“Honey, get out of the shot. I’m trying to take a picture of that ghost over there!”
—–
“So this is where we’re going,” Mabel said to Teebestia, who had removed her mask since the facade was dropped, like water off a duck’s back.
“We *all* do,” the mechanoid rattled. “Eventually.”
“Riight.” Mabel was pondering how to get out of this. Really hard (!). “What happens when I wake up? I mean, when I get to the other side.”
“You’ll see your brother,” Teebeestia spoke plainly. “Reunited at last.”
I must be dreaming, thought Mabel. She goes to the edge, stares down into the hole, sees light at the bottom, way way down. She’ll be killed, yes. But the light will take her, swallow her. (Almost) all water removed. Just like a mechanoid. There will be little remorse for a life lived fully, quietly, in contemplation on the world at large. *Worlds*.
“Soo… this is how you got to be who you are.”
“Yes,” Teebeestia clipped rapidly. Death was good for her. She had a diseased heart, a diseased mind. The hole was a way out.
Mabel looked around the landscape for perhaps the last time. So much had changed about the Dawg Pound since their childhood, growing up with Winnfield — happy happy days. But the Cleveland Rocks up there remain. Perhaps, at least in part, as a memorial for Little himself, she imagined, the last place she saw him before he was taken. By the Universe. The mechanoids at least do that for him while shifting around everything else. She can’t really blame them, though. Climate change, she knew. “Oh, Little,” she lamented. “What have your Green-Gray Wars done?”
She shifts her attention back to the hole. Taking a deep breath… she jumps.
The bones rattle on.
Sunklands 