mind the gap!

Sam Jenkins didn’t mind the gap, and nobody remembered.

It was hard to miss. The gap was boarded over. 

It took him a while; Sam wasn’t that strong. Sammy was only ten years old when he pried the boarding away from the gap.below the plywood boarding, probably assembled by his father and mother, were two steel borders, clearly man-made, clearly over a hundred years old. The steel borders were painted with black-and-yellow warning strips long ago by human hands. They were worn with time, the paint scratched and chipped. They covered a fissure in the world.

Sam stared into the abyss between his yard and the next, between the hills, between the churning swathes of grass. The fissure was exactly one foot across, and grass didn’t sway there.

The thing about the gap was that you had to mind the gap, or actively decide not to.

Sam hopped into the gap.

There was an instant sound, like a gritting guitar chord, cht-rummm, but somehow inverted, hollow, a sound that was gasping for air. The sound felt like it came from the center of his brain, not from a place external. There was a sort of revolution, a swinging of his body, and then Sam found himself landing upon his knees, and then his rear, and then his back. 

Sammy lay, stunned and freezing, on a land entirely composed of black and frigid, endless cold. 

He tried to force his lungs to thrum, but there was that sound again, that chtrummm, and he couldn’t get them to stretch right. There wasn’t the right pressure, internal or external, and they stayed god-damned shut. Panicking, Sam forced himself up to sit, palms scraping a strange, gritty black material, and stared out at the world. His chest spasmed.

He stared before him. The shape of the earth was jagged, irregular, glassy black. The shape of the horizon poked city-like, like some irregularly filed-down skyscrapers, and the whole silhouette of them was glowing with a million tiny green specs. 

Sammy swivelled his head back, stared at the gap he’d come from, but the gap had become utterly black. The cut displayed no grass, no sky, no lawn. His head was weighed down by a billion pounds, and soon it forced back down to his chest with a chtrum.

Lungs screaming, Sam forced his head up, eyes brimming with tears, and coughed without air. Every movement made that sound, Sam found, as he forced himself forward onto his hands and knees, fear spasming electric bolts, muscles burning: chtrum as he got to his feet, brushing his finger-tips against his seized-up, screeching chest: chtrum chrtum chtrummm.

Sam managed to move, he lumbered forward: chrth-trh-chtrummn: and it felt that the pressure, a deep, oceanlike pressure pressing on his lungs, was increasing. 

His feet were slowing, throbbing, then, and then his nervous system jolted him as he noticed it. Everything around Sammy seemed inverted, every ridge of obsidian-like glass. Everything that faced him, like the pseudoskyscraper he churned towards, looked like he was looking inside it, somehow, while looking at the outer surface. And the horizon, the obelisks; they didn’t move quite right when he turned. 

That’s… weird, some part of Sam thought incongruously as every other bundle of him hollered and yelled in silence. Things were wrong, spatially. Then, his feet began to drag, soles scraping against crystalline shards. Yes, the world was wrong; it was as those illusions where you look inside a cardboard box that’s painted to look like a three-dimensional, outer, protruding edge of an animal’s head, like a dragon. Moving all wrong.

Sammy’s left foot buckled, stopped responding entirely. It was at that point that he looked down at the ground. 

His neck muscles laxed, straining tendons, and he found that his shoes had contacted the glittering-green, pitch-black, inside-out ground material. A black-and-glittering-green vein was pulsing, throbbing up into his ankle, into his leg, and as he moved, all around the spidering vein, the tissues of his skin began to darken, glitter, and to be seen as if outside in.

That’s it, Sam thought, mouth agape, teeth rasping on skin, that’s it for me. I’m a God-damned goner. He could only control one leg, now. The new, other leg was new to him, and him new to it. Sam tilted, plummeted, then slammed to the earth. He dragged himself forward, vision reddening, staring at those oddly-revolving, strangely-turning inverted-skyscrapers, those goddamn black obelisks, that’s the end of it all. 

Sam dragged himself across the earth, and the dark and green speckle spread across his face, turned his teeth to enamel jewels, and with a cold snap his lungs turned crystalline, and he could suddenly breathe again, albeit cold and raw. Sam crept along, dragging with one hand, as the rest of his body adapted, green and black and not there at all.

The darkness spread up Sammy’s hands, towards his cuticles, glinting on his fingertips. His jaw fell agape, once more, and stayed there. He left his jaw agape; it felt right. His eyes were sharp, green-glass pinpricks in obsidian holes.

He stared up at the void, down away from his childhood home on the hill as he clung to its dark glistening underside, rasped against its underbelly. 

He could see it, now. The world on the other side of the gap. the clear blue sky, glittering, a line of blue in the distance. It was foreign to him. I can’t go back out, he thought. He imagined breathing in the wheat, choking on the dirt. He imagined sky blue coursing through his veins, and the houses churning behind his eyelids when he blinked. He didn’t want to be composed of sky anymore, not glassy like that, nor with white cloud eyebrows or a flapping milkweed tongue.

I couldn’t breathe back out there, now, Sam thought internally with dismay, I don’t think I could remember how. That isn’t for me, now. Strange germs filled his body. Not for long, he cried, internally, not for much longer. I live here now. Sam stood. I’m sure of it. 

Sam stayed. He stayed so that he wouldn’t ruin them, the others. The men and women built of houses, in skin of grass that he could never, ever forget, of skin of steel, of yellow-black tar, and of whose skeletons built to tower into the sky like spiderwebs.

Sam Jenkins stood, petrified, staring at nothing, and remembered nothing.

There's no going back now, repeated in his head on loop, like a crystal glimmering, on retrograde; skipped upon his obsidian cerebrum again, again, again, like a needle skipping a groove on a shittily printed vinyl. Again, again, again. There's no going back now. There was no other thought; he'd gone all statuesque. And nobody outside the gap remembered Sam Jenkins, nor how he hadn’t minded the gap. Nobody remembered Sam Jenkins at all.

It was unfortunate, that, because there was another boy like him, actually, and Sammy was wrong. You could breathe back out there. Little Phil Jenkins these days stood in the above world, always screaming, but his body was like glass, an absence of a thing, and his voice the lack of a sound. He was nothing but a chill to shudder by. He was equally forgotten, but he remembered as his body turned into glass.

That didn’t do him any good, either.

Oh, well.