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I glance down, wiggling my toes into the silver earth. It gives against the slight pressure like a sponge—pliable, but resilient and…warm. Welcoming.
The soil heats beneath my feet and a pleasant fizzing sensation prickles beneath my skin. It feels like a hug, but from the inside. It’s strange, but nice. It also tickles a little.
I bite back the urge to laugh—not sure it’s safe to make noise in this strange place—and lift my gaze to take in my surroundings.
In front of me, there is nothing but more silver, sparkling earth sweeping away from me toward the horizon. But when I turn, I find I’m just a few feet from a fence made of brambles. The giant brown vines curl and lace into an impenetrable wall, blocking my view of anything on the other side.
Following a hunch, I wander to my right, sensing I’ll find an opening in that direction.
After only a few moments, my instincts are rewarded as a hugely intimidating gate comes into view. It’s forged of shimmering metal I don’t recognize and wrought into snake-like squiggles that squirm back and forth. It’s topped by daggers made of giant diamond shards, each one as long as my forearm.
Anyone trying to scale the gate while it’s closed will be in for a heavy dose of pain. The shards are so close together and arranged at such carefully varied angles, there’s no way to find a handhold without encountering the sharp side of one of them. Depending on where it sliced you, you might survive, but the odds wouldn’t be good.
Luckily for me, the gate is ajar, leaving an opening just wide enough for a man to slip through.
Luckily? a doubtful voice in my head whispers, but I dismiss it. Not because I think it’s safe to step through, but because I sense I have no choice. Either I enter the garden of my own free will or someone—something?—will be sent to fetch me.
The Garden.
I have never been to this place, never set foot on this silver soil, but as I pass through the gate and spy the rolling hills peppered with twisted trees, the patches of wriggling stick-spiders with their mismatched eyes, the rows of bright green and purple cabbage creatures with their chubby faces and toothless grins, I’m certain that I’ve seen it before.
I know these creatures, and they know me, and that I am…home. Not home like the spare, comfortable quarters I share with Da on the island or the cozy cottage in the woods where I spent my boyhood. Home like my friend Ferris speaks of home—a place that did its best to smother the life out of him. A place to be overcome, escaped. A place to run from as fast as your legs can carry you, never, ever looking back because even memories of that place are dangerous.
Memories can beat you black and blue long after the fists that introduced you to pain are dead and gone.
Instinctively, I take a step back, but it’s too late. The gate is already closing behind me, clanging shut with a low gong that echoes through the garden. The stick-spiders startle, their reedy legs rattling as they bristle and twitch. The cabbage creatures—more abundant than any other thing growing here—whimper and scuttle closer together, their wiggling roots tossing up clumps of earth as they move.
Heart thudding, I follow the trail winding past the smaller creatures’ beds to the trees on the rise. By the time I pass under their gnarled branches and the rotten black fruit hanging heavily from them, the warm energy that welcomed me here has vanished and my blood has gone cold.
I’m scared of that fruit, of what will happen if one of those bloated, putrid globs falls onto my head or, God forbid, creeps into my mouth. I sense that the fruit will only come if called—I would have to reach for it, to welcome the oblivion it offers—but I’m frightened all the same.
Frightened to stay in this dark orchard but scared to keep going.
I’m not sure what lies on the other side of these trees, but it’s the most terrifying thing of all. Something I’ve forgotten for sanity’s sake, but that once I remember, I will never be able to unknow.
Everything will change.
I will never be the same.
Certainty consumes me—that my dreams are about to die. That I’ll never be able to dream new ones. The open door at the end of my childhood is about to slam shut. I will never be a man. I won’t live to leave this nightmare place.
I step out of the trees, see the shallow pool reflecting the stars exploding across the canvas of night above it. Memories rush in so swift and merciless they bring me to my knees, retching, though there is nothing in my cramping stomach to heave out.
