Certain Death was playing on the turntable below the “Big Open”, beckoning them forward, the white twin obscured. Blackness. The End. Starless.
—–
Marsha “Pink” Krakow watched as the moving van gradually filled up with their possessions. “Drane Hill,” she said aloud, testing the name. A rather ugly one, she thought. Doesn’t roll off the tongue like Storybrook. Bad sign up front.
She’d looked it up. It was a mistake appellation. Drane *Lick* use to run through the area, and perhaps still does. That’s a stream — lick equals stream. But the small knob directly above the village wasn’t Drane Hill, at least originally. It was Pleasant Hill, a descriptive name. Somewhere along the line hill and stream had gotten mixed up. A confusion was created. But from where? she pondered as her father, The Man, waved her toward the now packed truck, black hair queerly flickering on and off from her present perspective, grey revealed in part.
“Time to leave, honey,” he said rather hoarsely, voice weary from commanding the movers all afternoon. “The ugly yellow living room couch your mother loves so much was the last item. Come on — get inside. We’re going for a drive.” He then beckoned The Dogg to jump in the back with rest of the furniture and boxes, now all locked down. Dogg perhaps strangely was reluctant to get up from the pavement. Another meaningful sign for Marsha “Pink” Krakow, if she was paying attention. Which she was.
She too could stand her ground and not allow the van to escape. She didn’t have speak down and say goodbye to the Big Inside, trading a closed hill for an open one and a known commodity for the unknown. There was still time to talk. She had an ace in the hole. She and SEAN had been watching her mother’s comings and goings for a while now.
“Daddy?” she said, not budging an inch. “Do — do you know that fellow Charlie Banana in town?”
“Bandana?” he queried back, getting hard of hearing with his advancing age.
“No — Ba*nan*a. Yellow. Um, like that ugly yellow couch you just loaded in the back.” And here comes the zinger…
Sunklands 