THE ART OF BURNING

VI: 'SUP, HETEROS?

[ ━━ ❝ ✧˚⋆｡☾✩˚⋆｡࿐❞ ━━ ]
CAIN

            INTERDIMENSIONAL TRAVEL IS a bit like shitting your pants. You don't even realize that it happened until its too late, and when you do, it's just an embarrassment for everyone.

            Picture this: one second you're standing in your normal woods in your normal town with your normal friends. The next second, you push yourself through a thin, flexible barrier (kind of like those beaded curtains potheads and psychics use for doors) and, suddenly, you find yourself in a completely different world. It was that quick and that sudden. Just thinking about it makes me sick with vertigo.

            But it's not that it's noticeably a different world. It's practically the same place that I left. A little patch of woods in the White Mountains, the northern tip of Appalacia, just outside of Warwick, New Hampshire. There are snow-capped mountains the sizes of giants and thick woods just beginning to bud with spring. The rift, a couple feet away from me, is in the same place here as it was back home. But this isn't the Warwick I left behind. There's no dramatic changes, but everything's just off enough that I can tell something's wrong.

            We'd entered the woods in the dark, but here the sky burns with daylight. The air's cool and heavy with the scent of pine needles and fresh water. On one side of me looms a gray steel fence as tall as an old sugar maple. On the other side of me, maybe fifty feet away, is a smaller fence of barbed wire.

            I feel doubts beginning to eat away at my courage—what if my friends don't end up in the same place as me? What if Rachel isn't in this dimension, or, even worse, what if she's dead like everyone thinks she is? What if I never find her again? What if the rift closes up while we're in here, and we get ourselves stuck in this place for good?

            "Daddy Trump, are you happy?" I ask the wall.

            The rift suddenly ripples like lightning in water, and where there was nothing, now there's a boy. A very adorable, very confused boy: Atlas. It was that sudden—nothing one second, something the next. I want to hug him, I'm so happy he made it here.

            He tilts his head back like he's trying to soak up all of the sunlight he can, slowly spinning around to take this strange world in.

            "Weird," I ask, "isn't it?"

            "Is that Trump's wall?" he asks, nodding towards it with his chin.