I think love might be a river

  Gradie looked up and saw the sky above the clubhouse dripping with stars. Night had e out of nowhere sometime during the hazy peak of his drunkenness. He wasn’t sure when he’d passed out, but he knew lucidly that he was no longer awake.

  “ kid. Time to go back,” Philip said.

  Gradie looked over and saw them all standing there. They were not of this earth.

  Their faces were lit by a hidden light, like an old silent film, and they floated like gravity had taken a nap. Philip had on a bck metallic overcoat over a dull silver jumpsuit. Lindsey looked like an elven ranger, all wool aher. The pinstripes on Luke’s three-piece suit panned and jittered like TV static. EP wore a short tunic with bck d silver ats, pulled tight with a mail belt. Sam was dressed as a sci-fi fighter pilot. Bck vinyl jump suit and mirror visored helmet. Gradie looked down at himself.

  Old t-shirt and sweats.

  “Shit, let me ge.”

  “What for?” said EP. She walked to the edge of the pool and a strange shimmering light rolled across it. When he was able to tear his eyes away from her, he looked down at his clothes and willed them to ge.

  The cloth rippled and dissolved, giving way to a bck silk outfit plete with boots and gloves. He stood up and walked toward the pool. Philip shook his head at him.

  “Too dark. Rookie mistake. I barely see you. Girls in the Allclub will ignore you even more than usual.”

  Gradie looked at his clothes again, dark as a starless night sky, and got an idea. He reached out to the impossibly bright and colorful stars and smeared some onto his hand. He ran his hand through his hair, dabbed some of the glittery brillian his coat buttons and shirt, then cpped his hands together ahe rest fall to the ground.

  “Better?” he said. Philip rolled his eyes.

  “We’re not really going clubbing. There’s work at the office.”

  Gradie’s stomach rolled, until the sparkling door-covered office Michael had taken him to repced the other one, with quality reports and staff meetings, in his memory.

  “Do you remember the hallways after the gas station, Gradie?” said Michael. Gradie hadn’t even noticed him. He looked like he had stepped out of a space opera. Polished bck armor ptes rey cloth, and a dark blue cloak draped across his shoulders.

  “Yeah,” Gradie said. “The ohat looked like a big hotel.”

  “That was my own perso route, you could say. The Hardworlds and the Otherworld have their own kind of gravity, and the Spirit needs help reag escape velocity. The hallways act as a mental buffer, allowing you to ceptualize leaving the Hardworlds.”

  There was a loud spsh and Gradie turned in time to see the top of Philip’s Head disappearih the prismatic shimmering surface of the pool. Sam onballed right behind him.

  “Wait, I need one of you to guide him out,” Michael said.

  No one volunteered. Gradie felt like a little brging along.

  “I’ll do it,” EP said without looking at him.

  “Good. Meet me at the Office.” Michael and the others jumped into the pool until it was just the two of them standing at the edge of the glowing water. The way the oved reminded Gradie of what he saw after pushing on his eyelids with the palm of his hand; formless ahereal, but able to bee identifiable shapes if he focused on one spot long enough.

  EP grabbed his hand.

  “Ready?”

  “Yeah. What do I o do?”

  “Just hold on and don’t fight it.”

  “Alright.” Gradie let the smile slip into his void EP sighed.

  “Three, two, one.”

  She pulled him by the hand and they stepped off the edge. The glowing surface rose up to meet them, and for a moment was the world, then shined above him in the light of an e sun. The water was warm, like a tropical o (so he imagined, having never been in one) and a strong current pushed them along. EP let go of his hand and shot up past him towards the surface, where a sb of shadow moved across the light. He got the briefest glimpse of her legs shining under her billowing skirt before she disappeared above the water.

  He kicked after her and popped up in the middle of a wide river rushing under an e sky, streaked by threads of pink and purple neon clouds. Dense jungle foliage draped over the far banks, and EP kneeled in a dark wooden oe.

  “Get on.”

  He struggled to pull himself up as the water moved him sideways. EP watched him with sapphire eyes, and he remembered this was the Otherworld. He pulled himself up and onto the boat in a gentle floating arc.

  “Look behind you.” He did, and saw the river stretg back for half a mile before snaking behind the trees. He tried to see whatever it was he was supposed to be looking at, but there was only jungle, river, and sky.

  “What is it?”

  “Nothing. You just o show your mind that you’re actually somewhere else.”

  “What?”

  “You have to put mental distaween yourself and where we were before, so your Spirit break free of the Dreamworlds ao the Otherworld.”

  “Is that what I did with the hallways?”

  “Yes, but that was Michael’s Dreamworld. I prefer a river. The momentum helps with the transition.”

  Gradie watched the jungle fly by a his hand down into the foaming refracted starfield below the boat. While the hallways had felt like Michael, a voluted ndscape with a childlike mischievous energy, this world all the way through. A focused river of violent white water, snaking around where it had to and rushing straight where it could. Dark unknowableness pressing in at the edges, proteg it. The current, an unstated desire propelling it along. The e sunlit air, a warmth just out of reach. It felt like loneliness.

  EP’s frown and tone reminded him he had been staring.

  “See that waterfall ahead of us?”

  About a quarter-mile downstream, the nd dropped away and gave a heart-quiing view of the horizon.

  “Yeah.”

  “Falling also helps with the journey. We’ll drop through the mist and e out over the office.” She held out her hand without looking at him, aook it. It was cool and soft, glowing like moonlight against his suntanned hand.

  A wind came and blew her long, white-blonde hair straight back, exposing the gentle profile of her fad the soft skin of her ned chest. She frow him, and he realized he had summohe wind with a thought.

  “Here it es!” He braced himself for a jump and looked ahead at the waterfall, still twenty yards away.

  “If you say so,” EP said. The boat rocketed forward like a bass boat and skipped across the water.

  “Shit!” Gradie fell ba the hull. EP kept hold of his hand, and looked down with a smug smile as he rolled to his feet. It was too much for him.

  She was standing on the boat like a surfer, her curves silhouetted by the golden su. Wind whipped her e-tinted blonde hair into a frenzy around her catlike smirking face. Her soft little hand held his with impossible strength. Overe by the electrisation squeezing his chest, he smiled at her and saw hers falter.

  As the boat sailed out into the air, he pulled her by the hand and caught her in his arms. Gravity returned with a vengeance, and they dropped down towards the white mist headfirst. He held her just for a moment, as the cold water spraying them violently, atuating the warmth of their bodies, before letting her push him away.

  Her eyes fshed a warning as she disappeared in the mist. He rolled over and over in the endless glowing grey and lost all sense of dire. Suddenly, the sensation of falli him, and he was floating in a familiar bck void.

  The glowing crest of the Allworld slid into view, but EP was o be seen.

  I took the title of this episode from a song by Keldian, called Dreamcatcher. If you had to leave this world, what would your path look like? ime, Gradie takes arip across the Allworld, but things have ged. episode: Masquerade.