AS RICHARDS SAT

For ten minutes now this impasse had lingered on between them, the whole time Richards hoping that his crafted expression of piety and exasperation might eventually compel his fiancée to respond, and, though his efforts thus far had been unsuccessful, still he went on glowering, faithful that at some point she’d have no choice but to fold under the nagging weight of his persistence, while in the meantime the couple’s ward—a five-year-old boy named Cyrus—had spent those same minutes lying ignored on his stomach near the foot of the orange couch, carefully sorting a small pile of paint chips he’d peeled away from the wall.

At first Richards had felt more than confident that this grievance with his fiancée would resolve itself easily—shortly and in his favor—and he’d been surprised when a speedy resolution was not forthcoming. He was, however, no longer surprised when, having already been engaged in their struggle for over ten minutes, he and Priscilla then managed to continue the stalemate, unchanged, for another five, at which point Richards suddenly found himself faltering, dropping his glare and allowing it to glance accidentally over the face of his forgotten ward. Unlike Priscilla, Cyrus answered Richards’ glare with a look of his own, and this caused Richards to redirect his own eyes sharply toward his fiancée, all the while keeping Cyrus at the edge of his vision, watching as the boy cast aside the paint chips he’d been sorting with a wave of his small arm.

“It would be helpful, I think,” Cyrus said, dryly, “if we discontinued whatever this is we’re doing and got back to the task at hand.” The boy’s eyes were fixed on the stained carpet.

“The task at hand,” Richards chuckled, punctuating his statement with a snort that came out louder than he’d intended. “Believe me, I’d love to, but unfortunately one of us is making that impossible.”

As he spoke, Richards narrowed his eyes and glared harder at his fiancée, who then responded with a sigh from the couch, still refusing to meet his stare.

“Look,” she said, “I know you think I’m at fault, but I didn’t even touch them. All I did was walk past.”

“That’s not the point,” Richards answered through clenched teeth. “The point is that you were the closest one when they fell, therefore rules of common decency suggest that you should have stopped what you were doing and at least started to put them back up, instead of walking away like nothing happened and expecting someone else to fix them for you.”

“If I remember correctly, repairs are your responsibility,” Priscilla said, finally giving in and making eye contact with Richards after all of her resistance, though Richards was now too caught up in his own aggravation to appreciate the victory. “In fact,” she continued, looking straight at him, “you were the one who sold us on this house in the first place, since, supposedly, you’d be able to handle whatever work needed to be done.”

“That’s true,” said Richards, and while he did he stood up, turning away from Priscilla and walking toward a heap of mini-blinds that lay crumpled beneath the kitchen window, “but when we chose this house the work didn’t include broken blinds.” He leaned down to inspect the heap more closely. “Not that I can’t handle broken blinds,” he added,  “they’re exactly the kind of repair I can handle. Cleaning up, changing light bulbs, hanging things that have fallen down—this is precisely what I had in mind when we chose the house, so, of course, a broken set of mini-blinds isn’t out of reach…like you said, I was the one who sold you two on this particular house from the beginning, because other than some filth and a few run-down furnishings there isn’t a thing wrong with it…at least nothing we’ll be able to notice in the time we’re here. But to the point, it’s not about my ability to fix the blinds,” he paused to breathe, inhaling and exhaling deeply while staring at the pile on the floor, “it’s about the responsibility you should have taken to start the job.”

Finishing this thought, Richards turned around to glare at Priscilla once more with his best attempt at righteousness and indignation, and she met Richards’ glare with a deadpan expression, holding it briefly before breaking into hysterical laughter.

“I’m sorry,” she gasped in-between peals, “but that look on your face…how long have you been working on it? Planning it?” For a moment it seemed as if she were trying to stop laughing, but then she erupted even louder.

“I’m not joking!” Richards shouted, his body constricting with tension. “This is about personal responsibility! About each of us cleaning up after ourselves so as not to unfairly impact others!”

“Well, whatever it’s about,” Priscilla said, smiling as she regained her composure, “I’m not lifting a finger in the direction of those blinds.”

“That’s fine,” Richards growled, “They can go ahead and rot on the floor then, because I’m not touching them either.”

Richards felt a surge of hatred as he made this proclamation, and while he looked at Priscilla lying on the couch, smirking, he wanted nothing more than to walk over and wrap his hands around her throat; however, frightened by his feelings, he turned away from her instead, planting his hands on the kitchen counter and facing the naked kitchen window, which—having previously been occupied only with its covering—he’d suddenly become aware of for the first time.

Wide and spacious, the window offered a generous look onto the street outside, a street that had been deserted when the three of them had discovered the house, but which now showed signs of life: no more than a stone’s throw away from the dead front lawn, a group of luminescent creatures stood arranged in a circle, their hands linked as they twirled together, counter-clockwise. These creatures appeared to be somewhere between four and five feet in height, similar in size to Cyrus, though they certainly weren’t children, more closely resembling koalas with their large ears and paw-like hands, yet coated instead of fur with a gelatinous material that glowed in the daylight.

Richards counted five of the things in total, watching them while they spun, and as they moved a humming noise rose from the group, traveling faintly into the house and sounding as if the creatures were singing or chanting in chorus, until suddenly one of them turned its head in Richards’ direction, allowing him to look into its eyes—a pair of large, round, silver orbs. Richards felt a sharp chill, and he sprang away from the window, looking back toward the front room where he was startled to find Cyrus standing before him.

“They can’t see us yet,” Cyrus said. “Them or anyone else.”

The activity around the window seemed to have attracted Priscilla’s attention as well, and she got up from the couch, joining Richards and their ward.

“The sun is out,” Cyrus continued, gesturing to the blue sky on the other side of the window. “The glare…we can see through, but no one from the outside can see in. It won’t last though. At some point the light outside will be gone, leaving us lit up from the inside for all to see, and while I know you two might think it’s still a long way off,” he paused and looked markedly at both Richards and Priscilla, “that we have plenty of time to spare…time enough left to engage in discussions about mini-blinds, to argue over such things, to take these arguments seriously, can you really be certain? And those things,” he nodded toward the creatures dancing in the street, “those aren’t even the things we should be worried about.”

“Let me ask you a question,” Richards said, collecting himself and looking down at Cyrus, sternly. “Have you seen the sky? Have you noticed what a bright day it is? Yes I am certain. I’m certain that we have plenty of time left…hours. I appreciate your concern, but it’s unnecessary. We’ll be fine here so long as the sun is out, and…when it sets…well, I guess we’ll just need to put the blinds back up before then.”

“He’s right,” Priscilla added, walking around Cyrus and coming to a stop beside Richards. “We have more than enough time left to finish getting ready, and I’m sure we can figure out a way to manage even after the darkness comes. Remember, this is temporary—probably just one night…maybe a few…but I know we’ll find our way home soon enough. And in the meantime, once we get the blinds fixed, this place will be perfectly secure, perfectly safe.”

Richards put an arm around his fiancée while she spoke, and when she finished the two of them then smiled together, beaming down at Cyrus who looked back at them, impassively.

“Yes,” Cyrus said, softly at first, “things often do appear to be far away, but those same things are just as often closer…much closer than we think. When I was younger…”

“When you were younger?” Richards blurted out.

Richards and Priscilla began to laugh in unison.

“When I was younger,” Cyrus continued, unfalteringly, “my grandparents—my mother’s parents—lived on a street where the houses were tall and close together. Their own house was made up, like most of the others, of two stories sitting on top of a street level garage, in their case painted a light shade of green, and every time I visited these grandparents I would find myself spending at least part of the visit riding my Big Wheel tricycle back and forth along the length of their sidewalk…”

As Cyrus paid Richards’ incredulity such little heed, both Richards and Priscilla let their laughter trail off, and instead the two of them now listened, quietly.

“It’s strange though,” Cyrus continued, “I can’t recall any parameters ever being set to this ride. I was more or less left on my own, and absent guidelines I usually started out with plans to ride my Big Wheel as far as I could, to some undefined ‘Parts Unknown.’ However, as I discovered time after time, to go that far was impossible. No one needed to set a limit to my riding, because there was something else, an external force that set this limit for me: whenever I’d get started, pumping my legs against the plastic pedals and looking off at the long street ahead, I’d notice a tall bush in the distance—it was dense and thick, perfectly pruned, forming a wall between the front yards of two houses on my grandparents’ side of the street—and each time I saw this bush it first looked so far away as to be inconsequential, but soon, before I knew it, it would become dark-green and throbbing, towering over me and sending a deep, heavy, droning sound into the air above it, until finally I couldn’t stand being so close to the thing a minute longer, and I’d get up, turn my tricycle around, and pedal back to my grandparents’ house as fast as my legs could take me.”

Richards listened as his ward told this story, and while he listened something about it began to sound strikingly familiar, until—trying to focus on exactly what it was that nagged at his memory—an image of a narrow sidewalk came to mind, bordered by a street on its left side and houses on its right, stretching out ahead, a perfectly straight line, bobbing up and down in his field of vision as he started to walk along its surface. It then occurred to him that he’d started onto the sidewalk from a front porch connected to one of the houses on the right, and from that porch the corner where the sidewalk ended had seemed incredibly distant. However, now that he was walking it felt like a mere three or four steps before he found himself standing at the corner, forced to either cross the street or turn, the terrible silence of the neighborhood so thick that he could hear his pulse roaring in his ears.

“Yes,” Richards said, feeling gripped by a sudden seriousness and urgency, “we have no time to spare, you’re right.”

Leaning down, he started to pick up the mini-blinds, while Priscilla joined in at the same time, helping to lift the other end.

“I’m sorry,” Priscilla said, “I really should have been the one to take initiative on this.”

“No, no,” said Richards, “you were right, it was my responsibility, and I should have shouldered it gladly.”

“This is encouraging,” Cyrus said, watching as his guardians hoisted up the window covering, “but unfortunately I think it’s too late.”

Hearing their ward speak, both Richards and Priscilla froze, stopping in the middle of fixing the blinds to look up through the uncovered window: on the other side the sky was now black, while the creatures that had been in the street were gone, though they’d left dripping traces behind them, glowing in the darkness.

“Quick!” Richards hissed, dropping his end of the mini-blinds. “Turn off the lights!”

Already in motion, Priscilla ran to the switch controlling a dusty bar of fluorescent lighting that hung along the kitchen ceiling, turning it off; meanwhile, Richards rushed to the front room and switched off a dim reading lamp that had been left on next to the couch, as Cyrus glided calmly to the front door and shut off the switch for the porch light. Then, with all of the lights out, the three of them reassembled in the kitchen, huddling in front of the window and peering through.

Outside, the street was still and quiet, but after a short time the sound of approaching footsteps could be heard, and as they grew louder and closer Richards was able to see a line of men and women marching across the sidewalk, a line that continued toward the house before finally coming to a complete stop in front of it, where, once stopped, each member of the marching group turned, looking back at the huddled trio through the kitchen window, to which Richards and Priscilla responded by ducking down to hide, though Cyrus shrugged his shoulders, remaining in plain sight.

“It’s no use,” he said, “they’ve seen us.”

With a sinking feeling Richards realized his ward was right, and he raised his head back up, taking a closer look at the group: there were around twenty in all, men and women, split close to evenly, none looking younger than thirty nor older than forty, each of them dressed casually yet fashionably in brand new clothing that shone under the light of a flickering street lamp nearby. Then, one woman in particular emerged from the middle of the line and stepped forward; this woman’s short blond hair was meticulously cut and she wore white Capri pants, matching wedge sandals, and a hooded olive-green sweatshirt. Trudging up to the kitchen window she waved as she walked, and while she did she called out as if it were a matter of course that the three inhabitants were waiting on the other side.

“Yoo hoo!” she said, coming into full view through the window.

Her face was stretched by a disconcerting smile, and seeing it Richards shivered.

