckles attaching her to her parachute. They shook when her fingers wrapped slowly around.
“Jonathon?” she whispered. “What happens if we fall?”
“Woah, woah, woah. Evalyn, take your hands off the buckles.” Jonathon had lost his grin. “They’re coming back I swear to God. They’re coming back. How are they supposed to find you if you go down there? Evalyn I swear to God do not detach. We’re safe up here. You don’t even know what’s down there!”
His voice was shifting, internalizing into her mental backdrop. “That’s the problem,” she whispered to herself. His face, peripherally, made exaggerated and silent gestures. The panic of it. She felt none of this anymore. “I need to know.” She gave a fierce and momentary glance to Jonathon and clicked. A rush of wind. She heard Jonathon scream her name before she had even hit the foliage. It scratched her arms and neck, spinning her backwards. No splash of water, she thought. Where had it gone?
Still tumbling slowly, she faced the ground again. “Oh fuck,” she managed to breath before the hard face of dirt smashed into her chest. She would have screamed as a nail shot through the palm of her hand but she had no air to do so. Instead her back arched severely, her mouth open wide but useless. Her eyes pinched as if pepper had been rubbed tightly inside them. An inhale, and then the scream.
Pain spread like lightning across her entire body. The sudden burst of awful sensation made her brain seize up, seemed to swell inside her skull, aching as she collapsed. The nail still stuck in her palm. She wheezed and coughed and curled, trying to get her body to regain itself. After a moment or so of trying to lie as still as possible on the dirt, shuddering involuntarily, she lifted her head to see the thick rust of metal towering inches above her hand. Tears clouded her vision as she dazedly raised the palm up to free herself of the nail’s rough arrest.
It had missed her tendons but, as her palm slipped off, the pressure holding the wall of flesh on the edge of the wound was removed. The thickness of crimson blood frightened her. She tried to rip her sleeve off to wrap it around the cut but could not find the strength. She slid slightly over and used the nail to make a hole in the fabric which she widened with her teeth before finally being able to shred it off.
The cloth was soaked black with the filth and the flesh as she wrapped it tightly across the center. She heard birds and a rustle of grass. Her eyes strained to close but she wouldn’t let them. She wanted to see. Blurrily, she noticed the umbrella of violet mushrooms on the wide trunks scattered around. There was some array of green and red insects and she saw a small family of what looked like lizards scatter out of view. It was beautiful. The light shone sparsely through and gave the area a sense of enclosure. As if she had just stepped through a door into the largest room. She pressed her good hand to her palm to keep the blood from flowing out and stood up slowly, wheezed a little and leaned with her shoulder against a tree.
“Evalyn!” came Jonathon’s distant voice. A scoff escaped her lips and she took some few steps back to look up. She couldn’t see him at all but could hear his faint warbling coming down to her.
“Oh go suck out a kidney stone, Jonathon!” she yelled before leaning forward to pant the air back in her lungs. After a brief glance back up, she began looking for some sort of deer trail to follow, pushing her way through the brush. The branches impeded but she could see over the tops of them fairly well. She stopped to pull out her compass and ended up looking through her pack to see what was available to her. She thought about going back to ask Jonathon to drop down his first aid kit but stubbornly ridiculed herself for even thinking about it. She did pull out her lexic, a small handheld instrument which was issued to all those sent outside the base, and tucked it behind her belt before walking again.
“A drill,” she scowled, unbelieving. “My ass. No one ever said anything about a drill.” As she walked, though, her annoyance at Jonathon seemed more and more trivial. Decided instead to think about where she was. The environment was alien to her. They had flown in only two weeks ago and she had spent all her time at the base since then. Sure, she had been able to stand along the edge and look out but the stark face of jungle left much to the imagination. She had asked again and again when she would be allowed out into the new landscape. Most of the researchers spent six weeks at the base getting oriented to what little was known to lay hidden outside the makeshift gates. Evalyn was decidedly less patient.
