Storytime: Less Traveled By.

December 7th, 2016

Here are the places you’ve missed.
It’s alright. I’ve picked them up for you.

Under the mop bucket in the old closet there was a trapdoor. Under the trapdoor there was a tunnel. Under the tunnel there was a hole, and a drop, and a river, green under a blue-glowing roof of rock. Under there, there were things we don’t even have words for. I had to make them up. Pzqrwl. Vddlnk. Ket.
You’ll know what they mean when you’re younger.

Past that last sandbar you never dared swim, just a little farther, there was a shark in that lake. Asleep, just underfoot. If you bite her fin she’ll give you a wish and a piece of her mind. It’s a sharp piece, and if you head out even farther, ever farther, past the end of the dock you never dove from, you can cut through the bottom and drop into the old lake, where all the old fish go to spend forever.

That little runnel almost-path in the park never went into the ditch. It dipped and ducked along its edge, then turned into the trees and fell out of time and sight and came up again in old Gondwana, after the big split and before the little ones, when the world was still so much bigger than it is now and the breeze wouldn’t smell of flowers yet for twenty million years.

The railroad behind your backyard ended just around the corner and the curve, where the neighbors couldn’t see. The trains assembled themselves in a little cabin at its end, then rumbled past your home on their way over the horizon to make the one-way-trade with the fading people. That’s why you never saw the same train twice.

Up the top of the tree that was too high to climb before you moved, there was a spiderweb. In that web there was a spider. In its mouth was a fly. In the fly there was the soul of the immortal Queen Qorrallan, who lives underneath the roots of everything that’s died. If you catch the fly and save it, nothing you love will ever rot.

In the snack bar your parents never took you to, there was a glass skylight that opened up into the top of the sky instead of the bottom. That’s where they got their cotton candy that you never ate. It’s also why the place burned down years ago; nothing’s more ferocious than a wounded thundercloud, except its parent.

In the study of your mother in that desk that you never touched in the drawer you never opened there were ten thousand diamonds, each smaller and more valuable than the last. The smallest was thinner around than a hairs-width, and could’ve bought the entire country.

The side road beside the walk to school; that went down the hill and kept going down until it came out the other side of the street it started from. A Mobius street, the last of its kind and lonely.

Inside the house at the end of the road that never turned on its lights lived a family of raccoons the size of bears; a mother, a father, an aunt, and four children. They were why the cat went missing. They were why the power went out. They were why you moved out when you were too small to know.

Around the corner.
Behind the lot.
Past the intersection.
Across the bay.
Through the woods.
Over the hill.
Under the bushes
The other way.

I’ve been everywhere that you haven’t; walked every path you feared to tread. All the nowhere and never-beens I’ve seen, and now that’s all done and dead, I’ve got to say…

…You didn’t miss much.

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