Young Writers Society

It's an uncomfortable day, a perfect combination of all the worst traits a day could have. The sun's too bright, the air's thicker and moister than pudding, and perspiration seems to soar higher than the birds (who would probably only soar in decent weather anyway). Everyone's blinded by the atmosphere; no one wants to move.

"I have a suggestion," Miranda says quietly. She is like the ghost of a willow tree, but often appears to glow from within. "We should stand in the shade of that lovely brick building over there – no, look a bit more to your right – there it is. It's got a nice wide roof, hasn't it?"

I squint. "I don't think I've seen that place before," is my mumbled reply. "It looks like it'll crumble into dust any minute…"

" So why don't we use time to our advantage?" Miranda grins in her hushed, impish way.

I walk nonchalantly as Miranda pretends to do the same. The sidewalk bristles my feet through the thin-soled moccasins I foolishly donned that morning. Once in a while, a piece of mulch or long-dead weed terrorizes me (as if I'm more terrible than my annoyed expression, which I might be).

"STOP MOVING!" Miranda shrieks in a shrilly unnatural voice. "Somebody's followin' us!"

Heads whip backward and to the sides and forward again.

"Look up."

Nervously giggling, "I meant that something's following us. Look under your feet."

There's an odd crack in the concrete that might have been there before, but I don't remember. Miranda tends to notice meaningless things like these, so I trust her. "What do you think made this crack?"

"Guess."

"Weeds, moles, cave-dwellers, plate tectonics?"

"I don't know, I'm not sure either. Let's just keep walking now."

The musty-looking destination seems to get further away the more we walk, which is odd and unreasonable.

The landscape is overall flat, boring, and concrete-laden, with roads, telephone poles, warehouses, office-plazas, trees that definitely aren't growing there naturally…

"Miranda, why is that tree trunk purple?"

"Might be paint, I don't know."

"Hmm."

"Miranda, where are you going?"

"I'm not sure, where are YOU going?"

"Elsewhere, I guess," and it was a very sweltery, typical day again, like yesterday, the present tense, now the past tense…

I had just kept on walking as if in a trance, and now I was in the garden of the home I lived in. Miranda must have gone in another direction. I pulled a few carrots from the infinite brown of the soil but didn't have a place to put them, and decided to search for the vegetable basket.

It was in the kitchen, I thought. But it wasn't, and as I turned and looked, I saw only everything I had ever seen before. The black-and-blue tile floor, the countertops, the oven and the stovetop, the unwashed dishes I was supposed to do. The sink was filled with water, though. I hadn't put it there.

"Mom, where are you?" I called, and I heard an echo. I didn't remember our house having an echo, but then again, I was never much good at noticing.

Now two things lost: the basket, my mother, and possibly my mind. To the extent that I couldn't count.

"Miranda, I'm confused," I moaned, and sat on the wooden porch steps, sad and mystified. "Help me find everything, please."

"That's an awful lot of stuff to find, you know," and her voice had half-vanished again. That meant she was thinking.

"We still need to find it. As much of it as we can. Maybe we can find more than we think."

So Miranda, my only good friend, refused to abandon me once more. But after about twenty-five minutes of watching me sulk over the meaning of life, she snapped out of her trance. "I'm still wondering about that tree, you know. Just for the sake of curiosity, let's go visit it again."

We walked out into the concrete whirlpool beyond our little suburbian town, past the warehouses, the offices, the sidewalks, and in the midst of it stood the odd old building we had never approached. Now we stood at its door, looking up at its grand crippled roof, and for the first time in years, a breeze blew past every nose in the world and erased the dust – for then.

The tree was behind, as we had walked too far. Torn between two destinations, we picked

my house.

Because we were afraid. It was getting dark, and we needed to at least retain our identities.

"I'll go home now," Miranda said regretfully, "we'll keep on looking tomorrow."

"We will," I said in a foreign voice, trudging up the shallow steps. The childhood habit I once had, of twirling hair in fingers and fingers in hair, flooded back.

I paused for a moment. "You know what?"

Miranda nodded. "Let's not be frightened tomorrow."

There really wasn't anything to be afraid of, though, except the unknown.

That night I shivered through the heat, wondering where everyone had gone, why people like Miranda existed in the first place…and why they still did.

I was worried; I had never been like this before.

The next day, I swept through the covers and surged through my bedroom door, except it wasn't mine. This is odd, I thought. In fact, I didn't recognize a single thing around me. None of the photographs on the wall were familiar…but I was in every one of them, every ounce of my typical average self.