“Hey guys!” she tried again. “Hello?” She rapped on the glass, still smiling.

“She knows we’re here,” Cyrus told Richards, grimly. “You may as well meet her out front.”

Having been distracted by a mounting anxiety from the moment this woman first appeared, Richards responded to his ward’s advice automatically, without further discussion, and—thankful that someone else had made the decision for him—he got up from his crouch, meeting the woman face-to-face.

“We’ll come around front!” he shouted.

The woman nodded and grinned, apparently able to hear his voice through the glass, and, with a collective sense of resignation, Richards, Priscilla, and Cyrus each left their post at the kitchen window and walked toward the front door. Priscilla stood on Richards’ left side and Cyrus stood on his right, while Richards turned the porch light back on and reached out to unlock the door, pulling it open to see the smiling woman standing in the doorway, as the rest of the group she’d appeared with milled around on the sidewalk, coming no closer than the edge of the lawn.

“Hi there!” the woman said, cheerily. “I hope you don’t mind, but we noticed you three all by yourselves in here, and we thought you might need some company.” She paused, looking hopeful and expectant at the trio before continuing. “I mean, we all know you can’t go on living this way—shut-in and alone, doing nothing when there’s so much to be done…just look around!” she twirled in a circle, “There’s so much to see, so much joy! You should come with us,” her smile stretched wider across her face, “As a matter of fact,” she added, her smiled widening further, “I insist that you come with us.”

“Oh…well…we’re fine here actually…thank you.” Richards stammered awkwardly.

The woman retained her wide smile, but a hint of dismay flashed across her suddenly shrewd-seeming eyes.

“Yes,” Priscilla added, “we’re only here temporarily…the three of us are on our way home, but the trip’s taken longer than we expected, and when we came across this house we thought it might make a good shelter for a few days, nothing more. So you see, we’re fine, really, but thank you so much for your concern.”

“My concern?” the woman asked, her smile fading. “What do you mean by that?” Her face took on a look of flustered incomprehension. “I…I don’t understand,” she gasped.

Suddenly, Cyrus, who’d gone unnoticed by the woman thus far, stepped in front of his guardians and inserted himself into the conversation.

“While I can’t speak for Priscilla,” the boy said, looking up at the woman through the doorway, “what I can say with a fair degree of confidence is that the three of us cannot possibly accept your offer in any meaningful way. In fact, to do so would be to turn our back on meaning completely. Now—and here I’m speaking only for myself, though I hope my guardians would agree—you and your companions are more than welcome to stay with us. We won’t, however, be traveling anywhere other than home.”

“Oh!” the woman exclaimed, recognizing Cyrus for the first time, “Aren’t you sweet and grown-up looking!” She knelt down to his level and her smile returned. “I didn’t quite catch all of that, but children sometimes say the most imaginative things, don’t they?” She looked to Richards and Priscilla for confirmation, and the two of them smiled back, nervously.

“Yes they do,” Richards said, placing a restraining hand on Cyrus’ shoulder. “Look, we don’t want to offend anyone. We’ll walk with you for a while. There can’t be any harm in it.”

“He’s right,” Priscilla said to the woman, who had since returned to her feet. “Besides, it’s good to get out once and awhile.”

“Well, it’s settled then,” the woman said, “Follow me!”

She continued to smile at the three of them, welcomingly, though Richards picked up a certain coldness in her manner, as if the original damage their hesitation caused could never be repaired and, further, that the woman had catalogued the explicit form and content of this injury for future reference. Her coldness unnerved Richards, yet even so, heeding her direction, he, Priscilla, and Cyrus all walked through the front door—Priscilla closing it behind them—following the woman across the yard and stopping finally among the men and women who stood on the sidewalk. Joining this single-file line the three travelers found themselves facing their vacated residence, bathed in the strange amber light of the buzzing street lamps overhead, while the woman who’d rousted them from the house went back to her original place in line, somewhere in the middle, and the procession resumed, now with Richards, Priscilla, and Cyrus in tow.

The group then made its way down the sidewalk, turning right at the corner to follow an otherwise lifeless street winding through the deserted neighborhood, though before the street could come to an end the procession veered to the left, cutting through an alley that ran between two of the street’s dark houses. This alley took the group over a shallow creek smelling faintly of sewage, then opened suddenly back onto a dirt path, leading in turn to the same wilderness from which Richards, Priscilla, and Cyrus had originally come. Oddly, the neighborhood’s system of street lamps continued at regular intervals along this path, serving to illuminate the members of the group and the surrounding area, while oaks in the distance sprawled aimlessly across the hilly woodland, and stars and a full moon shone brightly in the clear night sky.

“We’re back where we started.” Cyrus said. “This can’t be good.”

“Don’t worry,” Richards whispered, hoping the ward would follow his example and lower his voice, “we’ll walk with them for awhile and find the right place to cut out.”

“You never know,” Priscilla added in a hushed tone, “we could actually end up in a better position than where we were before. Who knows what we’ll find out here? Maybe even a path home?”

“We’re back where we started,” Cyrus said out loud. “It can’t be good.”

“Smart boy you’ve got there!” a man walking in front of Richards said, turning his head toward them.

Richards tensed, worried that the man might have overheard their conversation.

“Just look at how he’s taking in all the sights and sounds,” the man continued, waving an arm imperiously at the surrounding woodland. “There’s so much to learn, and you can tell he’s really picking it up, just like a sponge. It’ll help down the road, believe me, I have kids of my own. The more they know, and the sooner, the better. Of course, it’s even easier to be informed nowadays than it was when we were kids. These days, any question, anything at all, you just sit them down at the keyboard, and BANG,” the man’s sudden shout caused both Richards and Priscilla to start, “there’s the answer, right there, on the screen.”

“Oh…yeah,” Richards responded, weakly.

Not knowing what else to say, he looked to Priscilla, hoping she might come up with more, but the best she could muster was a polite nod, while at the same time—uncannily able to move straight ahead even with his eyes turned in the direction of the three pedestrians walking behind him—the man went on speaking, his face lit up from the amber lights above.

“Of course learning is a life-long process, right?” the man said. “I mean, the brain is a muscle and we need to exercise it just like the rest of them…you know, we’ve got to keep it up, no slipping…always stay on top of things, am I right?”

Richards opened his mouth, hoping to formulate some sort of reply, but the man cut him off before he had a chance to answer.

“Speaking of which,” the man said, abruptly, “I tried out a new digital media receiver last night.”

He grinned expectantly at Richards, and Richards, now over his initial fear, looked back at the man closely for the first time, finally able to form a clearer impression. The man—like most of the group they marched with—was of indeterminate age, somewhere between his 30’s and 40’s. His hair was freshly cut and well combed, though in an unremarkable style. Similarly, the slacks, casual button-front shirt, and running shoes he wore were all noticeably new and relatively expensive, while at the same time thoroughly unmemorable. It was as if the man, or someone directing him, had put great care into his appearance, crafting a look that communicated its craft, yet ensured total anonymity. Still, the anonymous nature of the man’s look ran counter to his force of presence: Richards wouldn’t be able to recall the man’s face ten minutes later, yet the man put forward such an intense air of self-assurance, his words resounding with such confidence and certainty, that Richards felt obliged to recognize him as some sort of expert or authority figure.

“Did you?” Richards asked, again stumbling over how to respond appropriately.

“On a scale of one-through-five,” the man said, his voice rising in excitement and enthusiasm, “five being the highest and one being the lowest, I give it a four. A four,” he repeated the score with firm finality, growing slightly distant as he seemed to be reliving the act of judgment. “I have to admit,” he said, “I was a skeptical at first, but I was impressed with the way the high-definition movies looked on my screen. And…well…I was just as impressed by the sound. It was nicely separated…nicely separated…and huge…” he trailed off, taking a deep breath. “I’m really starting to think,” he said, almost in a whisper, staring intensely at Richards, “really, and I mean it…I’m starting to think that these things might change the way we obtain and consume video.”

“Wow,” Richards said in response. “I haven’t tried one yet, but they sound interesting.” He immediately regretted the words that came out of his mouth, but the man’s manner of speaking had been so infectious that it had driven him to participate without thinking.

“Yes,” the man said, smiling and nodding enthusiastically, “there’s no doubt in my mind that these receivers,” he paused, leaning his face closer to Richards’ while still in mid-stride, “that they are…they are a…a…” he paused again before enunciating sharply and clearly, glowing in the artificial light, “a significantly important and highly useful piece of technology.”

Richards stammered again, fumbling for an answer, but suddenly, before either he or the man could speak further, the procession came to a halt, and Richards saw that the group had reached a clearing, ahead of which the path coiled up a hill toward a wooden cabin whose chimney let out welcoming plumes of wispy, white smoke. Watching this smoke rise, Richards then noticed that his fists were clenched, his nails digging deep into his palms, and he quickly relaxed both of his hands, looking back to see Priscilla standing behind him where she examined their surroundings, nervously, while Cyrus stood behind her, taking in the scenery with a flat expression.

After the entire group stopped moving, the single file line then quickly disassembled, and in its place a formless cluster of individuals stood at the base of the path looking up at the cabin above. No longer working in unison the group started to power up the hill, each member obviously angling to place themselves before the others in their order of ascent, and, in turn, Richards and Priscilla took their cue from the group, scrambling up the path and prodding Cyrus along with them, until, at the top, the group began to form a new line, now facing the cabin’s front door. Once this line settled into place, Richards, Priscilla, and Cyrus each found themselves standing near the back, though this time they’d landed a bit closer to its center, while in the meantime the man who’d spoken to Richards had ended up elsewhere—either further ahead or behind—while the woman who’d led the three from their house to begin with now stood directly in front of them.

“Oh, hi!” she said, grinning from over her shoulder, still with a hint of coldness in her eyes. “Isn’t this exciting?”

Richards smiled back at her, dumbly, but Priscilla failed to acknowledge the woman at all, busy nudging Richards in the side.

“Look!” she hissed, pointing past the cabin.

Following her finger, Richards saw that behind the structure the hill deteriorated into a steep cliff face, overlooking a body of water that glistened black in the moonlight, and while it appeared that climbing down the cliff would be an impossible task, he noticed that a wooden stairway was accessible from the back of the cabin, scaling the cliff and leading directly to a small dock where a rowboat was moored.

“We need to get inside and reach that dock,” Priscilla whispered, sharply. “Think of where the water might take us!”

“I’m not so sure,” said Cyrus, having overheard Priscilla. “But I suppose it’s worth a try.”

“Ok,” Richards said. Sweat broke out across his body. “We’ll have to figure how to enter the cabin first.”

“Well, we’re all lined up,” said Priscilla. She craned her neck to get a better look. “But no one’s tried the door. I’m not sure what they’re waiting for, if anything. We could waste a lot of time standing here. I’m going to walk over and see if we can’t just go inside.”

“We’ll walk with you.” Cyrus said.

“Yes,” Richards agreed, “we need to stay together.”

Following Priscilla’s lead, Richards and Cyrus stepped out of line, and the three of them began to walk toward the cabin, calm and measured, hoping not to attract unnecessary attention, however when they’d gotten almost halfway toward the door a noise sprung up from behind—the woman in the hooded olive-green sweatshirt had left her own place in the line and was now running after them, though by the time Richards noticed this, Priscilla was already reaching for the handle of the cabin door.

“Priscilla! No!” the running woman cried. Her voice was shrill and wild.

Either not hearing or not heeding, Priscilla pulled the door open, and as she did Richards and Cyrus stood between her and their pursuer, facing in the direction of the frantic woman.

“No!” the woman cried out again. She stood on her toes and tried to look past Richards and his ward. “You need to wait in line! You need to wait like everybody else!” Her face was twisted and seething.

