This is a story I've been working on for a few years. It's not that long because on average I'll write about two pages every year. They're single spaced pages so.... go me.
Anyway, here it is! It's not done...
“Oomph!” she made a noise when the impact came. The feeling wasn't entirely what she expected, although that's kind of what she expected. She knew that she couldn't really know for sure what death and dying were like, but that didn't stop her from making a few predictions, one of which came true—she had verified that after death, everything was, indeed, dark.
Among the things she either falsely predicted or didn't predict at all, three sensations were more glaringly present than the others:
-That the darkness somehow felt familiar. It was like being in a giant ball made out of a completely black blanket that was floating in an empty, infinitely large room. She knew she had seen this before. But where?
-That death, for some reason, felt so... feely.
-That death—and this was the strangest one for her to think about—smelled like dry grass floating in hot, heavy air.
However, despite the surprises, she was pretty disappointed with the entire experience and deemed it as being much too anti-climactic.
“Um... Excuse me?” said a monotone, disembodied voice.
Great, there IS a God, she thought. Now I have to sit through his insufferably pointless theatrics.
“Hello?” the voice spoke again, hollow and too unsure, for her tastes.
“Yes, hi. I'm sorry, but can we skip the whole, 'Looking up my name in your big book thing? We both know that you know everything that happens before it happens. You knew how many times every single butterfly wing would flap, you already had a name for every hemorrhoid before they plagued the asses of your creation, blah blah blah. Just tell me if I'm going to Heaven or Hell. You know what? Don't even tell me, skip that too, just toss me there.”
A long, empty silence. Silence in death sounds pretty windy, she thought.
“What book?” The voice asked.
“Wait. You don't have a book? Well then I don't think you can be the Christian God if you don't have some type of book. Who are you then? Krishna? Vishnu? Zeus?”
“My name is Eric.”
“Eric?! Death was supposed to make sense! Not be terribly confusing! What spiritual realm am I in exactly?”
“Why are your eyes closed?”
The philosophical/spiritual implications of the question caught her off guard. How could her spirit (or whatever) have closed eyes? While she pondered the significance of this question, she felt a sudden rush of energy compressing her being, with all the force of a metaphysical entity, into a single point of reference. Then, it was as if all of existence (or lack thereof) shook, vibrated, was ripped apart all around her, inside her, and she became wrapped in a sudden terror that was like no emotion she had ever felt before. The darkness was subsiding, death was dying, and a mysterious , hellish light burned away every single preconceived notion of death into an impossibly vague ash. It was beautiful yet horrifying.
After what seemed like an eternity, she used her shattered point of reference to “look around” in this new realm, and was shocked by a truth so incalculably anti-climactic and boring that it made her want to die twice. She was still alive, having her eyelids pried open by two dirty fingers, and draping like a beach towel on a drying rack over the extended bicep of an abnormally tall, wide, and muscular man who broke her fall mid-flex.
“Excuse me, sir, but I'm trying to kill myself.” She said like she would've had her hands on her hips if she were standing.
“I think you failed,” responded Eric in a genuine, stating-the-fact-of-the-matter voice. His ugly cracked lips compressed and stretched as the words came out.
“Yes, obviously I failed. Now put me down!”
Eric crouched down, angling his arm out so she could slide to the ground.
“Well, I'm sorry I got in the way.” Then, as an afterthought, “You shouldn't kill yourself.”
“And why not?” she said, dusting off her sundress and finding a shoe that had fallen off.
This gave him pause. He never really thought about it before. The idea of remaining alive was never an issue for him. The fact that somebody else was struggling over the choice of, “should I die or not?” seemed ridiculous.
“Um... I actually don't know.”
“Me neither! I tell you, I've read almost all the books, talked to all of those old, happy, exuberant people who are in their 70's but look like they're in their 30's, and have done all of the spiritual exercises. And no one has been able to help me solve my problem.”
A few, empty seconds passed before he asked, “Your problem?”
“Yes! My problem. For the past year, I have continuously found myself stuck right on the verge between two different things. The things themselves always change, but it's as if I can never cling onto one or the other.”
Eric had no notion of what she was talking about at this point. But he figured that maybe if he should try to look sympathetic and understanding. He moved the features of his face until he was pretty sure he nailed down the expression (forcing emotions was always so much harder for him) but it sort of just looked like he was admiring the cuteness in something small and fragile—in a very sad way.
“Um... are you okay?”
“Yes. Go on.”
“Are you sure? You look like you just ate a cockroach.”
“I'm fine. What are you stuck between?”
“Well, yesterday was the worst of all. Every time I put on a jacket, it would immediately become too hot. Then when I would take the jacket off it would become too cold. All day I switched between wearing a jacket and not wearing one. It was excruciating. And then today, the things I was stuck between finally sent me to my breaking point.”
“Which was?” he asked. He finally started to understand how she doesn't fully explain a point until he inquired about it further.
“I couldn't decide whether to kill myself or not!”
Eric knew that this conversation was over his head, and frankly was a little tired of putting the pieces together. And why should he have to? She was a complete stranger who looked like she came from the same rich, over-privileged womb of humanity that had cursed at Eric his entire life for the odd shape of his... well... his entire body. Those were the people who had the comforts and luxuries that allowed them to be bored long enough to contemplate suicide. Eric figured that's why he's never understood suicide—he hasn't had the luxury to sit and think about it.
The girl stood there, her facial expression frozen in an inquiry-expectant fashion. Her mouth gaped just enough to slide in a banana peel and her eyebrows pushed themselves up her head like they hated the smell of her eyes.
In fact, he continued to realize, this girl hasn't showed one sliver of curiosity about Eric's life. Maybe he was in a rush. Maybe he was in a deep, meditative stroll, contemplating a very dire cross-roads in his life. Or maybe HE was, in fact, on his way to kill HIMself. Of course none of those are true, but she didn't know that! She was only craving attention towards her problems—and what the fuck kind of a problem was that anyway, why the hell wouldn't she just get a lighter jacket—like all the people living in their plazas built next to shimmering ponds where there are plenty of fish to catch and bears to skin for hide pelts and where carnivals pay monthly visits and the man working the candy stand always gives free candy to the children because he makes enough mon—
“Um, your lips are turning blue. Honestly, are you okay?”
—and the dead leaves get caught on eastern winds in the fall so they never need to be cleared out of gutters or gardens and the soil is probably always fertile and the apple trees—
“Eric! Get up! Jesus Christ you're heavy!”
