G/t I Guess

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It began the same way again.

It had only happened a couple times before now, but it was the same thing, yet again. Her eyes were probably open but it would be dark, inside some sort of pseudo-sleep. Then she'd blink and be awake, in the same position, always in the middle of the same, unchanged scene. Unchanged, at least, until her sisters and her parents blinked and awoke as well, and everything began to move again.

It always began in what looked like the mid-afternoon, based on the lighting, and sometime in the early fall based on the trees. The garden by the house was always the same, no more grown nor picked at by deer than before, the same faint smell of hickory smoke wafting across the yard, the venison no more cooked, or if it did, it went right back to how it was before and started over.

Her Pa always started off in the woods, chopping wood, that's what he'd told her. Her little sisters always jumped right into chasing each other around the clearing nearby, squealing and giggling. Her Ma would always start next to the hollow smoking tree, right outside the log house, tending to the flames inside, and Robin would be at her side, holding up hickory chips in her apron.

Once they were handed off to Ma to be put on the fire, then she was always free to go join her sisters, as that would be her last chore of the afternoon. The curious thing was, Robin could never remember what any of her other chores might have been. The thought frustrated her enough to leave her sisters to their devices more often than not, in favor of finding her own place to relax, usually in the small but much quieter meadow, where she could better try clearing her head.

Thick, deep woods surrounded the property on all sides, but in the field it stood out more. A massive, dark wall that seemed to go deeper and deeper the further in you looked, and it looped all around their land. But it was often so quiet. No chirping bugs, no singing birds, just the occasional bunny or prairie dog to scurry past, and even that wasn't too often. Even more rare was a deer Robin saw scamper through the field the other day, when she walked through and had startled it from its poise and it disappeared into the trees. The only other occasional noises were the ones she couldn't place, and sounded miles away, or like ghosts of another realm. Noises she wasn't familiar with, but that she heard often enough that she didn't ignore them, as her parents had dismissively told her to do the few times she tried pointing it out to them.

From what Robin could tell, there weren't very many woodland creatures, and they had their own ways of going about when everyone in her family woke. Her waking position had never been in the right field of vision to see where any one of them might start off, but she reckoned that if she did, they'd be starting in the same positions each time they woke as well, if her own experience was anything to go by.

Robin didn't like dwelling on it all, as it seemed to bring about more questions than answers when she pondered it for too long. So, again, when her mind grew tired from trying to understand it, she'd close her eyes and take a moment to breathe, and then divert her focus to the nature she sat in. So much of her time spent watching her sisters play or being given another chore, and so much of it spent keeping herself busy, doing as she was told, not paying attention to any odd distractions. It was during one of these periods of sitting in the field that she noticed it. Something... off. She had been taking a moment to scan the unchanged, partially clouded sky in all directions, but when she reached a certain point it just... stopped. There was sky, and then it just...stopped. And where it stopped, and beyond it, she didn't know what to think.

An empty space, but surrounded by a vast, mahogany colored barrier that she couldn't see the end of in any direction, except where an edge of it met another, somehow emptier space of a differently lit area, seemingly from a distant, out-of-sight source, different and disconnected from whatever lit up her home. The emptiness wasn't a black void; she could see it, for sure, but Robin's anxious confusion increased when she couldn't quite understand what it was she was seeing.