----a particular purple----

Should have been a real good day, one to hang on to. Kind of day you’d torture yourself with in the future when things were crummy, wanting to go back and relive the damn thing and never leave. Seriously—she figured she’d really be enjoying herself out here if she was capable of enjoying stuff. Holli never had much of a knack for that, was the only thing. Or if she used to she’d lost it.

Funny color to the sky for some reason. Not a shade she could put a name to, either. Too dark for the brightness of the day. That was what it seemed like. Some sort of purple maybe, or maybe you’d call it violet. Yet that’s all violet was, wasn’t it? Yeah. A particular sort of purple. And it wasn’t quite violet up there anyway, whatever it was. Close, still … Something else.

The sky looked bigger out here, too. Florida has a way bigger sky than Ohio, or it seems like it does. Like it goes higher up, if that makes any sense. You feel smaller and more aware of all the space around you. The horizon looks further off. She noticed this kind of effect a couple other places the same way. Little while she spent in Colorado, and in San Diego another year. Wondered if there was any truth in it somehow. Something to account for the perception. Only semi-sensible theory she’d come up with was that Ohio was overcast more often, plus just possibly its clouds might form at lower altitudes, for whatever reason (more of them? thicker stacks, pushing down the bottom ones?), which would give you the impression of a ceiling that was closer to the top of your head. Not close but closer.

Sea level might also have something to do with it. Except if that was it, Colorado should have had a lower-feeling ceiling than Ohio, right? ‘Cause over there you were elevated higher. But it fucking hadn’t. That state was also notorious for its pollution. She remembered seeing the scary brown smog haze looming overhead, all through the drive into the city from the airport. No joke—it’s really as bad as everybody says. A huge shit stain smeared across the sky. Yet at the same time it really felt like it had itself quite a good bit more room up there to spread itself out and hover evilly like that than it would have if she’d been seeing the same awfulness at home in fucking Ohio. Real weird.

In Florida you were always seeing rain showers in the distance. Every day or every other day at least. You’d see the curtains streaking down from the clouds, miles off, while you’re standing sweating under brilliant broiling sunshine. You could watch the storms moving. Watch them stroll along like huge creatures. Like invaders from Mars, but way bigger and taller than the guys in the movies, and with tons more legs. Made from smoke instead of metal, except maybe for liquid silver … The clouds were their bodies, flying whale things or jellyfish, but the size of mountains—sea creatures in the sky—the rain, of course, was their legs. She’d watched them striding steadily toward her, or head away, or amble sideways. The sideways ones, they always had a funny arrogance about them. That was the sense she got. When they’re coming at you, of course it’s like they’re coming to get you and stomp on you. You feel them looking at you, and it’s menacing. Then if they’re heading away, still retains that quality a little bit, ‘cause she would keep waiting for the guy to change his mind and swing back around. But the sideways ones made you feel like you weren’t worth their notice. Too caught up in their lofty musings. You’re too small and ordinary and forgettable.

This was one of her favorite sights, in fact. Despite the silly self-pitying bullshit it might make her think if she lets it. Watching a storm from outside it like that. Gorgeous. Awesome. Saw them the same exact way in Colorado a couple times. Never in fucking Ohio.

Well, wait now, that wasn’t perfectly true. Not anymore. There’d been one time she had, finally, and not too long ago. Took her by surprise, big time. It was only for a minute, though, and it wasn’t as great. Didn’t look half as big, and then it faded out on her real quick—from having moved too close or too far off, one or the other. Probably too close. She remembered getting drenched, yeah. The spectacle of it had only popped up or possibly started up—down rather, coming down—at the last minute before engulfing her. Sunset behind it, which was what illuminated the approaching edge. She’d been on a little pedestrian bridge over a freeway. Arched real fucking high up in the air. You wondered why they had to make the thing so tall. Didn’t seem worth the trouble, considering the number of people that used the thing. Which was hardly any. Unless in older days it had been different? Maybe it was meant for schoolkids for a school that wasn’t around anymore.

She’d only walked up there on the thing ‘cause she’d been contemplating jumping off from it. It was all enclosed in chainlink fencing; she could still have got her ass through the stuff if she set her teeth. Or else climbed out along the exterior, from the edge. That would have worked. Wouldn’t have been too hard.

Hadn’t gone forward with that idea, obviously. Just toying with the notion. Just a little, not very seriously. Helpful at the time. Keeping that possibility in mind, as a last resort. Private backup plan. You don’t gotta put up with anything forever. All your bullshit, and everybody else’s. You really don’t if you don’t want to.

One of those phases, you know. Dark period. Comes and goes. Not as bad as some have to deal with, sure thing, no argument. Crummy enough, thanks very much. And anyways she was better now, supposedly. She was supposed to be better. Things were good again. Real good, mostly.

She was in Florida, for fuck’s sake. On the fucking ocean in a fucking sailboat. A gorgeous awesome day with a gorgeous awesome sky. That color was weird but it was still beautiful, wasn’t it? Fuck yeah it was. A perfectly beautiful weird.

“Christ. Look at that! Look at that shit!” Fooled her for a second, tripped you out—only no, Rae wasn’t talking about the sky. Well obviously. Not Rae of all people, no chance. “Jesus. I mean, just, wow. Wow.”

“What?”

“Some people’s children. I shouldn’t be shocked. Why do I still let shit like that shock me?”

“What?” Holli sat herself up slightly, fiddling with her top. Bad habit of hers. Didn’t really need adjusting. She wasn’t used to tops like these. Well, not with nothing else on top of it. Never learned how to relax like this. Not properly. She could fake it pretty good most of the time, for whatever that was worth. At least she hoped she could or she tried to. Of course, fiddling with her top every two stupid seconds was rather a giveaway, wasn’t it? Pretty embarrassing.

Rae didn’t notice. Well, Rae wouldn’t. Entirely fixated sideways on the thing—whatever it might turn out to be, once Holli figured out what she was supposed to look at—that was freaking her out. The latest thing. She always was doing this. This was what she did. Fixated and freaked. Couldn’t seem to get through the day without finding new stuff to get ticked off about all the time. Or even half an hour, more like. Needed to have something new to bitch about, didn’t really matter what. Just about anything might serve in a pinch, whatever little nonsense might present itself. Something new would always oblige, one stupid little thing after another after another.

But hey now, we all have our coping strategies. Glass houses, Holli.

It was another boat she was looking at, another boat about the exact same size as theirs. Only pointing in the opposite direction. Well, not the boat itself—it was the people on it. It was what those people appeared to be doing together. That was what she’d zeroed in on. Rae being Rae, Holli shouldn’t have needed to look. “Scandalous.” Then again, if it hadn’t been that it wouldn’t have made much difference, more than likely. Whatever else those folks might have been doing instead, or not doing, one way or another Rae would have found a reason to disapprove if she wanted to. Or rather when she wanted to, or needed to.

“God. Unbelievable. I mean, just, my Gaawwwd!”

“Yeah,” Holli said, “Yes sir. Look at ‘em go.” Had to straighten her glasses again, soon as she raised up and then fucking again right away when she turned her head around. Jesus. Damn things wouldn’t stay put on her face. Her nose was too slick with sunscreen and with sweat. Ew. Although actually they’d been slipping like this just as bad for months now, hadn’t they? Had she got them bent again? Hell they were always a little bent. They were too shrimpy and frail, the stupid frames. Plus probably it was the damn little nose-pincher foot things wearing out again. That happened to her before. Needed to get them swapped out. Maybe she could talk the other girls into a swing by the mall on the way home once they were done sailing for the day. Had to have an eye place in there somewhere; most malls did.

“I don’t see anything.” This was Melissa now, up at nose of the boat. What were you supposed to call it? Was it the brow? No that wasn’t right. Fucking Neal would know. Oh yeah, yes sir. He was into all this goofy navy type shit, all the stupid special nerdy terms from ye oldy times. Had fancy model boats in his bedroom since he was a little kid, and owned the whole entire O’Brian series—she’d bought him hardcover replacements last Christmas for a few he said were his fav’s. Read the whole damn set like three or four times. Why was she thinking about this now? This was exactly the absolute last thing she wanted to be thinking about again. The fucking guy. Fuck. “What are we supposed to be seeing that’s so dreadful?” Melissa asked, in a voice as loaded with haughty contempt as Rae’s. She didn’t actually look around, though, and didn’t even lift her head. Kept right on staring downward into the sea like she’d been doing the whole trip. Since they started out she’d been straddling the very tip of the nose with her legs dangling either side of it, leaned down with her forehead on her forearms, which she had crossed along the top of the skinny metal railing up there. Didn’t look like a comfortable perch to Holli. Some of the bigger waves they’d hit—swells was the more accurate term, maybe—it was surprising she hadn’t got her ass bucked off there. Sploosh, right under the boat. Even when you didn’t get knocked off, you had to feel it when the nose jostled up. Kick in the crotch, the way she’d planted herself, every time. Or maybe that was the whole point. Maybe Melissa was getting herself off on that.

God, there she went again. The stupid shit that kept occurring to her ... Holli wasn’t normally like that. Didn’t have that sort of mind, or at least she didn’t used to have. Now, though. Now. Pointless little mean-spirited crudities like that. She never quit thinking them up. One after another without end. So messed up still. Neal and all the rest of it. All that shit he said about her when it was done. True or not it didn’t matter. Still hurt just as bad either way. All of it. God help her.

