Errick Nunnally was raised in Boston, served in the USMC, and graduated from art school. He has published three novels, Blood for the Sun, All the Dead Men, and Lightning Wears a Red Cape, and several stories in anthologies and magazines. Visit erricknunnally.us to learn more about his work.
Jessica rolled over, half asleep. Her elbow struck something solid, where her husband should have been. She massaged her elbow and rolled over. Her hands swept along a warm, smooth surface. She frowned.
Dinner had been good, the wine had been great, and once their daughter had gone to sleep, the sex had been magic. All of this culminated in a sleep so deep that now she felt as if she were clawing to wakefulness through a veil of cotton.
“What the hell?” She swore under her breath and reached to turn on her light. Its glow barely penetrated the fog.
Fog?
She turned back to her husband’s side of the bed. He lay enveloped within a clear rhomboid-like prism, similar to Lucite. She recoiled, her heart slamming in her ribcage. She slowly reached out, hesitant to touch the invasive material, and ran her hands over the warm surface again.
Her stomach turned and convulsed, her skin went cold. She worked her jaw until she ground out, “Jeff,” and slammed her palm against the unyielding substance. “Jeff!”
Jessica stared at her husband, suspended, motionless . . . Wait—not motionless. His chest rose and fell. She could make that out, at least, through the clear prison encasing him. She laid an ear on the rhomboid, listening past the blood thundering through her own body. Jeff’s strange prison felt warm against her ear.
There’s a heartbeat.
Relief tingled across her body and her shoulders relaxed. This madness felt like a nightmare. Something so surreal it was as if she’d stepped into one of Jeff’s stories, an author’s bizarre imagination spilled across reality. Nothing in her accounting background had prepared her for this. The corrupted world around her required an effort to process.
“Alive,” she sighed, “but . . . ”
Her daughter’s name speared her thoughts, Allana.
Pulse hammering again, Jessica swung her legs over the side of the bed, freezing just before her feet touched the cotton-like substance she’d mistaken for fog.
“What the hell is this?”
Her eyes took in the room. Everything was different, sketchy. Literally sketched. It was as if the room was roughly drawn, like thick pencil on paper. The walls, the windows, nightstands—everything but the bed had a surreal quality to its form. Even the space between objects seemed wrong. Fearing for her sanity, she struggled with her desire to look up, to verify there was a ceiling. When she did, she saw the same cotton-like substance hovering overhead and a feeling of vertigo made her sway.
Beneath her dangling feet, she could make out objects in the thick fog. She reached down and felt resistance against her hand before her fingers met the floor underneath the fog.
I have to do this, she thought and heaved herself out of bed. Her bare feet made little noise as she made her way out of her room and down the hallway to their daughter’s bedroom, moving as fast as the clouded environment would allow. A night-light served as the sole illumination. It had been transformed into a warm, glowing orb, suspended just above the fog and snug against the wall. As she made her way to the doorway, the fog dragged against her skin, a bizarre resistance akin to slogging through thick mud under water.
She leaned through her daughter’s door and felt the emotional punch of loss, a hole driven through her core. Allana wasn’t there . . .
The bathroom.
Jessica spun and high-stepped to the bathroom, evading the pull of the fog.
Empty.
Fear and sorrow pulled at her heart, the scream she felt in her throat came out as a whimper. “Allana?” she called out. No reply.
Sounds drifted in from outside. A warbling voice echoed, sometimes singing, sometimes talking, all incoherent. She felt the icy tendrils of shock creeping through her body and the walls began to dim, shadows pulled closer.
The walls.
“Why is this familiar?” She sniffed, denying any premature grief, and traced a finger along the sketched, paper walls. Then she ran her palm roughly under her eyes, smearing tears, remembering her daughter’s drawings. From the corner of her eye she saw vague, sketched footprints. Childlike renderings of feet traced a path from Allana’s bed, circled the room, went up the wall, and to the window.
Jessica scrambled over and peered out. Suspended in the air, like bits of paper frozen in the wind, footprints stepped down to the street below. All around her, the neighborhood was vague in definition. The streetlights were mere sticks with glowing dots on top, the pitched roofs a jagged repetition of angles. Cutting the night sky, a massive rainbow, impossible and flat, bent to the horizon. Movement caught her eye and she watched with growing horror as a figure came into view. It skipped and danced, singing to itself as its impossible, stick-like legs carried it along. Jessica watched and listened, her hands covering her mouth. It was a sort of potato shape and color, its face taking up more than half of its lumpy upper body. Two gelatinous orbs twitched in place of eyes. As it sang, a terrifying caricature of joy spread across its face beneath sparse and wiry hair. It stopped with a jerk and turned to look up at the window.
Jessica ducked and shuffled backward before creeping forward to peek. The thing looked at the house for long seconds. Then it returned to singing its song. As it skipped away, Jessica recognized the word it was crooning over and over: “Allaaaaaaahnaaaaa!”
