Foreverland Is Dead

1

    The rising sun on us, day beginning.
    The sky collapses.
    And consumes us all.

    A rooster crows.
    Over and over and over.
    He want s her to wake up, to get up. But the girl is stuck in a dream where she’s screaming, submerged in a cloud of fear, unable to move. Unable to see.
    Everything, just gray .
    She can’t escape, buried beneath the snowy sleep that buzzes like the inside of an anesthetist’s mask. Holding her down.
    And the rooster crows .
    The girl claws to escape, scratches through the cloth of sleep, follows the rooster like a beacon, a lighthouse on the rocky shoals of the living. She rises to the surface— The seal of crusty sleep breaks.
    She blinks to stay awake, to clear her sight, staring into darkness. Her head is nestled in a pillow, covers pulled up to her chin. The gel-like mattress fits perfectly to her body. Still, her body aches.
    Her eyes adjust. Forms bleed from the darkness. First, there are lines…lines scratched on a wooden wall only inches away. They are bundled in groups of five, organized in rows.
    She can smell her own breath, thick and rank. A film glues the corners of her lips together. She swallows. Her tongue sticks to the roof of her mouth. Hunger growls in her stomach, perhaps expecting something now that she’s awake.
    “Mmmm.”
    She jerks her head around, sinking into the pillow. Eyes wide. She listens to her pulse.
    It’ s a cabin.
    There are more beds with lumps beneath the covers, not moving. She can’t tell where the moan came from, but she hears slumbering breath.
    She breathes slowly, silently, until it hurts. She tries to remember where she was before she woke, but nothing has ever existed before this moment except for fleeting dreams, like whispers of another world. She dreamed of someone else.
    A boy.
    The sky falling.
    And screaming.
    Something flutters on the back of her neck.
    She runs her hand over her scalp, her hair bristling on her palm, and feels a lump. It’s marble-sized and quivers beneath her touch, sending electric tingles through her head, all the way to the back of her eyeballs. She jerks her hand away. A wave of nausea fades.
    She tr ies it again, this time starting at the crown of her head and rubbing as close as she can to the lump until the tingling warns her.
    Fear balls up in her throat.
    Th e faint sound of a helicopter is nearby, interrupted by the sound of an insistent rooster.
    The girl pushes up on one elbow, waits and listens. She sits up , moving silently. Her bare feet meet a cold, wooden floor. It’s brisk outside the blankets. Her bed is in the corner. With her back to the wall, a door is to her right and a window to her left.
    She walks to the window.
    The floor creaks , and she waits to take another step. Her reflection looks back from the dark glass like a ghost, an unreal apparition: white skin smudged with dirt. Perhaps her hair is blonde. It’s definitely a buzz cut. Body odor wafts up from her long t-shirt, her legs exposed from the knees down. Outside, the jagged edges of distant mountains.
    A gust of wind slams the cabin. The window crackles . The helicopter gets louder. She can’t see anything in the sky, though. It’s hard to see anything except her reflection. And she doesn’t recognize that.
    Coughing.
    The girl spins around. Chills creep into her chest, fear and cold. Another girl whimpers, stifled by a sucking sound. Maybe a thumb.
    There’ s a can on the small table in front of the window. The side has been cut out. It’s fastened onto a saucer with a short candle. A box of matches next to it. She pulls one out and holds the wooden stick in her fingers, trembling. She looks around, not really seeing the back of the cabin. There could be monsters.
    The girl strikes the match. The flame quivers but finds the black wick curled at the top. The tin can reflects the firelight like a lantern.
    Oh, my.
    It’s a small dormitory.
    A total of six beds with a window and table between them. There are boxes beneath the beds. The tables each have a hooded candle like the one she’s holding, surrounded by a variety of knick-knacks.
    The l umps beneath the blankets come to life, rolling over and lifting up. Their heads are shaved, each with a fuzzy crop of black or brown or blonde. Some of them rub their eyes, waking from a long sleep. One of them throws the covers over her head and whimpers.
    “Who are you?” A skinny girl sits up, her skin smooth and brown. She can’t be more than fourteen years