Stop thinking about this. She was in Florida in a sailboat on the ocean. Everything was better now, everything was gorgeous. All that other horrible hurtful crap was over and done with and umpteen thousand miles away in fucking Ohio with its low-ceilinged colorless soulless skies. Here the sky was twice as high, or three times maybe. Two or three times as much air to breathe and sun to bask in. And basking in it was exactly what she was supposed to be doing, not thinking again about the past. Holli was wearing the most ludicrously skimpy goddamn bikini she’d ever dared to put on her body in her life, which had also been, with an irony that still managed to be both appealing and infuriating at the exact same time, the single most ludicrously expensive article of clothing she had ever purchased for herself.

She’d set herself up in the center of the boat with her towel right in front of the mast. Widest part of the top—the deck or whatever. Where she’d have enough room to stretch out. The towel was old and ratty and actually a bit too short for her. Well, more than a bit. It was the only beach towel she’d ever owned, and she’d had it since she was a little kid. It had Chewbacca the Wookie on it. Well, it used to. Hard to see the bastard anymore, faded and ragged as it was. Anyway, she’d spread the thing out as much as it was spreadable, and then she’d spread herself on top of it, on her back. Practically nude out in the open ocean. Ta da!

Well now, in fairness, they weren’t that far out. Cruising along nice and gentle in aimless zigzags only like five minutes sailing from the shoreline, maybe ten tops—you could still see the beaches and all the people on them, over on the, um, left. (Wait, what was it? Starport? Larboard? One or the other—thataway.) They were tiny bug people but you could see them perfectly fine and they could see you if they wanted to look. If you fell off this fucking boat, it would be about a twenty minute swim to safety, twenty or thirty, a slog but doable unless you were too much of a huge helpless pussy for that, and if you were you might as well let yourself sink and drown for the betterment of the overall species. As to the other part, the nudity part, all righty yeah, of course she wasn’t, strictly speaking, letter-of-the-law. The essential goodies were still safely obscured, mostly kinda more or less. She nonetheless felt, and considered herself, pretty darn seriously close to buck bare-bottom starkitude. Kind of amazing how near to naked in public you can let yourself get, and without raising anybody’s eyebrows much, provided the setting is appropriate for it, like a place for swimming, and that the cloth your two little surviving scraps of coverage were made from is the appropriate matching sort of cloth. Sturdy-seeming athletic swimsuit cloth instead of wispy undies, no matter they don’t cover you any different or any better. Yet obviously this was a degree of nudity (call it ninety-eight percent?) that was the closest a girl like her was ever gonna let herself get, out of doors and under the sun.

Getting a good tan wasn’t the point. We may pretend … No, not that day. Not at all.

The point then? The point was to display herself. To make a spectacle of herself. Knowingly and on purpose. How did they say it in detective stories sometimes? With Malice Aforethought: a lewd spectacle. Not terribly lewd. Not porno. Only lewd to some tasteful permissible degree. PG-13. Still, suggestive content, mature themes. This was a sexual act and part of the big test was the fact she wasn’t gonna pretend it was anything else but that. Because indeed, a test was what it was. A kind of personal secret dare. She wanted to see what this felt like, and to see if she could enjoy it without wussing out or despising herself. She wanted to see—to prove, in fact—that she was adventurous enough. Not too chicken or too much of a prude.

She wanted to prove Neal was wrong about her. If you wanna be blunt about it.

Not that there were a whole lot of folks around to take in this particular spectacle, at least not close enough to see nitty-gritty details. That made it easier. It still wasn’t very easy. She had the figure for this, anyway. At least she was pretty sure she did. And if you’ve got the figure for this sort of stuff, it’d be sort of a shame not to take the opportunity. Up to now, she never had.

These are the kinds of things you keep telling yourself.

Holli tended to think of herself as too skinny. Much too skinny. Not so much skinny as scrawny. Lots of people would agree with her. But hey, the world right now, and the jerks that run it … Too skinny ain’t really a problem. Not like it is if you ain’t skinny at all. Too skinny plays just fine, most places, most of the time. Let’s not pretend otherwise. Let’s agree to call a spade a motherfucking shovel.

All this skin she was exposing, the freckled parts and the scarred parts, the bony spots that jutted out too much and the other softer parts that were supposed to do that and didn’t, or not enough—the frank majority of her exterior. Not once before had she dared or felt the desire to expose this much of herself outdoors in front of other people in this way—that’s not to say she’s never been swimming, only she certainly wasn’t swimming today, was she? While every other swimsuit she’s owned has been a different species than this bikini. A whole other order of being.

Now all this bare skin of hers, believe it or not, it’s started kind of shimmering, or it seems to. This was thanks partly to the liberal or perhaps excessive amount of sunscreen she’d slathered on, with an additional greasy coating of prodigious perspiration seeping beneath it or perhaps even pushing/ bursting up outward through the lotion … and also and perhaps more than any other factor it’s just due to the fundamental pallor of her body, since basking under the blaze of Florida sunshine was a new experience for it. She had developed across her whole surface a glassy sheen. When Holli looked herself over, she glistened with so much reflected bright brilliance it made her have to squint. For real! Her own flesh was almost blinding her! She didn’t have shades on—she’d need prescription ones, her eyes were too crummy—but she didn’t honestly think they’d help much if she had any. She was lit up from top to tiptoe like one of those mirrors at a solar power farm.

Had to look goddamn hot laying out like this, didn’t she? She was, in fact, goddamn hot laying out like this. Using that word “hot” in all its different senses—or the most of them, anyhow. The key ones. The mundane definition, and the figurative. The trick now was to savor it, as much as possible and for as long as it was allowed or uninterrupted. To consciously absorb and enjoy this state of being now that she had achieved it for herself—proven it was possible—and recognized the achievement.

Only it wasn’t working out. The last part—the savoring. Hot she might be, inside and out, literally and figuratively. Hubba hubba, pant pant, hisssssss. But she wasn’t enjoying it much. It wasn’t enjoyable, because it wasn’t comfortable. It wasn’t the kind of state a girl could get comfortable in. Shouldn’t have been shocked by that. Not when you think it through. Instead it made you antsy, didn’t it, and feverish, and itchy? Bound to, right? Oh yes sir. Of course it fucking did. It made you clench and quiver and squirm.

And she was. Each of those things. All of them together.

And then for a bonus of course there was the extra distraction of Rae in the back at the steering stick thing, with all her psycho fussy bullshit. With Melissa also on hand to provide her own individual alternate species of bullshit on the other end of the boat. Whereas Holli herself, if it came to it—and it had started to already, before either of the others spoke up—she could always be counted on to be carrying around her own overstocked supply of perfectly personalized and targeted self-destructive bullshit in the depths of her belly and her heart. Never buried too deeply. Readily accessible with a mere moment’s consideration. Proverbial blink of the eyes. She didn’t need her friends to ruin the moment. Holli could wreck it for herself just dandy all by her ownsome, without so much as snapping her fingers.

See now, she’d done it already. Wanted to throw up. Good thing she was on a boat. All she’d need to do was roll over sideways a little. She could spew all she liked. She could spew her fucking guts out, no cleanup required. No questions either. All she’d have to tell the others was she’d got sea sick all the sudden. Just hit her out of the clear blue, one of those funny things. Ah well.

This other boat now, next to them … Not right next to them but not far off either … Hailing distance, just about. That’s what Neal would wanna call it. They were close enough they could probably hear what Rae was saying, if they cared. It would probably just encourage them. Some people’s children, just like Rae said. Damn straight. Look at ‘em go over there. Wow.

Added stimulus of the worst type, as if she hadn’t been getting enough as things stood.

Name of the boat on the side she saw was Stud Muffin, ‘cause why not, right? What else would it be?

Theirs, incidentally—well, Rae’s, or really Rae’s dad’s—happened to be called the Laughing Cavalier. This was probably intended as a knowing reference to something. It was outside Holli’s range, or the scope of her education. Bugged her a tiny bit that it was over her head. Unless she chose to be bugged instead by the snootiness of ritzy-ass people like Rae’s folks that would name their boat in a showoffy way like that to make you feel dumb and small if you didn’t get it. She could have looked it up if she had her smartphone with her. She didn’t. Left it at home. Holli’d had a premonition if she brought it with her on the boat, the damn thing was bound to end up over the side one way or another and lost forever, and she just paid close to three hundred dollars for a top-of-the-line model. The catch turned out since it was so new and so nice she was always afraid to carry it around with her, out of paranoia of losing it or getting it busted. It never got any use.

But anyhow …

Over there on the other boat, a girl was giving a guy a blowjob. It was happening on the same spot Holli was laying out. The equivalent spot, that is. The middle upper part of the deck in front of the mast. The guy was sitting up and actually leaning his back on it. If the sticking-out arm thing decided to swing around it would sweep his ass right off there into the drink. (The spar, she heard Neal’s voice correcting her inside her head. Sticking-out arm thing, Jesus H.) Of course it wouldn’t—it was tied in place, just like theirs was, only on the opposite side. Stud Muffin was pointing the other way. Yet they didn’t seem to be moving away from each other. Both boats were sailing in curves. Holli hadn’t noticed before. She wondered if Rae steered them like that on purpose, and the other guy. Probably not. Just the wind and the current. Rae claimed she was an expert at this shit and Holli was pretty certain she was kidding herself, while the Stud Muffin’s pilot didn’t look like he was paying any attention. He had two other topless girls with him in that back section with the benches, and they were passing a bong around.