A nagging realization pushed her back to her bedroom where she circled the bed to open her husband’s nightstand. He still lay there, trapped. She touched the substance entrapping him again before focusing on the task at hand and rooting through the top drawer. Inside, she found Jeff’s Moleskin. Full of notes and sketches, it was something that Jeff always had at hand and scribbled in at odd moments. Jessica had gotten used to the behavior early in their marriage, an unsurprising price to pay for marrying an artist.
Flipping through the pages, she found the note she was looking for. Jeff kept notes on his own creative ideas, as well as some of the more interesting things their daughter had said when she was much younger. The one she was looking at was from age five. Jeff had written a couple of words, “Eliot, portrait, 5.” Next to it, Allana had drawn a pencil sketch of her childhood friend, a grotesque interpretation from her mind using awkward hands. It looked like the creature that Jessica had seen on the street. Other pages contained portraits of her and Jeff, recognizable only by the wiry interpretation of her loc’d hair.
She tossed the book on the bed and began pulling on clothes. Manic adrenaline drove her twitchy movements. She chose athletic gear and tried to remember the last time she’d needed to run with purpose. Snatching up the book, she shoved a small flashlight into her sweatshirt, along with the notebook. Her gaze shifted to her phone. She scooped it up, but it turned out to be nothing but a high-tech paperweight. No signal, just a bright screen of incoherent shapes. A bit of dull metal caught her eye. Jeff carried a folding knife and it sat with the other things he typically stowed in his pockets. She grabbed the knife and took a final look at her immobilized husband. It was time to find their daughter—she had no other options.
“I’ll find her, Jeff. And I’ll be back.”
* * *
At the end of the hall, she found the stairs were flat, like a sheet of paper with lines drawn on it to represent stairs. Testing it with one foot, she didn’t feel safe sliding down the paper. Jessica tensed in frustration and went back into Allana’s room. The floating footprints remained. The window, she now realized, was nothing, just an empty space in the wall, a child’s conception of glass. Despite that, there was a cool surface barring her way. She struggled with the geometry of grabbing the bottom of the window frame and managed to slide it up and open. She ducked, stuck one leg out, and paused, terrified. Love and trust guided her foot to the first, tiny floating footprint.
Better this than falling through paper stairs to God-knows-what.
The footprint sagged a bit, but sprang back when she took her weight off. Jessica looked down at the lawn.
“It’s only fifteen feet or so,” she told herself. “C’mon, Jess.” Her scalp tightened at the thought of falling even a relatively short drop.
She tested it again, feeling the resistance, and levered herself farther out the window to trace her daughter’s footsteps. Her back struggled with the effort to balance on the sketchy sole cutouts, and she fought back feelings of vertigo. At the bottom, the lawn, she realized, was actually a set-piece of oversized Easter grass. Everything had the surreal appearance of diorama objects hundreds of times their normal size. The footprints went into the street and pointed the direction the potato-head thing had gone.
The prints were so small. Jessica placed her foot next to one, knowing it was her daughter’s, but trying to understand why it was so much smaller. Allana wore the same size shoes as Jessica now. Whenever Jessica dreamed of her daughter, however, Allana was small, still a young child. She’d grown so much since then. In the present, waking world, Allana tested her autonomy, worked to get her bearings as a twelve-year old.
Far down the street, Jessica heard the thing singing again, warbling Allana’s name. With one hand to steady the book, she jogged in the same direction, an absurd idea forming in her mind. The creature came into sight and she slowed to a fast walk, being careful not to make too much noise. She grasped the knife in her pocket and called out, “Elliot!”
The creature stopped on a dime and turned. “Yes?” Its voice sounded so young and slurred the “s” sound, making it into an approximation of “sh.” The same way Elliot used to do. It trotted toward her.
Jessica clutched the knife and suppressed a shiver despite the very comfortable temperature. This world smelled like plastic, sugar, milk, and occasionally cinnamon. As “Elliot” approached, however, the smell turned to something akin to the collective scent of a daycare. Fresh diapers and lotion, juice boxes and dried snacks. And its appearance—his appearance—made the smallest, most primitive part of her brain scream with terror. It was a physical configuration that was impossible for anything alive, as all child-drawn stick figures were.
“Hi!” it yelled gleefully. “Hi, Miss Jessica!”
Jessica choked back her rising bile. “Hello . . .Elliot, how are you?”
“Good.” He fidgeted, tracing one stick-foot on the ground.
“Elliot, I need to ask you, where’s Allana?”
He hopped up and down on impossibly skinny legs, an excited grin splitting his lumpy head. “She’s down here. I’m lookin’ for her to play!” He pointed in the direction her prints indicated she had gone.
Jessica’s skin crawled whenever Elliot moved, and the misshapen thing wouldn’t stop moving. The boy was nothing but a drawing, a child’s illustration given form and substance and life. Though she was now immersed in a world of such impossibility, Jessica shuddered with revulsion at the overwhelming evidence. The horror she felt at the sight of this childish interpretation brought to life paled in comparison to her desire to be reunited with her daughter.