“I’d like to confirm that for myself,” Priscilla said, calmly, staring straight ahead as the door opened.

While Priscilla stood in the doorway, Richards and Cyrus then turned around to face her, coming up to see what lay beyond the entrance. Even the woman who’d tried to stop them now watched in silence, as did some of the other men and women who were standing near the head of the line.

Inside, the cabin was nothing more than a filthy, single-room shack, with a back door that led toward the stairway standing directly across from the front door. Between those two doors, in the center of the room, a man sat in a precarious looking wooden chair, facing a crude, warped dining table and gazing down at a clay bowl that rested in front of him. He held a bent metal spoon clutched in his motionless right hand, and he was dressed in clothing similar to that worn by the men lined up in front of the cabin—expensive, fashionable causal wear—though his own clothing was faded and dusty, and his hair streamed wildly down to his shoulders, his features obscured by a full, untamed beard.

Beside him a second man stood, tall and gaunt, wearing a white button-front shirt, a black tie, and a black apron. This man appeared to be attending to the first, as he hovered over the seated man, watchful and expectant, while on the table, next to the bowl, a lone candle sent a jittery light dancing around the room, throwing misshapen shadows against the cabin walls.

Still in the doorway, Richards, Priscilla, and Cyrus looked on, and as they did the seated man continued to slump forward, until, suddenly, a strand of his unkempt hair grazed the candle’s open flame, and in an instant his entire head of hair began to catch fire, a development to which the man himself seemed to remain oblivious, though his attendant burst into action, retrieving a rag from a pocket on the front of his apron and batting at the flames, frantically, till finally, following a barrage of zealous pats, the flames died out from the seated man’s hair, however the attendant was then presented with a new problem, as the rag itself was now burning. Shrieking, he began to run around the room, waving the fiery rag in front of his face, until, after several laps and countless thrashings, it too was extinguished, allowing the attendant to resume his place beside the table, amidst the smell of smoldering hair and burnt cloth. Then, when the situation seemed to have stabilized and the attendant had regained his composure, Priscilla left Richards and Cyrus waiting for her in the doorway, venturing alone into the small room where she began to exchange inaudible words with the dutiful man inside. Their conversation was brief, and when she returned she was shaking her head, frowning.

“Apparently,” she said to Richards, moving away from the cabin door as the attendant slammed it shut behind her, “this is a line to get inside the cabin. We’re each waiting to be admitted until the guest ahead of us leaves. One guest at a time it seems.”

“And when will that be?” Richards asked.

“Who knows,” she shrugged. “The man inside wouldn’t say how long a typical guest stays, and he wouldn’t even tell me if he knew when the other man in there…the current guest…might be leaving.” She paused, apparently mulling over what little information she’d been given. “He did tell me though,” she continued, finally, “that guests are the only people allowed onto the dock, and that the line to get inside usually forms here every morning right before sunrise, then, if anyone’s still left, it breaks up after sunset.”

Richards looked, and he noticed that the sun was, in fact, just beginning to appear on the horizon, however at that moment the conversation was interrupted, as the woman who’d followed them when they’d left the line called out loudly, reminding the trio of her presence.

“I told you!” she screeched. “I told you you needed to wait, but you wouldn’t listen!” The woman then turned back to the other men and women still waiting in line and tried to soften her tone. “I’m very sorry about this,” she told them. “Please accept my apologies on their behalf.” She nodded toward Richards, Priscilla, and Cyrus. “They really have no idea what they’re doing.”

The men and women in line looked irritated, shaking their heads in disgust as if the woman’s explanation was insufficient, though hinting in their eyes that they sympathized with her position, and seeing this Richards began to feel furious, exploding suddenly without warning.

“That’s not true!” he shouted. “We know exactly what we’re doing!” He paused, glancing at his companions from the corner of his eye, and he noticed that Priscilla seemed startled, while Cyrus, who’d been silent for some time, observed him with interest.

“Excuse me?” the woman in the sweatshirt said, snarling as she whipped her head in Richards’ direction. Any remnants of a pleasant veneer had now been worn away, revealing a creature consumed by venom.

“I said it’s not true,” Richards answered. “We’re not idiots. In fact, if anything, we were the only ones here with good enough sense to walk through that door and find out for ourselves whether or not waiting is even worthwhile.” Richards finished speaking, and as he did the line began to ripple with murmurs of discontent.

“And we could have already told you that it is, it’s certainly worthwhile!” the woman shouted.

“Is it?” Richards asked, smirking. “I wonder.”

“Oh, I should have known this would happen!” the woman hissed, pointing a trembling finger at Richards. “I knew it the minute I saw you. You—all three of you—there’s a streak of wrong in you!”

“In us?” Richards was laughing caustically now. “A streak of wrong in us? And you’re the ones out here, in the middle of this no-man’s-land, wearing your absurd get-ups and running off at the mouth about absolutely nothing, while standing in a line that may never move, all for a chance at that?” He jerked his head toward the cabin door. “A streak of wrong? A streak? Of wrong?” Richards stared at the woman angrily and spat in the dirt.

Flanking Richards, Priscilla began to giggle, while a grim look broke over Cyrus’ face.

“This is unnecessary,” Cyrus breathed to Richards.

“I am offended!” the woman in the sweatshirt shrieked. “I am offended!”

“No,” Richards said, shaking his head and disregarding his ward, “No, what you are is offensive.”

Suddenly, the irritated rumblings that had been coming from the waiting men and women shifted in tone, and the next thing Richards knew, the line began to convulse with laughter. The woman then froze, looking behind her, slowly, as the laughter was now coupled with a growing chorus of voices hurling insults in her direction, and when Richards heard this chorus he felt a surge of exhilaration, a wide smile forming across his face.

“Do you hear that?” he sneered at the woman. “They hate you. They hate your pants, they hate your shoes, they hate your stupid hair. They hate you. I hate you!”

“I…I…” the woman stammered, unable to get anything out.

Wilting before Richards’ eyes, she raised her hands to her face and slumped down, sobbing, then stood up and ran away, disappearing into the woods, to which the line responded by bursting into a roar of applause, and as it did Richards smiled wider, though it was a weak smile—more of a grimace; the exhilaration he’d felt was short-lived, and it had been replaced by a come down of nausea and regret, however, before he could reflect on his feelings, the line broke up and turned into a small, circling crowd, hoisting Richards, Priscilla, and Cyrus each onto a pair of waiting shoulders, while the air filled with the echo of spontaneous songs and chants taken up by individual members of the group, disjointed and unharmonious.

At the same time, in the midst of this noise, Richards could also hear what sounded to be the braying of a mule coming from nearby, and from his precarious perch he saw something approximating such a creature being led through the crowd of men and women; its handler—a man who’d been in the line—tugged at the sickeningly distended animal by its harness, bringing it closer to the center of the strange celebration, where, surrounded by the group, the animal snorted and kicked, struggling with the handler until more men and women came forward to help hold it still, and as Richards looked on he noticed that Cyrus was being let down from the shoulders that held him, placed instead on top of the agitated creature.

“What are you doing?” Richards shouted.

Richards’ cries were drowned out by at least five competing college fights songs being sung enthusiastically by the jubilant group, and he saw Cyrus protesting as well, but the ward’s complaints went unnoticed against the background of noise and activity. Looking to his left, Richards made eye contact with Priscilla, who, like him, was still being held in the air, and she shook her head, seemingly at a loss. The two of them then did nothing as the men and women cleared a path for Cyrus and the mule, all the while cheering the animal and its rider, until the animal’s handler hit the beast with a stick, sending the creature like a shot into the wilderness. In seconds the ward was out of sight, and the celebration came to an awkward, unceremonious end.

As suddenly as they’d begun, the members of the small crowd trailed off from their chants and cheers, looking blankly at one another before walking into the woods heads down and deflated, each in his or her own direction, and—having been set down gently when the group dispersed—Richards and Priscilla found themselves standing alone on the path leading toward the cabin. They moved sluggishly at first, wide-eyed and in shock, then became progressively sharper, leaving the path and sprinting in the direction that the mule had run off, cutting through oak trees and blackberry bushes and using the crushed and trampled foliage as a guide, till eventually they tracked the beast to a small dirt trail which then gave way to a wider dirt path, turning finally into a fully paved road.

The couple followed this paving for some time, hopeful that at any moment they might overtake their ward or at the very least come across clear evidence pointing to where he’d gone, yet their hopes continued to be frustrated, as the surrounding woodland was gradually replaced by rolling grassy hills, and fatigue caused their initial sprint to settle into a hurried walk. Then, following a particularly long bend in the road, they emerged onto a narrow two-lane highway. This highway wound between the hills before opening up against a coastline where a small harbor town could be seen in the distance, and as the pair kept walking along the shoulder of the road they soon reached a spot where a second narrow road split off from the first, leading toward the town; without speaking the two of them came to a mutual conclusion that they’d best be served by taking this split, and so grimly they began to descend into the cold morning mist.

Once they’d arrived at the end of the narrow road, Richards and Priscilla found that the town was little more than an unusually crowded asphalt parking lot, a supermarket, and a scattering of docks where small fishing boats floated up and down on the water. They both began to walk across the lot, toward the store, all the while scanning the rows of parked vehicles for signs of their ward or the mule, until—crossing row after row of sedans, station wagons, sports cars, minivans, and SUVs, seemingly too many to fit in the cramped area—Richards was startled by the sight of a yellow blanket lying on the ground in a shallow puddle of motor oil; he and Priscilla looked at one another in surprise, then Richards scrambled to retrieve the blanket from the pavement. The object was familiar to both of them, as it was one of the few possessions Cyrus had brought with him when the trio began their journey, and while it was nothing more than a simple knit blanket, not even big enough to cover the five-year-old ward, it held enough significance to the boy that if it was here, he too was likely somewhere in the vicinity.

“He’s here. He has to be,” Richards breathed nervously. “He can’t have gone far, we weren’t that far behind.”

“Let’s go into the store.” Priscilla said, trembling. “Maybe he’s inside, or maybe somebody in there has seen him at least.”

“You’re right, we should go inside,” Richards agreed. He folded and bunched up the soiled blanket as compactly as he could and shoved it, hanging out, into the back pocket of his pants, when suddenly a chuckling arose nearby, and Richards looked around to see a man standing beside them among the parked cars. The man, his face haggard and weather-beaten, wore filthy jeans and a soiled white t-shirt. A wild shock of grey hair sprang from his head, and a long unkempt beard framed a jagged grin, exposing a mouth full of broken and missing teeth.

“Think you’ll find what you’re looking for?” the man laughed, meanly.

“Excuse me?” Richards asked.

“You heard what I said. I asked if you think you’ll find what you’re looking for.”

A diseased, buzzing sound seemed to come from the man, and Richards felt repulsed. He looked at Priscilla and saw that she seemed equally disgusted.

“Thanks for asking, but we’ll be fine.” Richards said, moving to usher Priscilla away from the man and closer to the store.

“Heh. Ok,” the man said, standing still as the pair retreated.

Richards and Priscilla went on crossing the parking lot, trying their best not to look back and coming finally to the supermarket’s entrance, but before they could go inside the thin ringing of a small bell interrupted them, and they turned to see the strange man still lurking behind them, now seated on top of a rusted bicycle.

“Look,” Richards said, angrily, “I don’t know what you want but…”

“Oh, well I know you!” the man snarled, cutting him off. “I know all about you. And I know you too!” he sneered at Priscilla. “Yeah, I know who you are. And I know what you do. Now, which one of you wants to take a ride with me on my bicycle?” His face was leering and terrible, causing both Richards and Priscilla to shield their eyes as if looking into an unbearable glare.

“He’s sick,” Priscilla said. “Let’s get out of here.”

“Yes,” Richards said, peering at the man, hatefully. “He’s sick.”

