Antumbra - A Lost Cause

Primary - Chapter Fifty Eight

"You're digging too close to my house!" Louise complained, pointing to where Hannah had dug out. There was a crack in the newly formed wall that revealed light through the sandy exterior, light that came from Louise' kitchen.

"No!" Hannah denied, "I said this was going to be the bedroom, you dug too close to me!" Louise pouted and began packing sand back inside her house, which leaked into Hannah's, forcing her to dig it out again. Eventually the two managed to reach a compromise, and Hannah was free to put her doll in their new sandy home, and she got to work shoveling out the next extension.

"Are you going to have a pool?" Louise asked as Hannah dug her trench.

"Yeah!" She replied excitedly.

"Can I help?" Louise asked, "I can go get the water."

"Sure," Hannah smiled, and the two continued to dig until the nice, square trench reached the size and depth of a shoe box. Louise stood up, brushing sand off of her pants, and skipped out of the sandbox, pausing only to come back and grab the bucket. She went over to the water fountain and, using the park bench to get some reach, filled the bucket to the rim. As Hannah finished the last minute adjustments, she returned, and carefully filled the pool. The water mixed with the sand into a murky, dirty soup, but to them it was a luxurious in-ground pool their dolls could use to beat the summer heat.

"Are you guys making houses?" A boy's voice came from behind them. Tommy, covered head to toe in grime and grass stains, rubbed his nose with his normal arm. "Can I make one, too?"

"You always make dumb stuff," Louise said bluntly, "you can only make one here if you make a normal house."

"No army bases," Hannah joined in.

"Okay!" Tommy said, sitting down cross-legged between them. He got to work scooping and shaping his own property, "I don't have a doll, so I'm gonna make my guy out of rocks, but he's a normal guy."

"He can be called Rocky," Hannah joked, and they all giggled, "he can be our neighbour!"

"He's gonna have a dog," Tommy said, "who's also a rock." That seemed good enough for Hannah, and so the three worked on expanding their modest community. Hannah began to turn her house into a homestead based on the one she saw in a book they used to read at school. In the book it had pigs and cows, and a big tractor, but she didn't have those. Instead she took a page from Tommy's book and used rocks to represent the cattle, as well as the wheels of a tractor made of sand.

"How come you're not with Stevie?" Louise asked Tommy.

"He doesn't come out anymore," Tommy said, not looking up, "because his house is far, in the outskirts."

"Nobody lives in the outskirts," Hannah corrected him, "just near it, my Gramma says so."

"Well he doesn't come out," Tommy said, indignant, "his parents don't let him because of all the humans."

"Or the humans got him," Louise muttered, "Danny from Ms. Yelchin's said humans got Trevor, and that's why nobody sees him anymore."

"I saw Trevor a few days ago," Hannah pointed out, "he's not dead!"

"Or you saw his ghost," Tommy said, "they put a ghost show on TV, on the fuzzy channels, and they had a ghost's voice on it."

"You don't think he got squished by the Umbra?" Louise asked. Hannah hadn't considered that despite recent circumstances. Umbras happened a lot recently, to the point where Travis didn't want Hannah going outside, but she got so bored at home watching the same TV show episodes and playing with the same few toys. Summer break had just started and she barely saw any of her friends, so she screamed as loud as she could until he said yes, and now she was allowed to go to the park.