—and their parents never disown them, their brothers are never drafted into the military to pay off debt, and their skin is all smooth and teeth are straight—
“Help! Somebody, please help!”
—and every day probably ends with a beautiful sunset, where it makes the clouds look like the juice from beets and the moon always rises immediately after and it is never, ever new.
Lola hates a lot of things. She hates the taste of dates and doesn’t understand people who like them. She hates when birds wake her up in the morning and how she could pass a thousand people on a street and not a single one of them will look her in the eyes. She hates the taste of ale (but she loves the feeling of being drunk), cold winds, her inability to inflict physical pain on people, and she especially hates when people inflict physical pain on her, although this is more out of jealousy. But the core of her hatred, the absolute fiery center of her contempt, is for heat.
She loathes heat, and every cursed phenomenon that comes packaged along with it—sweat, apathy, sunburns, rotting smells, mirages, heat waves from sand and pavement, evaporation, ash, thermodynamics… and so here in the late afternoon sun, trying to seal her back against the decaying brick wall which she tried jumping off hours earlier just to catch the final vestiges of shadow while also keeping an eye on Eric’s impossibly huge body, she once again, felt like killing herself.
Angling her head up to see the lip of the wall, she shuddered at the idea of the climb. The bricks had been baking in the sun the whole day and she still had cuts from the climb up. She peered over at Eric. Christ almighty, what is he? She thought. He lay catatonic in the peach colored sands. Heat waves slithered out of the ground and threatened to carry him off into some wavy, ether realm. She knew that if she wasn’t going to kill herself today (maybe tomorrow?) she had to do something about this. She didn’t know where the thought came from; it was probably just human compassion. “Simplicity, patience, compassion,” came Lao Tzu’s voice from a book she had read. She couldn’t remember the rest. “Okay, what can I do?” she seemed to ask the wall she leaned against. It continued to wall in utter silence.
She gazed left, then right; a crumbling thatch house with old irrigation ditches snaking through the ground. Weeds grew from the ditches and the sand was old and hard. She looked back at Eric. His chest moved, but almost incomprehensibly. She shot her eyes upwards, back at the top of the wall, still considering suicide as a viable, appropriate option. She reached her arm up to the closest brick—the wall was highest over to her left and lowest to her right like a narrow staircase—and grabbed the top of the brick. She yelped when it seared her skin and she yanked her hand away, frantically whipping it up and down. There was just no way. Her only option was to live, and do something about Eric. “Fuck!” she resigned.
She moved to the corner of the wall and looked around: no people. The sands and patches of grass remained vast and inactive. Other than a buzzing insect and the occasional hawk, there was no other life. Lola pulled her arms into her dress and removed it, exposing bra, panties, and slightly pink skin like a bloody sock that’s been washed. On the ground near her feet she found a sharp stone and punctured the bottom rim of her flower print dress. She pulled until she had a half-inch loop. While she worked the heat began to buzz around her naked skin. She could almost hear how hot it was today, and uncomfortable globs of dust began to mate with the sweat already appearing on her body.
Lola fashioned the top hole of the dress around her crown and tightened it with the loop she had cut. The effect was a shoddy, makeshift poncho which could at least keep her head and back shaded as she looked for a way to help Eric.
When she stepped away from the wall, the heat was so oppressive that she had to fight back a series of urges to immediately jump back into the shade. She felt it pushing against the poncho and stabbing her bare ankles. “Tomorrow, I’m killing myself tomorrow,” she comforted herself. Over at Eric’s bulbous body, he didn’t look good. His breathing was ragged and narrow. She thought about how implausible it was that the amount of air he was pulling in was enough to satiate his entire body. Plus the heat was starting to burn his skin and sweat was drenching his clothes. Looking at him closely, she saw more aspects of his hideousness. In certain spots at his arms and neck, the skin was purity white and craterous; indented with mysterious miniature concavities which plastered the two words, “MOON MAN,” in capitalized, red letters across Lola’s inner-eye. She compromised a snicker.
Taking in her surroundings for the 100th time, Lola walked over to the irrigation ditches, caught her toe on a stubborn root, and tripped into the ditch landing on her hands and knees. Raising her palms and cursing every god she could think of to, “a thousand years of shit!” she found another sharp rock and proceeded to wrench it into the dirt. The top layer seemed like a shell which fractured into larger pieces. Underneath, the dirt was softer. She stabbed, pulled, stabbed some more, feeling the dirt collect in the miniscule amount of space under her fingernails—she didn’t bite her nails, but instead peeled them off with her fingers at the slightest margin of whiteness. After some seconds of digging, she arrived at a warmish, moist layer of dirt which made her dig more ferociously with the rock. The dirt became more granule-y the deeper she went. Eventually she picked up a handful and held it against her sweat covered, reddening arm. The moisture was certainly comforting. But is it lifesaving?
She immediately started to feel like this was a stupid idea, but she might as well finish it. She grabbed handfuls, walked over to Eric, and started caking the moist dirt around his head, first creating an earthy compressor. Then, after a few more trips back and forth, a very thin dirt helmet. His heat and body odor radiated off of him like a miasma of rotting garbage. She thought of another book she had read which told her to savor the blessings of every moment. The more she thought about this moment, however, the more she hated it. Every one of her senses were miserable. She knew that if she were born with a 6th sense, she would hate that one as well.
When Eric had a compact helmet, she started to layer the dirt on top of his bare patches of skin—dropping the dirt on the white pieces of skin from a distance, as she had no idea as to the contagiousness of that area. After some time of mindlessly walking back and forth, she noticed with a shot of frustration that the dirt on Eric’s head had already been dried by the heat, and now the dirt itself was rising in temperature. In her mind, this spelled imminent death for him, for herself, and all of humanity. “Welp, you do what you can. Sometimes the freaks of nature live,” she turned on her heel and started walking away, “and then sometimes you die alone in the desert under ridiculous and unexplained circumstances with nobody but a walking suicide to give you a dirt mask for a grave. See ya in hell!” But as she walked away, the view of the seething, hungry desert slapped her in the face. There was nothing but heat death out there in the sands, and she realized with dread that she would rather live until she could find her own, more comfortable way to die than die by heat. Maybe she could find some poisonous but super delicious berries somewhere, or take a bath to death.
She turned back to the wall, and slumped against it, waiting out the heat in utter and complete misery. Every so often, she would stand up and grab more dirt, place it against her hot face and it would be a temporary reprieve, yet enough to keep her from gnawing Eric’s face off, whom she concluded was entirely at fault for putting her in this position in the first place. But despite her contempt, she was still able to find enough compassion hidden in the recesses of her soul to fling wet clumps of dirt at his prostrate body.