Holli had thought it was a microscope for a second. Kind of embarrassing. Why are they putting in their mouths? Oh. Duh. Not her scene. She’d never used one of those.

Then there was two other assholes on jetskis circling the boat. Pretty far out from the shore for jetskis, wasn’t it? You couldn’t tell if they were part of the Stud Muffin group or not. Could have gone either way. Except both those dudes had real long hair, and the guys in the boat were buzz-cut types. And also one of them looked like he was trying to get the other guy to stop orbiting them. Shouting at him and trying to cut him off when he turned, looking pissed. His buddy wasn’t having it—he wanted to keep watching the blowjob. Craning his neck, and riding directly into wavetops to make the jetski jump from the surface. Probably gonna end up flipping himself or crashing into the boat. The other dude finally gave up on him and roared away, with his middle finger over his shoulder. His buddy didn’t notice.

The Stud Muffin gang didn’t seem to care what he was doing. Holli would have got pissed, if she’d been over there. Then again, if she was the kind of person that would go down on a guy out in the open like that, maybe she wouldn’t have. Maybe she’d have been pleased at the additional attention.

“Fucking gross,” Rae said.

Was it, though? Seriously? They were out on the ocean, not in middle of a shopping mall or a restaurant. On the beaches, everybody was just specks, and most other boats to be seen here and there in the area were almost as small. Holli’s group were the only people close to them—except for that jetski asshole—and they still weren’t really properly close. And it hadn’t happened on purpose. It wasn’t like she could have recognized any of their faces tomorrow in a police lineup. You couldn’t really tell if any of them were good-looking or not. It wasn’t likely, was it? People that act like that—especially girls—they’re generally overcompensating. Not to say it’s a firm law of nature or nothing. Call it a statistical probability.

What was the big deal anyway? The girl was sucking the guy’s cock; why was that so horrible? Rae acted like they were doing devil worship over there, cutting up a baby with black knives.

“Ain’t you ever took a cock in your mouth before?” Holli asked, “Try it sometime, if you haven’t. It’s not as gross as you might think. You might find out you like it. It’s kind of fun, once you figure out the right way to go about it.”

“Christ, Holli,” was her response, “There’s a time and a place. That’s all I’m sayin’.”

“Fair enough,” said Holli. In truth, most of the time, she would have absolutely agreed with her. She would have reacted the exact same way, and meant it when she did, or thought she did. Today she didn’t feel that way. No mystery as to why.

She envied the girl over there. She really did. She wished she had a hot guy sitting on this boat to blow in front of everybody, and not give a shit while she did it. Not Neal, though. Somebody else, somebody new. Somebody hotter.

Here was the best part: she knew if there really was somebody, she couldn’t have done it. Never in a million years. Certainly not in front of Rae and Melissa—that went without saying—but not even if neither of them were here. If it was just her and the guy all alone, with no other boats passing or assholes on jetskis close enough to ogle them, she still couldn’t have done it. Not even if the guy was Hugh Jackman or Justin Timberlake. Not even if she was drunk off her ass or stoned, or both. She just simply didn’t have the capacity for a stunt like that.

Normally she wouldn’t have questioned that. She wouldn’t have seen it as a problem or a flaw or a limitation. Any other day than a day like today.

A horn went off. Not close, not very loud. You often saw big cargo ships moving along the horizon—the horn was probably from one of them. Yeah, there it was. They passed surprisingly quick. If you kept your eyes on them, they didn’t look like they were moving. Seemed like you could swim out to them in a few minutes, if you wanted. But then you’d look away for a second and they’d be gone or almost gone when you glanced back. One of those weird tricks of perception. She wondered why it had honked.

“Storm coming,” Melissa said. “Look.”

Well, that answered that.

Melissa was pointing behind them, over Rae’s head. Huge thundercloud looming back there. Christ, where had that come from? How had it got so close without them noticing? Holli would have sworn it wasn’t there the last time she looked that direction—and that hadn’t been too long ago. Had it? Didn’t she look around at Rae when she first started bitching? That was just like a minute and a half ago. The thunderhead hadn’t been there. Or she was going blind.

More likely just plain too fucking self-absorbed.

You could see the rain coming down, exactly the way she liked seeing. Silver silk curtains. Another interesting trick of perception—the way the rain looked like it came down in individual strands. Did it? Did the drops fall in clustered lines or columns, with gaps between them for some reason? Did they come only from the underbelly of the cloud, or from the middle too, or the whole thing? Did anybody know these things? Probably. You had to go to meteorology school. They would have figured out all these details with the cloud chambers they used. More stuff she could look up on her smartphone after they went home. If she remembered. She doubted she would.

Lightning flashes, now. No thunder yet. The flashes looked greenish. That was weird. Never saw that before.

The wind started picking up, yet it didn’t get chillier. It stayed hot and steamy, like the blast from a laundry vent except without the detergent smell. The cloud wasn’t blocking any of the daylight on them yet either. “Shit,” Rae said, “we’re gonna get our asses drenched in a minute.” Impossible to take that seriously. Holli knew she was right, but you couldn’t make your body believe what your eyes were telling you, not while the sun was still blasting you at full power. Its rays felt like they drummed on her skin with physical weight.

She was looking forward to having that replaced with rain. That was going to feel pretty nice.

“We got some ponchos below, if you want one,” said Rae. This whole time, she’d been wearing a light hoody, and now she put the hood up and pulled the strings tight. It looked endearingly ridiculous on her, with its pointed top, and the way it gripped her face. Made her look like an elf or a space alien. Rae was always fussy about getting her hair wet. Like she was afraid it would all wash off her head. “Did you hear me? You guys?”

“I’m good,” Holli said.

“You won’t be, when it catches us.”

“I don’t mind a little rain.”

Melissa did get up and scrambled around Holli to the open the hatch and jumped down. “Where are they?”

“Green bags in the cabinet. No, the other one. The other other one, other side.”

“They’re not in here.”

“Yeah they are. They have to be.”

“There’s nothing in here but dishes and cups and shit.”

“Dig underneath all those.”

“I did. They’re not in here.”

“Well fuck. Where’d Dad move them? Where would he have moved the things? Fuck!” She unlatched and lifted the bench seat across from her, revealing another storage space crammed with stuff. Holli hadn’t known the seat could do that. Did the other one raise the same? It probably did.

Rae dug violently through the bench cabinet, swearing. “Fuck is the good of having stuff if nobody knows where it’s put? Fuck! He’s always doing this to me!”

The ponchos did not surface.

More lightning flashes—still strangely green, and with no thunder. Wait, there it started. A brief grumble, then a whip crack, and then more grumbling, louder and angrier. And Holli felt a rain drop hit her shoulder, though the cloud didn’t look like it was close enough yet. The sun still wasn’t getting blocked. Must have been swept ahead on the breeze. It didn’t feel cold like she expected.

And what was that smell all the sudden? She’d never smelled anything like it. It was shockingly strong. Made her nostrils tickle inside.

“What is that? You guys smell that?”

“What?” Rae said, “What are you talking about?”

Then the cargo ship let off its horn again. Except it was a different horn, with a completely different pitch. And when she looked over at the ship, it wasn’t the same ship. It had a totally different profile. Much bigger or at least much closer, making it look that way. It seemed to be turning toward the coast, or towards them. That was a bit alarming, in fact. The horn let loose again. More like a sort of siren. Wow-wow-wow. Wow-wow-wow.

“Hey! Fuck is that?” Melissa had stuck her head up from the hatch. Holli thought she was talking about the cargo ship but that wasn’t it. She’d spotted something else. In the sky. Flying out of the thundercloud, with the green lightning flickering and fizzling around its wings.

Her wings. It wasn’t an it. It was a woman. A woman with wings.

Coming at them from out of the storm.

Rae couldn’t seem to see her. Holli would remember that, afterwards. Rae looked right at it and it didn’t register. “What are you pointing at? What? I see nothing.”

“Are you kidding?” said Melissa, “Fucking look! Look at it! Right there!”

“I don’t see anything. Are you fucking with me?”

Melissa threw that right back at her. “Are you fucking with me?” She whirled around to Holli. “Do you see it? Can you see that shit?”

Holli nodded. “Jesus H,” she said.

Then the boat hit something, or something hit them. Big crash and the whole vessel jumped up at least six feet in the air.

Holli got flung overboard. The boat launched her like a catapult. Then it was like the ocean kicked her in the face and the belly and the tits and the crotch all at the exact same time. It would probably have knocked her out if it hadn’t hurt so fucking much. That is to say, if you’d asked her ahead of time, she would have bet money on something like that knocking her unconscious. The level of pain alone. In her own head, she thought she’d been struck by lightning. Her eyes were closed when she smacked into the water, or rather, when the water smacked into her.

It turned out to work on her as a kind of ultra alarm clock. It didn’t put her lights out—instead, in her case, the shock and the agony stimulated her imperiled system into a state of supercharged heightened consciousness. Woke her up when she was already awake, or had imagined she was … For the next few minutes, Holli found herself more awake and aware and alive than ever before. A hundred times more, it felt like, or a million.

Lucky the clobbering happened to take her that way. If it had gone the other direction, she’d have drowned and died. No question about it.

It had been the jerk on the jetski. He was what ran into their boat, ‘cause he was staring up at the woman in the sky with wings. That was the first thing Holli put together, when her head came out of the water. She saw the jetski on its side, and the asshole splashing around next to it, and she saw the huge horrible gash he’d punched into the nose of the Laughing Cavalier. Only for a second—then enough water had gushed into the hole for it to drop out of sight, as the nose sunk. Then the whole boat was tipping its ass into the air ninety degrees like the friggin’ Titanic. And then she dived. The boat wasn’t slow about it. She plunged under like a dolphin. Done and gone.

