Cave Game

II - Walk

A sound escaped his dry throat, up out his lips: a groan. Steve rolled from his back to his side. With a plop, he landed in the sand which felt as soft as any bed had ever felt to his aching bones. Truthfully, Steve did not feel very much like moving any further. He was very much content to stay where he was until he fell back into whatever deep comatose his brain figured he just came out of, but his brain also figured that he wouldn't be permitted to stay comfortable for very long. With the might of Atlas lifting the globe, he flipped from side to a crawling position, propped up on his calves and forearms like a strange, sad coffee table, discarded in the middle of nowhere. He sighed with discontent; this was very much not where he wanted to be, but it made the next step easier. 

He stood up, and promptly fell over. 

After muttering some curses, Steve was able to bring himself back to kneel, his thighs resting on the heels of his feet, each of his hands pressed into the ground on either side. Once more he stood, being sure to hesitate before declaring it a success. Using his hand for shade, he glanced up at the sun which shone brightly down at him from its perch at high noon. He looked back at the horizon, absorbing the view of the surrounding beach and forest. He let his hand drop from its salute on his forehead and finally looked down at himself. His skin was a deep tan that he must've earned from his lay on the beach. He wore a loose teal tunic and a belted pair of faded purple pants, neither of which he could seem to recall purchasing or putting on. What mattered now was that they were dusty. Brushing off the layer of sand earned from his flopping about on the beach, he warily made his way further from the shore to the tree line. Questions assailed his brain, all of which he couldn't fathom to answer until he was at the very least satiated with a meal of some sorts– exactly how and where he would be getting that meal was one of the questions he paradoxically left in the queue. Steve's footfalls felt to him more certain as the shifty sand underneath them faded to soft grass, and then to the thick soil of a deciduous undergrowth. 

As he waded through the forest, an uneasy feeling began to creep into his mind; an uneasy feeling that tickled the stem of his brain and stood in the corner with its shoulders shrugged and hands outstretched in a gesture of proposal. The forest was uniform. Not completely; there was some differentiation, but Steve began to notice that nearly all the tree trunks around him were his height or about one and a half times that, and they all featured almost the exact same shape of canopy. His gaze drifted back to his feet, dismissing the thought as overly-scrutinizing. But instead, the uneasy feeling stayed, gesturing, remaining in his corner of Steve's mind, raising his eyebrows, and suggesting ominously. Averting his gaze only left it to fall on another oddity. Each tuft of grass he passed was either half his height or his height completely, without any in between. The dandelions were also almost half his height, matching the poppies that grew near them. 

It was hard to remember, but Steve could've sworn that dandelions and poppies didn't grow to half the height of an oak tree. 

While preoccupied with the thought of this, Steve barely noticed himself stopping his stroll and bending over to pluck a dandelion rooted at the base of a tree. It was very pretty. It also shrank in his hand. Still mulling over how tall the flowers are and attempting to do the mental math in his head to figure out how tall he was, he didn't notice the flower vanish from his palm. His brow furrowed and his mouth bent into a concerned frown to mirror the creases of his mind currently being flexed. His scalp began to itch mildly. Steve could not, for the life of him, seem to remember traditional measurements, in addition to countless other pieces of information; the holes in the fabric of his memory were beginning to seem altogether too frequent, as if a rabid moth had taken to consuming it's dark recesses as he slumbered on the beach. Hazy memories drifted by, their ill-defined ambiguous shape offering little help. Steve took a breath and glanced up to the sky, looking for some solace in its expanse. He only came to realize the clouds were mere abstractions of the 'real' clouds he only vaguely remembered. 

An arm shot out and struck a tree nearby in frustration. 

Slowly, he bent and collapsed until he was leaning against the tree, pressing the rest of his body to his newly-found botanical crutch. His eyes kept closed, for fear of having to confront more befuddling truths about the nature of his situation. His opposite hand, not preoccupied with being used as a pillow, began to meander across the ridges of the bark. It felt real: as real as he could remember. The brittle and tough exterior painted mountains and valleys behind his eyes as the tips of his fingers mapped the surface like explorers on a strange new planet. His explorers reached an unexpected canyon: a sizable crack had formed where he struck the trunk. His eyes jolted open.

"Surely," Steve said to convince himself. "Surely, this was here before."

His hand more consciously examined the crack in the bark, flaky grit sticking to his fingers as he investigated. "There's no way."

Unconvinced and bewildered, Steve took a step back, and hit the tree again. A fist pulled back to reveal the crack had widened.

He shouted at the tree like it had made snide, cutting remarks on the appearance of his mother. "I said there's no way!"

He glanced down to his hands, his open palms staring back at him. They didn't seem to hurt. Another foggy memory drifted to the forefront of his vision, one of uncontrollable and childish anger. He knew his fist was supposed to hurt when he hit something as solid as an oak.

"This can't be a dream; this- this is too real." He continued to titter to himself.

As if to prove a point in the debate he was engaged in, he looked for a flower or tuft of grass he could pluck from the ground– something small and manageable that he could judge the detail and intricacy of. While thinking about it, he recalled he picked a dandelion earlier. As if it was a trick in a magician's act, just thinking about the flower produced it from thin air into his hand. His open palms, cupping the pretty dandelion, now were the ones that stared while Steve stared back. A yelp escaped his dry throat.

Steve didn't notice that when he dropped the dandelion, it remained floating ethereally above the ground, spinning in a lazy figure eight pattern. He was too busy pummeling the tree.