Other than that, there was not much to do but sit and wait for something—anything—to happen. Lola passed the time by thinking about her life. Her memory played itself out like a long strand of vomit colored ribbon. In the beginning, there was childhood. Fearful, uncomfortable and sporadic. Dreams had more fluidity than the life of baby Lola. Past childhood was her teenage years, a hotbed of fits, tantrums, complaints—all of the chaos that existed externally in Lola’s childhood was internalized in her teenage years and came out with a vengeance. Lola played the role of teenager like a rattlesnake being cast as a babysitter. She filled the lives of those around her with chagrin, contempt and antagonism. At the time she did not associate her teenage violence with her terrible childhood, but in retrospect it made perfect sense. She had long since forgiven herself for that.
The end of teenagerism brought upon a lifetime supply of healing and self-identification. Lola, on the latter cusp of becoming an adult, now felt that her destiny lacked the straightforwardness which she felt everybody else in the world had. At some point in the middle of her teenage years, she became obsessed with books. Specifically, she read books from older eras such as Lao Tzu, Confucius, Ben Franklin, Ghandi, Marcus Aurelius—the people writing these books always finding a path of righteousness, always so fucking confident in their methods for living that they honestly provided little to no catharsis for Lola at all. If anything, they strengthened her resolve to end her own life. If people were living like this in the world, what possible hope did she have to be happy? Every day was a whirlwind, every moment was a struggle to fight through whatever foulness beset her at the time, anticipating the foulness of tomorrow.
The books were really just reasons to cement her convictions in her self-termination. After all, when her parents had—“Wait… my life is flashing before my eyes! I’m dying you asshole!” she accented her statement with a particularly huge clump of dirt which she lobbed with all her strength (which was much less than she thought she had) at Eric’s body. The clump broke apart mid flight and only lightly splattered his elbow.
And then Lola fell into a sort of trance. Time blurred. The dirt caking her hands began to vibrate against her palms, then slowly moved up her hands, turned inward, travelled along her veins, until her entire arms were titillated by a foreign prickliness. She felt a certain pulsing inside of her, pleasurable and cathartic. At some point she didn’t realized, the heat itself also disappeared. A part of her knew where this was going. A part of her knew she was dying. It only made sense. She hadn’t eaten or had any water for at least a day and a half. Closing her eyes seemed like a good idea. But wait—her eyes were already closed. When did that happen? She doesn’t remember. The last thing she clings onto is the sound of a calm wind in the distant canyons. Wind too far to feel, but close enough to hear. And then, like the color blue steadily turning into the color purple, the wind itself undergoes a transformation with no clear threshold being crossed—it is now the sound of dripping water. Steady, calm, drips onto a rock. A cool, lazy breeze. That’s nice, she thinks.
Eric dreamt of a cave. In his dream, the jagged teeth of the mouth of the cave cut out the edges from the bright light outside. Behind him, the throat of the cave was so absent of light that the blackness seemed like a solid thing. Coldness seeped out of the blackness and he felt like it was digesting him.
He blinked. It wasn’t a dream. He shot upright, eyes wide open. An ocean of panic dropped on top of him and he was immediately on his feet. Instinctively, his hands patted his body, making sure it was all there. His hear t pounded. Calm down. Just try to calm down. Fuck fuck, okay, just stay calm, you should be use to this by now. Eric traced the familiar spiral of fear and paranoia until he found himself with his hands on his knees, unable to catch his breath. With legs made of mud, he tried to force himself to stand up straight and take in long, slow breaths. Let’s just find out where you are now, okay? It’s happened before—but never this frequently, god dammit. The last time Eric’s entire body had suddenly appeared in a different place was three weeks ago. Before that, it was a month. Before that, it was half a year and before that it had happened at two year intervals for the last ten years.
The intervals made no sense and only added to his panic. There was never any pattern to it, it seemed to be completely spontaneous. The first time it happened, Eric assumed it was sleepwalking. Only, if it was sleepwalking, he had walked about 500 miles from where he fell asleep. The fourth time it happened, he had paid a ***** a whole lot of money just to follow him around and, if he was sleepwalking, to wake him up any means necessary. For three days she followed him around with a bucket of ice-water and a bat. Then one day, he simply awoke in a place he’d never been to, and never saw the ***** again.
He had no idea what to make of it. Its source was unknown, purpose unknown. The people he told didn’t believe him. He thought, however, that when he suddenly disappeared they must have believed him at that point. But how could he know? He never saw them again either.
Three weeks. What could that possibly mean? Why is it get—his thoughts died in place. As he was starting to ward off the panic, a new, crushing wave of confusion drowned out what little sense of reason he clung onto. A pile of something was slumped against the wall of the cave, sprawled and heaving and pink. He edged forward, disbelief making every step heavier and heavier. The girl, that fucking girl, was right there in the cave with him. Leaning against the rocky, jutting wall with her left arm over her bare thigh and her right arm indenting the sand, her chest struggled up and down with every breath. For some reason, she was almost naked, covered in dirt, and wearing some type of weird, mangy shawl around her head. Her eyelids were shut.
Eric stood there in dumb confusion for some time. Before today, he felt as if he’d finally been starting to learn how to simply ride through the nightmare of his life like a surfer trapped in a tsunami. Now, however, his distrust of reality grew to such depths that the very air he breathed tasted hostile.
“What—what are you—” the rest of the question fell back into his lungs, too heavy to lift.
“Oh great, there is a God!” said Lola, the words coming out like she were being woken up much too early for school. She opened her eyes. Eric stood there before her, half silhouetted from the light outside. Dirty, sweaty, and disgusting, his face wore all of the fear and uncertainty of somebody who is entirely undivine in any way. Lola was still alive. “Fuck!” she said.
Cool water filled the cracks in Eric’s hands. He rubbed them together to wash the dirt off, and then collected enough in his palms to splash his face. He was covered in dirt for some reason.
“I’m sorry, I just have to ask—is there something about the sentence, ‘I want to die,’ that confused you?” Lola chided. “If you think you’re being a hero by carrying me up here, you’re not.” Lola pictured Eric waking up out of his dirt blanket, disoriented. She pictured him eyeing her helpless body in the sand and believing himself to be a self-righteous do-gooder. She pictured him roughly manhandling her across the dessert, up a hill and into a nice shaded cave. She pictured the welts and bumps on his white skin scraping against her half naked body. She shuddered, rubbing her hands down her arms.