“Jesus H. Jesus H.” Holli kept saying that to herself. It helped to keep saying that. It helped her maintain a balanced rhythm as she treaded water, rather than just thrashing around out of control, and screaming. “Jesus H. Jesus H. Jesus fucking H.”

Where were the others? She didn’t see them on the boat as it went down. She should have been able to see them if they’d still been together in the back part. They hadn’t been. They’d already jumped clear or got flung off like Holli had. But where were they now? She couldn’t see them. Couldn’t find them. Just the asshole with the jetski, trying to tip it upright so he could climb back on to the thing, and not being able to do it. It was too fucked up. It wasn’t sinking but it was too bashed out of shape to stand up properly anymore.

“Motherfucker!” That was what she could hear the guy shouting over and over; his analogue to Jesus H. “Motherfucker! Motherfucker! Mother! Fucker!”

New screams now. Female screams. Holli turned.

It wasn’t her friends, neither one. It was the girls on the Stud Muffin. The guys too, actually. They were both screaming the same as the girls, just as loud and just as high, so you couldn’t distinguish them from the females. In another context, Holli would have been amused by that. Too much else was going on at that moment.

The winged woman. She’d landed on their boat. In the middle, right on top of the couple.

The girl wasn’t blowing her boyfriend no more. Well, of course not. She’d scrambled away, crawling backward to the nose of the boat. She was huddled against the safety rail there—just like the one Melissa had been leaning on, on their boat.

The guy hadn’t moved at all from the mast. Holli noticed he still had his erection. What he didn’t have any longer was his head. The woman with wings had just swhacked it off.

Blood had shot up all over the front of her, and across the white surface of the sail. In fact it was still going … It was amazing how high up the blood managed to reach. It was like a red geyser. That much blood didn’t shoot out of people when they got their heads cut off in the movies. Except for one—this old samurai movie she watched. She remembered thinking they’d gone overboard when she saw that. She remembered laughing her ass off at that part. Looked like the joke was on her; they’d been perfectly accurate.

“Jesus H. Jesus H.”

The jetski asshole had seen it too. “Mother! Fucker!”

It wasn’t an angel. Whatever it was, it was no angel. First thing most folks would think—a woman with wings. At least a full size woman—if she’d been little, people would guess fairy or pixie. Holli wasn’t going for any of those.

Or if it really was an angel or a fairy of some kind—here was the catch. It would mean an angel or a fairy in real life was so utterly different than we usually think of them, it was pretty much a completely different creature anyhow, and might as well get itself a different name, at least if Holli had a say.

Like when she saw a thing on TV about how some folks thought a rhinoceros was a unicorn, when rhinos first got discovered. By Europeans, anyhow, in medieval times or whenever the fuck. They’d gone, “oh, lookee here, this is what a unicorn is really like, outside the stories.” Obviously this idea hadn’t stuck. The differences too much outweighed the similarities. A rhino could only count as a unicorn if you threw out everything that made the idea of a unicorn appealing in the first place. Not to pick on rhinos—she liked rhinos a lot, actually. Adorable animals. You just couldn’t say they were much like unicorns, except for the horns on their snouts. And even those were completely different kinds of horn.

The wings on the woman—they weren’t proper angel wings and they weren’t fairy wings either. An angel’s would look like a bird’s, or were supposed to—these didn’t. No feathers, and the shape was all wrong. Fairies had buttery wings or dragonfly wings. Again, these weren’t like either of those kind. They were actually closer to airplane wings, implanted in her naked back. Only to a point. The angles weren’t right, and they weren’t near large enough.

Were they really metal? They sure looked like it. At least most of them did.

Helicopter blades. Not as big, though. Bigger than swords but not big enough to go on a real chopper, and they were folded up on the ends at steep angles, the last quarter-length of them, with scary hooked barbs projecting downwards from the tips. They were tar black, with ribbed cables or veins threaded through them, which even at this distance Holli thought she could see flexing, pulsing. And both blades had strange, languid ripples moving over them, up and down, back and forth. Flickering wrinkles of red and green distortion in the air across the surfaces of the blades. The flat faces of them.

She had a brassy helmet of the kind Romans and Greeks used to wear in ancient times, with a mohawk plume built on the top. They looked a lot like a horse’s mane, didn’t they? She had never noticed that before—she wondered if that was deliberate, when the guys first invented them. The hairs or bristles of the plume were white with red-dyed tips.

Other than that helmet, the bitch had nothing else on. No, that was wrong. She also had armor on her forearms and shins. Same color as the helmet. But no shoes and nothing at all covering the main middle parts. Her skin looked greenish. She had an elongated, rail-thin figure like a supermodel or a drug addict. She was totally flat chested, worse than Holli’s. Then again, you wouldn’t want big gazonga’s flopping loose when you flew through the sky without clothes on, if that was your thing. Holli also happened to notice she had piercing in her belly button, and her bush was completely shaved off.

She was holding an axe. More like a hatchet or a tomahawk—a one hander. It was what she’d used to behead that guy. She also took a moment to crouch down and hack off his genitals with the thing. She didn’t have a belt or sheath for it that Holli could see—did that mean the bitch had to carry it in her hand the entire time? That seemed stupid to her, and unlikely.

Just then the woman, after she straightened up and was swiveling around toward the blowjob girl cowering at the nose-rail, she casually stuck the weapon to the side of her leg, like it was magnetized or she had Velcro on her skin (she didn’t, not that Holli could see). Well, that was kind of nifty. Weird but kind of nifty, yeah.

The woman lunged for the blowjob girl, who tried to jump off the boat to get away, but wasn’t fast enough. The winged woman grabbed under the girl arms and took off with her into the sky. Launched damn near straight up like a rocket, except there was no exhaust spewing behind her. Her blade-wings didn’t have to flap to work. Only thing they did was shift their angle slightly wider at the very last second, and they made a chiming sound.

Poor blowjob girl screamed and screamed and never stopped, with the tone getting higher the higher they went. Fainter, too, of course, dwindling … Awful as it was, it was funny too. The cartoony sound of that. Which ended up part of the awfulness. Holli was expecting the winged woman to drop her in another moment, just to be mean, but that turned out to be wrong. The winged woman carried her off out of sight into the storm cloud and never reappeared.

Holli never saw either of them ever again. She would eventually learn a bit more about the pair, and what that whole bizarre abduction was all about, but not for quite a lengthy while.

A series of booms and whistles. Firework sounds.

It was all from that other boat, the one blaring its horn before. The real big bastard that used to be a cargo ship and then apparently changed into something different when the storm started, as well as its direction. It had moved much closer than it was the last time Holli looked at it, yet without being very close at all still. It was shooting rockets into the storm cloud. Or maybe firing big old-fashioned cannons. She couldn’t quite make out which it was.

She guessed those guys were shooting at the winged woman as she flew off over top them. They didn’t seem to hit nothing. The boat had a fat, curved tower at either end, with a bunch of guys standing on the tops peering through telescopes. Five or six squat figures on each tower, with funny shaped, lumpy hats or hoods. The front of the ship had green writing on it that seemed to be glowing a little. She couldn’t read the letters. Three diagonal scribbles. It didn’t look like Chinese or Russian or anything foreign she might recognize even if she couldn’t translate them.

Implication was pretty obvious, wasn’t it? Those guys were from the same place the winged woman had come from. Some place else. Fuckers must have come here through the weird storm the same way she had. Chasing the bitch, most likely, since they’d just been shooting at her naked butt. Unless it was the other way around …

What if it was the Cavalier and the shitty Stud Muffin that had just, together, jumped worlds? (With the jetski jerk also caught up in this shit.) And the crazy storm that did this to them all, had it sprung on top of them by accident or was it done on purpose?

If none of them were on Earth any longer, that meant they were all screwed. This was all going to get worse before it got better. Or it might never get better.

Holli went to the bathroom. It started before she realized and then she couldn’t stop. But she reminded herself it was all right in the circumstances. She could get away with it. She was in a bathing suit in the fucking ocean.

Where was the other sailboat? She couldn’t find it for a second. Then when she did, she was astonished to see how far off it had moved from her while her back was turned, watching the winged bitch fly off and then wondering about the big guys with the towers and the cannons and telescopes … how many minutes had she been staring at them? Must have been longer than she thought. Or else a powerful wind or current had pushed the Stud Muffin away from her. Like almost a goddamn mile, looked like. Not really that far but still pretty damn fucking far. “Jesus H! Jesus H!”

“Motherfucker!” from the jetski jerk beside her, in a tone of agreement.

They started swimming for the sailboat. The waves were against them, fighting them. Laughing at them, felt like. Holli had started to cry, or probably she’d been crying for a good while. Probably she started crying right after she peed herself. It didn’t matter. All that mattered was making it to the boat. If they could.

Didn’t feel like it was gonna happen. Didn’t feel likely. Not with these waves as bad as they were. And the rain pelting down just as violent, like it was really trying its damnedest to shove her under the surface and hold her there and drown her ass.

The jetski jerk grabbed one of her arms. She wasn’t sure if he was trying to help her or trying to get her to help him. Either way, all he was doing was weighing her down. She tried to shake him off and couldn’t. “Let go! Let fucking go!”