Richards and Priscilla each turned back to the store’s entrance and walked toward its automatic front doors, while the man on the bicycle cackled, ringing his bell before peddling away.

“What was that?” Richards asked Priscilla, gripped by panic as they listened to the man ride off.

“Nothing, he was crazy.” Priscilla said.

“No, he meant something. What did he mean?” Richards was wide-eyed and frantic.

“Calm down, it was nothing, you’re being paranoid,” Priscilla said, though Richards could tell that she didn’t believe it herself.

“He meant something,” Richards muttered under his breath. His thoughts were racing. “What did he mean?” He paused inside the doorway, causing the automatic doors to open each time they were about to close. “I know!” he said, almost as much to himself as to Priscilla. “We’ll ask Cyrus, he’ll figure it out, he’s good at this kind of thing.”

“Yes,” Priscilla nodded. She tried to smile. “Good idea. I’m sure it was nothing, but you’re right, we should ask Cyrus, just to be safe.”

Richards’ mood brightened, and he looked around for their ward.

“Where did he go?” Richards asked his fiancée, cheerfully.

“He’s right here with us, isn’t he?” she asked. “I thought he was right here.”

“So did I,” Richards said.

He looked around once more, and he felt another wash of panic.

“Oh God!” he wailed, “We lost him! He’s really gone!”

“Oh my God!” Priscilla tore at her hair, “I’d almost forgotten! I thought he was still here!”

Richards looked into Priscilla’s desperate eyes, and for a moment he couldn’t find her pupils—two silver orbs looked back and him, and he remembered the creatures he’d seen dancing the day before.

“We’ll find him, he has to be here somewhere.” Richards said, firmly.

“Yes,” Priscilla said, “let’s find him. We have to.”

“We’ll ask if anyone here has seen him,” Richards said. “They have to have seen him.”

“Yes, you’re right,” Priscilla said with resolve. “They have to have seen him.”

Richards and Priscilla then began to walk the aisles of the supermarket, which were dusty, un-stocked, and poorly lit. Furthermore, although the lot outside was full, the store itself was empty, and it wasn’t until they’d made their way to the back of the building that they came across anyone else. At the very opposite end of the supermarket’s entrance a butcher counter sat, with cuts of meat, fillets of fish, and packages of ground beef and chicken displayed under its smudged glass covering, while behind this counter a man and a woman stood, each of them thin, pale, and feeble. Both the man and the woman appeared to be very old, though it was unclear whether this was a consequence of natural age or some premature disease. The man wore a butcher’s coat, stained with blood, and his head was bald save for a few patches of white stubble; meanwhile the woman wore a cream-colored cardigan sweater and a white apron. Her long grey hair, parted in the middle, spilled over her shoulders like cobwebs, and as they stared blankly at Richards and Priscilla, both the man and the woman looked to be as dusty and empty as the market itself.

“Excuse me,” Priscilla said, taking initiative and stepping toward the counter, “we’re looking for a boy, about five years old, we think he might have passed through your store. If he did, it would have been in the last couple of hours.”

“No, nothing like that here,” muttered the woman behind the counter as she shook her head. “Nothing like that. Not that we’ve seen.”

“No, no kids, no ponies, nothing of the kind,” added the man beside her. Richards noticed that he was wrapping a fresh parcel, and that the grey remnants of a carcass lay on a table behind him.

“Why did you say ‘pony’?” Priscilla asked, pointedly.

“Because we haven’t seen any kids, any boys, and none of them riding on horses or tricycles or anything else for that matter,” the man wheezed.

“I think it’s strange you’d mention ponies and horses,” Priscilla said. “The boy we’re looking for was riding on an animal, but I hadn’t said anything about it. It seems very strange you’d bring up something similar for no reason.”

“But he had a reason,” the woman behind the counter whispered, “HE HAD A REASON!”

Without warning, her voice rose into a piercing shriek, and Richards and Priscilla cowered side-by-side in unison, terrified by the force of the woman’s screaming, coupled with the fact that her hair was now white and wild, while her face had become an angry, porcelain mask.

“He had a reason,” she said again, hissing this time as she stood impossibly tall before them, a snow-white apparition with arachnid limbs and twisted, spindly claws. “He said it,” she continued, her voice dripping and malicious, “because we’ve seen nothing like that here. Nothing.” Then, in an instant, she regained her previous form: small, frail, her voice quavering as she spoke. “Nothing of the kind. Nothing. Nothing at all,” she rattled.

“No, nothing at all,” the man added, wiping his shaking hands on the front of his butcher’s coat.

“Nothing at all,” the woman repeated. “Nothing…at least not since our own boy was here.” Her eyes reddened, welling with tears. “But he…he isn’t a boy anymore. He’s a man now,” she whispered, leaning forward.

“A good man,” the man in the butcher’s coat muttered, “a good man.”

“That’s him, right there,” the woman said. She pointed to something dark and dusty hanging on the wall behind the butcher counter: a tarnished and gaudy golden frame, squaring a photograph, hard to discern beneath the layers of dirt and grime, though clearly of a stern looking silver-haired man in a grey business suit glowering down at his observers.

“He’s done many things,” the woman said, wringing her hands, “so many things.”

“A good man,” continued the man in the coat, “a good man.”

“Important things,” the woman said.

“Many, many good, important things,” the man echoed.

“Our son is an important man,” the woman wheezed.

“A good, important man,” the man in the coat offered.

“It’s a…lovely portrait,” Priscilla said, backing away from the counter and pulling Richards toward her, while the frail couple looked on, vacant and confused.

“They can’t help us,” she whispered to Richards. “Not at all.”

“No, you’re right, they can’t,” he said. “They can’t help us…in fact I don’t think they ever could have.” He paused, looking at the store’s empty shelves. “No,” he said, “we need to go back outside…it was a mistake to come here. It really did seem like a good idea…it made so much sense, but…it wasn’t right. He’s got to be outside, he’s got to be there, somewhere.”

Priscilla nodded in agreement, offering her hand to Richards, and as the two of them linked arms they left the butcher counter and its two ghostly sentries, neither of whom seemed to recognize the couple’s abrupt departure. Then, walking quickly out of the supermarket, the pair returned to the parking lot, emerging from the store to find themselves confronted by a sky mirroring both the gloominess inside the establishment and the shadowy fruitlessness characterizing their search thus far—the greyness that had greeted their entry into town had now taken on an even darker, almost nighttime cast, though by Richards’ count it should have still been mid-morning; meanwhile, making matters worse, the gloom was hanging so thick and heavy that the lighting in front of the market and around the parking lot could barely penetrate it, and, stepping away from the store’s entrance, each of them found it hard to know where they stood or in what direction they were headed. At first the two of them groped blindly, staying close to the sound of each other’s breathing, but as their eyes adjusted they noticed the hint of lights bobbing rhythmically on the water, attached to some of the fishing boats tied to the docks, and again, without speaking, they decided that following these lights was their best option.

The couple moved slowly, each holding the other’s hand as they came closer to their destination, when suddenly they were engulfed by the presence of a new light altogether—the white glare of a large, mounted search lamp shining down at them from above. Covering his eyes, Richards looked up into the harsh brightness, and he saw that they had stopped underneath a tall, free-standing scaffolding structure, on top of which five or six men in rain slickers and fisherman’s hats milled about on a wooden platform. Richards was able to glimpse the face of the man who stood behind the lamp, steering the white light to shine in their direction, and it was a grizzled face, rough and sneering.

“Hello!” Richards called up to the men. “Hello! We’re looking for a boy, five years old, we think he’s somewhere around here. Maybe you’ve seen him?”

Watching expectantly, Richards was startled to see the shoulders of the man who controlled the lamp heaving in laughter, and soon enough he could hear cackling coming from the platform.

“Hello?” Richards called again. “Can you hear me?”

“This isn’t a joke!” Priscilla shouted. “We need your help!”

Laughter continued in response to their voices, followed by both Richards and Priscilla crying out in surprise as a torrent of liquid splashed down on them from above—a mixture of fish innards and murky water emptied out of a barrel by the men perched on top of the scaffolding structure. Drenched by the foul liquid, Richards panicked, watching while Priscilla began to shriek and tear at her hair.

“He’s gone!” she screamed, the light magnifying her own look of horror.

“He is! He’s gone!” Richards cried, and as he shouted out, cold anguish tore through his body.

“He’s gone!” Priscilla wailed.

“Yes, he is, he’s gone!” Richards wailed alongside her.

Shivering, the couple stood there, holding one another, sopping wet and crying, and in the same instant that the search lamp was suddenly put out, Richards found himself flooded with a feeling of emptiness, shaken by the sight of a glowing shadow creeping across Priscilla’s crushed, despairing face. And then, in the next instant, the darkness consumed them.

— srm, 11/13/08

THE ANTHROPOLOGIST

And so today, months removed from making his determination, the anthropologist carried the search forward, resting his wings and gliding along as he soared half-heartedly with the wind. Though his faith in the evidence had never faltered, he’d lately begun to feel weighed down by a mounting frustration, a frustration made immediately worse when—for the third time in as many days—periodic flashes of static began to erupt across the length of his ocular field, a sign that he’d overexerted his systems. He first tried to ignore the condition as he’d done before, but it soon became unbearable, forcing him to make a slow, circular descent toward a nearby beach. Once he’d descended, he then perched on top of a large rock that overlooked the waves, gradually shutting down his sensors and allowing the blackness of cessation to replace the grey of the misty ocean air. Grey in turn retook black, and when it did the display in the upper right corner of his ocular field read that it had been offline for three hours.

Slowly, the anthropologist stood, trying to shake the stiffness from his limbs and wings. Despite his extensive training the exhausting nature of the journey had begun to take a toll—he’d found it harder to focus his attention, and his thoughts crowded and stumbled over one another with a growing frequency; meanwhile his wings, ocular sensors, and the rest of his self-modified bio-technical equipment were all losing their charge at an increasingly rapid rate, deteriorating to the point that when he suddenly noticed an island in the distance, covered by a huge, dome-like structure, his first instinct was to run a diagnostic on his sensors, checking for visual distortion.

The anthropologist followed this instinct without a second thought, yet his examination was unable to find any evidence of systemic failure, leaving him no choice but to conclude that there was indeed an island just off of the beach, covered by a massive dome, independent from any misfirings of his machinery, and as he reached this conclusion he then began to record his visual input to memory, taking flight and soaring in the island’s direction until the dome covering the island grew large and close enough for him to observe its design: what had appeared at a distance to be constructed from inert building material was, his sensors now told him, in fact comprised of wingless humanoid bodies piled on top of one another, their arms and legs intertwined in an intricate web of structural engineering. The anthropologist’s pulse raced. According to his readings, these bodies were alive.

At first it was hard for him to accept the data, yet hovering directly above the dome he found that his readings were confirmed, as the structure rippled with the inhalation and exhalation of its countless component parts, each of which lay in different states of exposure depending on where and how they were positioned: in some cases only an arm or a leg could be seen poking out in order to intertwine its fingers or toes with the fingers or toes of another, while in other cases full humanoid figures were visible, their faces pointing toward the ocean or the mainland, and, although these faces seemed not to notice the anthropologist as he passed, it was something other than their strange disinterest that struck him: from a brief, cursory scan, he read that each face wore a type of covering over its ocular sensors—a pair of spherical lenses, varying from face to face in size and color, though identical in overall form and, presumably, function.

The anthropologist hurried to perform a more detailed scan, and it soon became clear that the devices the humanoids wore were entirely synthetic in composition. No biological components were involved. They were neither a feature natural to the faces, nor one induced through any latent mutation. Instead, the ocular coverings were self-created, self-applicated additions. Perhaps even improvements. But how odd, he thought, to find such a discovery in this place that, till now, was nothing more than a rumor, a legend, and among entities that couldn’t even be considered human in the strictest sense of the term.

