Twins (Two Journeys)

She took to chewing gum by the packet, sucking every last drop of bubblegum flavorant out of each strip, the packet rapidly accumulating as a squishy ball of flavorless slump wrapped in the remains of the foil wrappers. It was dusk, the sun giving way to the first blue-moon sky of the night, long black shadows telling what’s the come, casting forward from the city. Behind her, true infrastructure reaches its terminus at her rest, the scrubland before her stretching out to begin the wilderness proper. The gas station she sits at will close in five minutes. She forgot to bring a car, still deciding if she has any intention of returning.

The forest path was too inviting where it turned opaque, hedge-like bushes grown up in the undershadows beneath the canopy, the forest they all knew and avoided, its southern expanse widely veered around by the nearest roads. He knew it went somewhere, perhaps down into valleys, or held a mountain, maybe bandits or bears, but ultimately, never sought it. As the crow flies, it would lead to another village some fifty miles away - not that he cared until now. 

Here was the terrain of junk, accumulated in scrubgrass moistened with rainwater pooling in deep-slung ditches furroughed to collect trashbags and gulpcups. Dogs growled and scampered along the long blue shadows the dusk made, the sun and moon dancing together along the horizon line through the unkempt trees, along the sheltered subdivisions, glinting briefly as another car slammed past her. The plain opened wide beyond her, the highway a brief ribbon of distraction she no longer needed. She dipped off, hopping the watery ditch, ducking her head as she sunk to her waist in the waving dead grass of the hayfield.

He was tumbling downhill, far below the forest should reasonably go. Canopy after canopy seemed to close up the more he descended the muddy slope, ferns and brambles becoming a black sky that eventually turned to blot out like night, until his eyes could adjust to the green. The deepswamp glowed, the color of pine needles and frogwater, as the slope turned to a ladder, embedded rocks and root systems giving him gentle climb to the bottom. 

She found an abandoned barn, the ceiling cracked and rotted to form an observatory. It was getting colder as she sat down, leaning back against the nearest solid mass, pleasantly tickled as spiders avoided her tennis shoes and the night turned black through the door. Even the highway was muffled now, as if it never was. No one had turned on a light in miles, the owners of this farm most likely never even visiting this particular acre of their vast mechanized holdings. The stars began to dot onto darkness, slowly forming a language as their connective patterns emerged, through the crystalline fog.

The water at the bottom was warm, a womblike basin with smooth stones lining its bowl, the water semi-opaque, the source of the surreal green glow. Somewhere, he had lost his clothes, not caring as the stifling air turned to a welcome smoke, filling his lungs with something thicker than the thin oxygen above. Hands wrapped around him, everywhere at once, as he shut his eyes. His hands sunk into the mud, his hair now well-dirtied into it. Something touched him, closely - it was time for a change, and the results would bring nothing but joy to those who deserved it.