His only answer, inevitably: “Mother! Fucker! Mother! Fucker!” Except then there was an abrupt change. “Moth—” His head went under, and stayed under for what felt like too long. When it finally popped up again, all he said was “Guhhahh!” Just for an instant before he disappeared once more.

Funny thing was, when that happened, his head had moved a longish distance away from her. Only he was still clinging to her arm. Except he couldn’t be. Not at that distance.

Then she realized his arm was clinging to her with nothing else attached. A lot of blood was streaming out the end of it, though not as much as you might guess for some reason. Not at all like it gushed from the decapitated guy. The end of the arm just oozed and seemed rather nonchalant about it.

Then all at once it was gone. Holli would never be able to remember shaking or prying it loose and flinging it far away. That must have happened, but her brain immediately blanked out the details of the task.

She ducked her head under the water, keeping her eyes open, which she hadn’t been doing before as she was swimming. If a shark or something was about to nab her like the jetski jerk, she wanted to see it coming. She wanted to see what it was.

There was no shark. Not coming for her. She could see the thing that got the jetski jerk—it was moving away from her at considerable speed, carrying the jetski with it in its mouth. She could see one of his legs kicking feebly, as it chewed. The creature was like an eel, except its black body was flat horizontally like a ray rather than vertically. The way it rippled or undulated reminded her of a bedsheet on a clothesline. The old lady that lived next to her hung one like that out behind their apartment building every other week.

No other fish around. The ocean wasn’t as deep as she thought it was—or as deep as it used to be. The bottom was covered with what looked like tall, jagged white grass. She also found the Cavalier, resting on its side. With a deep breath, she could probably make it all the way down to it if she wanted to, provided she started from right above the spot, but she wouldn’t be able to stay there for more than a moment before she’d need to come up again.

The ocean had become bathwater warm on her skin, and it had—or seemed to have—an odd texture to it. A sort of oiliness, if she wasn’t imagining it. The smell or flavor of it in her nostrils and against her lips, those might also have changed. Though it was still salty, this was not the same sort of salty as the oceans of Earth. Somehow it had a milky or chalky quality. She couldn’t pin down the difference any better than that. It was only the flavor that seemed that way. The water didn’t look milky or chalky. Instead she thought it looked clearer than at home. Brighter than it should have been, as well, with the storm above. She couldn’t account for that.

There was definitely more light ahead of her than behind. When she surfaced, she saw why.

Behind the Stud Muffin, the storm had cleared. The water was calm again. And beyond, you could see the coast again. You could see the buildings and the crowds on the beaches. Florida was right there. They hadn’t been cut off from Earth after all.

Bonus, she could see Melissa and Rae. They’d made it to the sailboat ahead of her. They were being helped aboard. Her friends were safe!

She glanced behind her one more time. There was a whole other coast that direction. A shoreline that shouldn’t have been there, and normally wouldn’t have been. It was about the same distance from where she was now than Florida in front of her. Maybe a little further away. The angle wasn’t an exact reflection. There were no buildings or beaches. Instead there was a treeline, like a jungle, with cliffs behind it, and mountains behind them, much further off.

The big ship with the towers and cannon was heading towards there, or possibly just following the coast, parallel. But much closer in than the cargo ship had been, before the storm transformed it or swapped it or whatever had happened, and also that cargo ship had been moving the exact opposite direction, unless she was even more turned around at this point than she thought she was. And she might be, honestly.

All that mattered was she knew the direction to swim to get home. It would still be a difficult swim, mos def. But it was what it was. If she grit her teeth and stuck to it, she should reach the sailboat in another five or ten minutes. And it wouldn’t matter if she couldn’t catch up with it. She could still make it to the Florida beaches entirely on her own eventually, if she had to. If things came to that. It would suck, and probably take a good hour at least—but she knew she could manage it. Or she was at least ninety percent sure. Well, eighty five.

Her friends would spot her anyway, if they hadn’t already. The stupid Stud Muffin would pick her up, soon as she was clear of the storm and out in the sun where it could safely turn around and sweep back for her …

Five or ten more minutes, she’d be okay.

Except right then she hesitated. She treaded water, looking back. Looking again at the other shore, with its trees and its cliffs and its mountains. No buildings, no people. No sun, either—the storm was still hitting the shore hard as it could.

She was gauging the range again, second and third guessing herself. Yes, it still definitely looked further away than the Florida beaches, but not by much. She’d realized something, all the sudden. More was at stake in this moment than plain survival. Much more beyond that. There was a whole other side to the question. Now that it stood in its present terms.

Here’s why:

Holli used to read a lot of fantasy books when she was younger. That was at the root of it. As a little kid she’d adored all that crap. Actually it lasted longer than that, right ‘til middle school. When she stopped. Kind of grew out of them or chose to, in fact. Told herself she had to. It was part of a deliberate and pretty elaborate campaign at that age to make herself less nerdy. An embarrassing phase; all kids go through a variation. Self-consciousness is part of maturity.

Nerdiness isn’t something anybody can completely shake off, regardless how hard you might try. The present day Holli still considered herself a nerdy person to a degree—but it was perfectly true she’d been worse when she was little, with her braces and the clothes she liked. Back then she used to be one of those frumpy overall girls. Baggy overalls and bright colored turtlenecks were all she wanted to wear. ‘Til middle school when all the sudden she changed her mind about that stuff and started trying hard as she could to be stylish and popular. It wasn’t because of boys, nothing to do with that—only to stop other girls picking on her. Mostly it had worked, too. She did a good job normalizing herself and stopped being a target.

All her nerdy fantasy books got boxed up and shoved under her bed. She might still have that box somewhere, or maybe she didn’t. Maybe it was at her parents’ house in her old room. Or it could have got thrown out ages ago.

When you read a lot of that shit, when you care about those kinds of stories—when you fall in love with them, if you allow yourself—there’s a part of you that’s always waiting for your portal to pop up, one of these days out of the blue. Just like happens to the lead characters in those books. A magic door opens to adventure, letting them exit the ordinary world in exchange for another one. A more exciting one. Wardrobe, looking glass, police box … A painting you can crawl inside, or a grandfather clock, or a TV set … Whatever’s handy, makes no difference. Obviously you’re not banking on this. You don’t really expect it to happen unless you’re a moron or deluded. It’s just sheer fantasy, an appealing dream that you know in your heart only happens in books—which is exactly why all those books get written (and the movies and the computer games and so forth that follow from them). It’s a fundamentally childish desire, too—“Take me away from real life. Make me somebody else.” It never goes away. Never. That’s why it’s funda-fucking-mental.

Deep down, the fantasy reader never stops hoping. They carry that wish their whole life—that a chance will come.

What Holli realized was that hers had. Just now out of nowhere. God knows how, God knows why. It shouldn’t be possible—yet it had happened. It was still happening.

Maybe none of this was actually real. Perhaps she was dreaming and didn’t know it. What if she was only a character in a book? No way to tell. Well, if she was, so be it. The plot was starting to pick up.

If she swam after her friends and made it to the daylight, that would probably bring this story to an end, wouldn’t it? Ordinary existence would resume. To keep the plot going, and keep it focused on her, she would need to swim the other direction. Hell with safety.

In the books, the portals always opened for a reason. The characters were chosen. They’d have to fulfill a prophecy. Save a kingdom, or an entire world.

Did she have a destiny? Was that why this had happened to her? Felt like she did. She could feel the call of it. A magnetic draw. Sucking at her soul, or the proverbial heartstrings.

Easy to fool oneself. Real easy to get carried away with one’s own self-importance. If she followed that call, it might just turn out to be a feeling. Wishful-thinking and nothing but that. She might not ever get to come home. She might just, frankly, die. Same as the jerk on the jetski—just as bad, just as quick, just as pointless. She might not even make it as far as the jungley shore. Another of the big black eel things might snarf her up, or something else might get her on the way. Or some other big beastie charging from out of the trees, soon as she got over there and clambered her butt out of the water. Plus there was still the big battleship thing to factor in, whatever their deal was. Moving off, but still not far at this stage. And the men at the back still watching her with their telescopes—if the fuckers were even men. They’d see if she started swimming back their way. What would they think of that? Would they care? What would they do?

Fuck all this, she’d already decided to risk it. To risk everything. Who was she kidding? All her dithering was only for form’s sake. She made the choice the second she stopped—soon as she realized she had the choice to make, she made it. Right there. Done deal. No thought had been required. Not really.

Holli swam away from her world, her friends, her life. Her past, her problems, her bullshit. Holli abandoned all of it. She swam into a brand new story all on her own and of her own.

She did this gleefully.

Maybe her friends screamed after her, trying to call her back. Maybe they didn’t see what she did. They were already awful far off, and she didn’t look back that direction once she got moving, and couldn’t hear properly while she was swimming, especially not with the rain still hammering down.

She thought she heard some calls. Just as likely she imagined them.

----a pointing finger----

“And now folks, we’ve rejoined our intrepid heroine,” Holli mutters under her breath, “to find her creeping cautiously through the middle—better yet, the midst, or no, amidst—what appears to be, at least I suppose to the educated members of our viewing audience, a mangrove swamp. One which furthermore qualifies both as shadowy and, in my estimation, mysterious. Thus perfectly suitable for the purposes of our ongoing drama. Yup yup yuperino. How ‘bout dat. How ‘bout dis.”

Come on, you’d babble a bit too, wouldn’t you? With no one else to trade impressions with … She’s decided it’s crucial to maintain her sense of humor. You have to put the effort in. You hang on to your shit by never fucking letting go of it.