Fascinated, he made several more laps around the structure, while the faces continued to peer through him, unable or unwilling to register his alien presence. Then, hovering close to the top of the dome, he landed carefully on the inhaling-exhaling backs and torsos of bodies, all of which were outfitted in garments of variant color and design, and as the anthropologist scanned these garments he began to feel gripped by the strangeness of his own naked state, a feeling that disoriented him before passing quickly due to the humanoids’ refusal to stay in any one place for long. Without warning, a particularly violent shifting occurred underfoot, and the anthropologist was pitched forward onto his knees, accompanied by a chorus of muffled shouts, shrieks, and wails reverberating from within the organic structure.

He stood, and another surge of movement knocked him down again. A hand covered a nearby face, pulling it back into the mass of bodies. A new face erupted from between an arm and a stomach. Feet appeared and elbows disappeared. The dome, just like each of its parts, pulsed with a life, and, studying the structure’s movements from the vantage point of his hands and knees, the anthropologist wondered at its depth—both how far down the layers of bodies went and what, if anything, lay beneath. The dome covered the entire island aside from a small outer ring of land, and so, he rationalized, it must have been designed to shelter something.

Wanting to know more, he started to crawl along the roof of the structure, over limbs and torsos and unresponsive faces, till eventually he reached a gradual slope, at which point he began to climb slowly down one of the dome’s sides. This climbing was difficult however, since the constant shifting made it hard to find reliable handholds, while the guttural protests of those bodies being pulled from the surface were loud and distracting. Several times the anthropologist lost his grip and footing, forcing him to hover until he could reestablish contact with the dome, and though he’d hoped his climbing might reveal a sizeable gap in the mass or some other noticeable point of entry, this side appeared to be just as solid as the roof in its shifting instability.

The anthropologist decided to discontinue his climbing, and instead he pushed off from the surface, flying around the perimeter again, slow and deliberate, only to observe the same conditions everywhere he scanned. His readings made it clear that any hope of penetration lay in a more direct approach, and so he landed once more on top of the structure, this time laying flat against the roiling bodies where, during the next shifting, he took hold of a flailing hand. The hand in question answered his grip with a crushing grip of its own, yanking his arm hard enough to nearly dislodge it from its socket, and, following a great deal of painful wrenching, made worse by the awkwardness of his wings, the anthropologist finally succeeded at being consumed by the mass: inside, a cascade of bodies pressed themselves close against him, lit dimly by transient shafts of light, smothering him and making it hard to breath, while his own grasping hand was still in the mutual grasp of its object, and he could feel other hands clinging to each of his ankles.

These bodies had surrounded the anthropologist from the moment he’d penetrated the dome, and they’d given him little choice but to swim along with them until the direction of their flow changed, in turn causing the hands that were pulling him to release their hold; however, before he could choose his next course of action, a new hand grabbed at his mouth, forming a hook-like claw and pulling violently on his lower lip, while two more hands pressed against his head and pushed downward, yet soon this arrangement came to an end as well, and the anthropologist found himself being shoved back toward the top of the dome, the consequential outcome of a writhing cluster of bodies beneath him.

Moving up, he came face-to-face with a pair of lens-covered ocular sensors, and for the first time one of these humanoid faces took a vague notice of him, a notice that lasted just long enough for the humanoid to work its arms free and begin choking the anthropologist, forcing him back down into the mass, a task again made more difficult by the width of the anthropologist’s wingspan, and, from then on, the anthropologist tried his best to remain limp and pliable, doing what he could to maintain his descent without fighting against the swirling tide of humanoids, all of which seemed to be bent on moving both upward and outward, until, after almost an hour of maneuvering, he finally broke through a last tangle of bodies, emerging from the structure bloodied, covered in saliva, and with the feeling of empty air beneath his feet.

Once he’d emerged he quickly trained his sensors upward and read that the dome hung over him now, letting in only sparse patches of natural light, though visibility was improved by the flickering of torches and bonfires burning below. Hovering, he scanned downward to read that the dome’s highest underside stood approximately three hundred feet above ground, where a maze of buildings constructed from processed bricks of mud and straw stretched across the center of the island floor, and, while crowds of humanoids milled around these buildings, exiting and entering without any immediately discernable pattern, even larger crowds stood waiting in lines that faced out from the heart of the island, winding their way toward several points along the walls of the dome.

The anthropologist continued his observations, and soon he noticed that bodies were falling from the dome’s ceiling and its interior sides at sporadic intervals, many of them remaining lifeless after crashing to the ground, though a roughly equal amount returned to their feet, either limping off toward the concentration of mud and straw buildings at the island’s center, or hobbling over to join one of the long, twisting lines of waiting humanoids that led to the dome’s walls. He examined these lines more carefully, noting further that whenever a body fell, the first humanoid in the nearest line would immediately reach out and add itself to the structure’s mass, an operation that had an initial appearance of chaos, but which upon closer study identified the precision and rigor behind the humanoids’ system: the humanoid population itself served as a renewable resource with which to keep the dome intact, replacing those pieces that were unable to remain a part of the structure and that didn’t survive their fall with the seemingly limitless number of those waiting in line to comprise the dome and those that stood after falling, ready to comprise again.

Noting this organization and efficiency, the anthropologist lowered himself slowly toward the island floor, landing close to one of the dome’s walls, a ways away from the nearest line of humanoids, and, touching down, his sensors read that a humanoid body lay in the dirt beside him. He kneeled and inspected it: the body had recently ceased functioning, a result, he presumed, of evident and severe trauma around the head. Continuing his inspection, he then read that the humanoid’s physical makeup was more or less identical to his own, differing mainly in its lack of wings and distinctive gender characteristics; however, more important to the anthropologist was his discovery that this body came equipped with the same type of spherical lenses worn by the other humanoids he’d encountered during his descent.

He trembled a bit with excitement as he reached out his hands to remove the lenses from the body’s face, and they came off easily, exposing a pair of dead, grey sensors underneath. At once the anthropologist lost all interest in the body, becoming preoccupied instead with his examination of the spheres: this particular pair was average in size compared to those he’d observed so far, and it was tinted with a dark, maroon color. On a whim, he fitted them over his own ocular sensors and snapped them into place without difficulty, feeling refocused and invigorated, his entire ocular field colored by a rich, warm, red, as objects stood out from their background, vibrant and alive.

He then returned to his feet and scanned the area around him, taking in a sight that had gone unnoticed before: a few yards away, up against a piece of the dome wall, a pair of humanoids moved about wildly, flailing their arms and chirping in shrill, agitated tones. One of the humanoids held onto a long wooden pole—sometimes with both hands, sometimes with one when the other was needed to punctuate a point being made to its partner—while at the same time the partner manned an uneven, though functional wooden winch attached to the pole’s base, controlling a thin cord looped along its shaft.

The anthropologist studied this pair, and doing so he noticed that their pole penetrated the wall in-between small gaps made by the dome’s shifting bodies. Occasionally the pole’s cord would become taut and the two of them would begin frantically pulling it in, most times bringing back an empty line with a sharp, misshapen hook at the end, but twice the line yielded gasping, flopping sea life from the ocean outside, which the pair quickly deposited both times into a rotting wooden bucket, and suddenly the anthropologist felt an uncomfortable wash of shame, contrasting it with his own familiar images of naked men and women, their wings sprawled carelessly, lying half-awake on the stony floors of mountainside caverns.

“So much to learn,” he mused, “so much to learn.”

The pair proceeded to carry on with their work for almost fifteen more minutes, till finally, appearing gaunt and weathered, they started to disassemble their apparatus, collecting it and their bucket before heading in the direction of the buildings concentrated at the center of the island floor, and—following them with his sensors—the anthropologist began to notice similar pairs positioned at further points along the dome’s interior, as well as other humanoids, working both alone and in groups of varying sizes, engaged in a number of industrious activities: extracting and collecting items from the island soil, using lengths of wooden sticks to measure particular patches of ground, erecting materials for the building of more mud and straw structures, while bodies continued to fall sporadically from above, and the lines of humanoids waiting to comprise the dome maintained their sizeable numbers.

Standing still and observing, the anthropologist again found himself drawn to the creatures’ colorful garments: swaths of fabric dyed orange, yellow, green, and purple, some single-colored, some alternating hues along their length, and, remembering the body at his feet, he bent down to examine its clothing, a full-length gown covered with a sunburst design of orange and yellow. Unfortunately, dark brown stains obscured the otherwise brilliant striations of color, still the anthropologist was curious, and he started to strip the garment off of the body, carefully so as not to further damage the cloth.

Once he’d finished removing the clothing he then felt an overwhelming compulsion to try wearing it himself, though unlike the lenses this proved to be a difficult proposition—where the gown had draped handsome and effective over its previous owner, the anthropologist was hampered by the burden of his wingspan. He stretched at the cloth, delicately at first, then with more force, but he wasn’t able to fit it over his frame. Frustrated, he cursed and yanked harder, causing the material to tear as he finally pulled it on, yet by the time his cumbersome wings had managed to push their way through a newly-torn opening in back, his mood was improved: even stained and ragged the clothing allowed an increased fluidity of movement, and he stood taller, ready to resume his exploration.

He began by starting off toward the buildings in the distance, stepping occasionally over humanoid bodies in different stages of decomposition while passing groups of still-functioning creatures carrying out their respective tasks, and, where the anthropologist had previously failed to register with these humanoids, the addition of lenses and a garment seemed to draw their attention. Whether single or in groups he noticed that the humanoids now disengaged from their functions as he walked by, pausing to observe him, coldly. Meanwhile, unsure how best to engage the creatures, the anthropologist kept moving; the further he got from his landing spot, the larger the groups of humanoids he encountered, and the greater their numbers, the less notice they seemed to take, until before long he found himself surrounded on all sides by a throng of humanoid activity, a mass almost as dense as the one that had made up the dome.

In the absence of a marked path this crowd confined itself to an imaginary pedestrian roadway, some of its members pushing to go back in the direction the anthropologist had come from, while the rest of the crowd pushed forward alongside him, and, as the crush of bodies grew thicker, more and more mud and straw buildings could be observed flanking the unofficial thoroughfare, the humanoids streaming in and out of these structures both adding to and taking away from the mass of which the anthropologist was now a part, till eventually the crowd began to fan out, and the anthropologist’s sensors read that they had arrived in a square at the center of the island, teeming with bodies in rest and motion. Buildings lit up by the wavering light of open flames sat huddled on top of one another, walling in the square’s perimeter, and heavily trafficked, non-delineated paths like the one the anthropologist had followed branched off from every side.

The anthropologist came to a stop after he reached this point, taking in the machinations of both the humanoids around him and those comprising the dome’s roof high overhead. He felt overcome by what he’d observed so far: the absolute, unflinching drive of the island’s population and, more so, the fact that their entire system appeared to have a life of its own. No obvious overseers directed the industry, nor did any visible authority figures instruct or compel them. Everything was done as if it could not be otherwise, as if the creatures were born into the world with an unmistakable sense of purpose, a purpose carried out with such perfect calculation that even the screams and shouts of those fighting for their places in the dome above sounded like an intentionally orchestrated musical performance from the island floor.

For the first time since his search began, the anthropologist took a moment to appreciate his readings, yet the moment was short-lived, interrupted too soon by the rough shove of a passing, brisk-walking humanoid, the force of which was nearly enough to knock the anthropologist to the ground. Once the anthropologist recovered his balance he hurried to scan the humanoid’s face: even from behind the obstruction of its lenses it was evident that the creature analyzed him with an impersonal mask of contempt and disregard. On one hand it seemed as if the humanoid had nothing but disgust for the anthropologist’s shabby, slow moving display, while on the other, the anthropologist’s display appeared to be of such small distinction to the humanoid that having to recognize it at all amplified the creature’s irritated disdain. All of this was manifest in the push and glare that the anthropologist received, and it was this push and glare that oddly overtook him, driving him irrationally to pursue his assailant.

