Excerpt: Nameless Alternate World Novel

They were the wrong stars. Sonia was not an expert star gazer, but she could always look up into the sky and find Orion. Sometimes she could find either the dippers. Those tiny strings of lights were a comfort, reassuring her that something, anything, was watching over her.

Now she looked up and they were the wrong stars. These were strangers. Loneliness washed over her in a great tide, and her chest constricted. She sank down on the rock behind her and pulled her knees to her chest.

Twilight stretched itself into the full dark of night. The craggy fingers of the mountain peeks were silhouetted against the deep velvet blue sky. The valley was so black that is seemed a great hole had opened in the world. Once someone had told her that there was more space between the particles in an individual atom than there was space between the galaxies in the universe. That the world which we perceived as solid was actually more empty than full.

Sonia knew this intimately. Looking into the black hole of night, she remembered the emptiness between the worlds and felt herself rising to a panic. Her breath came in ragged gasps.

She reached down beside her and gripped the rock so hard hurt. These stones were real. They were solid. They could make you hurt. If she believed enough in the stones, in the sky, in the wrong stars, then she wouldn’t fall again. She wouldn’t have to face the empty.
Slowly her breathing calmed and the vertigo subsided. It was getting easier.

Sonia remembered walking through the Haight-Ashbury, vaguely peering in and out of shops looking at the tye-dye tanks and the sequined wrap skirts. On the street a man with a greasy beard and bad breath had asked her if she knew where to buy some ecstasy. She had said no, but had walked away from the encounter proud that she had blended in to such an extent. She had belonged without her even trying. She had looked up and saw a pair of life-sized plastic legs sticking out of the side of a building. She laughed and turned the corner.

It was in between one footstep and the next that she had fallen. There had been a pull, as though something tugged on her from the inside. She was so started that she fell backwards. But instead of tumbling onto the sidewalk, scraping her elbows, and bruising her bum, she had fallen straight through the sidewalk. She felt the spaces within her line up with the spaces in the sidewalk as she passed through it, passed beyond it and through places so empty that she understood finally the meaning of void.

All this had taken less than a moment. All this had taken thousands upon thousands of years.
She had awoken in Mitra’s stone hut. It was real and solid. Or at least it pretended to be. Her faith in the real solid world had been shattered. She knew the empty in things. Solid was a lie and it was so, so easy to fall. It took a week for her to believe enough in the ground that she could move.

Sonia heard a call from above. She took a deep breath and climbed back up the stone stairs. Once she almost lost her balance, but she regained her footing and used her hands to guide her the rest of the way.