The Box (part 10)
As Bailee lapped up water at the stream running between the trees, she felt more refreshed than she’d ever been. She licked her lips after lapping up half a gallon of water and shook her head.
She also noticed — one of her last human thoughts — that she felt more at peace than she ever had before. There was no stress weighing on her, no fear about the future or homework she had to get done. There was simply a nice patch of shade beside some delicious grass for her to lie there and munch on.
Her tail wagged to swat away some flies and she lumbered her hefty body over to a shady patch of grass and settled herself down, being careful not to crush her udders.
Bailee’s last thought before the human bits of her passed away once and for all to her bovine impulses took over was, What a nice, yellow day this is.
And she lay there beneath the tree enjoying the day and swatting flies away with her tail until she was taken back to Crumb Hill.
Officer Gurt came home in the late afternoon and was confused when his wife wasn’t there. He wandered around the house calling out her name, but there was no answer. He began to get concerned immediately. With all the disappearances recently, there was ample cause for alarm. His wife was never gone without leaving a note or letting him know where she’d be.
In a panic, he rushed out toward Crumb Hill Elementary. He hadn’t been there for hours, with all the paperwork he’d been doing at the station. His mind was swimming, out of fear and exhaustion, in thoughts of what could have happened to his wife. Did she get sucked into the black cube too?? Is she in The Dimension?? He imagined running up to the school and seeing his wife’s shoes lying next to the cube. He blamed himself for not being more cautious, for not watching after his own wife!
He half walked, half jogged up the road to the school, terrified of what he’d find. The fact that she could have been running a simple errand or doing anything else didn’t even cross his mind.
Little Timmy was being carried along by the tall woman as she sailed effortlessly through the forest in the strange, two-dimensional world made of squares. As they moved forward, he saw the world revealed to him in layers. As they moved toward a tree, it was like pieces of thin, translucent paper were removed and it became clearer as they got closer. Like a fog made of sheets.
“Where are you taking me?” asked Timmy for the sixth time.
The woman didn’t answer. She didn’t even seem to hear him or acknowledge his presence, but kept holding him in her arm. Her face looked straight ahead as she lumbered through the trees.
They finally came to a clearing in the trees and he saw a huge expanse, like the ground dropped off. And as they got closer, her saw that it did — they stood on a cliff over a massive chasm. But as he looked down into it, Timmy saw that he couldn’t even see the bottom, it simply descended into blackness, one layer at a time.
“What are we doing here?” asked Timmy, no longer expecting a response.
The woman slowed her pace and walked toward the edge of the cliff. The cubic rocks between them and the edge grew fewer and fewer, and soon Timmy was looking straight down into the blackness. His papery heartbeat picked up and he wondered what the woman was going to do. Was she going to jump with him? Was she going to throw him?
He began to get agitated and thrash his body around in her arm. “Put me down! Let me down!”
So she did.
And Little Timmy Shugger dropped onto the edge of the cliff, bounced off of his leg, and tumbled into the abyss.
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Day 68 of 100 Days of Blog
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