Everything is strange here. Every detail is new and weird. Every single stupid thing, big or small. The smell of the very air, just that in and of itself. And not the scent of it alone, and the flavor it leaves in her mouth. There is the feel of it against her skin. That too! It’s not the same as the air of Earth. It seems heavier or denser or fluffier. Like there’s more to it, whatever all it’s constituted of. Bigger chunks. She can breathe it fine—doesn’t seem to be killing her, or not so far. But this is definitely different stuff. A whole other atmosphere for a whole other world. A whole different kind of atmosphere. There is a sense of … of what? Of keenness. She doesn’t know what the fuck that means—it’s just the first word that occurs to her. A sort of hum or a buzz to it. Not a sound, though. An electric charge infusing her body from the air. Like a glow—yet not a glow you can see. You only feel it, in your flesh.

There is power here. There is magic. Already she is becoming part of it. Absorbing it. Unless instead what it’s doing is absorbing her.

Or unless she’s imagining the sensation, tricking herself. Holli doesn’t think that’s right, yet all the same it’s a possibility that has to be considered. ‘Cause she’s trying to be rational about this whole experience, as much as she can. She’s trying to keep her head together. And obviously in a situation like this one, that ain’t easy.

She doesn’t feel freaked out. She feels surprisingly calm and collected and, well, all around chill, in spite of the rather thrilling, tingling energized sensation her skin is picking up from the alien air. Now of course she realizes that doesn’t make a great deal of sense—not a lick, in point of fact. It’s a complete contradiction. You can’t feel a thrill and chill at the same time (chill in the colloquial zen sense, that is, as opposed to the shivers which are a kind of thrill, if not enjoyable). The physical surge she’s experiencing should have triggered a matching emotional one, positive or negative. She should be getting really excited by the stimulation, or else upset and scared. Instead her emotions are staying almost completely locked down. That alone should freak her out—the fact she’s not freaking out is a freaky realization in itself. Still doesn’t happen, though. Best she can manage is a little twinge of wry amusement.

It puts a slight, crooked smirk on her face. She feels her mouth shift and stiffen into that position. It creates a smug and entitled expression she’s painfully familiar with, from photos and reflections. Though she can’t feel it happening the same way, she knows her eyelids will have started drooping a tiny bit, giving her gaze that sleepy, saucy, cat-like “hooded” look. Her goddamn eyelids almost always do that when her mouth fixes itself into the Smirk. Her countenance (if you’ll forgive the indulgence of the old ten dollar word) frequently and habitually settles into this cast. A “too cool for school” face you wanna slap the hell out of when you see it. And the irony is—if it’s ironic and maybe it isn’t, she goes back and forth—that fucking look, that slanted smirk, never has nothing to do with her internal state of mind, whenever it pops up. It’s an expression that never expresses the actual truth of what she’s thinking or feeling. It’s a lie, a mask. But it’s not a mask she puts on consciously—somehow it does that shit on its own, regardless what she wants.

Right now, though—this is an exception. Well, these circs are exceptional, so there you go. For once the detached deadpan look on her face fits her feelings. More accurately, her lack of them. Her emotional machinery is jammed inside of her or entirely closed down, or nearly so. Like ninety percent. Gunk in the works. Too much to process.

Maybe that’s for the best. Yeah. Probably it’s the safest way to be, walking into a weird new world with nothing but the clothes she’s wearing. Especially in light of the fact those clothes she’s got are only a bikini. Barely fucking qualifying.

And speaking of barely qualifying, this swamp is not very swampy. Ain’t no Dagobah. Which should probably count as a check for the win column, for sheer practical considerations. It ain’t half as mucky as you might guess, this close to an ocean and with all that heavy rain that had been going on less than half an hour ago.

There’s no sign of that storm now. Not a hint of it, really, besides the humidity, and a place like this semi-tropical shoreline forest is almost always gonna feel like that. But no mist to contend with, no mud, no drippings from the leaves. Sky’s cloudless and real bright up there, above the treetops. Holli noticed it happens to be a pinkish creamy white color, rather than any shade of blue. The particular lurid purple that the storm had is gone without a trace. The rain had stopped and the clouds had vanished or at least moved beyond the horizon by the time her swim was finished and she clambered out of the ocean on to the beach. Except there wasn’t much of one. The mangroves grew all the way to the edge of the land. That was what mangroves did. They stuck themselves out as far as they could manage before the water got too deep for them.

Holli knew a forest of this type was called a mangrove swamp because of something she’d watched on television. Admittedly that might not be perfectly accurate. She wondered how general a term “mangrove” was—were there tons of different types or just one? And how many other mangrove-looking type trees were there in different places that worked the same way but weren’t actually mangroves? At least to folks that knew what they were talking about. Only other tree she knew about that stood up above ground level like them with their roots as legs was the big fuckers in India with the name that started with a b. Fuck was the name? Bunyuns or bunjuns, something like that. Those were super big, though, and these guys weren’t. They were hunched and twisted and wouldn’t have stood much taller than Holli except for their roots boosting them up. The root legs weren’t all even, either. Ranged from Holli’s knees to her chin. There seemed to be more of the taller chin-level ones than the shorter sort.

So she could have walked under most of the trees if she stooped, except usually they had too many roots in the way and it wasn’t worthwhile—quicker to go around. The trees were pretty well spaced apart from each other and there wasn’t much undergrowth. Basically none, except occasional collections of nubs or pointed spikes of wood sticking up from the ground, sometimes stretching as high as her waist. She assumed these were the ends of roots that had grown the wrong direction, or maybe they were brand new trees getting started, or trying to. Some of them had to be. Except none of those spikes she saw had branches on them and that didn’t seem right. How big did a baby tree—a sapling, was the correct term—have to get itself before it put out its own branches and leaves and got serious, essentially?

Other thing you couldn’t help contemplating when you looked at tiptoe trees like this was how deep did the roots go under the dirt? Probably far as other trees, that would be her guess—or could they not dig down as much because of the elevated, exposed parts? Or did those legs not count as proper roots anymore, since they weren’t really rooted? What was the point of the silly things sticking up out of the ground like that anyhow? What was the survival advantage?

She imagined it was to let deep water flow by them easier, without knocking all the fuckers over, pushing too much against their main trunks. At the moment there was no water at all. The tide must be out, or maybe this was the dry season. The ocean might never get this far in. Lots of times in wetlands, if she understood the cycle right, when they flooded the flood usually came the opposite direction, or from sideways—the overspill from gorged rivers.

Their leaves are weird. Yellow and curved, they remind her of flattened bananas. Except the inside edges of the curves are also scalloped. Little curves within the curve. And the leaves all grow in round bunches off a single stem, to form clusters of pinwheels or propellers along the tree branches, except they can’t actually rotate when a breeze whispers through. They just flap and rustle around instead. Same as green Earth leaves, yet somehow not the same at all, the patterns they make, and the noise of them. She couldn’t articulate how it’s different more specifically than that—but it’s unmistakable. They have a music and a dance distinctly their own.

Holli wonders (and not for the first time) what the name of this world is. Maybe she’ll get to come up with one. Probably not, realistically. There are people here already. If people is the right description. People of some sort … The angel that wasn’t an angel, and all those schmucks in the big boat that kept shooting at her and totally missing. This world will already have a name. Maybe lots of names.

Then she hears music for a second, or thinks she does. Faint and far off. A flute or something similar. Three or four low notes, hooting. Could have been a bird or an animal. It doesn’t repeat.

She heads that direction. It was more or less the way she was trudging already.

Now, out of nowhere, another sudden and somewhat startling realization: no bugs. Not that she minded; it was just you'd think she should have noticed that before. Place like this, a cloud of evil little fuckers should be swarming all over her, sucking her blood, buzzing up her nose. Yet it wasn't happening. She didn't see a single insect anywhere. Maybe this world didn't have any. That might be cool. Hard to imagine how that would work, though. Something else she'd seen on television. You needed bugs to get rid of all the organic garbage, gobble up all the dead shit. Leaf litter alone would pile up damn quick in a forest like this one and bury everything else. Of course it wasn't only bugs that broke stuff down, there were other kinds of things contributing. Fungus, for one, and bacteria. But bugs were major hitters.

And it would be a mistake to read too much into the lack of bugs here. That didn't necessarily imply there weren't plenty of bugs elsewhere on this world, in different type environments, nor that they didn't or wouldn't show up right here at different times. Like at night. Maybe there were tons of the crawling kinds under the dirt and tunneling inside the trees where she couldn't see them, ants and beetles and so forth. All she could say for sure was missing at the present moment were gnats and mosquitos, or equivalent aerial pests. Or perhaps they were all keeping away from her because she wasn't native and they could tell, not liking the smell of her. Maybe her blood and sweat would be poisonous to them.

A problem like that would go both ways. She hoped food wasn't gonna be a serious issue for her. It might, now she was thinking it through. It would really suck if it turned she couldn't eat anything 'til she went home. All depended just exactly how alien this world was, and the things it was made out of, the chemicals and minerals. It didn't seem too strange, so far. Strange as it was, it wasn't, you know, Mars or Jupiter. They had trees here and they looked like relatively normal, recognizable trees, rather than being made out of glowing crystals or having hairy tentacles all over them or shit like that. The fact the air was breathable was another substantial confidence booster in this regard; also she was sure she'd swallowed a little of the ocean water during her swim -- inevitably one always gulped or snorted down a tiny bit at some point, without meaning to, like when a big wave smacks you in the face. It hadn't been any worse than regular sea water. Salty tasting, obviously. Not refreshing. And much like the air, it had seemed to have a subtly different flavor and consistency than the Earth ocean (provided she wasn't crazy and kidding herself about that) as well as having a strikingly different temperature. She'd noticed all those things when she was swimming in it; they'd been key factors in clueing her in to what the hell had been happening, the purple storm being a rift or a portal between realities, however you felt comfortable classifying it ... Her tummy felt okay, for the moment. No queasiness or cramps.