“Would it be okay if I walked with you, Elliot?” she asked, pushing aside her fear and tattered sanity.
“Okay!” He started off again, singing his Allana song, bright and happy.
Under the scritching sounds Elliot’s legs made as they bounded off the asphalt, Jessica could hear something else. Static? No. More like a million echoes of Elliot’s footfalls.
The air had congealed into something sweet and familiar. She could smell grape jam and peanut butter. Elliot stopped, but began dancing from one leg to the other. He wanted to go forward, but something appeared to be making him nervous. Jessica shuddered. She held the folded knife in clenched fingers as different sounds came closer, surrounding them. The cloying sweet smell raked the inside of her nose and she felt something scuttle across her toe.
Elliot screamed.
* * *
The jump was instinctual, as was the yelp. Jessica twitched back a step as her spine tingled with Elliot’s childlike screams of pain and terror. His voice clawed at her ears, set her instincts on fire, but the ants were everywhere on him. They scrambled up Jessica’s legs, the size of pine cones, leaving sticky trails of sweetness. Jet black, the creatures were secreting the fermented sweetness of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich forgotten in the bottom of a backpack, soggy and molded. The ants pinched at her clothes, her skin.
Jessica brushed at her legs, pushing the ants off in rapid sweeps. “Elliot, brush them off, run!”
“No, no, no!” Elliot wailed and turned, stumbling, his skin inflamed and splotchy. The ants crawled into his huge maw and he tumbled to the ground.
The gurgling sounds coming from Elliot’s throat pushed Jessica to the edge of panic. The boy was allergic to peanuts—the real Elliot, out in the real world. She glanced back at her home, then forward, at the little footprints marching off into the distance.
Without much more thought, she sprinted, her feet alternating between sliding on the viscous death of crushed ants or sticking in the aftermath of their passage. She ran until she couldn’t hear the Elliot-thing anymore and her breath came in heaving gasps. Her husband’s Moleskin notebook, still tucked into her sweatshirt, pressed into her side, scraping at her until she finally came to a halt, breathing hard, choking back her panic.
She fished the notebook out and began flipping through the pages. Throughout the front half, Jeff’s scribblings had been supplemented by Allana’s drawings and her own incomplete concepts. The little girl had a jarring, freeform imagination, no doubt fueled by her father’s interests. Her interpretations of his fantastical ideas had found their way into Jeff’s notebook.
Above Jessica, the sky remained a flowing, indigo bisected by the massive rainbow. In the notebook, there were a few words and a sketch showing “the rainbow clam.” A crustacean who emitted a rainbow while its shell was open.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” Jessica muttered, her adrenaline-charged fingers pinched on a page with a single, hastily scrawled quote: Ants are peanut butter jelly! She flipped through a few more pages, trying to get familiar with the imaginings before continuing.
At the very end of the street, a copse of pine and maple trees separated the neighborhood from a private school campus. The trees were now impossibly tall, stretching straight up to the “sky” and striated. The trunks weren’t closely packed and the forest floor was as flat as fresh concrete, but soft with pine needles. All of the branches above were entangled, with none appearing to dangle below their towering tops. Allana’s penciled footprints led through the trees, and so Jessica followed.
As a family, they’d walked this way with Allana more than a few times to visit the bakery just beyond the campus. The small patch of forest was larger and darker than she remembered. Midway through, she spotted a collection of branches jutting out lower than any of the others. Entangled within them was an object composed of stick-like ribs in the shape of a diamond. A kite made of bones with a tail beneath it. Bright white, it hung above Allana’s footsteps. Her little girl had apparently circled the tree a few times before moving on.
Jessica walked past the bone kite, getting a closer look, and saw that its tail was a string of vertebrae.
A quiet voice spoke, seeming to come from nowhere. “You must be Jessica.”
She spun around, scanning the gloom. “Who’s there? How do you know my name?”
“Allana told me. She said you might come looking for her.”
Jessica stared at the kite. It had no face, nothing to articulate with, but it spoke.
“Where’s my daughter?” Fire burned in her gut—she’d tear this thing to pieces if she had to.
“I’m not entirely certain where she is at this moment, but we can follow the footsteps.”
“You spoke with her. Where’s she going?”
“I can’t be entirely sure . . . ”
“Tell me where she’s going or—”
“Or what? You’ll take me from this tree? Because that’s what I want.”
Jessica stared at the thing for precious seconds before making her decision.
The kite called after her, “Wait! Wait . . . ”
Jessica stopped walking.
“She went to the Rainbow Clam.”
Jessica looked through the trees, toward the horizon where the rainbow dipped. “How do you know that?”
“That’s where I told her to go.”
“Why?”
“To help me. Only the clam knows how to help me fly again. I’ve been stuck here forever.” The kite paused. “Allana couldn’t reach to take me down, so I sent her to get help.”
