A desire into devourment

  The cicadas were screaming. A pne grumbled overhead, its enginesound dappled iexture of the surrounding quasi-rural suburbia. A dog’s bark skipped over the far fence. Wind hissed in the leaves of the high oaks, whispered in the sugar maple, woke up the wind chimes on the deck that sang in pure metal tones while the wooden ones swinging in the pe tree thunked a softer song. She smelled grill smoke ah, post and wildflowers.

  The garden flowed down the hill aled against the fence. An herb spiral close by. Tomatoes and beans and farther out. Flowers everywhere. Down the slope, a creek trickled, seen more in memory than vision, sed by the trees, the shrubs, the little wooden bench.

  The backyard curved off into a grass slope then disappeared behind the sunroom jutting off the house. She khere ool oher side, p length, its crete deck jutting over the steep grassy hillside below. She could see it glittering iexas sun. She could see it glowing from its uer lights st night. She could feel the drink in her hand, feel him ed around her, still smelling of charcoal or fresh grass or motor oil. Felt the sigh in her chest, the stillness in her head, the warmth in her blood.

  She stopped just short of remembering him, like running up to a cliffside and swaying on your toes, arms windmilling, hanging in the bance, poised to fall beyond and leave gravity and anythiain behind for a moment of pure merciless motion, or rock backwards ale stiffly on the grass. Maybe with a soft half exhale. Thinking, oh, imagine if I had. Imagine what that would have been like. But thehe imagining would die, and you would just be standing there, still. Standing on a cliffside just as you might stand i over the sink, or in the etic aisle, or at the gas pump on the way to work. Standing still and waiting to die.

  She hovered there, her soul in two pces, each push-pulling her with a violence meant to remihis state of being could not st forever, must be killed to create something else. She reached out, like an inhale, and saw it all.

  This was a dream. A false awakening. A few nights ago, she had had twenty of them in a row, woken up sobbing, her husband already slipping off to make coffee. But the house was real. The summer air was real. The night at the pool had been real. This life was real. It would be waiting for her when she woke up, and she could wake up at any time.

  All she had to do was fall forward, down the hill, let the impact wake her, and she would be in her bed, him lying there, her life waiting for her, as o perfect as to be indistinguishable from it, for an imperfect person.

  The other way, was a dream. A Lindsey lost in fantasy, believing herself an assassin, a dream traveler, rejeg a world of endless bliss for one of highways and pain. What did it mean, that dream? What was it trying to tell her? That she secretly sought out misery? That she was afraid to be happy? Or that she wanted a real life, but overflowing with importand danger?

  She felt that other her step away from herself and face her across the void of the mind. But, like standiween two mirrors, she could also see her staring at herself, see the back of her head, her face, repeated into infinity, and she was suddenly uo fix herself in one or the other selves, a as if floating, falling, again h on the edge, needing to make a choice.

  She leaned forward. The fall quied. Like rotating a textured map, the surface of which had been parallel to her line of sight, so that she could see its surface head on, her oning awakened life revealed itself to her iail.

  His face, his he days of the week before, the routes from home to everywhere else, their triumphs and troubles, her life came up to meet her, to take her, and all else disappeared in a haze.

  Except for a single sensation behind her. A voice, a motion, a feeling.

  “Goodbye,” she sighed, she waved, she let herself go.

  And the other mirror-her threw her arms out like wings, and stopped the fall.

  She missed herself. She missed her fear, her desire, her passion. She missed the Lindsey waiting up on that cliff, waiting on the unsolved side of the mirror. Ready to watch life shatter and heal and shatter again all around her. She missed the longing for something, and the hope that could only e from such a longing.

  That Lindsey could in this pne of peace, of easy evenings and pure underived bliss. A world made of an answer forced upon a question.

  She rolled the world around her, and the waking life became the dream, the texture of the nd became a gradient he still peace that had beed her became what it truly was, the stillness of death.

  The mirror shattered ao the stone floor, the fragments refleg m sunlight from that other world, now o be seen.

  The sensation of that other her evaporated from her mind. The knowledge of her Spirit rushed in and bridged the gap between the single kernel of pure light she had preserved throughout her dest and everything else. All of her life, the Real, the Hardworlds, the Other, up to her fall in the byrinth, aligself again in memory, and her mind was still.

  It was a chamber in a deep cave. The floor was roughly smoothed stone, like moonlit ste, covered in pces by richly colored carpets, blood red and bright gold, Tyrian purple and molten silver. The ceiling was a high textured stone, disappearing in pces into solid darkness. The walls were mirrors and clear gss, staggered and spiraling out from the ter room towards a yawning cavern spreading towards the horizon and dropping endlessly below, seen through scattered portals ione floor.

  It took a moment to divide the room and its refles from the cavern beyond, and from the other worlds intruding on the space. Some of the mirrors reflected siblings to the stone room, but lit in daylight, ht neon, or rolling fme, entle o evening. Some of the portals led to other caves, their mouths breaking into forest dappled sunlight or shimmeri mirages.

  When her mind had categorized the near, it took in the far. That vast yawning cavern, with the cave room led in its roof, spread out into a straice of glowing gss tubes and beams of light, some pulsing, others vanishing rowing like roots in a time pse.

  It was the core of Arthel. The great engine used by the makers in ways she was hopeless to decipher. The tral processor of one of the greatest gameworlds iher, and, she realized with a shock, surely one of the greatest feats of human aplishment in any world.

  A moment after she had processed where she stood, a few breaths after the mirror had broken, the shattering sound still eg oone and beyond, she realized she was not alone.

  On the far side of what could be called the room, a se of the floor was raised a step, and its deep night-blue carpet glowed softly iarlight ing through a billboard sized window cut into the stone wall. Outside. The stars were dense as pebbles in an old bck topped parking lot, h over a dark forest stretg to the horizon.

  A figure stood before the portal, ed in a cloak like a piece of the night sky beyond, but with a flow of warm dawn breaking at the edges.

  In the same moment she noticed it, the figure started to turn, and the dawn broke fully across its cloak, until it faced her, a still inhuman face wreathed in daylit metal, floating over fluttering sunrise.

  Its movements were robotid it stepped towards her like something out of a stop motion film.

  “Be not afraid.”

  Could you say no to everything you ever wanted? And what kind of Gamemaster would ask you to? ime, a relic of a more romantic age. episode, The Phantom.