American Elsewhere

CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE




In the south of Wink, just below the skin of the earth under the highway crossroads, many eyes open in the dark.

The dark does not bother them. They were born in the dark. They have lived their whole lives in the dark. They were made for the dark and their hearts will always belong in the dark. So they open their eyes, and see:

Movement. Their creation is hissing. Melting. The blocks of metal (of Her) bubble at all the seams and edges, swirling together like boiling lead.

At first they are concerned: they chirp and tweet and grumble in the darkness, shifting in their roosts and rolling over one another in their shallow pools. They spent so much time on it, so many hours hunting through the ravines and empty homes of this place… they spent days bearing the stupendous, horrible weight of those blocks up and down mountainsides… and now, without warning, it is to melt?

But then they feel it: the world here grows soft. The barrier, which is already quite permeable in Wink, begins to disappear entirely. All places—those distant and disparate, those Here and There, Elsewhere and Nowhere—converge into one.

Their tone changes. They begin to flute and cry and sing in the darkness. This is not an ending, not a death in the dark. This is a new day, this is a beginning, a new world.

She is coming.