There was a time, Jessica remembered, when Allana had been dangerously naive. She wanted everyone to be happy, always wanted to help, no matter the cost. It worried Jessica to no end that someone might easily convince her daughter to stray. It had taken years to get through to her, to get her to be more cautious. The girl she was now, at twelve, was very different, but that little girl was the one Jessica most often remembered in her dreams. This thing had taken advantage of her little girl’s trust.
“I see you met the ants,” the kite said, breaking her from her thoughts. “Had I been there, I could’ve warned you, guided you through safe passage.”
“Allana got past.”
“She’s a clever girl. Let me help you avoid dangers. Take me down.”
Jessica pulled the notebook from her pocket and flipped through it. One of the last entries during Allana’s pre-school years was a simple, diamond-shaped drawing with the words “bone kite” beneath it. Jeff’s only annotation was a line of question marks. She looked at the frame of thin bones, trapped in a tree. “Fine.” Jessica sighed, reached up, and plucked the bone kite from the tree. It was extremely light, felt dry and brittle. “We’re following her tracks, right?”
“Absolutely.”
Jessica tucked the kite under her arm and started walking. Soon, they cleared the stand of trees and a vast expanse of the Easter grass lay before them, the low chain-link fences breaking up the space in intermittent planes. Dotting the grass were massive, cabbage-like growths. Dozens of heart-shaped, colorful faces floated above the field. Beyond them lay the bizarre brick buildings of the private school. A stink like hot garbage hung in the air.
“This field—never mind all this weird stuff in it—it’s way too big, more than I remember.”
“It is as Allana saw it, Jessica.”
Allana’s tiny footprints could be seen heading into the grass and beyond. A large dinosaur-like creature, the same hue as the grass, swam through the field and leapt over one of the fences, briefly scattering Allana’s paper footprints. Its long green body twirled in the air, flippers tucked close, before it splashed down on the other side.
“Oh my God, is that thing dangerous?”
“The pliosaur? Not at all. It’s the brain cabbage that you need to be wary of.”
She looked at the gnarled shapes. “What do they do?”
“Think. Very hard. At you, into you. They’ll destroy you from the inside out. Allana’s mind is all soft angles and magic. She’s safe.”
Jessica glanced at the kite, then looked at the line of her daughter’s footprints and clenched her teeth. Allana had been through here. She took a step to follow.
“Wait,” the bone kite said.
“For what? My daughter is—”
“For her. Look carefully.”
In the middle distance, the approximation of a girl danced. She had a deathly pale pallor, paperlike, and graceful. Her legs ended in little round stumps slipped into ballet shoes. She wore a pink leotard and tutu to match her shoes.
“Who’s that?”
“Ecnad, The Little Ballet. You can follow her safely through, but you’ll need to get her attention.”
“How?”
“Try calling her?”
Frustration tensed Jessica’s jaw, but she took a deep breath and shouted the dancer’s name. The figure didn’t react, simply kept twirling and hopping, bending at two-dimensional angles.
“She can’t hear me from here.”
“You’ll have to get closer.”
“But you said—”
“I know, but you’ll never make it all the way across the field without her. The cabbage will make your brain their own. Your mind will become one of theirs and you, well, you’ll be gone, just a lumpy green thing in a field. There’s no other way.”
Jessica swallowed her fear and wondered, Why not go around? She looked to the left and right of the field only to be met with the unsettling sight of nothing. The edges dropped away in hard angles marred only by the strange “fog” she’d wandered through to get here. She remembered seeing a ballet dancer in the notebook so she pulled it out and started flipping through the pages. There. Jeff had transcribed a story along with some pasted-in clippings of Allana’s drawings. The story, titled “Ecnad,” recounted the tale of a ballet dancer whose classmates trick her into dancing by herself all day. It ended with Ecnad impressing the teacher with her dedication; she goes home to her mother, triumphant with the teacher’s highest praise.
“Won’t those things affect you too?”
“Don’t be foolish, I’m a kite made of bones.”
Jessica swore under her breath and eased into the field, trying to move at an angle that would intersect with the twirling Ecnad. She hoped there was something in the story that could help her through this. She passed the first brain cabbage, moving through the grass with a wary step.
The first cruciferous obstacle, about waist high, glistened a pale green. It shivered and Jessica froze. Her throat tightened and she swallowed the lump before moving on. The brain-cabbages grew larger toward the middle of the field. She glanced and saw Ecnad ahead. A tingling fear crept up her spine, tightening her scalp. A sense of confusion swept over her. How could this world exist? Where did it begin and end? She frowned, memories sifting through her mind. Her daughter, over the years, the scares along the way. A broken arm, when she was seven. A misdiagnosed infection that kept her in the hospital for a week. The desperate effort to understand her child’s wants and needs as she got older. The transition to—
“Jessica.”
She blinked. Within arm’s reach stood one of the cabbages. A huge one, easily two feet taller than she was. They were in the center of the field, though she didn’t even remember walking here.
“Call to Ecnad. Jessica, don’t lose yourself.”