So far birds were missing, too. Then as she was looking around overhead for them, or for critters like squirrels or monkeys or any damn living thing at all, she spotted some spiderwebs strung between tree branches. Pretty big ones, tough to see unless your eyes caught them at the right angle in the daylight. There were a lot of them up there, actually. They weren't everywhere, but there was more than just a few. And not all were up that high. She found a couple lower down between tree trunks and root legs. She found them by walking straight through them while she was still gawking around upward. Got a strand stuck in her mouth. You couldn't spit it out. You had to get it with your fingers.

The way the webs were woven -- they weren't the standard spirals. These were made in crazy jumbled zigzags. Like when scientists gave spiders drugs and filmed them. Caffeine fucked them up, she recalled, while acid, amusingly, made the webs better. These webs were the caffeinated kind. Still perfectly capable of catching things, though all the ones she saw had caught so far were loose leaves and shiny droplets of moisture.

Until she saw a light on one, blinking. It was on a web at the bottom of a tree, in shadow between the arched roots. Holli thought it was a firefly. The dot of light of was emerald green instead of yellow. Minor variation.

She went over for a closer look, crouching down. Damn thing wasn't a bug. Made her gasp when she saw it clear. It was actually a tiny man with wings, caught in the web upside down, struggling for all his worth and not doing any good for himself at all.

A fairy or a pixie. Real and alive, right the fuck in front of her.

The angel-that-wasn't-an-angel ... Your first thought was "angel" when you saw her, and then if you were sensible you immediately rejected the term. At least that was what Holli had done. The important, jarring differences outweighed the similarities. With this winged guy, your judgment had to go the other direction. It was definitely a fairy or a pixie of some sort. There were still differences from the standard illustrations, but not enough to change your mind.

He was very, very small. No bigger than a moth, and not one of the big kinds of moth. In fact when she put up her finger next to him, he was shorter than the top segment. Taller than her fingernail (Holli kept hers short and almost never bothered painting them) but only just. Holli had tended to imagine fairies a tad larger, like an action figure. Like the Disney version of Tinkerbell. She imagined them in that sort of outfit too, and with that sort of hair style. Essentially her conception of fairies was completely Disneyfied.

This tiny guy was naked and hairless, with blue and black jagged lines all over his skin in a complicated maze pattern. She couldn't quite tell if they were stripes or some kind of writing. Tattoos, possibly. His wings looked like the curved banana leaves on all the surrounding trees -- real good native camouflage. His body glowed, pulsing feverishly, and when he illuminated she could see the shadows of his bones and some of his organs inside him, which was both pretty neat and pretty horrid. His wings, however, did not illuminate at all.

The fairy was wearing protective goggles, or possibly his eyes just bulged naturally like that, a bit like a frog's. You would need a magnifying lens to tell which was right. She also couldn't tell if he was aware of her presence or not. She tried to talk to him: "Hey. Hey there. Can you understand me?" He didn't answer, and he didn't stop struggling against the web. Maybe he looked at her and maybe he didn't.

She could see his teeny-weeny cock. The guy had a hard-on sticking out. It was dumb and childish of her but it made her blush and giggle a little. She couldn't help herself. Just the absurdity of it. She guessed it was the same kind of thing that supposedly happened to guys when they got lynched. He wasn't dangling by his neck, though. Was it the pressure on the throat that did it, or just the horror and humiliation of the whole situation? She'd put her money on that second explanation.

Then the spider appeared, emerging from behind the tree root on one side. It scrambled for its prey with dreadful rapidity ... only it wasn't a spider. Instead it was a worm or a grub of some kind, or a caterpillar. It was fuzzy and orange and it had four tiny stubby pink feet on each segment of its body. It was as long as one of Holli's fingers but slightly thicker around. It might have been cute looking, if it wasn't doing what it was about to do. That made it seem perfectly ghastly. And the tiny pixie started squealing as it approached. It made Holli's guts clench and she almost wet herself.

She grabbed a twig off the ground and used it to slash the web. She didn't kill the caterpillar, only prevented it from reaching the pixie and driving it back out of view behind the root. In fact she felt a little bad for the thing, depriving it of its meal, snaggled fair and square, nature's way. But all the same she had to side with the tiny man, because it was closer looking to her species and seemed to have some degree of intelligence or at the very least, consciousness. She wasn't gonna watch it get killed when she could do something to help.

She used the twig to cut him loose. He flew the fuck off fast as he could.

It was disappointing. Sure. She'd had vague but potent hopes he would make friends of her. Sit on her shoulder, lead her to his people ... Saving him would turn out to be the first important step in establishing her position in this world, finding her destiny, taking on the mantle of a heroine ... All that stuff. Too conventional?

She wanted—no, needed—to believe there was a real reason she'd come to this place. A significance. It could have been a meaningless accident, yes. Fair point. For now, she was still banking on it being deliberate. A summoning. That was her working theory. It was too coincidental that the "magic door" had opened out there right in front of someone like her, who just happened to have the particular background and personality type to recognize the event for what it was, and also be enticed to come through. It wasn't all that unusual a mentality to have, but it wasn't mainstream either. Her friends wouldn't have done either of those thing, and hadn't, in fact. That was established. They fled the other direction fast as they could. Same was true of the unfortunates on the other stupid boat, while that wretched douchebag on the jetski, equally clueless, just got his ass eaten almost instantly.

There was the other girl to keep in mind, Exhibitionist Blowjob Girl, who the angel-that-wasn't-an-angel had carried off. That had been done against the girl's consent, obviously, and it hadn't looked like she understood what was going on, or why, yet she seemed to have been the creature's specific target. A compelling case could therefore be made that the portal was all about that girl, not Holli. Or perhaps their destinies were linked. It might turn out to be Holli's job to find the other poor bitch and rescue her.

The portal hadn't closed the moment the angel-that-wasn't-an-angel went back through. Holli had been given plenty of time to come through herself. Again, that might have been accidental. Holli didn't believe it was. Stories like this never worked that way. Somebody or something had kept the door standing open for her, 'til she figured out the situation, got her shit together, made a conscious choice, and came the fuck through.

There were bound to be other signs. It was bound to happen soon. Helpers would eventually pop up, telling her where she was supposed to go and what she needed to do and how to do it. Supplies and equipment would be provided. You had to trust the narrative. You had to let its current sweep you along.

Shame about the pixie. She really thought for a second she'd made the next big breakthrough there. Had started feeling pretty proud of herself. Maybe that was what fucked it up. Maybe that was the lesson she was supposed to learn from this. Not to get cocky, not to get ahead of herself. Not to assume too much. Yeah, that must be it. An important lesson, in fact.

So she'd do her best to take it to heart.

That music started up again. Louder, closer now, and it didn't immediately die off like the first time.

Holli nodded to herself. "Okay. Here we go. Here we fucking go. Okay."

But she proceeded with increased caution and as quietly as she could manage. She kept huddled low, scurrying from tree to tree, checking around carefully each time before hustling to the next one. Being barefoot was a big advantage for this, and not having any stuff like a backpack or armor to encumber her movements or jostle around. Her practical nakedness felt properly practical, all the sudden.

"Trust the narrative," she mumbled, "There has to be a narrative at play. The current will carry me. It already is. Yes."

Soon enough, what the current carried her to was a seated figure playing a wooden flute. Probably a girl, maybe a young boy. Holli was betting on a girl. She was perched on one of the mangrove roots, a thicker one than most of them had. The tree it belonged to was slumped over sideways, and half its roots reared higher than every other tree’s. Not like the tree had got pushed over; it seemed to have grown that way because half its root legs were too fat on one side. It was a bit of a mutant. Made the roots comfortable to sit on while the skinnier majority wouldn’t be.

The girl had a cape on, with a hood. Cloak was a probably a better word. It was a lurid purple color, not at all good for camouflage. For a second Holli thought it was the same shade of purple that the portal-storm had been, but then she changed her mind. She was looking too hard for signs and portents, and if she didn’t cut it out she was gonna trick herself again.

One of her legs was folded under her and the cape/cloak, while she had the other stuck out propped against another root. The leg was wearing bright yellow tights or hose with a stirrup—in Holli’s estimation that color didn’t go any good with the purple cloak at all—and on her foot was a sandal, the sturdy gladiator kind strapped snug around the ankle. Holli also took note of a knife in a sheath along the girl’s calf. But what in fact was most immediately striking about her costume was the bunny ears on top her hood. The left flopped sideways at the top, the other one stuck up straight. They weren’t exactly bunny ears, the shape of them. More like a cat’s except too big. The tufts of extra fur sticking up in points from the tips made the ears look longer than they were. Like a lynx had, if Holli was thinking of the right kind of animal. The hood hid the upper part of the girl’s face. From what Holli could see of her mouth on the top of the flute, it was a regular human mouth, not any kind of furry muzzle. The tip of her nose also appeared normal.

