Author: Vera Marie Scott

Those places that you go when you dream.
Some indefinable sensation settles across your head and chest, and you half expect to either pass out or wake up, either way having faded through something that was neither here nor there. Another part of you feels that it must be the reality, the final thing consensus past all fleeting action. Both parts are… fine. You’re content to stay here, if it is to be.
Duality. It’s still, except for a steady wind, and the noise of some garden snails crawling through the leaf litter off the side of the concrete. It’s mating season for them. That and the noise when the plastic case of your electronic device momentarily bonks the concrete sound simultaneously like sound effects in a movie and more real than anything you’ve ever heard.

Another noise sounds, one that came not from wind or snails, but from something on the same timescale as you, and it starts to feel less like an in-between and more the moment before your doom.
You get up and start to move as a human again. Another sound joins you in the silence, and you think it’s closer this time. Something is coming for you. You change gears into a run. Again a close relative of those other apes, scared for your own life. In this moment, neither where you are nor where you were feels like “home,” but you want to go back.

You’re out. You’re back. The light is golden and modern-human-paced sounds crowd around you, but it doesn’t feel safe, much less home. You still feel that you haven’t separated from the other place. Things know you here. They respond to your actions and are accustomed to your existence and you to theirs, scampering around in your time, and you feel better. It’s still not the same as before you were somewhere else.
Everything feels wrong, you feel alone, yet watched at the same time, as if this is just a hiding spot where you are separated from the thing that chased you, and your protection is false or failing. You press into the matching warmth of what should be your other humans, but you start to worry that the warmth feels false—like a disguise. Nothing feels safe or real. You worry that it never will again.