Let Me Be Crazy

Photo by Adrianna Van Groningen on Unsplash

“You know it’s not going to work,” Mason said, arms folded as he leaned against the doorway.

“I’m going to do it anyways,” Evelynn snapped, lacing up her shoes.

“It’s not even real. You’re crazy.”

“Then let me be crazy,” she pushed past him, onto the street and started running.

The thing was, Mason was probably right. It was just a game they’d played as children with the neighbor kids, before they moved away and grew up. Pretending they’d found a kingdom in the abandoned lot. She hadn’t even thought about it in years. But now that they were emptying out their great-aunt’s house a lot of memories were resurfacing. And her memories of the kingdom (had they ever bothered giving it a name? There must have been a name,) were just too solid to ignore. She remembered buildings - living buildings grown out of trees and bushes that breathed and bent in the wind. And people. The baker who saved hot rolls for them; his wife who only wore red; Adria who’d taught her to herd geese.

They weren’t like memories of playing dress-up, where jeans stuck out from under sparkly princess skirts and all the play food in the toy kitchen was plastic. No, they had been real rolls, so hot they had to toss them back and forth between their fingers; she could almost taste them. The wife’s deep red tunic and leggings had extensive embroidery - a detail she wouldn’t have known to make up as a kid. Real unruly geese, not some random stuffed animal. Mason, of course, said that she just had a really good imagination.

But this morning she’d found the photograph. It was her and Adria in a brown tunic, unlike anything the kids at home wore, with the geese and beyond them the strange living houses. The photograph was real, so the rest of it had to be, right? Mason said it could all be explained. He said the houses were just bushes and she was looking too hard at them. Adria must have been some visiting kid in weird clothes. And there were geese in the area, so they’d just been sitting there with them. But Evelynn knew he was wrong. So she kept running.

At last she reached the place. It wasn’t an abandoned lot anymore. There was a nice house there and if anyone looked out the window and saw her, well, they’d think she was crazy. Because as she looked at the blank air above the sidewalk, it was there. Something she’d never had a name for. Something you didn’t quite see with your eyes. But something she wouldn’t forget again. A shiver in the air. Taking a deep breath, she closed her eyes and leaped. For a moment she was flying.

Then she landed. Not on hard sidewalk. Something soft. Opening her eyes, she saw grass. Sitting up, she saw geese scattering and in the distance, growing homes beckoned.


Written for Verge.
 
I like stories where characters travel to other worlds. But I think the characters get a raw deal when they have great childhood adventures and then are expected to go on and be normal adults without ever going through the portal again. So I'm sending them back.