a group of children were fleeing a kindly man. though he was kind and was not dangerous, the children knew he would turn them over to people who would harm them. and so they ran.
they were in a different dimension, a fever dream of bright colors and impossible architecture and church roofs that arched high above candy floss clouds and ikea chairs arranged in neat domino rows, where for the most part the locals were kind and alerted the children when the man grew close, even if some of them had no eyes.
the man trapped the children in a church, but they tricked him and escaped. the man cornered one child with mousy hair, but she hit him with a chair and escaped. at the start there were ten of them, girls and boys, all who thought only to flee. maybe they thought of returning to our dimension, to their homes. maybe they remembered that amongst us they were still different, and would only find more people like the man. or maybe they thought only of each other.
the sky still bright blue, the shades neon pink and the shadows deep indigo, the stars still blinked from their depths like eyes. the children were never uncomfortable; they flitted like moths from towns to cities, from lonesome streets lined only with unsold couches and stone to bustling canal-cut cities where beige and white marble columns rose like fingers towards the sky. there they had settled, in the bones of an old church. at least before one of the rambunctious locals had swaggered by carrying gossip of another human man. that was when the man trapped them, and that was when they outsmarted him and escaped.
but the children’s numbers dwindled, and no one knew where the ones the man got went. they seemed only to melt into the saccharine backgrounds as the man followed slowly, steady and implacable. there were ten of us, the child with the mousy hair told herself. but for all that she tried she could not remember their faces.
ten of us, ten of us, yet before she knew it there were only three. herself, another girl, and a boy. she was now the oldest and now they looked to her for guidance. she was now the oldest and now she didn’t know what to do but run.
and then she found the other one, the other child, the friend she remembered back when the sun still rose and set and things were still peaceful. another girl, with hair long and black and glossy. another girl, who promised a solution.
they wandered in the shadow of a giant infant’s playroom, lurking in the voids between the toes of stuffed animals and the hollows between cradles and grounds. or was it the room of a pixie? beds were smaller than the children’s feet, closet doors came up to their chests, rattles and toy rabbits towered over their heads. the black-haired girl was to hide in a closet as the man approached. he would look left and right and behind the rows and rows of clothing, but he would not look up. he would not see the black-haired girl and the hammer she swung at his head.
except that hammer never swung and that black-haired girl never freed them, because she was long tired of this nightmare dimension where up was down and left was right and nowhere was home, because she was tired of running from hallucination to hallucination and being forced to grow up, because she wanted to be a child again, and then she was in his arms, the man’s arms, and he was telling her that everything would be alright, that it was all fine now, and then the child with the mousy hair was running and running under rattles and over blankets and through doorway after doorway, not stopping to look back even as the other girl and the boy were taken, not even as the ones who had followed her and believed in her and trusted her vanished behind her fleeing shadow one by one. with her heart in her throat she threw herself into the twilit gloom beneath a human-sized bed, and then footsteps were approaching and her heart was screaming her position under the bed and she could see the man’s harsh shadow across the pale green ground, frozen as he paused to think and smile, and there was a silence, a silence, a silence, a silence.
