Stars Will Fall Out
an excerpt

She gulped the contents of the vial. Immediately, her head felt heavy, as if she had taken Nyquil. It was time to relax, give in to the heaviness of sleep. Her eyes fluttered, then stopped fighting as she slipped into the cold pond without notice. From leagues away, she thought she heard a voice, Jerry or Jeremy or someone, yelling her name.

Jil drifted down through the water like the girl had, like a leaf spiraling and swaying groundwards. With heaviness in her head and the pit of her stomach, she floated through murk and litter like some kind of lead fairy and glided downwards until the sun disappeared and all sense of direction fled in the gloom. The direction registered again as a spongy algae ceiling formed over her, and walls around her so that she alighted on the floor of a carpeted, doorless chamber. Her legs dangled like seaweed with leaden feet on the end threatening to tear her legs off her body. The chamber was like looking at crepuscular water with sunglasses on, visible, but turning more inscrutable all the time.

Through a murky veil, the sun shone, but it was on the wall, not the ceiling. Behind it a green king and green queen on a shaggy black pony emerged. They could have been the King and Queen of spades or clubs, with ebony knobs on their weeded finery and harshly drawn features. They remained behind the wall, protruding through it only enough to give their shapes.

"Someone is here," announced the queen," and Jil felt the cold of the water hit her with the queen's voice.

"I cannot see," said the king, "But I feel the traveler's wake and know their direction."

The queen stroked the pony's mane and it glared around the chamber with jaundiced eyes of strange eerie moonlight. Its eyes locked onto her, and the queen nudged it. Sirens erupted in the pony's neigh and rose to a red alert pitch, ugly and piercing.

Booted footsteps ran on the ceiling, muted in the algae. "What!" said a man's voice. Weeds cloaked the voice, but its demand could be heard harshly even through layers of padding. The king and queen both slowly rotated to the voice. Whatever it was, it ranked higher than them. "What, I said! And who!"

"Traveler," the kind and queen said together as if issuing a royal decree. The pony bored its eyes into Jil, and snorted.

"What else would it be?" the man snapped impatiently. "Let me give you my eyes, and we will see."

Jil dreaded this man, dreaded him moer than the cold king and queen, or the gaze of the black pony. There must be a door. She struggled to move, but her limbs were not her own and her heavy head would not turn. She was paralyzed. Please don't find me. If only she could tear the walls, if only there were a door. She couldn't move, but she concentrated on movement, shrunk against the wall. Fetal position, arms around legs, head inwards. Was she doing or imagining? Small as possible, crouch into the wall, let it fold over like a curtain.

The wall enveloped her. "Gone," wailed the king and queen. She drifted out of the chamber, out of consciousness, and dreamt sunlight.