And now it was here. Surrounding her in glades of green and blue which she slowly picked through to see what lay hidden and might prove of interest. There was a fire-red moss that had crawled over a large, dead tree trunk. She set down her pack and nudged the moss with a small stick. The red mass crawled alarmingly fast across the wood and Evalyn dropped it before it could reach her hand. Without waiting for the stick to hit the ground, the moss had encompassed every inch of it. It seemed to squirm as it shifted to get comfortable to its new host. She stuck the sensor of her lexic to the virulent red briefly but the moss didn’t react. “Must only respond to organics,” she hummed to herself. Her mind calming to the serene mystery of the place as she held the lexic up against the red growth, the display feeding her dozens of statistics it was collecting. Some she understood. Some she didn’t.
She put away the instrument and continued in the same direction her compass had been pointing to before. Some small apes rushed across the lower branches above her with playful screeches. Her distraction of looking at them pass by kept her from noticing the snail which she then crushed with the foot that had no shoe on it. She grimaced and decided to take the other shoe and sock off too, thinking she should be more careful as she glanced at her bloody palm which had soothed down quite a bit since the fall. The soft plush of foliage caressed her heels energetically with each step, as if embracing. The feeling sent warm waves up her sore and shaded back. She felt it all and it felt full.
A break in the trees to her left caught her attention and, curious, she made her way towards the bright wall of light behind it. As she reached the edge, wrapping her arm around a small, light tree, she saw an elliptical clearing which looked to her as if it was naturally formed. As if the trees had just halted their advance, or more as if they had walked up and surrounded the area. Nothing cut to clear the area, the jungle simply formed this way. Slightly farther to one end, but central, stood a large stone statue. There was a closeness to the two figures who looked almost human, their arms reaching out and seeming to grasp each other’s bodies as they very subtly seemed to be falling out of shape. Evalyn stepped closer and found her attention drawn to their faces.
The man, his left bicep dripping slowly towards the ground, his foot pooling into chaos, had a look of wide-eyed anxiety focused on his hands as they worked to keep the woman opposite him in form. She had a concavity in her left side which he was furiously working to put back together. The struggle seeming to bead sweat across his brow. The woman, in contrast, had this playful and curious expression as she worked her hand across his chest and thigh. Molding him in such a way as to creatively build his shape in contrast to his frantic chase to maintain. Evalyn found it difficult to pinpoint why, but she felt as if the man was staring at the woman’s waist and, at the same time, also paying attention to the intent written across her face from the corner of his eye. This had an abstract, calming effect on him. Even though his face was distraught, she sensed a slight motion in his expression which seemed to be relaxing.
She looked for some sort of plaque that might explain who built the sculpture. At the base of the woman’s foot stood a small rise in the stone base which had been etched with the phrase, “Nothing is given.” Evalyn scanned her eyes up the woman’s body and saw small pieces of her dissolving away as well. Her form changing and disintegrating in equal parts. Again, Evalyn was drawn to her facial expression. The novelty of the man who stood before her, even though it was apparent they were familiar with each other intimately, was obvious and unflinching. Evalyn couldn’t help this odd and not entirely unwanted tinge of jealousy rise up within her which forced her attention to the man himself. What was this woman seeing in him? It seemed apparent and totally unknowable at the same time.
A glance around the base of the man’s feet revealed a similar bulge in the stone beneath him which read, “Nothing familiar.” Evalyn noticed the tension in the man’s form. It became somehow even more distinct directly leading up to the areas that were losing shape. It seemed the man was willing himself back together as he focused his attention on retaining her. The slow easing of the fear in his heart spoke, through his expression, of a mystery he could not name but which he was glimpsing in her. The motion of this drew Evalyn back again to her.
She was pacing circularly around the figures in this endless loop when suddenly a sleek, black face with piercingly white eyes popped into her sights. The cat was peeking silently out of some palm fronds with its full attention directed at Evalyn. She stopped mid-stride and stared back. Turning slightly and lowering her arms to her waist. The panther’s powerfully black muscles lining its ribs rippled as they emerged piecemeal from the growth. Its tail swung circular and organic, raised upwards like a beacon. It kept its distance and seemed to emerge simply so she could see the strength of its body. The secrets in its eye.
