Our community is small and tight knit, everybody knows everything.
It would be utopia except none of it is real.
The day I became aware of it I was too small to understand. The Sun blinked, serving up a wink to the community below. Except I was the only one who seemed to notice. I stored the memory away until we learned in school how truly large and permanent the Sun is.
I thrust my hand into the air, “But the Sun isn’t always steady, right? It can flicker.” Mrs. Goodman stared at me in silence. Then she laughed, almost robotically, while my classmates joined in.
“Oh, what an imagination you have Hana.”
A few weeks later I was lectured about never staring at the Sun.
When I decided to run away I didn’t believe I would get far. I only wanted a taste of the world outside.
I slipped from my bedroom window in the middle of the night and pointed myself east. It was the next evening before the search parties caught up with me but by then I had noticed the way the horizon was unending. It always seemed to be two steps ahead of me. A vast expanse of nothingness to swallow any images I held of a great unknown.
As I got closer something loomed but not the horizon I believed I would find.
A wall, smooth and towering stretched far into the sky and back towards the community. It surrounded me, us … It surrounded everything.
I reached out to place my hand against it, to feel the deception we lived our lives under. As my fingers pressed against it the horizon faded away revealing a landscape haunted by a grey-green fog. Trees, nothing but spindles, were silhouetted against dark skies.
I didn’t realize the longer I held my fingers on the wall the image continued fading all around me, stretching back towards the search parties and the community. An orb glowered in red beyond the thick gray-green fog. Could it be the Sun?
Suddenly I was off my feet. A man in police gear landed on top of me. Instantly the wall returned to its false horizon.
“What are you doing?” He seethed. His eyes were grey-green, just like the fog and cloaked by red-brown curls. “You can’t just let the dream fade away like that.”
That’s the last thing I remember before waking up in my bed. The sky, lit by tiny pin pricks of light, glows a deep purple outside my windows.
I feel my father’s hand on mine before I truly see him.
“It’s ok Hana, you were just having a bad dream.”
Something I’m brewing, feedback welcome.