Eric was about to speak, but exhaled a large, exasperated gasp instead. He was suddenly tired. So, so tired of it all.
“I mean, what did you expect to happen? That I’d wake up, kiss you on the cheek , say, ‘Oh gee mister you sure are a swell guy for helping little old me!’” A thought struck her and she sucked in air, “Oh my god, did you—did you do something to me when I was unconscious?”
Eric craned his neck to look at her. “What?” was all he could think to say.
“You took advantage of me,” Lola’s pink hand went to her mouth.
“Listen… I haven’t even touched you once since I—”
“Why am I in my underwear?!”
“I don’t know! I found you like that!” Eric covered his face in his hands. “Please, just please stop talking. Please. I’m exhausted, I’m scared and I have no idea where I am.” Although, he often had no idea where he was. Eric slumped down on the ground with his elbows on his knees. He gazed at the sand and registered how varied every grain really was. There were sharp, flat specks which glittered in the half-dark, salmon colored specks which seemed to be the majority and ugly brownish specks which sat lazy and sloth-like amongst them both. He stuck his finger into the mixture and moved it in a slow spiral. Each grain scattered out of the way to reveal a layer slightly darker than the one on top. He continued this movement at a snail’s-pace until the spiral came to the end of his reach. Lola had remained silent. He looked up at her.
She was studying him like a dog studies an unfamiliar noise. When his gaze met hers, she looked down. After some tense, noticeably empty seconds, she walked unsurely to the dripping water, lay on the ground beneath it and positioned her mouth to catch the drops falling into the sand.
She took mouthfuls at a time, moved her face out of the way, swallowed, then returned underneath the drips. Every swallow was greedy and accompanied by great, satisfied breaths.
Eric watched her, then stared back at his spiral. He placed a giant hand print right in the middle. From the mouth of the cave, he could see the sky outside turning a copper-mixed blue. He realized he hadn’t really looked outside yet to see where they were, but a part of him didn’t even care anymore. Maybe she feels a little bit like this, he thought.
Lola moved away from the drips, apparently quenched. She tried to think of something to say. This was one of the very rare occasions throughout her whole life that she was at a loss for words.
Eric broke the silence first, “Listen—” and then he paused, choosing his words carefully. Lola propped her head up on her elbow. “You don’t look well.” Lola was about to burst out in laughter at the tremendous hypocrisy of that stupid, stupid sentence but caught herself. His voice carried notes of utter seriousness which affected her. “This place is going to get cold,” this place, like I fucking know where the hell we are, “and you—um—you need to cover yourself up.”
It was as if Lola suddenly became shy of her nakedness. She sat up and pulled the faux dress-poncho over her torso. She made quick, tiny circular motions in the air with her right index finger. Eric took the hint and turned around.
She pulled her ruined dress down over her head and fitted it semi-appropriately around her neck. Her arms found the holes, but there was a slice going right up the front, revealing a sliver of her midriff. She closed the gap by overlapping the flaps. It was damp, dirty and smelled of body odor. The feeling of her rough dress on her skin suddenly reminded her of how utterly distanced she was from happiness or comfort. Despair choked her from the inside but she tried not to let it show. Eric’s face was just—so—pitiful. It made her feel amateurish. Like she was with somebody who had mastered sadness to an absolute extreme. “Okay,” she croaked. Eric turned back but didn’t meet her eyes.
“Are you hungry?”
“Starving,” she heard herself say.
“I am too,” he responded. And then, shockingly, the corners of Eric’s mouth twitched momentarily up into a smile. It was a defeated, slap-happy smile, but a smile nonetheless. “Well,” he said, pushing himself up to his feet like a rusty machine cranking to life. “Let’s find out where the hell we are, shall we?” Eric reasoned that once past a certain point of despair and confusion, life tends to take on a soft buttery feel. A warm cloud of ecstasy vibrated his chest. He took his first, born-again steps towards the mouth of the cave ready to find either an entire army of starving hyenas, or a field of two billion cooked sausages on plates with steamy mashed potatoes on the side. None of it mattered anymore and he would have welcomed anything with stupid, hilarious indifference. With new found strength in his legs, he stepped into view of the outside. Greeted by red, jagged cliffs which bore down on an unusually clear river, he could see red mud caking the bed all the way through the canyon until the river bent towards the left. If he stared towards the direction the river was flowing, he was on the left side of the stream, which he deduced as being north, judging by the setting sun. Below him was about fifty feet of steep, loose gravel which gave way to cliff. With some small amount of pain, he remembered a similar river during boyhood. Long, mysterious canyons, treacherous cliffs, toes stained red from hours of mountaineering—
Eric peeked upwards out of the cave mouth, where the steep hillside leveled out about twenty feet above him.
He peeked back inside the cave. “Can you walk?” he asked Lola.
She made her way to her feet and strode over to him, taking five whole steps before the blood rushed to her legs and she almost stumbled. Eric caught her by the wrist. “Just wait here for a second,” he said.
“Fuck that! You’re not a guide!” she said with regained fervor.
The elixir-like water was bringing color back underneath Lola’s skin and that color was angry pink. She bore into Eric with yellow supernova-like eyes.
Whatever was happening, she was on-board. Eric placed a tepid foot into the gravel and found decent purchase. It was shards of something smaller than shale and easier to break apart. The walk up wasn’t too steep, but his weight was worrisome. With careful planning—he had obviously been in similar situations—he took no step without assurance. Lola watched with small drips of awe. Such a practiced monster, she thought.
“Honestly, we might have to come back to this cave and sleep here for tonight. There’s really no point in both of us going,” he said.
Lola thought for a moment and then said, “Yeah, think about this from my perspective. I wake up in a mysterious cave with a mysterious giant man in a mysterious area while said giant man refuses to tell me where we are, and now he isn’t letting me leave the cave. Yeah, you’re not ethically capable of taking initiative for my decisions right now.” The noise of the river rose above some of her syllables but he understood the message. For the first time, Eric considered the fact that she still thought he must have carried her all the way to this cave. Soon, however, she would see miles in every direction and not recognize any of it. They could be in another country for all he knew. Sooner or later, he would have to explain what was happening and god only knows how this girl would take it. For all he knew, he had just destroyed every semblance of her old life. Anything that she was connected to, or identified with from her life was now gone.