The panther blinked twice and turned back into the brush with slow padded steps. Evalyn found herself taking a step forward in a silent bid for its company. But the panther moved still. Without a thought, she left the statue and cautiously made her way to where the back legs of the panther had just disappeared. She could hear the sound of falling water as she followed the rustling of small plants ahead. Its path was sporadic but Evalyn didn’t get the idea that it was trying to lose her. The panther seemed to be making sure she was keeping up, although it never stopped to look back. A spider web caused her some momentary panic as it brushed her face. Her hands clawing to get it all off. The panther’s shuffling through the palms stopped.
She looked ahead in the direction she thought it was headed but couldn’t see any movement. She started off again hoping it had stopped to wait. Large blocks of granite started to appear along the side of her path. They seemed wet with rain but it hadn’t. The water trickled out of tiny crags along the sides of the boulders forming small trails of vegetation which seemed to lap the liquid with greedy tongues. A green and grey face alive in small and subtle ways. There were many of them scattered between the trees and, while there was no mountain nearby, she seemed to get the impression that they had all tumbled from somewhere high above this plane. She reached out to touch one of the deadened rocks and felt some small static energy caress her through the foliage. Leaning in closer, she pressed her body against it. The buzz of energy spread up and down her side and she felt it softly pushing her away. Closing her eyes, she leaned in further to stop herself from backing up. The flow strengthened as if responding to her caress until finally it gave out a small push. She opened her eyes to keep from stumbling back and saw a hand reaching down to her from the top of the rock.
The man’s face was edged along the sides, drawing her up towards bright yellow eyes hid behind a glass frame. He smiled at her, bent on one knee in an offer to help her up top. She let out a small, unexpected breath and reached up to him. Without effort she pulled herself up to where he stood now and smiled back. He was handsome and aged. The clothes around him seemed to erase the barrier between him and his surroundings. A sort of fluidity in the threads which connected him to everything not him. “You’ve come quite far from your base,” his voice was mezcal and evergreen.
“Never was one to stay put,” she managed a chuckle out of him. “You live out here by yourself?” A bigger laugh.
“God, no,” he smiled. “We were certain you had seen us by now in your aircraft but apparently not. There’s a group of us not far from here.” Evalyn had ten different questions run swiftly through her head. What was the architecture of the buildings? Were there buildings? Were they agriculturally sustainable? How far ahead or behind was their technology? She dampened this stampede with a practiced touch of passivity when approached with something unknown. Let it speak before you speak for it, she reminded herself.
“I’d love to see it,” she flashed a smile his way and he shined back.
“First,” he bobbed his head rhythmically. “I have something else you may be interested in.” Without waiting he pointed vaguely to his left and began hopping from boulder to boulder towards a small ledge of red rock in the distance. She quickly followed, taking care not to jump on any sharp outcroppings which might jab the soft underbelly of her naked feet. Sometimes unsuccessfully. He had reached the ledge and waited to give her a boost up and over before seemingly gluing his palm to the largely smooth surface and climbing up and over the drop. Evalyn tried not to stare.
In doing so she turned to see what lay ahead and stopped in a half step which slowly touched the ground again. Her mouth fell slightly open and uttered some indistinct wonder at the view spread out before her. The drop just a few steps ahead fell some eighty feet to a space in the jungle which held trees of such vastly different sizes that it seemed as if the ground itself was rolling around in waves of maroon, fiery orange, chartreuse, and beige. The leaves pluming here at the top and there all along the base and trunk. Birds twirled around each other spherically some twenty feet above the highest limb, manically diving in and out of the center without ever hitting each other. A tree trunk largely obscured by the surrounding foliage shook violently as a massive white bear scratched its side against it in a low grumble. And through all this the sounds of a brutish, cackling laughter sprang up off every leaf that stood above a pack of dogs fighting over who gets to fuck whom.
“The water,” he pointed out past the edge of land as he stepped by her side. “is without fathom. We have sent many ships out to seek far shores and those that manage to make it back, merely wreckage after the brutality of the sea, say only that it has no end. Those that have gone too far have surely died of starvation or submersion. We do not know why your people have come from where you’ve come but, if it is knowledge you seek, the highest mystery lies past that dark, water-shorn horizon.” As Evalyn glanced towards the man’s face, she saw his eyes had the look of lighthouse fog. Staring into the face of the unknown and seeing nothing but mist.