The flute thing was a simple recorder, or something similar. Not that Holli knew shit about instruments. Only it didn’t seem like anything fancier like a clarinet or an oboe or whatever. Why were they called recorders, it made her wonder all the sudden? They didn’t record anything. Kind of mystery you could solve real easy with Google, if she had her phone. And the internet, obviously.

Sounded nice, though, the recorder. The tune she was playing. She wasn’t exactly jamming on it. This was something low and slow and simple, melancholy maybe but appealing, regardless. Catchy. Holli started nodding her head to it.

Best of all, the girl had fairies flying all around her, hundreds of them. They were dancing in the air along to her music. From Holli’s position, they were just spots of light, or rather streaks of colors. The swarm fashioned whirling, interlocking rings and spirals around the musician. Not just green-glowing ones like the dude she’d rescued, there were also bright blue ones and orangey-red ones, and some whites, though not many.

It looked pretty fabulous. Exactly the kind of gorgeous scene you want to find, when you go through a magic portal into another world. This was the real fucking deal.

Holli didn’t want to interrupt. She kept quiet on her knees in a huddle under another tree not too close, screened pretty good by its root legs but with plenty nice size little gaps left for her peer through … She soaked up the spectacle before her, savoring it. It was wonderful. She almost cried.

A shiny silvery glint separate from the fairy rings caught her eye after a while, down next to the musician’s hip. She had a sort of staff or walking stick leaning there beside her against the root, and mounted on the top of it was a small metal hand. It was formed with all the fingers closed but the first one, the trigger finger. So the little silver hand was pointing straight up in the air. Well, not exactly straight up at the moment, the way the stick was leaning.

It was a bit creepy looking, somehow. Didn’t strike her like that at first … then for some reason it did. Gave off a disturbing vibe.

Then a big animal jumped on the musician from behind. It clobbered her off the root and drove her face forward into the ground, and it was taking a bite out of her shoulder and the side of her neck as it was doing that.

Didn’t roar when it attacked, and the girl didn’t scream. She didn’t have time. It was some kind of huge cat, like a panther or a lion, as big as the girl herself or possibly slightly larger. It was sleek and gray and petrifying. It held the girl down with its front paws and moved its head back and forth in little rapid jerks without letting go with its jaws. Worrying was the word, when an animal does that. Holli watched its ears twitching, mesmerized, and the tip of its tail, curled up high behind it.

The girl wasn’t killed instantly. Her legs were kicking and her hands were scrabbling at the dirt. She still didn’t make any sound. The fairies did, though only for a split second. They all shrieked at once—it was a little like a bunch of wineglasses shattering at the same time, an entire warehouse full of them, except higher-pitched and finished too quick for that. And then they all vanished, zipping off every direction. The entire swarm was gone in the time it takes to blink your eye.

While on the ground with her face in the dirt the girl was still kicking and clawing and it wasn’t gonna do her a lick of good; the huge damn ghastly cat kept worrying at her neck. Only Holli heard it purring now. Sounded like a motorcycle engine.

Holli found herself standing over them both, with no memory of running out there from her hiding spot. She had the girl’s staff or walking stick in her hands, again having it grabbed it without realizing. Now she watched herself swing the thing from over her head with both hands and smack it across the back of the cat. She hadn’t consciously decided to do that either, and in fact as it was happening, she was thinking that it wasn’t a good idea. The stick was too short and shrimpy to do any damage. All she was gonna accomplish was calling the cat’s attention to herself. She wasn’t gonna save the other girl. It was already too late for her. Bound to be.

She walloped the damn cat anyhow. Couldn’t have stopped herself if she wanted to.

There was a white flash and Holli got flung back on her ass.

When she sat up and looked at the cat, it was split in half. It was made entirely of stone—had it always been? And now the stone was shattered in the middle. The body was hollow, greenish steam was pouring from inside. Something else flew out and flickered away, too small and too fast for her to see what it was. Maybe another fairy, but not one that was lit up. And small as it was, she thought it had been a bit bigger than the fairies were. Now it was gone.

The staff in her hands was vibrating and warm, and the silver hand on the top was shimmering slightly. But while she watched, it stopped and went back to normal.

Okay, magic wand. Weapon. Check.

She set it aside carefully, then crawled over to the cloaked girl and pulled her clear of the broken cat statue. Its mouth was still fixed on her neck; Holli had to pry it away. Which might have been a bad decision considering the amount of blood that gushed out from the holes its teeth had made. More likely it wouldn’t have made any difference, unless she sped along the finish. Probably better that she did, if she did.

The girl partly rolled over and looked at her. She didn’t try to say anything. There was almost as much blood coming out her mouth and her nostrils as from her neck. Her hood fell back when she moved her head. Holli had expected the lynx ears to be her real ears, fitted through slits in the hood. That didn’t turn out to be the case. The girl had normal ears. She was a normal girl, except her hair was dyed blue and cut kind of weird and jagged. Cool looking but a style that would have drawn stares back home.

Holli took her hand and held it as the girl finished dying, which didn’t take long. She might not even have felt Holli’s hand. She didn’t close her eyes or make any last sounds. Just went still. Holli didn’t see a light go out of her eyes, as the expression goes. Instead they seemed to fix or freeze. Like she focused intently on something in the distance ahead of her, and then stuck that way while she was concentrating.

It had a profound beauty to it, believe it or not. It wasn’t as ugly or sad or horrifying as Holli had been trying to prepare herself for. Though afterward she still felt guilty about not feeling any of those ways. Kept wondering if she had missed something.

She left the body there. Couldn’t think what else to do with it. She ought to bury it but without good tools she wouldn’t manage to do it right. She wouldn’t be able to dig deep enough and the body would get dug right up again by other animals. It was gonna end up getting torn to bits and eaten either way. That was the cold truth. She wasn’t strong enough to carry it along with her—the only other decent option—especially not knowing which direction to take it.

Holli took the girl’s magic stick and she took the hooded cloak. It had been torn a little on one side over the shoulder, and it had some blood on it, but not very much. Not like the rest of the girl’s clothes, a knee-length sort of tunic or jerkin, totally ruined with gore. Her leggings just as bad. Sopping. Holli took the knife off the girl’s leg, strapping the sheath to her left forearm instead. She also could have used the sandals. Looked like they would have fit her just fine. She dithered over the question a long while. Couldn’t bring herself to do it. Felt too gross, too creepy. Maybe if the girl had complete stockings on, but she hadn’t. Yes, it wasn’t the fact the girl had died in them that bothered her. It was knowing her bare feet had sweated in them, soaked into the leather. Made her squeamish. Wasn’t something she would have expected to get under her skin as bad as it did. But then, this wasn’t the kind of question that had come up in her life before. More she thought it over, she decided if one of her friends back home had offered her a used pair of flipflops for some reason—not that she could realistically imagine Rae or Melissa or any other girls she knew thinking that was an acceptable idea—she would have refused. She would have been disgusted by the offer for the same reason. Could have borrowed boots or fancier shoes without a qualm, but not anything you wore without socks or hose. Would other girls feel the same hangup, or think she was crazy? Holli couldn’t figure.

If the forest floor had been harsher, gravel or even deep nasty mud, she might have made herself get over this. There was no great need. The ground in here was easygoing for a barefoot explorer, much drier than she would have predicted, just sand and smooth fallen leaves. It was a little squishy but not slimy or slippery, and grit didn’t cling to her either. When she glanced at the bottoms of her feet, they’d stayed almost perfectly clean.

How shitty was it of her to be claiming this dead girl’s things? It was videogame thinking, wasn’t it? Reduced the death to a narrative contrivance, providing Holli shit she needed. Yet it also would have felt disrespectful to leave everything untouched. Like it had cooties. Pointlessly wasteful, too. Coldblooded as you could call it, salvaging the things did give a tangible purpose to what would otherwise have been a meaningless tragedy. Not a purpose, not really. A transformative benefit.

Shit, she was only managing to make herself feel crappier.

Holli didn’t take the recorder. In fact she couldn’t find the thing. It must have rolled or bounced off under one of the trees. If she had located it she would have left it with the body. Put it in the girl’s hand. Holli couldn’t have made use of it in any case. She’d played the flute back in junior high but only a couple years before she decided to quit. Never any good at it. Plus a recorder worked completely different. Hadn’t touched an instrument since, except now she thought of it the guitar of a guy she dated very briefly and she hadn’t shown any knack for that thing either. Completely forgot all about that guy until just then. Great kisser but much too clingy. Fuck was his name?

Five minutes after walking away from the corpse she changed her mind and went back. Practical considerations be damned, she’d feel like way too much a shitheel for the rest of her days if she left it lying there. She’d have to grit her teeth and make a grave. Maybe the magic wand could help, if she concentrated hard enough. Maybe it could blast a big hole for her. Worth a shot, at least.

She had a hard time finding the right spot again. Then when she did, the body had fairies all over it. For a second she almost flipped out thinking they were devouring the girl. Then she saw they were covering her with leaves they’d gathered, but doing something to them, spraying some sort of glassy coating on them out of their tiny mouths that made the leaves glow and harden and stick together. So the swarm was rapidly forming a mound over the body.

Little guys had found the recorder too, and they had it sticking up out of the top of the mound.

Fine then, they had this taken care of. That was a load off. She wouldn’t disturb them.

Holli got out of there. Unlike before, she walked fast. No more of the stealthy scampering, she decided. Not now that she had this wand thing and the cape covering her. She left its hood down. The lynx ears were too dorky looking.