Jessica gulped and stepped back from the plant, took a deep breath and called to the dancer.
The Little Ballet froze in mid-twirl, twisting like paper, searching for the source of the voice. Jessica wanted this to be over, wanted to see her daughter again, to bring her back home and free her husband from the prism. None of this made sense. Her daughter’s magical flight, the ants, Elliot, this strange world, the kite—
“Jessica!”
She turned on her belly in the fake grass, the dry edges tickling her face. Her mind had drifted again and this time she caught herself crawling toward one of the cabbages. Ecnad bent at an impossible angle to look in Jessica’s eyes.
“Help, please, I have to find my daughter,” she said to The Little Ballet.
The paper girl looked at the kite, then helped Jessica to her feet and began leading her back to the forest.
“No, Ecnad—the other way, please,” Jessica said.
Together, they stumbled to the edge of the field where Ecnad released Jessica’s hand and gave her a gentle push. The Little Ballet waved and twirled back to the field, resuming her dance.
Jessica sagged, struggling with an aggressive headache. Sweat and tears soaked her skin just from the fight to keep concentrating. “Oh, God . . . ”
“As I said,” the bone kite said.
“Shut up. Which way now?”
The kite held silent under Jessica’s arm.
“I said ‘which way,’ damn it.” She felt how brittle the kite was and imagined breaking its bones.
“Follow the rainbow.”
She sighed and looked up at the unchanging, indigo sky. The rainbow remained, bifurcating the expanse. It flickered, the colors dimming and coming back to full volume. “What was that?”
“What?”
“The rainbow. It flickered. Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t—you said the rainbow came from the clam.” Jessica tracked the arc down to the ground. It no longer appeared to land across the horizon, but somewhere more like a half-dozen blocks away. “That the Rainbow Clam is where Allana is.” She started walking around the impossible geometry of the private school.
“Yes. That’s where she should be.”
“What’s she supposed to do there?” Jessica picked up her pace, ignoring the fatigue in her legs and the ache in her forehead.
“She went to query the clam about getting me back into the air where I belong. To help me. I tried to tell you earlier . . . ”
Jogging now, she asked, “Why’d the rainbow flicker? Does that mean it’s closing or something?”
“I didn’t see it flicker. There’s no need to rush. Allana is perfectly safe with the Rainbow Clam. She’s safe here, with us.”
Jessica didn’t answer, just focused on her pace, keeping her breath even and her thoughts to herself. The kite was part of this senseless world and she wasn’t sure what to trust. The city was a distorted vista of windows and street. Cars had frozen in mid-air with oblong wheels and tiny cabs, two-dimensional people wandered here and there, staring with blank, happy faces. She avoided them as best she could.
As she drew closer to the end of the rainbow, her lungs and legs burned. The kite, light as it was, felt awkward to hold with so little substance to it. Its dry surface clung to the sweat on her skin. She rounded the final turn and came upon a stone structure in her path. No, not stone—they were pillows. A gigantic pillow fort. The walls of the fort stretched from the nothing of one side to the other. At the center, there was a doorway, half her height.
* * *
“What’s this place?”
“The market. You have to go through it.”
“Is this dangerous?”
“Not to me.”
Jessica tossed the kite a nasty look. The light shifted again, but she held her tongue on the matter. To enter the fort, she had to duck down and shimmy through the doorway. It was not an unfamiliar experience. Allana loved to build forts. Inside, a line of people stood waiting at a single cash register. Jessica remembered when they’d bought the toy register for Christmas one year, a bright red and blue affair that made a ding sound whenever it opened and closed.
None of the people in line had anything to purchase. It appeared that they were getting items for sale from behind the counter before proceeding to the back of the pillow fort. The people in line clutched bright yellow coins and blue-tinted paper money.
“What am I supposed to do?” Jessica asked the kite.
“I don’t know. Kites don’t need to buy things.”
Jessica ground her teeth and moved around the line. The people in line were sketchy outlines with rudimentary faces. They were hard to look at, difficult to perceive. She needed to find the exit on the other side of the structure.
When she began to move around the counter, her trajectory making it clear she intended to bypass the entire affair, the cashier would have none of it.
The vague figure appeared in front of Jessica. “You need to buy something. We’re very busy.”
Jessica huffed and made her way to the back of the line. The figure resumed selling. She stood, moving forward a step as others took their place behind her. Her daughter was somewhere beyond this place, waiting, in danger, safe, not safe . . . The thoughts nagged at Jessica and frustration drove her to push forward, shoving her way past the paper-like figures. She didn’t hear their protests until she got to the front of the line.
“I need to get through here.”
“You have to wait in line,” they all said.
“No.” Jessica hopped over the counter, only to find herself back on the other side. After a moment of shock, she hopped the counter again, surging forward to find herself back where she had started. “Please,” she shouted, “I have to find my daughter, I have to get to Allana!”
“You have to wait in—” The chorus cut off and every paper face in line turned toward Jessica. “Allana is your daughter?”