She had been across the ocean. In fact, she was born across the sea that touched the opposite side of this continent. Eight thousand miles away from where they stood now. She knew that with the plane she flew in on she could cross this ocean in less than a day and that she could do it comfortably and without event. She knew this and yet the look in the man’s eyes of a mystery that survived in his soul, that fed the curious hunger of his humanity, was something she could never gain back. And she would rather leave and never know what was here in this place than intentionally take that away from him. “Maybe someday we’ll be able to see what lies on the other side,” she offered.
“Hm,” the man seemed hopeful. “I would very much like to see that happen.” His hands rubbed together aimlessly in a sort of expectation. Evalyn had to walk down a ways to keep herself from releasing her tongue and ruining the beauty she recognized in his mind. She would not let herself do that. It achieved nothing. And yet it was difficult not to tell him. Not to give him that next step forward she herself craved so badly day in and day out. She wondered if he would feel the same. If he would enjoy this wall he had looming over him being suddenly shrunk down to the size of brush which he could easily step over and continue forward towards the next barrier. It was possible. The difficulty was that she knew what would happen if instead of embracing the new view opened up to him he recoiled in shock and fear at how strange and miniscule everything really was. How absolutely frightening it was to catch a glimpse into the mist and see the face that lay behind. The infinitely elusive. The back of one’s own head.
He gave off a smirking hum and stepped close enough to put his arm on the side of her shoulder. Smiled and crinkled his eyes passively. “Let us continue.” He side stepped around her and walked down along the ledge, keeping some distance from the brink. She turned and followed. The glittered scattering of rocks they passed by seemed to compel her towards some insight she could not quite make out. Could not even point in its direction. And yet they spoke silently of it all the same. She paused to press her lexic up against the subtly glowing interior of one as big as her foot. When she caught back up to him he had stopped and was staring up the side of an unusually rectangular karst. It stood only thirty or forty feet up but the sides were pocked with nests and ferns. He glanced briefly at her when she approached and set out once more, turning slightly to distance himself from the edge which could be seen curving out in the opposite direction. The plateau spread widely to their left and they no longer had the guidance of a finite amount of ground.
Instead, they ran into a display of odd looking bricks which lay in chaotic formation but which subtly led in the same direction. They didn’t strike Evalyn as looking old or new but she found it hard to tell how they had been positioned. It almost seemed as if whoever laid them had deliberately set them out to confuse you or that it had been many different people who had set them down without knowing where anyone else would lay theirs. But when looked at from a distance, or with a much less scrutinizing eye, they absolutely had a trajectory. One they followed for some time with no trees to pass by. No shimmering metals to explore. What they were confronted with were thousands of ragged ribbons which looked as if they once held enough color to blot out the Taj Mahal. Evalyn got the impression that the ribbons, which flowed in a windless breeze around their feet and out across the otherwise empty plain, were left or forgotten after some fantastic celebration. She imagined them falling down from some building onto the passing crowd as they cheered for the birth of a king or the end of a long war.
The shaded hues wrapped neatly together to create this cresting, waved storm of an ocean. It was beautiful but the emptiness which the beauty occupied gave Evalyn some small nauseous anxiety. She didn’t know if she wanted the ribbons to disappear completely or for some people to show up to appreciate what she felt needed to be. But as it was, she felt slightly sick. It felt so aged. They swirled around her and she found herself trying not to step on them which was useless because with so many pieces littering the ground there was very little of it left uncovered. The man walked confidently ahead of her. Unencumbered by its beauty. Completely at ease with letting his foot create grimy prints on any and all that he passed. She tried to push it out of her mind and catch up but each one of the thousands of ribbons had an individual glamor, a unique perspective of reflected light. She wished to reach the end so that she wouldn’t have to think about each unintended step she took. Each mark she left behind on each piece of the sea.