The anthropologist wasted no time following the creature into the crowd, making his own attempt to push bodies out of the way, however, used to the surges of movement in the square, and, he imagined, in the dome above, he found the humanoids around him difficult to shove aside. His first few tries were met with immoveable disinterest; then, as he tried harder and more insistently, some of the humanoids became disturbed, turning to call out at him in their shrill, frenetic tongue, until one of them answered with a shove of its own, knocking the anthropologist onto his back, where, determined to reach his original target, he decided to take a different approach, and as he leapt to his feet he unfurled his wingspan, readying himself for flight.

A huge roar followed from the crowd the moment the anthropologist’s wings were outstretched; every pair of lenses in the vicinity was suddenly trained in his direction, and when he tried to push off from the ground a group of nearby humanoids surrounded him, pulling him down by his hair and limbs and pinning him to the dirt, till by the time they finally let up he was covered in blood and bruises, his clothing reduced to a few hanging shreds of stained material. He was shocked by the severity of his miscalculation, though as he struggled to stand the humanoids showed no further signs of interference. Still they continued to observe him, silently, suggesting that any continued attempts at flight would be met with a similar response, and as it became clear that his wings were useless to him now, the anthropologist started to run across the square on foot instead, making headway this time as some of the creatures moved to let him pass, folding, he sensed, to his sheer persistence.

The anthropologist ran until he’d cleared the area, after which he joined another busy pedestrian highway where his sensors picked up a humanoid similar in appearance to the one he sought, or so it seemed according to his red-tinged visual data: he couldn’t say for certain whether the creature he zeroed-in on was, in fact, his previous antagonist, but the resemblance was close enough for him to disregard uncertainty, and it spurred him to run faster, while in the meantime the creature he chased wasn’t running, yet somehow it walked just fast enough to stay always a few yards ahead, as if by design, and, unable to catch up, though still able to hold the target in his sights, the anthropologist kept pace with it, till at a certain point in the pursuit it occurred to him that he had no clear plan of action were he to overtake the thing, and for a moment a sense of ridiculousness seized him, causing him to stumble before giving way to an overwhelming, inexplicable urge: an urge to prove to the creature—to all of these creatures—his own adequacy.

He sprinted with a new energy, making up for his brief slowing and rushing down the thoroughfare, now with enough force to convincingly push past the bodies in front of him, until finally, close to dropping from exhaustion, his pulse sounding loudly in his ears and static clouding his ocular field, the unmarked walkway opened into a clearing where a single-file group of humanoids stood, stretching out farther than the anthropologist could scan, an arrangement that he realized signaled the beginning of a line leading toward one of the dome’s interior walls. He scanned the nearest members of the crowd and read that his antagonist had inserted itself several bodies away from where he now stood, and so, cutting to the side, he tried to bypass the line in order to catch up with his target, though as he did the same collective roar that had greeted his attempt at flight came from the waiting creatures.

At once the humanoids in line—both those within the anthropologist’s ocular field, and, so it felt, those outside of it as well—turned, spitting and hissing, to inspect him from behind their spherical lenses. He decided that he must have violated protocol by walking next to the line instead of waiting in it, and he began to skulk measuredly back to its start, however this did nothing to settle the agitated crowd, which had become a twisting, single-file swirl of multi-colored garments and piercing, impersonal faces. Each face that the anthropologist could make out wore the same mask of contempt that had been on the face of his original assailant, and, studying this expression longer, on an infinitely larger sample size, the anthropologist felt revulsion across his entire array of bio-technical equipment, a revolt that made him double over in pain.

Bent at the waist, he scanned upward at the crowd: his visual data had lost its color, yet it appeared clear enough through grainy black and white that several of the nearest creatures had broken off from the line in order to face him in a half-circle. These creatures walked closer, snarling and gesturing, and the anthropologist panicked, grabbing blindly at the dirt in front of him until his hands returned clutching a flat, sharp-edged rock, which he began to wave in a wild arc. Continuing their approach, the humanoids accented their hissing and snarling with each step by holding their arms together in an “X,” then swinging them over their shoulders and hitting themselves on the back, and, once they’d come within inches of the anthropologist’s weapon, he suddenly understood the meaning of their communication. In an instant the anthropologist’s own arm fell limp, the sharp rock resting at his side, and then, with the same abandon he’d applied in warding off the humanoids, he reached his arm behind his own back, cutting at the base of his wings with the rock’s jagged edge.

He screamed, hacking brutally at skin and bone, while flecks of foam rose from his mouth; meanwhile the humanoids—both those that had circled around him and those still standing in line—observed his actions, and they responded by resuming their orderly arrangement, turning to face the distant dome wall. Unnoticed, the anthropologist continued his feverish cutting, until finally he stood with one severed wing in each hand, a mess of blood and sinew, his head thrown back and howling, and, after tossing aside what had since become two useless heaps of ruined, fleshy waste, he stumbled his way into the line as his body heaved; where moments before his presence had caused such an extreme reaction on the part of the humanoids, now, in spite of his mutilated appearance and tortured, gasping breaths, none of the creatures seemed disturbed by his joining them. Soon more came from the roadway and took their places behind him. More followed after that, and the line began to move in fitful stops and starts, its forward lurching movements signaled by the crashing of falling bodies heard at intervals in the distance, till eventually the anthropologist lost track of both when he’d joined the line and how long he’d been waiting since.

From that point on, time began to pass excruciatingly for him. Other than an initial searing shock he’d felt very little in the way of physical pain, in fact the severing of his wings had caused, if anything, a numbing effect—it was the waiting that became unbearable, the waiting and wondering as to when the line might move again. His sensory equipment was now only minimally functional, giving him no way to gauge precise time or distance, however, after a space of time that might have been anywhere from minutes to hours, his halting progressions finally led him far enough along from where he’d started that he was able to make out the pulsing of the dome wall ahead.

This close to what could only be the end of the line, the air crackled with the excitement and anticipation of the creatures around him, and the anthropologist couldn’t help but let a smile break over his own face. His readings had devolved into little more than a collection of two-dimensional shapes against a static background, but even still, scanning the humanoids in front of him and in back, the anthropologist realized that they were smiling too: smiling as what appeared to be lacrimal fluid leaked out from beneath their lenses, and in the midst of his observing those wet, smiling faces, the line began to move again, slowly and heavily, like the grinding together of two great stones.

The anthropologist staggered forward, gathering what remained of his strength and scanning upward, and while he read that the wall of bodies could now be no farther than ten yards away, he continued to smile, wide and hard, standing in the shadow of the massive structure that loomed high above him, the structure of which he himself would soon become a part. And then, in a cold eruption, tears began to flow free and unchecked down the length of his stretched, happy face, splashing and mingling with the dirt below. He lifted one foot in front of the other, his body trembling as he shuffled ahead once more, spurred on by the clear and irrefutable sense of purpose that waited in the wall before him, while doing his best to ignore the hollow, rasping whisper he could detect just beneath.

— srm, 12/13/07

RICHARDS

Fortunately though for Richards these sorts of dreams were easy to pick out, each time betraying themselves by the inevitable glitches in their surroundings: the fact that, for instance, the company employing Richards no longer existed, or that all of the customers he encountered spoke gibberish, and so it was no surprise that when he found himself inexplicably dressed in a purple, black, and teal uniform, reporting, it seemed, for an evening of work at a dilapidated multiplex movie theater, his first inclination was to think he was dreaming.

He stood in the theater’s deserted lobby, looking through its smudged glass windows at a blood-orange sky. All of the bulbs in the lobby’s display cases were burnt out, and the torn, yellowed movie posters inside were obscured by shadows; meanwhile both the box office and the concession stand were dark and un-staffed, as video screens in the upper corners of the high-ceilinged room looped trailers for films that had been released ten years earlier.

Confident, Richards smirked and began to shake his head back and forth, trying to wake up. These work dreams were never pleasant, and he saw no reason to slog through another one if he could help it, yet after several minutes of shaking his head to no effect his confidence began to wane, disappearing altogether when, suddenly, he was approached from around the far corner of the concession stand by a severe looking woman with grey, waxy skin and a tight helmet of curly brown hair. This woman was dressed in an off-white, button-front shirt tucked into a pair of stiff, khaki slacks. Neither young nor old, frown lines marked her scowling face, while a heavy ring of keys dangled from her right hip.

“I assume you’re here to work?” she asked. Her voice was flat and business-like.

“Yes…I am,” Richards said, cautiously, deciding he had no choice for now but to treat the situation as a real one. “Where would you like me to start?”

“Well…” the woman said, seeming to process his question as she spoke, “there’s almost an hour left before the next round of screenings, so I can’t use you in the box office or taking tickets…”

She stopped and considered the situation further, while Richards began to shift awkwardly in response, awaiting his assignment.

“Let’s see…concessions,” she said finally, motioning toward the concession stand. “You can start in concessions, right over there.”

Richards followed the woman’s gesture with his eyes, and he felt a bitter loneliness at the sight of the stand’s dimly flickering menus and signs.

“Concessions are the most important part of the theater,” the woman said. “They’re where we make nearly all of our profit, which means that working concessions requires close attention to company policy—employees absolutely, positively must upsell during each and every customer transaction. This is not an option; it’s a mandatory requirement for those employed by the theater, so please remember: no matter what else happens, you will be one hundred percent committed to upselling the entire time you’re behind a register.”

She fixed her eyes on Richards, firmly, and he responded with a stiff nod, intending to suggest his focus and comprehension. Then, apparently satisfied, the woman resumed her cool manner of speaking.

“A Large sizing of any item,” she said, “costs only twenty-five cents more than a Medium, and an Extra Large costs only twenty-five cents more than that. It’s your responsibility to keep our customers informed of these values, and your effectiveness will show in your sales numbers, meaning that if you forget, or for any other reason fail to carry out your responsibilities, your failure will be apparent from the office…readily apparent.”

Again she locked eyes with Richards, and once more he nodded, sweat beading across his forehead.

“Also,” the woman continued, frowning, “now that you’re here, I think I’ll move you from concessions to ushering when the current screenings start to let out—we’re short-staffed tonight, and it’s the only way we’ll be able to make sure that each room gets cleaned properly between showings…still, you’ll need to be back behind the concession stand in time for the next wave of customers—there’ll be about a fifteen-minute window—so you’ll have to clean quickly…get into each theater as soon as it empties, make it presentable, then get out. When you’re done, just come back to concessions and keep switching on and off until it’s time to close the stand—thirty minutes after the start of the last showings…oh, and speaking of company policy,” she paused, scrutinizing Richards through narrowing eyes as she pointed a finger at his midsection, “company dress code requires that all theater uniforms be tucked in while employees are on shift.”

Richards looked down and saw that he had left his own shirt un-tucked, perhaps in his haste to get to the theater, and—hands trembling—he quickly bunched the polyester top back into his pants. When he was finished the woman responded with a nod of approval, and without further instruction she turned and walked away, leaving him to take his place behind the concession stand. By this point the immediacy of the theater had, for Richards, outweighed the disconnectedness of his circumstance, and so without entertaining even the slightest possibility of doing otherwise he entered the stand through its small side door, picking up a faded purple apron he’d found draped over the counter and tying it around his waist, then moving to the nearest cash register where he again faced the lobby windows. Outside, the sky was dark, while inside all was quiet except for an occasional low rumble of bass coming from the screening rooms and the droning of the dated movie trailers playing endlessly above.

