Young Writers Society

I landed in a breathless heap on the floor. My side! It’s ripped open! I reached underneath my shirt and, almost reluctantly, traced a hand over skin. Smooth skin. I drank in oxygen.

Malibu! My head snapped up wildly. He was just standing there, back towards me, weapons in the bundle.

I was about to close my eyes and thank our lucky stars, when I felt a presence behind me. I only had a general notion of what it was. Danger was still hot on our heels.

“Down!” I commanded.

I don’t know why Malibu listened; he didn’t even know why he should, but he recognized my voice and obeyed. And it saved his life.

While he was in the process of falling to the floor, the Magneliohasetrop came soaring overhead. Since I was already stuck on the ground I peered up kind of like a snail might with its buggy eyes. It was a comical sight really. C’mon, the jet turbine thing thought it could fly.

And it was sadly mistaken.

The dumb thing ejected from the portal at a crooked angle, just like us come to think of it, so instead of obliterating invisible Heschita, which would have ended "moon rides" forever, it tore through the tub of glocks as if it wasn’t there. The polar-beared tub gave like cardboard, the guns getting dragged with the motion instead of scattering every which way.

The screaming engine continued into a special glass display case. Pictures of Malibu and longtime friends of his were in the case along with some legendary guns they all used to shoot. Items of reminiscence. We had avoided many calamities already today, but to evade all wouldn’t be probable. So far, this was the smallest possible calamity faced, so while it was crushing, our lives could have been crushed instead.

A shower of glass raining down, the wall brought the Mag to a bone-jarring halt. The oscillating super-fan inside of it ground to a weak slur, and fried wires at the back end sizzled. The poor room was not designed to take such punishment. The dent in the stone wall was ugly. The cracks showed sandbags stuffed behind the stones. Later I learned that they were actually between two layers of stonewalls. Otherwise, here in the basement, the swamp would have been leaking in. One day, with an insane amount of luck, I might have as much forethought as Gutterson.

The group of oddballs upstairs had probably felt the shockwave.

I turned from lying on my side, spreading myself flatter on the floor, and bellowed, “Honey, I’m HO-O-OME!”

“Gratefully,” my old pal stressed.

Now, it was just plain weird not to see five crescents waving along the wall. The bullet-hole rings were gone as well. It was like moving day, when all the walls look melancholy and bare. I rolled over to face Gut, who was surveying the slain, hands on hips, and stood up. Well, I tried to.

A fraction of the way up, I felt a strain in my side, cried out and slumped over. Gutterson shuffled over to my rescue.

“Is it real bad?”

“I can’t know for sure yet. I don’t think I’ve been opened up anywhere.”

I used my hand to get to a sitting position. He balanced me the rest of the way until I had my legs under me.

“Where at?”

“Obliques,” I told him, gingerly touching at my side. “Maybe from the landing.”

“There is no landing when you come out of there, you just pop.” A certain look materialized behind his loving eyes. “Son, how did you enter the portal?”

“Like a damn fool,” I said with distaste, remembering how I botched my awesome recovery when I busted the necklace. I felt a heat on my face. That is not going to go over well with the Rain man.

He assured me, “As long as it ain’t in your legs, you can support yourself for the better part.”

“The room is in much worse shape than me,” I said, shaking a head at the bulldozed face of a polar bear resting precariously amongst a blizzard of glass shards. His large face had been painted on the side of the Glock tub, now reduced to shreds, a diagonal slice parting him at the bridge of his bear nose. “Yow.”

A sandbag had fallen into the room and broken open, spreading sand harmlessly beside a limp tube and some flayed wiring spitting up sparks. Maggy’s butt end was mangled, probably from ramming itself against the underground facility's far wall. Again, I saw the small seat compartment pitted in its center. “You’re telling me we could’ve just hitched a ride?” I said dryly.

“If I’d’ve had a manual,” he said as he peeled off his gloves, “or been concerned with looking for a seat compartment, yes.”

“The seat was in plain sight.”

“Yap,” he admitted. “Sometimes the hardest place to see.”

I bent down, but quit before my arm was even fully extended, feeling a sharp bite in the meat under my ribcage. Malibu took note of my endeavor and completed the minor action that I could not. Once in my grip, I flipped the Flamethrower around and stared deep into its nozzle. “You caused us enough grief for two lifetimes, Bud.”

I pictured the nozzle coming to life as a pair of lips. “Could say the same about you, Bud.” The Flamethrower spit his Bud a little harder. Wow, you can’t intimidate a lifeless object, but a lifeless doodad can intimidate you.

That reminded me of how I was doing a lot of mind tripping of late. I didn’t think I would tell Gutterson about that freaktastic being who almost took the necklace. At least not right now. The necklace hadn’t arrived at a favorable end, and I already knew he hadn’t seen the bizarre visitor anyway.

