Unreal City

by A. R. Meyering

  “What are you waiting for? There’s so much more you can do. Think, Sarah. Dream. Bring it all into creation,” Felix coaxed, and I sat back up. I hesitated, then decided to forge ahead. If the clock really was ticking….

  I took off at a run toward the pier with the wild amusement park twirling and blinking atop its platform. I gathered speed and right as I reached the point on the sand where the waves were crashing, I took a little hop, then a leap, and I was gliding through the air. I skimmed above the waves, my heart skipping beats and a laugh ricocheting around in my throat. Felix was beside me now, and we both gained altitude, sailing next to that brilliant disc of light that was the sun, landing atop the Ferris wheel.

  We rode it, marveling at all the attractions below us and the small crowd enjoying them. I understood that none of the people around us were real; not the beaming children tugging at the hands of their parents, nor the young lovers cooing to each other in the other gondolas. They were all part of the illusion of the garden; puppet shows created to stave off loneliness. We floated from each ride and carnival booth to the next: the unrestrained speed of the roller coaster, the mystery of the fortune telling tent, the shocks of the ghost house. My senses were overloaded with bobbing balloons, the smells of caramel popcorn mixed with cotton candy, and fireworks exploding above us. When we had exhausted what was there, I raised up the ocean level and flooded the park, submerging the glimmering rainbow of lights. We rose with the water level, watching the fair below us, still operational within the sea. I took one last look at it, warmth filling my heart, and then wiped it clean.

  My desires unfolded one by one. My own island, complete with a three-story tree house. A million dollar shopping-spree in New York City. A stroll through an enchanted botanical dreamscape where Felix and I chased after pixies and sprites. I had always wanted to slay a dragon, too, so I brought that to reality. I couldn’t ever remember feeling so powerful and in control as when I lopped off the beast’s head while its blood dripped down my sword, drops of scarlet molasses. I decided next to go to a fancy ball where I chatted idly with Shakespeare, Abraham Lincoln, and Stanley Kubrick, and right in the middle of the affair the whole soiree came to a hush and I was presented an award for being a visionary photographer. As I was taking my bows and being lauded by too many famous faces to count, Felix nodded to me. We waved goodbye, then split through the ceiling, only to go sailing in a skiff across the Milky Way. Celestial insects all aglow with their own luminescence fluttered by: butterflies, ladybugs, fireflies, jeweled beetles with opal wings.

  “Felix, this is…this is the most wonderful thing in the universe. I don’t ever want to leave,” I told him, the sleeves of my gossamer gown flowing in the breeze as I dragged my hand through the starry stream. It was pleasantly cool. Felix crept over and curled up in my lap.

  How was I ever afraid of you? I thought with something very much like affection in my heart, stroking his fur and scratching behind his ears. We floated there for a while, drifting blissfully on the sea of stars until I wiped it clean and created an autumn forest set aflame with the light of a sunset, the air crisp with a hint of cinnamon and smoke floating on the breeze. I asked the animals to come out and spend some time with us, and became so immersed in the grand time we were having waltzing and singing in the forest hollow I didn’t notice a strange sensation creeping up on me at first, invading my joyful world.

  It was another person. I could feel them, unlike the projections of my imagination or the dancing animals and children amusement park. It was another soul.

  “Felix, what’s happening? Can you—can you feel that?” I looked down in concern at the familiar, his nod reassuring me.

  “You needn’t worry. It’s only someone coming into your garden for a visit. One of the others. Someone’s curious to see this garden occupied after being empty so long.” Felix turned toward the leaf-covered slope, blazing with the burnt orange and cranberry reds of the foliage.

  I watched with him, until movement disturbed the hill above and a face came into view. A pair of round, honey-colored eyes blinked back at me as a boy, maybe one or two years my senior, stepped up to the crest of the hill with feet well-practiced in hiking. The bones in his bewildered face were well-defined, his dark brown hair messy. He wore a well-loved wool sweater and scratchy brown trousers. Thirty seconds passed in silence before I spoke.

  “Hello,” I said, lifting my hand in salutation. He turned and ran, kicking up a shower of autumn leaves behind him.