She nodded to the queue, her eyes burning. A delicate touch shifted Jessica’s attention. A bouquet of paper hands held out plastic coins and paper money. Jessica took a bit from each hand offered. They gestured to the cashier and she stepped up to the front of the line. On the table were a cornucopia of items, some of which were familiar, most lost to memory. She recognized the game: choose something, pay, and be on your way. She chose a small blue figure of a dolphin. It had a keychain embedded where its blowhole should have been. She handed over the money.
The cashier lifted the gate on the counter and waited until she’d passed. “Allana gave us commerce, we give her you.”
“Thank you. All of you.” Jessica moved on through the back and into the strange air beneath the strange sky before wiping her grateful tears away. The rainbow remained in place.
“Well done,” the kite said.
“Shut up,” Jessica replied, exhausted.
The kite said nothing more.
* * *
Jessica put one foot in front of the other. It was all she could do at the moment. Ahead, a sparkling blue river flowed beneath a pink bridge. She felt sticky; the air clung to her skin and hair. She wished she could take a moment to rinse off in the river, but taking time for herself was out of the question.
She reached the foot of the bridge and saw movement in the water. Undulating bodies sluiced by, a strange appendage on their heads. Her desire to bathe in the river dissipated.
“What is this now?” she said under her breath.
The kite remained silent.
Testing the bridge with one foot, she felt confident that the crayon-pink wood could hold her weight. Regardless, this was where her daughter’s footprints led. Her own steps sounded heavy on the bridge and she heard a splash over the steady rush of the river. When she glanced to her left, a wet slap knocked her to the boards. Startled, she hit hard, scraping her hands and elbows, jarring her shoulder. Next to her, an eel flopped and rolled. The brown creature had an umbrella-like canopy growing from its head that flapped and folded as it managed to fall back into the water.
She reached up to where the eel had glanced off her head and her fingers came away covered in slime. Her temple throbbed.
“Damn it. Why didn’t you warn me about these stupid things?”
“You told me to shut up,” the kite said.
“Oh, now you follow my orders?” Jessica hauled herself up by the railing and ducked as another eel sailed past. It was soon followed by another and yet another. She started to scramble forward when a massive arm twisted over the railing ahead of her, hauling the bulk of a misshapen beast behind it. Its eyes were the size of dinner plates, black and unblinking like a fish. Between the staring orbs was a nose the size of her torso, and beneath that nose, the downward curve of a mouth with block-like teeth jutting between thin lips. Lank hair hung from its head, curled like kelp and as green and brackish as anything she’d ever seen or smelled. It vomited gallons of water onto the bridge before it spoke.
“Clip-clop, clip-clop, who’s come knocking ’pon my bridge?”
“Oh my God . . . ”
The beast looked through Jessica and began pawing at the bridge. “I said, who’s come knockin’ ’pon my bridge?”
Another eel sailed over Jessica’s head. Something was both familiar and . . .what? There felt a nagging realization at the back of her mind, an elusive fact that—
“You should answer him,” the kite said.
The beast’s head snapped around, locked in Jessica’s direction.
She glared at the kite, realizing that the creature was blind or very close to it. She put one finger to pursed lips and leaned against the railing. More eels thumped onto the bridge, confusing their bellowing obstacle.
“Bone Kite? I heared ye, trespassers. Bring me a little morsel, a tasty treat. Who goes there?” It bellowed at the last, taking a step forward.
Jessica remained frozen, hoping to slip past the brute. He bent at the waist and started pawing at the bridge, so huge that he covered every square inch as he moved forward.
Frantic, she managed to make no sound and forced herself to think. She had to cross this bridge, Allana was on the other side. Even now, her daughter’s paper footprints fluttered under the giant’s sweeping paws, settling back into place once he’d passed. Jessica ducked a flying eel. Seeing no other options, she swept one leg over the rail, then the other, clinging precariously, her feet barely keeping purchase on the edge of the bridge. The smell of the ponderous roadblock became stifling as he closed on her position. She began edging forward along the railing, holding the kite awkwardly under one arm. An eel slapped into her back with a meaty thud. It felt like being hit with a rubber bat. The impact, she knew, was going to leave a bruise. Another sailed into her shoulder, turning in midair to slap onto the bridge, where it undulated until the troll swept it back into the water.
Wait—a troll! That story, the billy goats. She loved that story—
Her hand came down on a smear of slime on the outside of the rail and her weight shifted dramatically as she lost purchase. The kite came loose and screamed. She snagged it before it could tumble into the water.
The troll had passed, but now twisted its two-dimensional shape to look—or rather face—her way. Jessica tossed the squealing kite onto the bridge, vaulted the rail, and picked it up. The troll lumbered toward her and she sprinted, dodging the occasional eel. Her quick footsteps slapped an odd counter beat to the troll’s slower pace and longer stride.
Her lungs burned, breath coming short, and the kite wailed about drowning. Ahead, she saw a thick, broad puddle of the eel-slime and vaulted it. The troll’s huffing threats, hot on her back, propelled her legs. She felt a sharp pain in her right calf and heard a thunderous thud that rattled the bridge.
