American Elsewhere - By Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,129

outside (its bottom half covered in truncated limbs, the result of serious pruning).

A hint of a teal flannel shirt, streaked in oil, perhaps glimpsed as a man working on the undercarriage of his truck in his garage wipes his brow (and the scent of sawdust, and gasoline, and old cigarettes, and the pleasant musk of cheap cologne, and everything is lit by old yellowed lightbulbs, which have not been changed in years). And, last but not least,

Bedtime stories.

Once she smelled him. Once when she was floating in fumes and all the world was wiped away she caught a stray whiff of his cologne, as if he’d just passed through her room and she’d only just missed him, and she wanted to run after him and say no, no, stop and pick me up and put me on your shoulders as you used to, but her arms and legs were leaden and she could not move, only moan and roll her eyes back and whimper in her sleep.

Even that misery was sweeter than never smelling him again. For more than anything in the world, Bonnie wants to go home. But she cannot. It is gone. It has amputated something from her, the incision reaching deep and dark. She now spends her days chasing ghosts, not dragons, and wandering down dark passageways, going places no one should ever want to go.

Weep for poor Bonnie.

Weep, weep.

I bet that’s why they bring the heroin in here in the first place. So that they can get some of us hooked, get us to break the rules for them. Do things no one should ever want to do. Then you can get high again.

They tricked me.

I let myself be tricked.

I am dying. I am dying, dying.

It is then, at her most abysmal point of despair, that Bonnie comes to the changing place, the threshold, and she stops.

The changing place is never exactly in the same spot. Like most things in Wink (and Bonnie is only slightly aware that this is a terrible, terrible secret) it is not really where it is, or where it says it is. When she first made this run, when she first entered this dark maze to find their silly treasure, she had to walk for nearly three hours. But on the second it was only ten feet in. Like it was waiting for her.

She feels it in her brain first. Right in the middle of her forehead, the most terrible of migraines you could ever imagine. It’s like her brain is being slowly pulled forward to put pressure on the front inside of her skull, threatening to worm out her skull and down her face like a maggot bursting from its egg sac.

She takes a step forward. Then another, and another.

She is passing through something hollow, some cyst or cavity or bubble floating in the darkness. She feels it in her bones.

Then it is like she is being ripped through a three-inch hole in a wall, inexorably pulled forward until she is a boneless, pulverized tube, her arms and shoulders and ribs sloughed away, and nothing will make it through but a baseball-sized fragment of brain and a tangle of nerve and maybe one eye dangling by a thread of tissue, and the last thing it’d report to her, the last signal it’d send to the sputtering, mangled ball of brain, would be the sight of the corrugated walls of this dark tunnel, flickering in the light of the lantern, her long journey into night abruptly (perhaps thankfully) halted.

This does not really happen. It just feels like it does. But then it is over, and she is done, and through.

Yet through what, and where she has gotten through to, Bonnie does not know. It is not where she was. The tunnel before is not the tunnel after. It is… somewhere else. Where things are different.

She keeps walking.

She is under Wink. Probably about under the courthouse, or the park. But just because she is underneath there does not mean she’s not also somewhere else. After all, thinks Bonnie, you can have a different thing under a different thing.

My God I am so high, she thinks.

But that doesn’t mean I’m wrong.

Sometimes there are cracks in the tunnel, and she can see light filtering in. Sometimes the light is gentle and pink. Other times it is harsh and silvery. Bonnie has never once put her eye to one of the cracks to see. She remembers the story about the flashlight—POW—and wonders what it’d look