The path of bricks they had been following was only mildly visible but the man seemed to know where he was headed. He turned back to her to see why she was falling so far behind. She could tell he wanted to ask what the problem seemed to be but couldn’t find the right question to find out. Instead he sat squinting his eyes in her direction. Evalyn started to feel silly for letting herself get so carried away with protecting each and every ribbon from herself. She stopped walking and let out a small giggle, looking at the man some twenty feet ahead and shrugging her shoulders. He briefly laughed back and then they both began to howl with laughter, doubling over and pointing at each other. Stuttering to say something but laughing even harder at what they were about to say before they could manage to say it. Eventually Evalyn stood up straight once more and wiped the tears from her eyes before briskly striding up to him. He touched the side of her arm before turning to head out again. The ocean of color still streaming indifferently around them.
Now that she was no longer staring so intently at the ground, she saw up ahead that there was some structure with tiny glass windows at the top but walled off the rest of the way down. Approaching it from afar, with nothing to block their view, Evalyn thought of a lighthouse or what she imagined people stayed in when they were watching for fires on a mountain. She assumed the entrance was on the other side because she couldn’t see a door on it but, when they finally reached it, she realized that there was really no door at all. She stopped to look up, hoping a window would open and some old woman would peek her head out to say hello or ask for help to escape or to share some idea that she had finally come to after years of solitary meditation. No such thing happened. “What is it?” she asked the man without turning her eyes away from the top window.
“It’s a tower,” he said but Evalyn thought he was just being an asshole.
“I know it’s a tower but what is it? Why are there no doors? Is something inside?”
“Perhaps someone built the wall around themselves wanting to escape into isolation,” he chuckled. “Or perhaps it is some sort of cocoon. Maybe both.” Evalyn couldn’t tell if he had seen the building before or if he was naturally just very calm and collected. It didn’t seem to bother him that there were no doors or that it was built without any apparent reason. She wanted to take a hammer to it and see what had been locked away for so long but didn’t think there would be any lying around nearby.
The ocean of color splashed against the walls of the tower. Washing away again and continuing infinitely and repetitively. Each crash different from the last. Each ribbon going its own way. Evalyn stepped closer to look for signs of erosion but found none. The ribbons being too gentle or too light to pull away the rocks atom by atom. She thought of what legends could be made with such a tower. The endless variety of Schrodinger-esque guesses as to what could lay inside and what would come out when the walls finally broke. What it would take to make that happen. Would a sound be released when the air inside finally touched the air outside? Would it be a song? Or perhaps it would be something physical. A creature, maybe even a person, who emerges. Naked. Unkempt. Divine. Dripping in embryotic sweat or shivering uncontrollably from the cavernous cold. Maybe some motionless wonder. Some psychic artifact or a collection of rare art. Would it bring destruction or herald a new age of communion among strangers? Would it find love?
He touched the side of her arm and motioned for them to continue. She found his touch comforting but wondered why he kept doing it. The tower had been placed directly on the path of bricks they had walked along and it took them a minute to find it again as the bright sea had enveloped it. Evalyn would infrequently spot a single brick underneath the ribbons but could not decipher the direction of the path at large. The man turned and whistled to her before setting off towards what looked like a skyline. “Is that your home?” She pointed and asked. He smiled and nodded. His pace getting quicker in the excitement of being so close. She wanted to ask him what she should expect to find when they arrived but couldn’t decide on what to ask. Unsure that what her idea of society was would translate at all to the way his ran.
As they approached the city, past the edge of where the colored waves stopped flowing, she noticed that some of the buildings were as tall as fifteen stories and shone in silver and oaken burgundy or a nice shade of burnt orange. A house made out of dark blue panels which swiveled slightly as they passed by. “What is this city called?” Evalyn said as she looked at the people who wore the same style of clothing as the man. The same flowing material which did little to demarcate the body from the environment. They all seemed to be busy doing something but she could not tell what. None of them carried groceries or seemed to be doing any specific task. A sense of contentment was across their faces but it seemed genuine. It was not obvious at first glance but when people walked by each other some of them stopped to touch each other’s arm and say some small greeting or compliment. One man was sitting on what looked to be a soapbox but instead of yelling out some banal prophecy, he seemed lost in thought. Staring at a window on the fourth floor of the building across the street although Evalyn saw nothing but closed blinds when she looked.
