Beach Day

12: Smokey The Bear Punches Tiff In The Eye

She's still there. The silhouette is gone; the stone is gone; the wicker cage surrounding her and the water is gone. All that is left is Tiff, in an endless, shifting black void, dripping wet and wiping black sludge from her mouth. Lungs cleared, she coughs into her fist once again; the thinned-out tar splatters and drips down her wrist. Wiping her face with the back of her other hand just smears it across her cheek.

The inside of her mind is what it always is: a black void filled with filing cabinets and strings stretching from point to point and idea to idea, overlapped and skipped over, pulled down by desperate and curious fingers. There are stars in that void, and countless swirling galaxies and nebulae, glowing gently and winking back at her.

The rift is still high above her head. She could find her way to it if she tried. The only issue is getting high enough. She assesses the situation enough to know that she could do that. She just has to act.

Tiff climbs up onto a filing cabinet, using it as a step to get to another. She steps over a string, careful not to pull it. It's easy. There's just about nothing to it.

She puts one hand against the rift. Though she fully intends to pull herself through to the other side like getting up onto a tree's strongest branch, she pauses.

Something catches her eye, though. Off in the darkness, near one of the filing cabinets, revealed by starlight and gentle glowing twine: the silhouette is back. Though Tiff doesn't traditionally scare easily, this thing is one of those that she doesn't want to meet. She doesn't want to know what it is or why it's watching her. She locks eyes with it by accident, and her throat shakes with a dying whimper.

All she knows is that it's watching her. It is reading every move she makes, reading every thought going through her head, reading everything about her. She is known, seen, and understood in a way she never wanted to be.

Tiff knows that she doesn't have anything in her pockets. It would take effort to summon a sword to her hand or to bring a version of her beloved ray gun to her. And it would know. It would know that's what she would want to do. Whatever it is, it knows everything.

But it probably can't predict Tiff taking off her shirt and throwing it at its face. The fabric hits the silhouette hard enough that it dissipates like smoke. Tiff doesn't stick around to see what happens next. Something about all of this is making her shake off the fatigue of what she did earlier in the day. She pulls herself through the rift and takes off running.

She steps out not into a white void, but into the lush fairy tale forest with which she is familiar. The sun shines on the land she liberated through trees older than time. New Greg retired here to live with talking animals and centaurs. The trees paint the ground with sunlight and reek of nostalgia. Tunnels of green lead off in some directions and end in others.

She knows what she has to do in order to get to where she intends to go— she has to run to some small break and make her way through— preferably before she runs into someone she knows. She doesn't want to explain to Honeysuckle the raccoon or Thomas Smokey the werebear that she's here because she's trying to get information by any means possible and actually isn't here to hang out via unconsciousness. She also doesn't want to explain why she isn't wearing a shirt.

But that's fine; she appears to be alone here, as she steps through the trees. This time, something didn't bring her here. She got herself in. She isn't totally incompetent or beholden to the whims of others. It was a choice she made, and she doesn't regret it. She takes a mental picture of the world around her and continues on.

Despite the pleasant temperature of the Dream World around her (an ideal seventy-seven degrees Fahrenheit for Tiff Sheridan, who famously has issues regulating her temperature), she shivers involuntarily. It's fine. There's no need to freak herself out about it or look at the beetles and their dangerous little horns scuttling in the darkness.