  “Wait! What’s wrong?” I yelled, trying to use my new sense of control over this world to shrink its vastness, but he’d pierced through what I sensed to be the boundaries of my garden and was gone. Confused, I bid the dancing animals—they had been consumed with festivities during the encounter—to run off into the woods and leave Felix and me. I turned down to the familiar and asked, “Who was that?”

  “I think his name is Angus. He calls his familiar Aodh. I rather like that spirit, too. He’s one of the others that makes eternity bearable,” Felix said, making my brain flood with the curiosities surrounding him.

  “You said there are eleven other spirits, right? And each of them has a human partner?” I asked, and Felix nodded, patient and attentive. “So where did you come from? Where did this place come from?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t remember that far back. It’s always been here, and so have we. I can’t remember being born any more than you can. I’ve been going to your world since the dark times, the times of fire, the times of ice. We all did. We’ve all had many names, and many faces. The times without creatures that can use words are terrible ones, full of chaos—we sit those times out and wait. Wait for refined consciousness to return to the physical world,” Felix murmured, hypnotizing my mind into visions of primordial Earth. The sun began to sink in the distance and the forest around us grew darker. The breeze kicked up and a chill I hadn’t willed there ran through it.

  “And you don’t want to hurt the people who feed you, do you?”

  “No, we don’t want to hurt you. We love you. You sustain us. You entertain us. You maintain us,” he chanted, his eyes glowing too bright.

  “And the others—can I speak to them? Can I go to their gardens the way that boy came into mine?”

  Felix nodded. “Of course. But you won’t be in control there. You’ve got to be careful with a few of them. Not everyone is receptive to visitors in their private world. The little one and the old woman would probably like to meet you. Stella speaks your language, and she’s here right now. I can take you to them, if you like,” Felix offered, his tail twitching.

  After a moment of deliberation I nodded. I wanted to talk to another person, someone who knew what was going on and could give me an explanation I could trust. Felix was…fantastical, but I still didn’t know if I could believe his words.

  THE FAMILIAR LED me through the woods of my own creation, and when we reached the edge of the world that I had inherited—or taken?—we stepped through something like a thin membrane of palpable, invisible energy. My skin tingled as I looked around, finding that we now stood in a beautiful little meadow. It looked like something out of a fairy tale; a cottage as precious and overly florid as the ones Thomas Kinkade painted was nestled in the grass, complete with a waterwheel spinning over a stream. Behind the cozy home was a forest, the floor carpeted with flowers of many colors.

  Before I could step through the knee-high grass, I heard a little cry from behind the home, and then a little girl was running toward me at full speed, her arms outstretched and a beaming smile on her lips. She was as pretty as a picture, and looked just like a porcelain doll with her rosy cheeks and blonde curls. Tiny arms curled around my leg as the child sang out in French.

  Above her fluttered a massive butterfly with oddly shaped wings, whose entire form hummed with wisdom and power. Every time it flapped its wings, they seemed to shine in a different iridescent hue and if I looked at it too long, I felt dreamy, like I was slipping away from this world.
I sensed it knew me—knew what I was thinking, and could speak to me if it liked, yet remained silent as I stared at those mesmerizing wings with their changing patterns and colors. I shook my head. These two were as real as the boy in my garden had been. I could feel the girl’s soul brimming with love for me, though I hardly knew why.

  “Blanche!” called a female voice from inside the cottage. This French sounded different than the little girl’s, as if the speaker had a strong accent. “Reviens vite, toute suite! Pischouette, c’est dangereux à l’extérieur, maintenant! Qui est...” The huffy woman stepped outside, her words trailing off as she noticed me. Her black eyes searched me the way the boy’s had, but instead of running, her face broke into a welcoming smile, stained with a deep sadness I could not understand.

  “Ma, jamais d’la vie…elle est la defante. Hey, girl, what they call you?” she pointed to me as she spoke, the child still chattering away in French.

  It took me a moment to piece together what she had asked. It had sounded like ‘Ey, gaal. Wut dey caah ya’. “Er, Sarah. I’m Sarah.”