“So Boo,” I treaded the water, “have you seen any outlandish, umm, visions during your time fiddling around with Heschita’s Mystical Moon powers?”

“Visions?” I smile wrapped his face in humor. “Yeah. One time a flying pig flew up to me and held out a candy cane to me with its hoof. And when I tasted it, it was bacon flavored. I looked up at him for an explanation. Instead of opening his snout to enlighten me, the little Oinker’s wings melted into butter, he transformed into a MerHog, slathered the butter all over the stick of candy with his flipper, smiled, waved, a penguin with a pool of water carved into the greater portion of its back flew by right under him, the pig-fish then strapped on a pair of sunglasses that were made from a halved cannonball, dropped into the pool, and swam away on a flightless bird.”

I blinked. I blinked again. “Really?”

“I wish. Wouldn’t that be exciting!” His face had, for the second time today and only the second time in the couple of years I had known him, regressed to the countenance of a kid absorbed in the speculations of fantasyland. I thought it was a wonderful sort of regression.

“But no,” the lifeblood pumping just beneath his luminous visage, suddenly chapfallen, “all I ever see is that goo-sand.”

Reality is more than unfriendly to a person who has seen its limits, for slowly they are deceived into believing the limitations are insurmountable. From then on it is near impossible for them to see over the tempestuous breakers: deadlines and promises to honor, the panic, the phobia of failing to stay afloat, the regret of being swept up in the sea of responsibilities, swept away from a refuge aboard Imagination’s island to drown under the shortcomings of what only appeared to be better shores.

And the fears only come with the awareness of knowledge, which afterwards leads to the compulsive engagement in the wrong kind of competition where those that are the same dethrone each other at every chance. It gets so ridiculous that everyone starts trying to build their tower to infinity. The right kind of competition has no losers, and is one in which equals forget themselves for others, but does not mean they completely abase, or deprive themselves for the cause of every passerby.

Hmm, I thought, competition. Gutterson said rabble-rousing amongst allies does the enemy's work. That statement is greater than first met my eye.

Thoughts akin to, Leave the dreams to those who can afford to chase them, gives birth to adults. Should we let an irrational fear of failure lower our mark simply because dreams tend to be longshots? There's just something one should never do in growing up, and that is to grow up all the way.

If they wander far enough away from Imagination's island, it is easy to be snatched away by the currents, and then they're more likely to be eaten by sharks than return. In chances they get lucky and are hauled aboard a ship, it will only be a matter of time until the ship is surrendered back to the waves after a life-long expedition that the odds favor will have been a search in vain one for an uncharted isle because once you lose the ability to imagine/dream/believe greater, it's one of the most painstaking things to relocate because you have to retrain yourself to process information in a way that no longer comes natural to a non-ignorant yet never totally-developed (because no one has all the pieces) and always-learning-ever-changing mind. Whether reckless, curious, or daring, wading out too far from Imagination's shore isn't all it's cracked up to be.

There is a drop off where the sea-water turns abruptly darker.

You can get swept away, and it's near impossible to forget what you see out at sea beyond the safety of obliviously blissful shores. Want to see if there's more out there and the new sights can overwhelm. And the wrest of your life, even if you manage to return, the time of your absence will have tainted the very way you are able to interact with the island.

It is formidable, malignant, degenerate, and by all accounts just plain dangerous for those who buckle under and adhere to dream-crushing nightmares, otherwise known in the forms of tempestuous breakers and sharks, all of which can be avoided by being content with the island as a base, not even necessarily a home, and never straying too far from it in overbearing curiosity of the sea's captivating expanse of false hopes.

This is all that distinguishes a child from an adult: a mindset. Take the good characteristics of children, and sometimes approach things like a child would though the adult in you tells you it won't work. Somewhere between is the perfect blend that makes up the Adild.

“Well I’ve seen a lot of things today. Things…” I looked behind me, “in there. Things that make me question my sanity.”

It was just so hard for me to accept that all of it could've actually happened.

“You’re not putting me on just because I did you, are you?"

“I dunno if this stuff is real, okay? Maybe my brain just made me see stuff that wasn’t there as a calming effect to counteract all this duress. And no I’m not pulling your leg. But I can’t…”

I seemed to have already forgotten so much of what I had witnessed, and what I retained wouldn’t make sense to him without the other parts. I mean, when I was there, it was all comprehensible.

“...fathom such simple complexity.”