She didn’t look back.
* * *
The air felt heavy in her nose with the syrupy smell of cotton candy. The ground had given way from the Easter grass to a sparkling sugar sand. Hedges made of pink fluff dotted with fat pearls lined the path and overhead, the sky remained bifurcated by the striking rainbow. Only . . .instead of six hard colors, it had been reduced to four. Light shifted at the corners of her eyes. It appeared that they were closing in on their destination. The arc of the diminished rainbow touched land just ahead. The kite had been quiet since the incident at the bridge.
“We seem to be getting close,” Jessica said.
“Yes,” the kite replied.
“You’ve been quiet.”
“You shushed me on the bridge.”
Jessica rolled her eyes. “You wanted me to talk to that thing. It could only hear us if we talked.”
“And you were going to throw me into the river.”
She sighed. “You can’t swim?”
“Have you ever known a kite that could? I’d’ve sunk to the bottom and that would be that. If you’d spoken with Bumblebutt—”
“Okay, seriously, shut up. You knew that thing on the bridge? Don’t answer that. I don’t care. I should toss your bone-ass into a bush.”
The kite didn’t reply. Jessica knew there was a connection between the kite and Allana, that her daughter might be cheered and more willing to go home if she saw the kite down from the tree. She kept it tucked under her arm until a gigantic mound came into view.
Not a mound, the clam. It was as large as a king-size bed and lay on a nest of pockmarked black rocks. The rainbow gleamed from its partially opened maw and she could see that the angle of its top half cut off some of the colors. Was it closing? She began to jog, ignoring her aching limbs, and called for Allana. She didn’t hear her daughter’s voice and now that she was close enough, it was clear why.
Inside the clam, curled up in its felt-like tongue, lay her daughter, sleeping. She twitched at her mother’s voice, but didn’t wake.
“Allana! Wake up sweetheart, it’s me, Mama . . . ” Jessica dropped the kite.
“See there? See? She’s safe, don’t wake her,” the kite said.
Jessica felt her heart clench at the sight of her little girl, so small, plucked directly from the past. From an age when she needed her parents for almost everything. “Allana, sweetie . . . ” She reached into the clam and touched Allana’s face.
“Mama,” her little girl murmured.
Jessica remembered how hard it was to wake her daughter, how she could be dragged from car to bed, undressed, and tucked in without waking. Kids slept hard, when they slept. She crept up the piled stones, wrapped one hand around Allana’s upper arm, and pulled. The clam convulsed, its tongue wrapping tightly around the little girl.
A surge of anger flared inside Jessica and she addressed the kite. “Why the hell won’t this thing let her go?”
“She’s where she’s supposed to be, right now. Let the Rainbow Clam finish it.”
Fuck this, she thought and unfolded the knife from her pocket.
“Jessica, don’t,” the kite said.
Jessica reached into the clam with her right hand, the knife poised to cut from her left, and the shell snapped shut on her wrist. A shock of pain wrenched a guttural shout from her throat. Blood flowed slowly down her wrist.
“I told you not to do that,” the kite said. “She’s with the clam. We’re all here now, we’re all where we’re supposed to be. The clam will fix everything.”
“Fuck off!” Sweat poured from Jessica’s brow, her skin felt slick and worn. She ached all over, on the edge of exhaustion. Her fingers burned at the end of her trapped hand. She could wiggle them; her wrist wasn’t broken. She could feel the warm surface of the tongue and wrapped her fingers in it, making a fist.
The kite said, “Once I have Allana’s skin, I’ll be able to fly again, all will be right in the world. That’s the deal.”
Jessica felt her stomach turn. She glared at the clam as bile crawled up her throat and she sobbed. Gulping back tears, she turned her wrist, an agonizing lever.
“You can’t escape the clam, Jessica. Let this happen, it was meant to be.”
The clam’s shell inched up a bit, but the agonizing pressure remained steady. There had to be enough room to try. She pushed her other hand in, holding the knife, and started cutting. The creature convulsed again, curling its tongue tighter, but it only served to move against the knife’s edge.
“No,” the kite said.
Jessica pushed harder, cutting deeper, slashing along the length, both of her wrists raw.
The kite shouted, “No, stop!”
She fought the oversized mollusk, pulling at the tongue, slashing at it, and seeing the edges of its shredded pink coming through the mouth of the shell. It snapped open and Jessica snatched Allana free. They both tumbled into the sugary sand.
“I was promised! We had a deal—you don’t know what you’ve done!”
The rainbow flickered in earnest as the clam thrashed, unable to move, other than to twist its tongue and snap its shell.
Jessica focused on Allana, but the girl only stirred slightly. Her mind turned cartwheels as she struggled to her feet, pulling her daughter up. “Baby, wake up—please, wake up.” She tried to remember how she ever managed to get Allana going on those early mornings, during the first days of school, or when they traveled.