  The old woman nodded and shut her eyes, then beckoned me to come closer. I complied, the little girl romping alongside me. The old woman had big, round eyes with yellowish whites. The skin of her face was soft, papery, and showered signs of age, but wasn’t very wrinkled. A scarf wrapped around her head tinkled with little beads and crystals, and many different shawls of varying shades of purple were wrapped about her shoulders.

  I couldn’t contain my questions. “Please, ma’am—can you tell me…well, anything about this place? I’m—I’m kinda lost, I guess you could say, I—”

  “Hush now, child. Come on inside. I’ll tell you ‘bout everything. This here est ma petite Blanche’s Garden. I’m a visitor here too, but she seem to like you fine,” the old woman laughed, her voice hoarse but amiable. I couldn’t imagine there being any danger here, so I followed her into the cottage, the little girl still hopping at my heels.

  The inside was just as lovely as the exterior. Porcelain cups, rustic furniture, home-sewn quilts, and vases bursting with flowers picked from the meadow were crammed inside the cozy space. It looked like a replica of Snow White’s cottage, complete with the pies sitting on the windowsills. We sat at a worn, wooden table with gentle light streaming in through the stained glass and coloring the room. The butterfly landed on the chair where the little girl sat, its wings still dreamily flapping even though it was not airborne. I couldn’t keep my eyes off the wings, no matter how I tried, and my head ached in the same way Felix’s eyes caused it to. The old woman bustled about, making tea for the three of us as she spoke kindly to the little girl in French, as if explaining something that a child her age would not easily comprehend. When she was done and three steaming mugs of tea that smelled strongly of herbs sat before us, she turned to me with her dark, hazy eyes and gave me her full attention.

  “First you tell Mama Stella, child, how it is you come here.” Beneath her thick Cajun accent her voice was motherly, though it didn’t quite make me feel safe. There was something powerful behind that kindly gaze that I didn’t feel like testing, so I stuck to the truth.

  “I—I gave some food to him,” I pointed at Felix, who had followed us into the kitchen, “and he offered me a cake, and I ate it and—”

  “And it take you here. To the Unreal City,” Mama Stella finished with an understanding smile.

  “Unreal City? Is that what this place is? Is that how you all get here? Please, tell me more,” I begged. I just knew my time here wouldn’t last for very much longer—I could feel the heightened sense of reality already fading, especially when I looked at that butterfly. I wanted to know exactly what I was getting into, and what it might cost me if I ever wanted to come back.

  “It what the man in the library call it, so most of us Cunning Folk come to call it that too, but it never had no true name,” she explained. “And what bring us here is something different for each one—a tiny bottle of sweet liquor for me, a bon bon for cher Blanche, so she tells me. It’s our heads that make it look different, make it look tempting. But my podna Mardi tell me it all the same stuff—only they the ones can make it.”

  “Podna Mardi?”

  “Ah weh, girl, my friend the spirit. Come on in here, Mardi,” she called into the back room of the cottage, and the sound of hooves on wood approached. An animal that at first looked to be an oversized ram with golden wool clopped around the doorway, and I shuddered at the sight of its face. Instead of the sheep’s head that should’ve been at the end of its fleecy neck, there was a solid gold carnival mask. Elaborate horns sprouted on either side; emeralds, amethysts, and a plume of feathers decorating them. I couldn’t see any eyes behind that mask, but the jewels glimmered with that ethereal light that made my head fuzzy. It was looking straight at me, feeling what I felt and pillaging my memories.

  “Please, tell me everything you know. I don’t think I have much time left,” I insisted, willing myself to look away from the familiar.

  “There sure ain’t time for that, but here’s the basics. Your spirit cannot lie to you, and he must do what you say once you enter a pact with him, but he always try to trick you, too. Just you gotta ask him the right questions, weh?” Mama Stella said, a twinkle in her eye. “You be careful ‘bout what you give him too, be careful ‘bout how many times you come here unless you sure you want it always—things start to seem different, back home, too. Don’t be scared of what you see. They can’t hurt you none. But stay in the right places here, ‘cause there’s things here that can. Don’t never go looking for trouble, peeshwank, don’t go digging deep in the Unreal City. Stay where your friends stay. That’s why I stay here with her, ma Blanche. She can’t wake up, anymore—she say there was a car accident in her life, and now she’s sleeping forever. I just make sure her dreams is always nice.”