And that was really how it felt, like an oxymoron. That’s how it felt outside. Here, my limitedness was just getting in the way. It ached to be outside. It killed to look at my contaminated island through the glass of a snow globe and try to clean it up when my fingers were locked out. I'd left stuff in there and I needed it back more than words could express, but if I tried to break it out the island would be dashed along with its watery confines and I'd have nothing but Humpty Dumpty—broken shards that could never hope to be put back together again.

But as long as I left the snow globe intact there was always hope that one day I'd stumble upon the key that could surpass the unthinkable of repossession. And do the unimaginable: restore the island to me in perfect condition.

“Like trying to follow dream logic after waking up?” he concluded.

“Nope. Worse.”

Because unlike a dream, it wasn’t a trivial escapade, my mind and my repressed self weren't speaking to me in my sleep. Somewhere in my heart, I knew I had been pushed right up against cutting edges of truths. I was so certain.

And I couldn’t prove it.

As with most dreams, I was left with flaky bits of recollection swirling around in a blizzard of profound feelings.

“Oh yeah,” I said, “and if we enter the portal together, how come I never see you? I would think you should be near me, if not next to me.”

Malibu just shrugged. His age was showing now. Guess mine was, too—I felt like a young heart and an older brain. Which to trust?

His laugh was wry. “So many things went haywire. The Taps usually last much longer than that. Maybe, since you spawned five, there wasn’t enough space available to fuel them all, with as much energy as each of them required.”

“You mean… they were asphyxiated?”

“In my theory, you hanged them.”

I acted like I didn’t hear his allegations. See, all you have to do is pretend a little. “I’d like to do some theorizing about that wasted pile of junk.” I pointed the flamethrower at the oversized magnet. “I didn’t think we’d get to take it home. Those puffy pyramids are beyond intriguing.”

“Hey now, remember when I played with the Big Boys? There wasn’t a whole lot of playing going on. Do me a favor son,” Gut rebutted in a pleading tone. “Don’t get caught up in that stuff.”

“But!” I protested. Then I gave the credit due my partner. “But that would be a dangerous thing to do.”

“You can’t just drop knowledge once you’ve tasted it," my friend warned, all too nostalgically, "unless you trade life to forget it, which is not such a sweet deal.”

Don’t worry Maggy. We’ll be seeing lots of each other if at all possible.

I muttered to myself, “I’ll definitely get started on plans for that memory eraser. After today, I’ll need it for a lot of hard memories.”

“Need what for a lot of memories?” asked Gutterson, concerned.

“Drugs, my friend, plenty of good drugs.” I made it sound believable, like I was really into it.

Malibu backed off, rubbing at his temple. “Oh, don’t let me interfere with that. Just keep in mind, if you go someplace new, you leave the old places behind, and if you ever get back, the places you knew will have changed, if not only in the way you perceive it with changed eyes.”

That literally almost made me cry. It was a variation of the growing-up thing. In this one, instead of your own growing pains, the world around you growing and taking on new shapes, which are way more out of your hands, and because they are mostly beyond your control, are harder to understand, harder to accept, and hurt pervasively more.

Things like people grow up (all the way) or they subtly change and grow apart, and time moves on and if you leave you can't just expect to walk back in, pick up a good time where you left off, and soak up the sun all over again.

Fading memories.

We are walking warehouses of them. And we're part of someone else's, on a page they can't flip back to, occupying a space in their story, but only so long as they are alive to recall it (which they'll only be able to summarize). Even the famous are ghostly hiccups; their verse is irrevocably logged, but few if any, really appreciate their life, their individual grind and the little things that made them, them.

And all that's left are hopes of making more times worth remembering in our futures. So they too, we can store away on a dusty shelf.

“If I cry, you're roast beef,” I said, stroking the costly bucket of nitro flame resting aboard my arm.

Perplexed he implored, “What does crying have to do with this? So far, we're victorious.”

He’d have to be inside my head to understand all my recent motives for tear-shedding. “For instance,” I skirted around the truth for time’s sake, “if we gotta climb back up that pole.” Not much of a problem for me, just an inconvenience. “Or thinking about how long it will take to clean up this warzone.”

“Phooey, leave the chores to Beaver, he ain’t hunting talking birds.” He walked over to the corner where the pole stood. He slid open a dinky panel tricked out to masquerade as an honest-to-goodness portion of wall. He grinned. "I never trod back the way I trode in.”

Who says that?

“You’re just full of surprises," I called after him as he disappeared into the doorway. "Trode’s not even a word!”

“You can bet a can of crackers it is now,” his departed body boomed back through the open doorway. “You haven’t been around long enough to know how new words land a spot in the dictionary. There are a lot of things you won't find in the dictionary—but every detail is in Life's Dictionary. Trode is no exception!”

Quickly, I turned and saluted the vacant air where the undercover Gatling gun rested. “Thanks for not forsaking us Heschita.”