Our trip to Florida.
“Honey, we have to get Daddy. We have to wake Daddy up! C’mon, sweetheart!” She gently shook her girl.
Allana stirred and said, “Dada?”
“Yes, sweetie, we have to wake Daddy up. I need your help.”
“Okay, Mama.” Allana took her own weight and glanced around.
“Allana,” said the kite, voice edged with desperation, “you have to get back in the clam. It’s important. You have to help me, my dear.”
“Bone Kite, I have to go with Mama now. I’m glad you’re out of the tree.”
“Let’s go, honey,” Jessica said, taking her daughter’s hand. “We don’t want to be late.”
“No, stop! Allana, give me your skin! I need it!”
The sky cracked.
* * *
“Oh, God. Let’s go, sweetie. Let’s go, we need to go home.” Jessica guided Allana away while keeping an eye on the incensed kite and its collaborator.
The clam spasmed again and colors in the rainbow shattered, throwing bits of light into the dull sky. Behind them, the world crumpled, folding like a cardboard diorama, the backing pulling away, exposing the raw materials of a nightmare. A void swirled beyond the artifice of this world, a maw of nothingness.
“Mama, you’re so sticky and dirty and sweaty,” Allana said as her mother stepped up their pace.
“We have to get out of here, honey, come on. I don’t know . . . ” She thought back through all the obstacles and the distance between them and safety. “Oh, it’s so far, honey. It’s so far.” Panic set in. She had to save Allana. Had to get her out of—
“Mama, this way,” Allana pulled.
“But we have to go back. This is the way we—”
She shouted, “It’s this way, Mama!”
Jessica stood, dumbfounded, unsure, as the world crumpled behind them. She looked at her daughter, really looked at her, seeing the wild run of imagination that had brought them here. All of this had sprung from her little girl, all of this was a part of the unfathomable ticking of her young brain. Maybe . . .
“Okay, let’s go,” Jessica said.
Allana tore off, running up the sugar sand path until it turned green. Her bare feet flung behind her, carefree, afropuffs bobbing with each step. She wore her favorite pink nightgown with an oversized-cartoon print, and Jessica followed and watched, appreciating her every step, loving her little girl. Then Allana veered off, moving parallel to the strange river. The papery grass shook in waves from the destruction that followed closely behind. The little girl hit the edge of the world and started feeling with her hands until she found purchase and pulled with both hands. A seam appeared, tearing in some places as the edge peeled away.
“Here, Mama!”
“You first, honey.”
Allana nodded and paused. Jessica followed her gaze, over the river, where the pillow fort lay in the distance. Hordes of figures stood in the foreground. She could see Ecnad, The Little Ballet, and crowds of paper people. They waved and Allana waved back before ducking through the tear in the paper. Jessica followed and—
* * *
She awoke in her bed, startled. Allana had been right in front of her. Her body ached, fatigue hummed along the edges of her sight. The room looked normal. Jeff looked normal.
Jessica reached for her husband and her skin burned where the clam had bitten her arm. Bloody and gummy, coated with sweat, dried slime pulled at her every move. “Jeff,” she shouted and launched herself from the bed.
Jeff jerked and said, “What is it?”, only to see his wife scrambling from the room. He glanced at the filth in the bed, the blood stains, and bolted after her. “Jessica, are you hurt?”
She turned into her daughter’s room only to find the bed empty. “No, no, no,” she sobbed. Jeff’s hands grabbed her shoulders and she looked at him. He said something, but she missed it. She surged forward and pushed past him, into the hallway, toward the long shadow in the rising sunlight. She turned the corner to the stairs and there was Allana, standing by the window, watching the sun rise.
“I’m sorry, Mama,” she said, her eyes watering. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”
Jessica crushed her teenaged daughter into a hug. “I’m just glad you’re okay, honey. If we never work out what happened last night, I don’t care.” All she felt was the rush of sheer relief.
“You always said I had a vivid imagination, but I—” Allana hiccupped, glancing up at her mom with wide eyes. “There’s just so much stuff I’d made and forgotten. Were you really in my dream?” Allana’s hand hovered over her mother’s raw wrist and she glanced at the dirt and scrapes.
Jessica pulled back, wiped the tears from her daughter’s cheeks, and smiled wryly. “Your father kept your ideas, even if you forgot. He always talked about it. Where else would those things live but in your dreams? What else can explain it?”
Jeff took in their disheveled appearance, and marveled at their hints of a shared nightmare. A stream of questions spilled from him. Questions that had no answers.
Jessica pulled Jeff’s notebook and knife from her pocket and handed it to him. “One thing is certain, you and your father need to come up with stories that have less of this weird stuff and happier ideas. Much, much happier ideas.”
Jeff, holding his notebook, stood utterly confused, but relieved his family was otherwise okay.
Jessica sighed heavily, her arms wrapped around her daughter, the sound of her baby’s laughter echoing in her memories.
Copyright © 2020 by Errick A. Nunnally.