A pole on the sidewalk had a poster pasted against it asking for volunteers for a variety of things which included landscaping, a position as a diplomatic envoy, a professor of law, and a medical doctor. “Volunteers? Aren’t these positions filled by someone who is already trained?” she asked him.
“Oh no people often change positions. Well, at least as often as they like. Our food and energy is grown and produced by machines which leaves us the time to do whatever it is we feel like doing. The man who used to represent us to the city just east of here decided he wanted to be a craftsman and trained himself in woodworking and smelting. He seems to be enjoying himself. I saw him make a beautiful windmill from just small twigs. It sits in the center of a garden a few blocks away. Would you like to go see it?” Evalyn nodded. A boy playing some game involving only scent went scurrying by with his eyes closed, inhaling loudly through his nose, and hit Evalyn’s bandaged palm. She recoiled her arm in pain and cursed at the boy’s back as he turned into a side alley unaware of anything else.
“But how do you get people to volunteer?” she said, still clutching her palm. He shrugged and looked at her as if the question was meaningless. Each of them just as confused as the other.
“As long as the people around you agree that you are the same something that you are pretending to be, you are that something. And if I want to change into something else I can do that too. Yesterday I decided I was an interior decorator. Today I am a scout.” Evalyn wasn’t sure she liked the way that sounded and asked what being a scout meant. “Well it means doing what I’m doing right now,” he replied with a good humored disbelief. “I found you didn’t I?”
“Yes, but found me for what?” she asked.
“For what?” The man looked down towards his feet as if trying to understand what the question meant. “For what?” he repeated slowly and sort of ambiguously motioned towards their surroundings. A stand selling small loaves of bread stood opposite a woman as she painted the view of the street they were walking on onto a canvas. Another woman sat on her balcony and smoked some sort of tobacco which produced blue and black smoke. “Aren’t you the one who wanted to come here? You are more than welcome to stay as long as you like. I heard they’re going to open up a new art museum. You could be the curator if that’s what you wanted to do. Or you could try your hand at cinematography. I noticed you have very steady hands, I think you’d be great at it.”
“Yes but did you mean to find me and bring me here?”
“I didn’t mean to do anything. That’s simply what happened. Each piece of the game, each and every one of us is simply doing whatever it is we’re doing. Today you were a part of my life and I was a part of yours. All that happens to me is mine and all that happens to you is yours. We both played the part and now here we are walking through the city. Our stories are simply happening in tandem.”
They passed by a couple arguing at the entrance to the garden. The woman threw her arms in the air in exasperation and said, “You could have acid thrown on your face and I couldn’t like you any less than I do right now.” The man said something about a dog but Evalyn was no longer listening. The garden was filled with different wooden statues which contrasted nicely to the surrounding plant life. There was a telescope made from slices of a small tree’s trunk. A watch made out of seeds. He pointed towards the wooden, twigged windmill and, as they approached, Evalyn couldn’t help but listen to this tidal surge that smashed into her thoughts. She’d seen a windmill a hundred times. Thought she understood what it was. But when they got close enough to where she could reach out and touch it, the fifteen foot structure seemed so very alien to her.
“Haven’t you ever wanted something,” the man seemed almost to say to himself as much as to her. Staring up at the blades. “And not known where to find it?” Each twig laced around the ones next to it like a giant weave. “Didn’t even know what it was you needed to be looking for?” Evalyn looked around the garden. Some of the people were walking around, staring up at the different structures. “And then when you finally do find it, it suddenly seems so mundane.” There were a couple people sitting on benches or laid out in the grass. “And everything seems to solidify in your mind. Harden the way crystals of ice latch together in the way that they do. The big book seeming to close shut because you’ve read all the pages.” And then she looked past the windmill to where the gates of the garden were. There was a group of fifteen or so people pressed up against it, trying to see what lay beyond. “And all you want is to have a question again. Even if you can’t articulate what that question is.” Suddenly, a man made a loud whooping noise and everyone rushed over to where he was, picked the gate up out of the ground and began to move it outward. She could feel the man turn to look at her next to him. “Find that sense of mystery in the world.” When the crowd had pushed it ten feet or so they quickly dug out a small plot of land and began building something entirely new. “Find that sense of mystery and never let it go.”