As for Lola, she figured there were only a few hours of golden sunlight left, and that each hour was going to become stranger than the last.
Anyway, here it is! It's not done...
“Oomph!” she made a noise when the impact came. The feeling wasn't entirely what she expected, although that's kind of what she expected. She knew that she couldn't really know for sure what death and dying were like, but that didn't stop her from making a few predictions, one of which came true—she had verified that after death, everything was, indeed, dark.
Among the things she either falsely predicted or didn't predict at all, three sensations were more glaringly present than the others:
-That the darkness somehow felt familiar. It was like being in a giant ball made out of a completely black blanket that was floating in an empty, infinitely large room. She knew she had seen this before. But where?
-That death, for some reason, felt so... feely.
-That death—and this was the strangest one for her to think about—smelled like dry grass floating in hot, heavy air.
However, despite the surprises, she was pretty disappointed with the entire experience and deemed it as being much too anti-climactic.
“Um... Excuse me?” said a monotone, disembodied voice.
Great, there IS a God, she thought. Now I have to sit through his insufferably pointless theatrics.
“Hello?” the voice spoke again, hollow and too unsure, for her tastes.
“Yes, hi. I'm sorry, but can we skip the whole, 'Looking up my name in your big book thing? We both know that you know everything that happens before it happens. You knew how many times every single butterfly wing would flap, you already had a name for every hemorrhoid before they plagued the asses of your creation, blah blah blah. Just tell me if I'm going to Heaven or Hell. You know what? Don't even tell me, skip that too, just toss me there.”
A long, empty silence. Silence in death sounds pretty windy, she thought.
“What book?” The voice asked.
“Wait. You don't have a book? Well then I don't think you can be the Christian God if you don't have some type of book. Who are you then? Krishna? Vishnu? Zeus?”
“My name is Eric.”
“Eric?! Death was supposed to make sense! Not be terribly confusing! What spiritual realm am I in exactly?”
“Why are your eyes closed?”
The philosophical/spiritual implications of the question caught her off guard. How could her spirit (or whatever) have closed eyes? While she pondered the significance of this question, she felt a sudden rush of energy compressing her being, with all the force of a metaphysical entity, into a single point of reference. Then, it was as if all of existence (or lack thereof) shook, vibrated, was ripped apart all around her, inside her, and she became wrapped in a sudden terror that was like no emotion she had ever felt before. The darkness was subsiding, death was dying, and a mysterious , hellish light burned away every single preconceived notion of death into an impossibly vague ash. It was beautiful yet horrifying.
After what seemed like an eternity, she used her shattered point of reference to “look around” in this new realm, and was shocked by a truth so incalculably anti-climactic and boring that it made her want to die twice. She was still alive, having her eyelids pried open by two dirty fingers, and draping like a beach towel on a drying rack over the extended bicep of an abnormally tall, wide, and muscular man who broke her fall mid-flex.
“Excuse me, sir, but I'm trying to kill myself.” She said like she would've had her hands on her hips if she were standing.
“I think you failed,” responded Eric in a genuine, stating-the-fact-of-the-matter voice. His ugly cracked lips compressed and stretched as the words came out.
“Yes, obviously I failed. Now put me down!”
Eric crouched down, angling his arm out so she could slide to the ground.
“Well, I'm sorry I got in the way.” Then, as an afterthought, “You shouldn't kill yourself.”
“And why not?” she said, dusting off her sundress and finding a shoe that had fallen off.
This gave him pause. He never really thought about it before. The idea of remaining alive was never an issue for him. The fact that somebody else was struggling over the choice of, “should I die or not?” seemed ridiculous.
“Um... I actually don't know.”
“Me neither! I tell you, I've read almost all the books, talked to all of those old, happy, exuberant people who are in their 70's but look like they're in their 30's, and have done all of the spiritual exercises. And no one has been able to help me solve my problem.”
A few, empty seconds passed before he asked, “Your problem?”
“Yes! My problem. For the past year, I have continuously found myself stuck right on the verge between two different things. The things themselves always change, but it's as if I can never cling onto one or the other.”
Eric had no notion of what she was talking about at this point. But he figured that maybe if he should try to look sympathetic and understanding. He moved the features of his face until he was pretty sure he nailed down the expression (forcing emotions was always so much harder for him) but it sort of just looked like he was admiring the cuteness in something small and fragile—in a very sad way.
“Um... are you okay?”
“Yes. Go on.”
“Are you sure? You look like you just ate a cockroach.”
“I'm fine. What are you stuck between?”
“Well, yesterday was the worst of all. Every time I put on a jacket, it would immediately become too hot. Then when I would take the jacket off it would become too cold. All day I switched between wearing a jacket and not wearing one. It was excruciating. And then today, the things I was stuck between finally sent me to my breaking point.”
“Which was?” he asked. He finally started to understand how she doesn't fully explain a point until he inquired about it further.
“I couldn't decide whether to kill myself or not!”
Eric knew that this conversation was over his head, and frankly was a little tired of putting the pieces together. And why should he have to? She was a complete stranger who looked like she came from the same rich, over-privileged womb of humanity that had cursed at Eric his entire life for the odd shape of his... well... his entire body. Those were the people who had the comforts and luxuries that allowed them to be bored long enough to contemplate suicide. Eric figured that's why he's never understood suicide—he hasn't had the luxury to sit and think about it.
The girl stood there, her facial expression frozen in an inquiry-expectant fashion. Her mouth gaped just enough to slide in a banana peel and her eyebrows pushed themselves up her head like they hated the smell of her eyes.
In fact, he continued to realize, this girl hasn't showed one sliver of curiosity about Eric's life. Maybe he was in a rush. Maybe he was in a deep, meditative stroll, contemplating a very dire cross-roads in his life. Or maybe HE was, in fact, on his way to kill HIMself. Of course none of those are true, but she didn't know that! She was only craving attention towards her problems—and what the fuck kind of a problem was that anyway, why the hell wouldn't she just get a lighter jacket—like all the people living in their plazas built next to shimmering ponds where there are plenty of fish to catch and bears to skin for hide pelts and where carnivals pay monthly visits and the man working the candy stand always gives free candy to the children because he makes enough mon—
“Um, your lips are turning blue. Honestly, are you okay?”
—and the dead leaves get caught on eastern winds in the fall so they never need to be cleared out of gutters or gardens and the soil is probably always fertile and the apple trees—
“Eric! Get up! Jesus Christ you're heavy!”
