Adrift In A Moment

This week brings another piece of the story I've been following these past couple weeks, dear reader. I'm not sure yet what to call the whole story yet.

Perhaps that means, like Ronnie, I'm...

Adrift In A Moment - a story by M. K. Dreysen

Ronnie floated; the ground had forgotten her. She'd been here so long, she had forgotten what the feel of dirt underfoot meant. Had the ground been here that much longer then?

The world bent differently, too. That meant something, Ronnie felt. But what?

She'd forgotten that part. If she'd ever known it. Kind of like her name.

He... yeah, he hadn't really called her Ronnie, had he? He... because he couldn't say her name. Not fully. Not until he'd... turned four? Vronnie? Was that it? Was that her name?

No. But that's as far as Ronnie could bring the sound forward. Here where the sky didn't so much hold as it accepted. She had nowhere else to go, right? And the curve of sky defined something, didn't it? A limit, a boundary, but Ronnie believed that the boundary was what kept her here, not the sky itself.

Here. In between. She'd tried, she thought she had, to push against memory. Ronnie Vronnie something... and that's when the ground suddenly remembered her.

Not that the sky rejected, no, she fell and accelerated (such a strange word did it mean force or something else here where the sky didn't fold properly and the ground only turned left to right...) downward.

And so Ronnie stopped pushing against memory. The ground didn't let go of her, not right away. It held her until the smell of it, dirt and dirt and pain coming. She ignored the smell teasing at memory, she closed her eyes against the motion and the wall coming up at her face.

Until the ground forgot her again. When she had tried this push against her boundaries, the ones that defined her world, and paid in panic for doing it, Ronnie held her eyes closed until she'd stopped and drifted and came still again. Back where she'd started, somewhere between a not-quite right ground and a sky that bent the wrong way 'round and a boundary made of.

Made of something. It felt wrong, but Ronnie left that feeling aside. Feeling meant remembering if she let it. No.

Ronnie held onto the fact that the boundary that held the sky, that bent and warped, that boundary was built of something.

And then, one day when she'd forgotten everything else but that, Ronnie felt herself drift upward. Toward the boundary. The one that held her here.

The boundary that, being built of something, could be broken.