Alone

 

Geo looked over to the slit of darkness that was the doorway, wishing with all his heart that his land was still there, safe and untouched.  He walked over the five meters or so of gray, dead ground, to look through the door. He peeked through, looking for some way back to where he had been.

 

“It’s all gone.”  She said.

 

“What is left in there?” he asked.

 

“Nothing,” she said.  Then she thought further.  “It must not be a vacuum, though, because it did not suck you in.”

 

Geo quickly pulled himself away from the door.

 

Shiara heard the Voices calling her.  She put her fingers to her mouth and whistled loudly. Then she assumed the shape of a large flowering shrub.  The gray bird that had flown in with them through the door landed on one branch.  Then it all disappeared.

 

Geo had never felt so alone in his life.  He realized now that he was the only human being, stranded on a strange world that seemed to have nothing to offer him. 

 

He closed his eyes and called to his memory the smell of the forest where he lived.  The smell of damp earth and evergreen trees.  The smell of the wood from which his house was built…of the scraggly bushes that grew next to the river.  He thought of his friends; Maya, with whom he had a romantic attachment, and Jadis, who had lived in the lodge for a long time as well.  There were Tally and Billy, and the one they called Scrappy Girl, who hardly ever talked, but was constantly building and fixing things.

 

There had been talking animals—his friends Aster, and Ursa, the Moles—Strongfirs the Beaver and his wife Alberta, who was preparing to have kits.  There were ermine and foxes that ran though the forest, and a small, furry piglike creature—Pigmet was his name.  They had been very best friends.  How could he almost forget?  Were the all killed? 

 

Shiara promised that they weren’t.  She said she rolled back time to before they were born, and that she wanted to create them again, from the beginning, in a real world.  A Real World. That is what she said.

 

He opened his eyes.  He thought to himself I wonder if she’s gonna create it here?

 

Looking around at this desolate planet, compared to all the forest he had just recalled, he thought of the Moon.  This place was worse somehow; the sky was almost the same color as the earth, making the horizon barely visible, and the ground was almost like asphalt.  On the Moon, one could look up and see the stars.  The stars had always been comforting to him, a sign of the steadfastness of the Universe.  But now there were no stars, and that steadfastness was gone.

 

He had a name for that growing feeling inside him, that was only budding before…it was terror.

 

***

4:24:23 PM