Threnody (015).

(This is a 500-word-a-day novel project.)

It wasn’t really all the bad at first when we got here, once we got a hang of the animals and the plants. Ryan could hear long-gone Tom talking to him now just plain as day, like he was standing right next to him. We tried to find a way home for awhile, just like everybody does, following one rumor after another, but we got tired of that and figured we’d better find a way to live. We ended up in a little village that makes paper.

Everything was fine, Tim had said, taking over, until the weather stalled and the monsters showed up. People got scared and moved on. The ones that stayed, our friends . . .

They changed, Tom finished. We tried to save them, but we had to run.

Tim’s face had been so guilty – Ryan thought that maybe they hadn’t tried as hard as they would have liked. The bad mood was broken later when Tom bagged a yellow-colored deer: while they drooled over the impending meat he warned them to NEVER eat the blue ones, which had had sent Tim into a giggling explanation that there was a psychoactive and laxative effect to blue-deer meat that led to Tom, soiled and nude, doing cartwheels for an hour.

They had met others who were lost, recently or for years, and every story ended the same: they were driving, walking, working, sleeping, and then somehow they became lost in the snow, even in places where it was physically impossible…like under the bay on a rail line. Theories were traded about government experiments, extraterrestrials, time travel, parallel earths – after the first time you saw an evergreen make a meal out of a full-grown animal you started to think that anything was possible. Anything at all.

The brothers were as patient as they could with Ryan’s insistence that somehow this made sense, and if they just could figure it out they could maybe get home – until after one dinner Tim pulled him aside and gave it to him straight: We lied to you, we did try to find a way home, but we never heard of anyone actually making it. There’s no going back, man. We’re here for good. Make your peace with that.

Ryan wished he had told his friend then what he was afraid of most of all, and still was. That they had all been sent straight to Hell, and worse things would always be coming.

Hey, you okay back there? Maddy called. He muttered something back at her, stretching. There were small plastic containers filled with odds and ends all over it – the kind of thing a man intended to sort one of these days but secretly enjoyed the chaos which only he understood. Mason jars separated screws and washers, their lids nailed to the underside of a shelf to hang from. His father had done the same thing. There were a lot of batteries; they were a brand he’d never seen called Actionvolt.