There is a moon and windmill in the dusk together in the hour after the Sun sets. From one vantage it looks almost as if the spinning windmill is hitting the moon every second: its three blades batter and beat the moon to no avail, bang bang, and there is no change. The cycle repeats; the blades come back, the moon is hit. The moon and windmill are two good friends—they see each other every night and share this blue hour. But they leave the Sun lonely: it has set, off on its mission to bring light to the planet, never knowing that white marshes turn dark at night. So it finds itself leaving the moon and windmill to frolic in the sky and grass together.
But Papre drives his car alone down the two-lane highway, and the marsh around him is dark. All he sees is the white line passing endlessly by to his right and the occasional rusted, faded sign. He is far from where he started, going in the only direction he can at reckless speeds.
When he passes every third mile marker or so, he wonders what would happen if he abruptly swerved off this unlit road and careened off into
Papre gets there in the dead of night, but the place has no place for the dead of night—here Death would be a stranger—life is everywhere in the forest around the meadow past the marsh. The meadow sits empty for now, as creatures gather all around it.
Papre arrives in the middle of the clearing on foot—he left his car behind—and takes it in. The creatures wait at the edges of the meadow, concealed from sight by the friendly foliage that envelops them like a once-warm mother’s embrace, while the darkness coats everything and Papre like a pillow held by a spiteful brother against one’s face. But pillows are hard to kill with, and Papre at most feels mild discomfort from the loneliness he faces now in the clearing.
And all the Things gather here in the dead of night. Papre was a guest, uninvited but tolerated, spectating, a Thing like the million other ones here. A purple one walked up to him from the shadows and stuck out what must be one of six and a half arms.
He took the proffered hand and they danced, danced in darkness and saw that over there a sloth was killing Anger, stabbing hard and fast—too fast for a sloth, as fast as the demon that chases you and eats your dreams—but Papre danced on, there was no problem with what he saw. Things attacked each other and threatened him and made him feel small but no matter what he did they went away one way or another; in the path of his dance there lay corpses of Things. A sheet of paper with numbered sentences lay on the ground как будто оно было закончено наконец-то и финально, and the text he hadn’t sent was lost in the meadow’s tall grass, trampled into the ground by the gambolling Things.
Soon Papre found the meadow crowded; still the Things seeped in from every gap between trees. The Things cavorted, Papre caught up in twirling motion among and between them, until soon the mass was nearly crushing and Papre could barely breathe. Between a dancing highlighter and a table he couldn’t sit on, he saw the trees moving closer—was he moving towards them or was the meadow getting smaller?—and his space tightening. Between the table’s twirls he gasped for breath and saw an outline of a path towards the trees. It was the wrong side of the meadow, but any side was right when the meadow was wrong.
Papre made it to the trees scathed but harmed too. He found relief among the trees in the meadow’s fence, watching the scene evolve. Still Things were flooding in, soon it seemed they’d need to fuse or find a second floor for the meadow to have space. But their pace hadn’t slowed, and the dancing grew more frantic. This was never that.
There was no music, Papre realized, though he had been on the same beat as every one of the thousand-large dance team. He had to find his car and get out of this place before he was missed—by the Things or the ones he had left behind where he’d started. A few meters into the forest (he planned to circumnavigate the meadow) he found unexpectedly another clearing, though this one had no wildflowers. His shoes began to click as the ground changed from dirt to some man- or woman-made material, and as he kept on his path—the stampede in the meadow was still deafening—a lone figure walking across a plain of polished white concrete. His shadow kept him company, cast by the moon cradled by the trees at the edge of the plain Papre walked on.
But between him and his escape Papre found an obstacle: mountains of red gravel, some covered in a plastic tarp the size of a giant’s blanket, to summit. Atop the second-tallest mountain stood a figure. There was no way around these mountains—as Papre approached their base, where the sound his shoes made started to contain the sound of red gravel crunching on polished white concrete, even his shadow abandoned him.
As Papre walked, the walking became harder and the ground softer. Every step gave way and he found his foot back where it had started. The gravel shifted and he had no way up, and yet he moved up through sheer repetition and kicked the gravel into submission until finally he reached the third-highest mountain’s peak. Below him, he saw everything: the stampede, his car, the long road; in the distance was the dark marsh; in front of him stood the figure.
The figure was a woman, though Papre knew and saw nothing else about her.
“What do you want?” asked the figure.
“I want to go home,” replied Papre.
They stood on these separate peaks, looking at each other in a vague, loose meaning of the word—they saw each other’s silhouettes and nothing more; or so Papre thought.
“You can go home. But what is it?” asked the woman.
“What is what?”
“Home.”
“It’s my house.”
“Your house is home?” asked the silhouette.
“Yes, it’s where I live.”
“Do you live?” asked the shadow.
“Who are you?”
“You don’t know that I know who I am,” she said.
“What are you doing up here?”
“That’s a good question.”
“You could answer it.”
“I could. But then you would never find the answer yourself.”
“I won’t find the answer myself. I have no idea what’s going on and I definitely can’t explain why you’re up here.”
“Why are you up here?”
“I had to get to my car.”
“Do you still have to?” asked the form in front of Papre.
“Yeah?”
“The world.”
“What? Can I go?”
“These hands could hold it. You can go whenever you want, Papre.”
At this phrase, exhausted by the climb and the trek, Papre began his descent. It was much easier on the way down, he realized after sliding down, assisted by the red gravel mountain. He reached the bottom safely and quickly, and in front of him he saw his way out: his car, at the end of a corridor of shrubs (bushes? Or were they trees?).
He walked inside the arch the walls of the corridor created, the branches creaking like the catcalls of an old loving lady, and as he pushed stray branches out of his way he noticed he was looking at his hands. Behind him the trace of what must’ve been a person stood at the top of the second-highest mountain of red gravel, illuminated and brought to life by the moon’s light. She watched Papre, and wished he had told her I imagine with the resources and skills that you have you will do great things. Perhaps we both will, и все б так же.