Standing there, Richards started trying to piece together a solid explanation for his being in the theater, something more credible than the fading possibility that this experience was simply a construct of his dreams, but his thoughts were disjointed and clumsy, stumbling over one another, each unable to follow the last, and, as he settled in at the counter, he soon allowed himself to be lulled by the lobby’s deadness, letting minute after minute pass, slowly, without further reflection, until the double doors to a screening room on his right—theater number two of six—burst open, and a bland, balding, middle-aged man emerged, striding toward the concession stand. The man wore a white polo shirt, tan slacks, and a pair of thin-framed glasses. As he approached his red face looked to be overcome with anger, while his eyes—piercing, yet unfocused, unseeing—were trained on Richards. Stopping in front of the cash register, the man placed both of his hands on the counter and leaned forward, his face turning an even deeper shade of red.

“I have something to say,” the man said, spitting out the words. “You can hear it, or not, but I have something to say.”

Richards, who’d been slumping before the man appeared, now stood up straight.

“You won’t like what I have to say, but I’m going to say it,” the man snarled, “and you can hear it or not.” His hands were pressed against the counter, their knuckles turning white. “Your pre-movie speed,” he spat, “You need to improve your pre-movie speed. What happened here tonight was unacceptable.”

Listening to the man, Richards found his own face growing red with irritation and he felt his own hands clench at his sides. Clearly the man’s accusations were unfounded: Richards hadn’t been present earlier in the evening, and therefore couldn’t have been involved in whatever slight or inefficiency the man experienced or believed to have experienced. In fact, this man was the first customer Richards had encountered since starting work at the theater, and he’d received nothing other than Richards’ complete and prompt attention. Logic dictated that if Richards were to explain this to the man the matter might be dropped, however he found it impossible to express his position in words—the whole situation was too complicated—and, since this man likely wouldn’t have the patience to hear him out, Richards tried offering a simpler excuse instead.

“Well sir,” he began, “as I’m sure you noticed, we were very busy earlier. There was a long line, and, while I try to serve each customer as quickly and efficiently as I can—scooping their popcorn into the appropriately sized container, retrieving their requested boxes of candy from the glass display case, filling their cups with ice and soda, informing them per company policy of the greater savings they’ll receive commensurate with the larger sizing of snacks and beverages that they purchase—even as I try my best there are times when the sheer number of customers is overwhelming and the speed of my service slows significantly, sometimes even grinding temporarily to a halt.”

The man glared at Richards, curling his upper lip and hissing through clenched teeth: “It wasn’t particularly busy tonight. You were simply…too…slow.” He parsed out the last two words individually, making sure Richards understood. “Too…slow.” He was trembling with rage now, and Richards was concerned that the man might reach out and strike him. “Again, you can hear me or not,” the man went on, “but what I’m telling you is the truth. You wasted precious time back there—fumbling with the butter flavoring dispensers, bungling with the soda machine, insipidly asking each of us whether or not we knew that the next larger sizing of our snack or beverage was available for an additional twenty-five cents. I’m telling you the truth, and for your own well-being I hope you take it as such.”

The man leaned in close, spittle from his proclamations flecking Richards’ cheeks and forehead, yet Richards stood his ground, furious at the man’s accusations, though more so at his own inability to mount an effective defense.

“Sir,” Richards said, “as I’ve already made clear, the policy of informing customers as to the value of purchasing larger sizes…upsizing it’s technically termed…is a policy of the company’s, rather than a creation or habit of mine or any other individual employee’s. The security of our employment here at the theater depends upon following this and all other company policies…”

Richards was interrupted as the man suddenly and violently moved his face even closer, as close as possible without making physical contact.

“I have something to tell you,” the man hissed. “You can hear me or not, but what I tell you is the truth. You were the one tonight who insisted on wasting time with your inane and incessant questioning, so don’t try to pass the blame. The blame is yours and yours alone.”

Richards stepped back slowly from the register and the man’s sneering face.

“You’ve made your point,” Richards mumbled, looking at the floor. “I have nothing else to say.”

“I’ve made my point, but I don’t think you’ve heard it,” the man said. “The matter isn’t settled. I will use the proper channels to make my grievance known and you will face the consequences. This is, as always, the truth.”

While the man finished speaking, the doors to theater two opened once again, and a small trickle of customers filed out, each of them glaring at Richards as they crossed the lobby to exit through its front doors; meanwhile, never taking his own eyes away from Richards, the angry man crouched down into a menacing arachnid pose, scuttling toward the exiting group and vanishing alongside them into the night. Shortly afterwards the lobby returned to its earlier state of quiet, and, when it looked as if theater two had cleared out completely, Richards untied his purple apron and placed it back on the counter. Then, walking out into the lobby, he opened theater two’s double doors, kicking down their doorstops with his right foot before passing through.

Inside, the screening room’s overhead lights were turned on, but the lighting they provided was considerably dimmer than the lighting in the lobby, and it took Richards’ eyes a few moments to adjust. Once they had, he peered through the shadows, noticing that the rows of seats in the room were empty and that the large screen they faced hung lifeless, while elsewhere pieces of popcorn, cardboard popcorn tubs, candy wrappers and soda cups lay strewn across the floor. Richards looked at the mess and realized he would need equipment in order to clean properly—a trash can, a broom, a dustpan—but he had no idea where to find these items, and, unsure what to do next, he figured it would be best to return to the lobby in search of the woman who’d given him his assignment; still, his run-in with the man at the concession stand had left him exhausted, and so, rather than going straight back out, he decided to sit for awhile in one of the room’s empty rows, hoping to regain some strength. After picking a chair at random he walked toward it and sat down, then tilted his head back and closed his eyes, enjoying a silence that was interrupted too soon by a sound from the room’s entrance.

At first Richards slid deeper into his seat when he heard the noise, fearing that it was the sound of someone coming to check on his progress; however, turning his head to see, the sound’s source instead looked to be a group of customers early for the next screening: three men in tuxedos and an elderly woman wrapped from head to toe in white furs. Richards watched this group walk down the center aisle, and while he watched he noticed that the tuxedoed men appeared to be in the elderly woman’s employ, the three of them kicking aside garbage from her path and otherwise seeming to be professionally concerned with her needs and comfort, until, as the group moved closer to his seat, he realized with a start that the woman herself was his fiancée’s grandmother, a woman whom he had met on several occasions, but occasions so few and infrequent that he had failed to place her on first sight. He suddenly remembered that the grandmother was scheduled to be in town visiting that week, and—he figured—must have coincidentally decided to take in a movie at the theater. With a mounting sense of anxiety, he wondered if she would recognize him.

Eventually the three tuxedoed men stopped at a cluster of seats across the aisle from Richards, guiding the elderly woman down the row with a great deal of fussing, gestures, and flattery, and, once she was seated, she pulled a pair of theater glasses from a white handbag, using them to squint up at the dead screen above. Meanwhile, sitting frozen with indecision, Richards considered whether or not he should take this opportunity to slip out of the room unnoticed, until, without warning, the creaking of the woman’s thin, cold voice reached out toward him, ending any possibility of a quiet escape.

“Young man,” the woman called out, “excuse me, young man!”

Richards—who had already been unable to act before being pinpointed by the elderly woman—became gripped by an even more rigid state of immobility, unsure whether to answer or to ignore her, to bolt out of the room or to stay seated, to hide under his chair or to stand up and boldly make himself known. Doing none of these things, he remained semi-slumped in his seat instead, his eyes locked onto the sticky, concrete floor.

“Young man!” the elderly woman called again. Her voice took on a sharp edge of impatience.

Richards turned his head weakly in her direction and saw that she was regarding him through the insectile lenses of her theater glasses. He met her gaze, nervously, and as he did a pleasant, yet lifeless voice joined in addressing him, sounding much closer than the woman’s.

“Excuse me, sir?” the voice asked.

Startled, Richards looked up to see one of the tuxedoed men standing over him.

“My employer would like a word with you,” the man said.

“Oh…of course,” Richards stammered, resignedly getting out of his chair and walking with the tuxedoed man to the row where the elderly woman sat.

“Well,” she said, watching Richards come toward her, “no need to stand around.”

She gestured at an empty seat next to hers, and Richards sat down to face her, while she stared back at him from behind her lenses.

“Ah yes,” she said. “I thought so. You’re the young man who’s planning to marry my granddaughter.”

“Yes…yes I am,” Richards said. “We’ve met before. I’m Richards.”

“Of course, of course,” the elderly woman said with a dismissive wave of her hand. “Now tell me, what are you doing wearing that hideous outfit?”

Richards paused to examine his purple, black, and teal polo shirt. “I’m…not sure to be honest,” he said, his voice wavering. “I work here, I guess.”

“Not a very decisive young man, are you?” the elderly woman asked. “Not at all.” She shook her head and clicked her tongue. “Now,” she said, “I haven’t spoken to my granddaughter yet, but I’ve only just arrived in town. Do the two of you have a wedding date picked out, or is this another matter that’s been left undecided?”

As Richards opened his mouth to answer, the lighting in the room grew even dimmer, while the screen hanging above them suddenly came alive with an advertisement for the concession stand. The advertisement’s accompanying soundtrack was deafening, and in an inexplicable fit of inspiration Richards rose from his seat and looked down at the elderly woman.

“As a matter of fact,” he stated, loudly and with confidence, trying to be heard over the roar of noise in the background, “our wedding has been postponed.”

The elderly woman appeared dismayed from beneath the veil of her theater glasses.

“Not to be too concerned however,” Richards continued, noticing her reaction. “The postponement has nothing to do with my relationship to your granddaughter. Instead, it has everything to do with the fact that I’m currently involved in a protracted legal dispute over the custody of my children…it’s become a long, drawn out case, and far too much of a distraction for the two of us to be married properly until the matter is settled.”

“A custody battle?” the elderly woman asked, sounding alarmed. “You have children? But, how is this possible?”

“To be honest,” Richards said, “I was married once already, briefly, before I met your granddaughter.”

“But I thought the two of you met in high school?” the elderly woman argued, incredulous.

“Ah,” said Richards, back-peddling, “I meant to say before we were engaged. Yes, your granddaughter and I have known each other since high school, and have been a couple most of that time, though we did have a short separation.”

“Oh,” the elderly woman said, peering up through her theater glasses, “I see.”

“Yes, my earlier marriage was an unfortunate decision on my part,” Richards said, with an emphasis on its decisive nature. “One in which I was an earnest and innocent participant. Please understand, I was led to believe that my first wife was a person of remarkable character, limitless love, and profound patience, however all three of these were, sadly and in fact, false pretences. Instead of ours being a lifelong partnership, I was abandoned after a few months without warning, shouldering all the debt we’d accumulated in that time and left on my own with the children.”

“What you are saying is truly remarkable,” the elderly woman gasped, standing up to face Richards on equal footing. “You managed to have not a child, but children in such a short span of time?”

Flustered, though trying not to let it show, Richards recovered. “Our children were adopted,” he said. “We adopted them as soon as we could after being married.”

“And if she left you as you’ve said, why then is there the need for a custody dispute?” The elderly woman moved her face closer to Richards’, threatening him with the proximity of her theater glasses.

“Well,” said Richards, “my first wife is an extremely vindictive and calculating individual. Her hope is to gain legal custody of the children, only to neglect them so that I’ll ultimately become their caretaker, though with no official status of my own.”

“You poor dear!” the elderly woman exhaled. “This truly sounds like a despicable situation. It’s no wonder your wedding to my granddaughter has been postponed. It seems as if there’s no other possible course of action.”

“No,” Richards murmured, lost in thought, “No, there isn’t.”

He was about to say something more, but before he could he was interrupted, as the thundering soundtrack corresponding with the movie trailers that were now playing—a sound to which he and the elderly woman had since become accustomed—came to a jarring halt. The film had snapped in the projector overhead, and, while a blinding white light replaced the images that had been on the screen, Richards froze; he looked up through the projection booth’s window and realized that he’d lost track of both time and place, and as he did he felt a coldness sinking in, understanding that this entire period of extended idleness could have been observed by anyone operating the projector.