—and their parents never disown them, their brothers are never drafted into the military to pay off debt, and their skin is all smooth and teeth are straight—
“Help! Somebody, please help!”
—and every day probably ends with a beautiful sunset, where it makes the clouds look like the juice from beets and the moon always rises immediately after and it is never, ever new.
Lola hates a lot of things. She hates the taste of dates and doesn’t understand people who like them. She hates when birds wake her up in the morning and how she could pass a thousand people on a street and not a single one of them will look her in the eyes. She hates the taste of ale (but she loves the feeling of being drunk), cold winds, her inability to inflict physical pain on people, and she especially hates when people inflict physical pain on her, although this is more out of jealousy. But the core of her hatred, the absolute fiery center of her contempt, is for heat.
She loathes heat, and every cursed phenomenon that comes packaged along with it—sweat, apathy, sunburns, rotting smells, mirages, heat waves from sand and pavement, evaporation, ash, thermodynamics… and so here in the late afternoon sun, trying to seal her back against the decaying brick wall which she tried jumping off hours earlier just to catch the final vestiges of shadow while also keeping an eye on Eric’s impossibly huge body, she once again, felt like killing herself.
Angling her head up to see the lip of the wall, she shuddered at the idea of the climb. The bricks had been baking in the sun the whole day and she still had cuts from the climb up. She peered over at Eric. Christ almighty, what is he? She thought. He lay catatonic in the peach colored sands. Heat waves slithered out of the ground and threatened to carry him off into some wavy, ether realm. She knew that if she wasn’t going to kill herself today (maybe tomorrow?) she had to do something about this. She didn’t know where the thought came from; it was probably just human compassion. “Simplicity, patience, compassion,” came Lao Tzu’s voice from a book she had read. She couldn’t remember the rest. “Okay, what can I do?” she seemed to ask the wall she leaned against. It continued to wall in utter silence.
She gazed left, then right; a crumbling thatch house with old irrigation ditches snaking through the ground. Weeds grew from the ditches and the sand was old and hard. She looked back at Eric. His chest moved, but almost incomprehensibly. She shot her eyes upwards, back at the top of the wall, still considering suicide as a viable, appropriate option. She reached her arm up to the closest brick—the wall was highest over to her left and lowest to her right like a narrow staircase—and grabbed the top of the brick. She yelped when it seared her skin and she yanked her hand away, frantically whipping it up and down. There was just no way. Her only option was to live, and do something about Eric. “Fuck!” she resigned.
She moved to the corner of the wall and looked around: no people. The sands and patches of grass remained vast and inactive. Other than a buzzing insect and the occasional hawk, there was no other life. Lola pulled her arms into her dress and removed it, exposing bra, panties, and slightly pink skin like a bloody sock that’s been washed. On the ground near her feet she found a sharp stone and punctured the bottom rim of her flower print dress. She pulled until she had a half-inch loop. While she worked the heat began to buzz around her naked skin. She could almost hear how hot it was today, and uncomfortable globs of dust began to mate with the sweat already appearing on her body.
Lola fashioned the top hole of the dress around her crown and tightened it with the loop she had cut. The effect was a shoddy, makeshift poncho which could at least keep her head and back shaded as she looked for a way to help Eric.
When she stepped away from the wall, the heat was so oppressive that she had to fight back a series of urges to immediately jump back into the shade. She felt it pushing against the poncho and stabbing her bare ankles. “Tomorrow, I’m killing myself tomorrow,” she comforted herself. Over at Eric’s bulbous body, he didn’t look good. His breathing was ragged and narrow. She thought about how implausible it was that the amount of air he was pulling in was enough to satiate his entire body. Plus the heat was starting to burn his skin and sweat was drenching his clothes. Looking at him closely, she saw more aspects of his hideousness. In certain spots at his arms and neck, the skin was purity white and craterous; indented with mysterious miniature concavities which plastered the two words, “MOON MAN,” in capitalized, red letters across Lola’s inner-eye. She compromised a snicker.
Taking in her surroundings for the 100th time, Lola walked over to the irrigation ditches, caught her toe on a stubborn root, and tripped into the ditch landing on her hands and knees. Raising her palms and cursing every god she could think of to, “a thousand years of shit!” she found another sharp rock and proceeded to wrench it into the dirt. The top layer seemed like a shell which fractured into larger pieces. Underneath, the dirt was softer. She stabbed, pulled, stabbed some more, feeling the dirt collect in the miniscule amount of space under her fingernails—she didn’t bite her nails, but instead peeled them off with her fingers at the slightest margin of whiteness. After some seconds of digging, she arrived at a warmish, moist layer of dirt which made her dig more ferociously with the rock. The dirt became more granule-y the deeper she went. Eventually she picked up a handful and held it against her sweat covered, reddening arm. The moisture was certainly comforting. But is it lifesaving?
She immediately started to feel like this was a stupid idea, but she might as well finish it. She grabbed handfuls, walked over to Eric, and started caking the moist dirt around his head, first creating an earthy compressor. Then, after a few more trips back and forth, a very thin dirt helmet. His heat and body odor radiated off of him like a miasma of rotting garbage. She thought of another book she had read which told her to savor the blessings of every moment. The more she thought about this moment, however, the more she hated it. Every one of her senses were miserable. She knew that if she were born with a 6th sense, she would hate that one as well.
When Eric had a compact helmet, she started to layer the dirt on top of his bare patches of skin—dropping the dirt on the white pieces of skin from a distance, as she had no idea as to the contagiousness of that area. After some time of mindlessly walking back and forth, she noticed with a shot of frustration that the dirt on Eric’s head had already been dried by the heat, and now the dirt itself was rising in temperature. In her mind, this spelled imminent death for him, for herself, and all of humanity. “Welp, you do what you can. Sometimes the freaks of nature live,” she turned on her heel and started walking away, “and then sometimes you die alone in the desert under ridiculous and unexplained circumstances with nobody but a walking suicide to give you a dirt mask for a grave. See ya in hell!” But as she walked away, the view of the seething, hungry desert slapped her in the face. There was nothing but heat death out there in the sands, and she realized with dread that she would rather live until she could find her own, more comfortable way to die than die by heat. Maybe she could find some poisonous but super delicious berries somewhere, or take a bath to death.
She turned back to the wall, and slumped against it, waiting out the heat in utter and complete misery. Every so often, she would stand up and grab more dirt, place it against her hot face and it would be a temporary reprieve, yet enough to keep her from gnawing Eric’s face off, whom she concluded was entirely at fault for putting her in this position in the first place. But despite her contempt, she was still able to find enough compassion hidden in the recesses of her soul to fling wet clumps of dirt at his prostrate body.
