She opened her eyes to a queer blue bird looking at her with near motherly concern. A sudden caterwauling sent the bird into flight, long indigo tail feathers shimmering in the air as it arced above the trees. In the distance, she saw three mice scampering towards her. Only as they grew closer did she realize they weren’t mice at all, but three little boys in weird oversized robes with odd vestments and long loose sleeves that hid the hands beneath them. Her throat burned and her eyes stung and her back ached, but she struggled to sit up as the boys approached.
“Well,” said one, a little hoarse from shouting.
“You all right?” asked another.
The third looked away from her, arms crossed. “Stupid thing to do, crossing the river.”
“Well I didn’t want to,” Gabrielle snapped, still blinking as she stood up sorely. “There was a girl. Is she okay?
“No girl,” the cross one said.
“Just a bird.” The first boy’s voice was a bit uneasy.
“That flew away.”
“Good timing, too. It could have plucked your eyes out.”
Gabrielle shivered. “Where am I?” She tasted the strange air and eyed the strange landscape. It was familiar and yet eerily altered. “I’m not home anymore.”
“You’re on the other side of the river now. Welcome to the stranger shore.”
On that enigmatic note, the three boys grinned mischievously and darted up the hill, running with the playful abandon of youth and swooping across each other’s paths just for the thrill. Gabrielle followed much more sedately to the lights that crowned the slope where her memories told her graves should be. Though the grass was green and the dirt was loamy just like home, the sky was a dusky mauve and the moon that shone was unrepentantly orange. A stranger shore, indeed.
At the top of a hill was a bustling village somehow squeezed into a small plot. Standing abreast of the village, its proportions seemed skewed and its perspectives odd; the houses seemed like crudely hewed toys of different sets all mixed together and the people like phantasms in warped mirrors. It reminded Gabrielle of a child’s drawing in the dirt; the shapes were familiar enough to communicate the image’s intent, but little heed was paid to size relations or reality’s true make. Or perhaps it was that the buildings all seemed very far away when Gabrielle knew they were close enough for her to reach with a few brisk paces.
Yet as dizzy as it made her to stare at it from without, the layout grew clearer as Gabrielle walked through the town. Each building was small and blurry until one grew nearer, at which point space yawned open to allow it more room and detail, as if proximity gave it priority. The first time this happened startled Gabrielle abominably, as she found herself transposed suddenly from a communal street into a familial scene, with sisters chatting on a porch that only steps ago had seemed too small for a cat- the residences grew exponentially fast. It seemed to Gabrielle as if the telescoping homes should give her a headache, but it made a sideways sort of sense if she didn’t dwell on it. As long as you skirted their spheres of influence, the houses wouldn’t loom too largely at you, so Gabrielle kept to the streets and merely peered at the pocket-places off to the side.
As she wandered the streets, which also stretched queerly as you walked on them, depending on how many others bustled about, she saw glimpses of people she used to know. There was young Sally, who had been thrown off her horse during a thunderstorm, and old Randolph, who would always tell Gabrielle long meandering yarns when she asked for alms. At one corner she even caught sight of Rina with her trusty rooster strutting behind her as she bustled off to the east. The people all seemed cheery, chatting pleasantly if they chanced to meet. Yet if Gabrielle met someone’s eyes, she was usually offered at most a bland smile, and for the most part people paid no notice to her at all.
“The river washed you right clean, it did.”
Gabrielle spun around to see one of the boys from before leaning against a tree in a clearing.
“What do you mean?” Gabrielle was proud of the way her voice sounded calm and collected instead of fearful and frantic.
“It’s like you have no color,” another of the boys mused, as he suddenly appeared out of a house’s sphere. “As if all the flavor of you was drained away.”
“If we hadn’t known you so well to begin with,” the third boy said, ensconced in the tree’s branches, “then I fear we may not have recognized you at all.” He dropped down to stand next to his brothers, looking bashful.
“Where am I?” Gabrielle asked again, not expecting a straightforward answer.
“I expect you already know,” one replied. And then they scattered through the town again, leaving Gabrielle with a lonely tree and increasingly melancholy thoughts.
***
Gabrielle’s heart and head may have been heavy, the latter so weighed down that her eyes barely left the ground, but her legs were steady as they carried her out of the town. Though the sky and moon seemed to have forgotten their true colors, her legs remembered the way home.
The walk was not arduous, but still her breath was ragged and her face flushed. Her cheeks were hot and her eyes were wet, and to stop herself from crying she kept her fists clenched. As she frantically recited an old poem over and over under her breath in an attempt to stave off the cold slimy fear in her chest and the frantic boiling thoughts in her head, Gabrielle realized she was probably dead. It wasn’t a sudden realization, but one that had started as a sharp pinprick of pain and then had swelled monstrously until it loomed over her and she couldn’t quite ignore it anymore.
Dead.
She must have died in the river where the water had numbed her bones and burned her throat. All her life she had avoided the silver-gray river, known it was trouble, and then a single careless moment, a solitary lapse in judgment, and she was dead. The sheer injustice was hard for her to comprehend; surely the universe wouldn’t allow the entirety of a person’s life to balance on such a minute fulcrum. There had to be a way for her to go back, to choose a different path. A second chance, a way to reverse it, to return to before, there had to be-
Gabrielle stopped and slowed down her breathing. The air she exhaled quivered, and she returned her focus steadily to her feet. When her breathing became even, she set off walking again, perhaps more slowly than before.
She looked up only when she knew she drew near to the church, but the only thing perched on the top of her child-home hill was a pair of heavy wooden doors closed tight. She examined them with tracing touch and squinting sight, then determined their colors richer and their patterns sharper here than ever she knew them in her land of life. Yet they were the same doors that had always stood guard as she sheared candles of their protruding scars and thus honored each of the villager’s prayers. “The very same doors,” she declared to the empty air. As if that statement had drained her last dregs of strength away, she dropped to the ground hopelessly fatigued, her back against the doors’ dark solidity, and stared out across the realm.
It was like staring at the night sky and witnessing more and more stars coalescing out of the hazy half-light; the longer she looked outward the more she could see. It was almost impossible to hold all the strange sights in her head at once: trees of gold with parchment leaves, a fluorescent ribbon of bubble-bells that flowed in the air as a brook might meander through a glade, a narrow ivory tower that spiraled as it rose, thousands of grave-villages that swelled on sight, a sea of walls that squirmed like snakes, exotic gardens of nothing but wisterias and statuary, the dark river dipping in and out of the ground like a child’s sloppy needlework, and an old fashioned four-towered castle way out in the distance…