Dreams and Shadows - By C. Robert Cargill Page 0,50
have TV? Do you have video games?”
“No, what’s that?”
“Oh, well, we have TV and video games too. That’s a pretty good reason to want to leave. It’s pretty neat. It’s a box that they tell stories on, and a video game is where you get to control the story and jump over things and shoot stuff and stuff.”
“Shoot?”
“You know, with a gun?” asked Colby. He made a pair of fist pistols and pretended to open fire at Ewan. “Bang, bang,” he shouted, but Ewan, completely unfamiliar with the concept, had no idea what to make of it; he merely shook his head. Colby stared at him, his eyes wide and jaw slack. “Man, you really don’t know anyth . . .”
Colby trailed off midsentence, walking abruptly into a sudden fog of drunkenness. His entire body felt warm, fuzzy, his head swimming in a numbing sea. Everything was hazy, dreamlike, colors exploding into starbursts, revealing layer upon layer, dancing in perpetual motion, as if each shade were a drop in a kaleidoscopic ocean.
Colby’s depth perception shifted radically; approaching an object seemed to flatten or deform it, causing the very strange sensation that the world had been bent out of shape then returned to its original form as best as the bender knew how—leaving millions of tiny creases and imperfections that Colby now noticed for the first time. He floated; while his feet still touched the ground, he felt buoyant, drifting through an ocean of ecstatic elation. Everything was muffled, as if he were twenty feet underwater, his body tingling, tickled by a thousand fish while he was down there.
For minutes he stood still, stuck in a thousand-yard stare, gazing into a chimerical world he’d long daydreamed about. The trees were the same; the ground was the same; the air was the same. And yet, it was all very different. The same color, but different; the same texture, but different; the same world, but different. Colby stood on the edge of forever and let the sensation wash over him—not just buzzed, but thoroughly drunk off it.
Such was fairy time, and he was swept entirely into its flow.
“Come on. What are you waiting for?” asked Ewan of his new friend.
Colby grinned, dazed, staring dumbstruck into the woods. He looked up at Ewan, trying to shake off the euphoria, but it wouldn’t pass. He would be swimming in this feeling for a while. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m coming.” Together they continued up the hill, each step fighting a current rolling steadily against them, as if they were metal men walking through a magnetic field. The trees buzzed with static, like a thousand cicadas screaming.
They walked for what seemed like forever. Time was irrelevant now. A day was just the shifting of the sun in the sky, nothing more. Everything began to make sense. The interconnectivity of every living thing was transparent, obvious—even if Colby didn’t know what any of those words meant. He got it now. The universe was a magical, beautiful place; bristling with energy, full of life, overflowing with joy.
Up the hill. Down the other side. Fields of flowers rippled in the wind, exploding with smells. Tinkling notes of fairy music wafted in on the afternoon. There was so much to take in and so little ability to process it all that Colby didn’t notice as pixies began to flutter about, closing in, circling the boys. There were four in all, each six inches high, beautiful, shimmering in glamour.
“A boy!” exclaimed Caja, the smallest and shrillest of the four.
“Indeed, a boy! A boy!” echoed Broennen, the prettiest of the lot.
“Oh, it’s not that big a deal,” said Melwyn, shrugging apathetically and narrowing her eyes at the interloper.
Only the fourth pixie, Talwyn, showed any reservation at all. She hovered ten feet away, flitting back and forth from behind a large oak, catching only glimpses of the young boy, assembling them together to form a complete picture in her head. Once she saw her sisters swarming the boy, flying as close as a span to him without a single reflexive swat to strike them down, she peered around the tree and took a good, long look, folding her arms and narrowing her eyes. “I don’t trust him,” she said, pronouncing judgment. “He shouldn’t be able to see us.”
“That’s what I said!” exclaimed Ewan, happy someone was finally agreeing with him.
Colby looked around, smiling nervously. “What are these things?” he asked.