“No, certainly not,” said the elderly woman.

“What?” Richards asked, dazed.

“Certainly there was no course of action other than to postpone the wedding,” the elderly woman said.

“The wedding hasn’t been postponed,” Richards replied, distracted, “where did you hear that?” Squinting up at the projection booth, he glimpsed what might have been a human silhouette perched above. “Of course we don’t have a specific date picked yet,” he said, still preoccupied with the booth, “but…I’m sorry, you’ll have to excuse me.”

Suddenly, Richards turned away from the elderly woman and her tuxedoed entourage, and he began walking quickly down the center aisle, toward the lobby.

“Young man!” the elderly woman called out after him. “Young man! This has been a most unsatisfactory conversation! You’ve contradicted yourself horribly and shown no capacity for action of any kind! I’m sorry to say that I’m very disappointed, and others will have to be informed of this disappointment!”

Already halfway up the aisle, Richards raised a hand in feeble acknowledgement without looking back, and when he reached the double doors he stepped cautiously into the lobby. Entering the brightness of the room, his thoughts raced—he was sure that he’d been observed from the projection booth, that someone had stood there watching him shirk his responsibilities, but then he couldn’t work out whether or not the silhouette he saw in his mind’s eye, framed against the illumination of the projection booth’s window, was a concrete memory or a product of his own fear, and furthermore, who was to say that the conversation with his fiancée’s grandmother couldn’t be considered a part of his ushering duties?

Maybe, he consoled himself, he had nothing to worry about, yet he cringed when, walking across the lobby, he saw the woman who’d originally given him his assignment pacing back and forth, looking for someone or something. Still, as nervous as he was, Richards had also become unavoidably fixated on his fiancée’s grandmother’s parting words, and as that fixation grew, so too did he begin to feel strangely intent on behaving otherwise.

“Excuse me,” he said, straightening up and walking directly toward the woman, “I’d like to complete my assignment, but I’m lacking the proper tools. Can you please tell me where I might find cleaning supplies?”

“Oh,” the woman said, looking startled at his sudden appearance, “of course. Take that hallway,” she pointed to the other side of the lobby, “go past the restrooms on your left and the office door on your right, and you’ll come to a roll-up door at the end. The dumpster is in there, as well as portable trash cans, brooms, mops, mop buckets and anything else you’ll need.”

“Thank you,” Richards said, relaxing a little at the easy nature of her response.

“Before you leave though,” she added, her business-like monotone returning, “there are two issues we need to discuss.”

Richards tensed again, feeling back on edge.

“First, your shirt.”

She pointed to his waistband, and Richards looked to see that his shirt had come un-tucked since their previous encounter.

“Oh…yes…sorry,” he mumbled, fumbling to tuck it back in.

“Second, it doesn’t seem, from the monitoring we’ve done, that you’re particularly suited for concessions.”

Richards felt a coldness creep across his body.

“However, it’s possible you may be suited for other duties.”

The two of them then stood in silence as Richards waited for her to say something more. The silence lingered heavily.

“And?” Richard finally said, “Is there anything else?”

“No,” the woman replied. “I told you, there were two issues that needed to be discussed before you left. Those two issues have been addressed.” Her eyes were elsewhere, and she craned her neck to look past Richards’ shoulder.

“Yes,” Richards said, “they have been, though I’m not sure I understood the second of the two. Am I being assigned to something else? Or should I clean the remaining theaters and return to the concession stand?”

The woman didn’t answer, scanning the lobby as if Richards wasn’t there.

“I’m sorry,” Richards tried again, “I’m a little confused. I’m not sure what you meant by ‘other duties.’ Is there something specific I should be attending to?”

Silence continued in the wake of his questioning, and the woman then turned and began to walk away.

“Wait!” Richards blurted out, more frantically than he’d intended. He put his hand on the woman’s shoulder and tried to make her stop.

The woman, who had long since vacated the conversation, now returned her attention to it, a wave of irritation rippling across her face as she fixed her eyes on Richards, sharply.

“You know as well as I do!” she snapped. “You know as well as I do!”

In an instant the woman’s face transformed into a mask of seething contempt—her skin took on a burnt, orange sheen, and her frown lines became deeper and darker, while her hair was now impossibly matted and tangled, and, as Richards shrank back from the woman’s anger, his quick deference seemed enough to subdue her outburst. Crouched down with his arms thrown up in front of his face, she’d again appeared to forget he was there, and, while her features recovered some of their previous neutrality, she turned once more to leave, this time without Richards making an attempt to stop her. Instead, watching the woman disappear around the corner of the concession stand, he decided it would be best to continue with his original course of action, sorting out any confusion only after his given assignment was complete; however, as he started off anxiously toward the cleaning supplies, he was brought up short by the hint of a presence behind him.

Glancing over his shoulder Richards saw, at the edge of the lobby next to theater two, an open door leading toward a stairway, a stairway which led, presumably, to the projection booths for each screening room. A shadow blanketed these stairs, and Richards sensed that he was being watched. Trembling, he quickly entered the hallway to which he’d been guided, passing a pair of restroom doors on his left, then, a bit further down, the office door on his right, and although he was tempted to stop and listen to the strange and muffled voices coming from the other side of the wall, he kept his brisk pace, walking instead until he faced a tall, wide roll-up door made of corrugated steel; leaning down, he pulled up on the metal handle welded to the door’s base, then ducked through as it trundled open.

Behind this door Richards entered an empty and cavernous room, lit faintly by a bare bulb hanging somewhere high above. He scanned the area, noticing first that a dark chasm divided the room’s floor into two halves, each bridged precariously by a rickety construction of frayed rope and rotting wooden planks. Then, across the room, he saw a second door on the other side, marked with a sign that read “Storage Closet.” Recognizing his destination he got ready to cross the bridge, yet he stopped when he realized that someone else was standing inside the room as well.

From the corner of the room on his left, on the same side where he’d entered, this person came forward, and as she did Richards cried out with a start, then nearly collapsed with relief when he saw that the person was, in fact, his own fiancée. The room’s shadows hid her face, but Richards felt convinced that it was her. She was dressed casually, in jeans and a sweater, giving the impression that she wasn’t there as an employee, however she was loitering in an area where no one but an employee would have reason to go, causing Richards some confusion.

“I didn’t realize you’d started working here,” she said. Her voice had a musical quality to it, like the breaking of glass. It soothed Richards and put him at ease.

“I only just started,” he said. “This is my first shift. It’s encouraging to see you though.”

“Is it?” his fiancée asked wistfully, as if she were meaning to say something entirely different.

“Yes,” said Richards, with enthusiasm, “yes it is.”

“I spoke to my grandmother earlier,” his fiancée said. “She told me she saw you, and that you had some strange things to say.”

“Did she?” said Richards. “Did she tell you what I said? Why she thought it was strange? Or only that she thought what I said was strange?”

“She was mostly concerned with ‘discrepancies,’ discrepancies in the content of your speech, but in your manner as well. Sometimes you appeared shy and retiring, as if a sharp look was all it would take to make you crumple up and blow away, yet other times you were blustery and arrogant, full of posturing and bitterness, though both of these extremes sound like they might have been nothing more than shells…and not even shells of a kind that, by necessity, carry anything inside.”

“And did this seem strange to you?” Richards asked his fiancée.

“In a sense it seemed very strange, and in another there was nothing strange about it at all. In fact, one might argue that my grandmother’s expectation of consistency is itself strange…or even impossible…that those instances where she sees consistency are constant only because she sees them that way, which is why I say that in one sense there was nothing strange about it at all, either what you said or how you said it. The strangeness, I think, lies in the fact that our only constancy is itself discrepancy…every instant negating the last and refuting the next, an unending and insurmountable tangle of insincerity.”

“Yes,” nodded Richards. “Yes, I agree with you completely, and in fact sensed much of the same thing when I spoke to your grandmother. It was as if I had started out climbing a ladder with a definite sense of up and down, but then suddenly I was spun in a million different directions, and up and down disappeared, leaving nothingness on all sides. But even that isn’t right: there weren’t any sides left for nothing to be. I must admit I thought it was strange myself, but thinking about it now I realize that it was no different than conversations I’ve had previously, some even earlier tonight, meaning the strangeness wasn’t specific to the incident…to any of the incidents…but a total strangeness, enveloping all things, everywhere, at all times…”

“Consider this,” his fiancée said, as if singing, “We’ve known each other for quite awhile…or at least it seems like we have…or at the very least we say that we have, or even less and more precise than that, we are saying that we have at this moment…and if we accept this, then certain other statements follow. We might say we trust in one another…not only a trust in the sense of giving ourselves up to the good judgment of the other’s actions, but a trust that the other is and acknowledges us the same. We might also say that we anticipate one another, in the way we’re situated always to look forward…to a time when our life’s circumstance has reached the point where we envision it to be headed, when we can finally take a breath and stay in place. Most importantly though, we might say that we love one another, and not only one another, that we love others as well. I, for instance, might say I love my grandmother. Perhaps in time you might say this too. But have you noticed that you can’t see my face? And do you know that there are shadows crawling across yours when I look at you? Well, what then? We find ourselves back in the realm of discrepancy.”

“Indeed,” Richards said, scratching at the stubble on his cheek and mulling over his fiancée’s words. “What you say makes sense, though I don’t see how it changes our situation. There’s little we can do about it, other than to try and link whatever discrepancies we can into something solid enough to stand on. Your grandmother, I think, would agree.”

“Yes,” said his fiancée, “she would, as would yours and your mother as well.”

“And my father, and my brother also.” Richards added.

“Yes, and the woman who gave you your assignment tonight…I believe she is the assistant theater manager,” his fiancée said.

“Yes,” Richards nodded enthusiastically, “and the customer who was upset with my service at the concession stand.”

“Yes, him too,” his fiancée agreed, “not to mention the man who’s been watching us from the doorway.”

Richards looked at the opening made by the raised roll-up door and saw a shadow looming from the hall. He felt a shock of fright, but maintained a manic grin, the comfort of his fiancée’s proximity competing with his fear.

“Yes, yes!” Richards shouted in a shrill attempt at bravado, “All the women and all the men, each and every one of them! And now,” he pointed across the chasm with a flourish, “I need to enter the supply closet and retrieve some cleaning equipment…I’ve been horribly neglecting my ushering duties and I don’t even want to think about how far behind I’ve gotten. I’ve enjoyed this conversation though, and I promise we’ll talk more as soon as I’m done.”

Richards turned away from his fiancée and approached the bridge that hung over the chasm, but its shoddy construction and the dubious quality of its parts made him hesitate; looking down into the darkness it was hard to gauge how deep the chasm went, though it was definitely too wide to leap over, at least with any certainty of success, and when he gingerly placed one foot on top of the bridge it felt as if it would give under his full weight. Still, he thought, cleaning equipment and other supplies had to be in constant demand at the theater, and he could hardly be the first person to walk across. With this in mind, he placed a second foot on the bridge, and as he did he felt it sway and creak.

“This looks sturdy enough, don’t you think?” he asked his fiancée. Looking back, he smiled weakly.

“No,” she said, shaking her head. The voice she spoke with was one he had never heard before. “No, it doesn’t.”

Still looking over his shoulder, and with his weak smile straining across his lips, Richards watched his fiancée come forward, and for an instant he could see her face, shining and clear, while the bridge groaned and buckled beneath him. Then, forgetting the bridge, he turned around, stumbling back in the direction he’d come from, feeling as if he were at once both nothing and nowhere, yet still something, still somewhere, and, as he cast his arms out into the darkness for balance, he was again able to see his fiancée’s face, clear and distinct, while his own face lightened, his fear—for the moment—lifted, and for the first time his weak smile grew strong.

— srm, 11-09-07