  The old woman looked upon the little girl, who was sipping at the steaming cup and licking her lips. My heart ached for her. She might forever be frozen at this age, in a state of unchanging innocence, until she died. I knew that if I ever came back to this place—to Unreal City—then I would want to spend some time with her.

  “Now come here, Sarah. I know what is your kind of girl—you not gonna heed my warning,” Mama Stella said, standing up and gesturing for me to do the same. “So I’m gonna help you out, silly as you is.”

  I rose alongside my anger, opening my mouth to protest her criticism, but the old woman hushed me with her raised finger. The ram moved its head back and forth, the beads, coins, and jewels adorning its body tinkling. Mama Stella studied me, then shut her eyes and took a deep breath in through her nose.

  “Hang on, a minute, what are you going to do to me?!” I cried.

  Before I could stop her, the old woman lifted two fingers and touched them to my pendant. The brief contact sent an electric current flowing through the chain of the necklace and buzzing down to my chest, making me gasp and double over. I caught my breath and looked up at her, shocked tears in my eyes.

  “What the hell was that? What did you do?”

  “I gave you a charm for protection. I want no harm to come to you child, that’s why I done it.” Mama Stella’s dark eyes were passionate, but I was already withdrawing, my hands clasped over my pendant.

  How dare she touch this...does she know?

  “Thanks for your help, but I’ve got to be going,” I barked, making for the door.

  Little Blanche leapt from her seat, looking back and forth from me to Mama Stella in confusion. Mama Stella nodded, that sadness overtaking her again, and waved her hands in the direction of the door.

  “Please take care out there, child. You come back here too. You always welcome. Come back,” she pleaded as I made my retreat, Felix scampering after me.

  My breathing was agitated and my heart pounded as we made for the edge of Blanche’s Garden. “Felix, what did she do to me?” I panted as I walked, not daring to look back.

  “What she said she did,” he
replied, calm and confusing as always.

  I wasn’t sure I was in the mood to dissect potential meaning behind this, so I charged onward until I stepped through the thin layer of cellophane-like energy separating the gardens. I thought I’d been going back to mine, but found I had stumbled into another stranger’s world. Things were starting to look less focused now, but I could tell I was on a beach at night, though it was neither tropical nor rocky like the ones in California. It was nestled between green mountains, and the sand was soft beneath my toes.

  In the sky was a dazzling display of aurora borealis. A few feet away stood a little hut with a thatched roof and paper screens. I took a moment to study this, then noticed a slender, middle-aged woman approaching in the dim lavender light. She seemed glad to see me, her smile reaching her eyes. She took my hand in hers, holding it for a moment before letting go.

  “Hello,” I said, comforted by her presence, the threat of the electric shock already fading from my nerves.

  “Youkoso,” was her reply. The tone of her voice was soothing, but I shook my head to show I didn’t understand her. “Hajimemashite, atashi ha Masami...namae ha Masami. Masami desu. Kore ha Masami no niwa yo.” She pointed to her chest, repeating Masami until I guessed that she must be telling me her name.

  “Oh, um, Sarah. I’m Sarah,” I said and pointed to myself.

  She nodded and gestured for me to come to the shore, and we sat down together in the sparkling sands to watch the aurora. I tried to communicate details about who I was, and she did the same. She kept making little motions as if she were casting a line, and I guessed her daily life had something to do with fishing. We gave up and just enjoyed the lights in the sky.

  A pair of iridescent jellyfish floated by in mid-air, glowing as if under a black light and connected by their tentacles. Masami laughed, a pleasant sound, and Felix leapt up to join them. They spun around together in the sky, silent communication ensuing as the jellyfish pulsated with that particular type of light that seemed to be the familiar spirits’ energy.