Other than that, there was not much to do but sit and wait for something—anything—to happen. Lola passed the time by thinking about her life. Her memory played itself out like a long strand of vomit colored ribbon. In the beginning, there was childhood. Fearful, uncomfortable and sporadic. Dreams had more fluidity than the life of baby Lola. Past childhood was her teenage years, a hotbed of fits, tantrums, complaints—all of the chaos that existed externally in Lola’s childhood was internalized in her teenage years and came out with a vengeance. Lola played the role of teenager like a rattlesnake being cast as a babysitter. She filled the lives of those around her with chagrin, contempt and antagonism. At the time she did not associate her teenage violence with her terrible childhood, but in retrospect it made perfect sense. She had long since forgiven herself for that.
The end of teenagerism brought upon a lifetime supply of healing and self-identification. Lola, on the latter cusp of becoming an adult, now felt that her destiny lacked the straightforwardness which she felt everybody else in the world had. At some point in the middle of her teenage years, she became obsessed with books. Specifically, she read books from older eras such as Lao Tzu, Confucius, Ben Franklin, Ghandi, Marcus Aurelius—the people writing these books always finding a path of righteousness, always so fucking confident in their methods for living that they honestly provided little to no catharsis for Lola at all. If anything, they strengthened her resolve to end her own life. If people were living like this in the world, what possible hope did she have to be happy? Every day was a whirlwind, every moment was a struggle to fight through whatever foulness beset her at the time, anticipating the foulness of tomorrow.
The books were really just reasons to cement her convictions in her self-termination. After all, when her parents had—“Wait… my life is flashing before my eyes! I’m dying you asshole!” she accented her statement with a particularly huge clump of dirt which she lobbed with all her strength (which was much less than she thought she had) at Eric’s body. The clump broke apart mid flight and only lightly splattered his elbow.
And then Lola fell into a sort of trance. Time blurred. The dirt caking her hands began to vibrate against her palms, then slowly moved up her hands, turned inward, travelled along her veins, until her entire arms were titillated by a foreign prickliness. She felt a certain pulsing inside of her, pleasurable and cathartic. At some point she didn’t realized, the heat itself also disappeared. A part of her knew where this was going. A part of her knew she was dying. It only made sense. She hadn’t eaten or had any water for at least a day and a half. Closing her eyes seemed like a good idea. But wait—her eyes were already closed. When did that happen? She doesn’t remember. The last thing she clings onto is the sound of a calm wind in the distant canyons. Wind too far to feel, but close enough to hear. And then, like the color blue steadily turning into the color purple, the wind itself undergoes a transformation with no clear threshold being crossed—it is now the sound of dripping water. Steady, calm, drips onto a rock. A cool, lazy breeze. That’s nice, she thinks.
Eric dreamt of a cave. In his dream, the jagged teeth of the mouth of the cave cut out the edges from the bright light outside. Behind him, the throat of the cave was so absent of light that the blackness seemed like a solid thing. Coldness seeped out of the blackness and he felt like it was digesting him.
He blinked. It wasn’t a dream. He shot upright, eyes wide open. An ocean of panic dropped on top of him and he was immediately on his feet. Instinctively, his hands patted his body, making sure it was all there. His hear t pounded. Calm down. Just try to calm down. Fuck fuck, okay, just stay calm, you should be use to this by now. Eric traced the familiar spiral of fear and paranoia until he found himself with his hands on his knees, unable to catch his breath. With legs made of mud, he tried to force himself to stand up straight and take in long, slow breaths. Let’s just find out where you are now, okay? It’s happened before—but never this frequently, god dammit. The last time Eric’s entire body had suddenly appeared in a different place was three weeks ago. Before that, it was a month. Before that, it was half a year and before that it had happened at two year intervals for the last ten years.
The intervals made no sense and only added to his panic. There was never any pattern to it, it seemed to be completely spontaneous. The first time it happened, Eric assumed it was sleepwalking. Only, if it was sleepwalking, he had walked about 500 miles from where he fell asleep. The fourth time it happened, he had paid a ***** a whole lot of money just to follow him around and, if he was sleepwalking, to wake him up any means necessary. For three days she followed him around with a bucket of ice-water and a bat. Then one day, he simply awoke in a place he’d never been to, and never saw the ***** again.
He had no idea what to make of it. Its source was unknown, purpose unknown. The people he told didn’t believe him. He thought, however, that when he suddenly disappeared they must have believed him at that point. But how could he know? He never saw them again either.
Three weeks. What could that possibly mean? Why is it get—his thoughts died in place. As he was starting to ward off the panic, a new, crushing wave of confusion drowned out what little sense of reason he clung onto. A pile of something was slumped against the wall of the cave, sprawled and heaving and pink. He edged forward, disbelief making every step heavier and heavier. The girl, that fucking girl, was right there in the cave with him. Leaning against the rocky, jutting wall with her left arm over her bare thigh and her right arm indenting the sand, her chest struggled up and down with every breath. For some reason, she was almost naked, covered in dirt, and wearing some type of weird, mangy shawl around her head. Her eyelids were shut.
Eric stood there in dumb confusion for some time. Before today, he felt as if he’d finally been starting to learn how to simply ride through the nightmare of his life like a surfer trapped in a tsunami. Now, however, his distrust of reality grew to such depths that the very air he breathed tasted hostile.
“What—what are you—” the rest of the question fell back into his lungs, too heavy to lift.
“Oh great, there is a God!” said Lola, the words coming out like she were being woken up much too early for school. She opened her eyes. Eric stood there before her, half silhouetted from the light outside. Dirty, sweaty, and disgusting, his face wore all of the fear and uncertainty of somebody who is entirely undivine in any way. Lola was still alive. “Fuck!” she said.
Cool water filled the cracks in Eric’s hands. He rubbed them together to wash the dirt off, and then collected enough in his palms to splash his face. He was covered in dirt for some reason.
“I’m sorry, I just have to ask—is there something about the sentence, ‘I want to die,’ that confused you?” Lola chided. “If you think you’re being a hero by carrying me up here, you’re not.” Lola pictured Eric waking up out of his dirt blanket, disoriented. She pictured him eyeing her helpless body in the sand and believing himself to be a self-righteous do-gooder. She pictured him roughly manhandling her across the dessert, up a hill and into a nice shaded cave. She pictured the welts and bumps on his white skin scraping against her half naked body. She shuddered, rubbing her hands down her arms.
Eric was about to speak, but exhaled a large, exasperated gasp instead. He was suddenly tired. So, so tired of it all.
“I mean, what did you expect to happen? That I’d wake up, kiss you on the cheek , say, ‘Oh gee mister you sure are a swell guy for helping little old me!’” A thought struck her and she sucked in air, “Oh my god, did you—did you do something to me when I was unconscious?”
Eric craned his neck to look at her. “What?” was all he could think to say.
“You took advantage of me,” Lola’s pink hand went to her mouth.
“Listen… I haven’t even touched you once since I—”
“Why am I in my underwear?!”
“I don’t know! I found you like that!” Eric covered his face in his hands. “Please, just please stop talking. Please. I’m exhausted, I’m scared and I have no idea where I am.” Although, he often had no idea where he was. Eric slumped down on the ground with his elbows on his knees. He gazed at the sand and registered how varied every grain really was. There were sharp, flat specks which glittered in the half-dark, salmon colored specks which seemed to be the majority and ugly brownish specks which sat lazy and sloth-like amongst them both. He stuck his finger into the mixture and moved it in a slow spiral. Each grain scattered out of the way to reveal a layer slightly darker than the one on top. He continued this movement at a snail’s-pace until the spiral came to the end of his reach. Lola had remained silent. He looked up at her.
She was studying him like a dog studies an unfamiliar noise. When his gaze met hers, she looked down. After some tense, noticeably empty seconds, she walked unsurely to the dripping water, lay on the ground beneath it and positioned her mouth to catch the drops falling into the sand.
She took mouthfuls at a time, moved her face out of the way, swallowed, then returned underneath the drips. Every swallow was greedy and accompanied by great, satisfied breaths.
Eric watched her, then stared back at his spiral. He placed a giant hand print right in the middle. From the mouth of the cave, he could see the sky outside turning a copper-mixed blue. He realized he hadn’t really looked outside yet to see where they were, but a part of him didn’t even care anymore. Maybe she feels a little bit like this, he thought.
Lola moved away from the drips, apparently quenched. She tried to think of something to say. This was one of the very rare occasions throughout her whole life that she was at a loss for words.
Eric broke the silence first, “Listen—” and then he paused, choosing his words carefully. Lola propped her head up on her elbow. “You don’t look well.” Lola was about to burst out in laughter at the tremendous hypocrisy of that stupid, stupid sentence but caught herself. His voice carried notes of utter seriousness which affected her. “This place is going to get cold,” this place, like I fucking know where the hell we are, “and you—um—you need to cover yourself up.”
It was as if Lola suddenly became shy of her nakedness. She sat up and pulled the faux dress-poncho over her torso. She made quick, tiny circular motions in the air with her right index finger. Eric took the hint and turned around.
She pulled her ruined dress down over her head and fitted it semi-appropriately around her neck. Her arms found the holes, but there was a slice going right up the front, revealing a sliver of her midriff. She closed the gap by overlapping the flaps. It was damp, dirty and smelled of body odor. The feeling of her rough dress on her skin suddenly reminded her of how utterly distanced she was from happiness or comfort. Despair choked her from the inside but she tried not to let it show. Eric’s face was just—so—pitiful. It made her feel amateurish. Like she was with somebody who had mastered sadness to an absolute extreme. “Okay,” she croaked. Eric turned back but didn’t meet her eyes.
“Are you hungry?”
“Starving,” she heard herself say.
“I am too,” he responded. And then, shockingly, the corners of Eric’s mouth twitched momentarily up into a smile. It was a defeated, slap-happy smile, but a smile nonetheless. “Well,” he said, pushing himself up to his feet like a rusty machine cranking to life. “Let’s find out where the hell we are, shall we?” Eric reasoned that once past a certain point of despair and confusion, life tends to take on a soft buttery feel. A warm cloud of ecstasy vibrated his chest. He took his first, born-again steps towards the mouth of the cave ready to find either an entire army of starving hyenas, or a field of two billion cooked sausages on plates with steamy mashed potatoes on the side. None of it mattered anymore and he would have welcomed anything with stupid, hilarious indifference. With new found strength in his legs, he stepped into view of the outside. Greeted by red, jagged cliffs which bore down on an unusually clear river, he could see red mud caking the bed all the way through the canyon until the river bent towards the left. If he stared towards the direction the river was flowing, he was on the left side of the stream, which he deduced as being north, judging by the setting sun. Below him was about fifty feet of steep, loose gravel which gave way to cliff. With some small amount of pain, he remembered a similar river during boyhood. Long, mysterious canyons, treacherous cliffs, toes stained red from hours of mountaineering—
Eric peeked upwards out of the cave mouth, where the steep hillside leveled out about twenty feet above him.
He peeked back inside the cave. “Can you walk?” he asked Lola.
She made her way to her feet and strode over to him, taking five whole steps before the blood rushed to her legs and she almost stumbled. Eric caught her by the wrist. “Just wait here for a second,” he said.
“Fuck that! You’re not a guide!” she said with regained fervor.
The elixir-like water was bringing color back underneath Lola’s skin and that color was angry pink. She bore into Eric with yellow supernova-like eyes.
Whatever was happening, she was on-board. Eric placed a tepid foot into the gravel and found decent purchase. It was shards of something smaller than shale and easier to break apart. The walk up wasn’t too steep, but his weight was worrisome. With careful planning—he had obviously been in similar situations—he took no step without assurance. Lola watched with small drips of awe. Such a practiced monster, she thought.
“Honestly, we might have to come back to this cave and sleep here for tonight. There’s really no point in both of us going,” he said.
Lola thought for a moment and then said, “Yeah, think about this from my perspective. I wake up in a mysterious cave with a mysterious giant man in a mysterious area while said giant man refuses to tell me where we are, and now he isn’t letting me leave the cave. Yeah, you’re not ethically capable of taking initiative for my decisions right now.” The noise of the river rose above some of her syllables but he understood the message. For the first time, Eric considered the fact that she still thought he must have carried her all the way to this cave. Soon, however, she would see miles in every direction and not recognize any of it. They could be in another country for all he knew. Sooner or later, he would have to explain what was happening and god only knows how this girl would take it. For all he knew, he had just destroyed every semblance of her old life. Anything that she was connected to, or identified with from her life was now gone.
As for Lola, she figured there were only a few hours of golden sunlight left, and that each hour was going to become stranger than the last.
