Drink Me

         The hallway was built of gray stone and it was narrow, with a cathedral ceiling. Every fifteen feet or so, wooden beams supported lofty Gothic  arches that appeared to be made of wicker. Dim light filtered through slits in the stonework like those used by medieval archers in castles, each slit exactly in between two beams. The light gave the impression of twilight, and in it, the entire corridor had the faintest suggestion of purple.

         Della picked herself up off of a dirt floor littered with aging leaves as far as she could see. She puzzled for a minute over her clothes, trying to figure out where she acquired them and failing. The gown was white, silk, with a hemline that reached to her shins and sleeves to her elbows. Someone tied a deep shamrock green sash around her waist with a bow in the small of her back. Her hair was tied back away from her face, and there were white dress shoes on her feet.

         The hallway stretched on for an eternity before her. She turned to look behind her and found only a stone wall. She turned and stared down the passageway until she made out a light at the end. She was apprehensive to follow an unfamiliar corridor to a light at the end. The idea filled her head with innumerable voices and images of people and their notions of death, but with little option to do otherwise, she took a deep breath and started walking.

         She wasn’t sure how long she walked. She didn’t feel like she’d been walking long, but when she turned to look behind her, the other end of the corridor was too far away to see. After she’d walked a fair distance, Della began to pass a square, wooden window for every archer’s slit. The windows were adorned with identical, gray, tie-back curtains. The first window looked out over a perfect little farmyard on a country road, with a small oak tree in the front and a peach pie cooling on the sill. The second window looked out at a tidy housing development, with a hardy green oak tree beside the street and an apple pie cooling on the sill. The third window looked out at a slum of indentical decaying houses, with a stump near the road and a pecan pie cooling on the sill. In all three of these places, the light was a dusky lavender, similar to the light in the rest of the hallway. She was relieved to find another farmyard in the next window, but when she found a housing development outside of the fifth window, she realized that she was seeing the same places. Indeed, the windows thereafter were identical to the first three, right down to the pies, and they continued on in perfect order, from farm to suburb to ghetto, peach to apple to pecan, further and further down the hallway in apparent perpetuity, only to stop abruptly after one last apple pie window.

         Della turned by the final window to look back. She couldn’t see the beginning of the hallway where she started. The length of purple stone faded into darkness. Ahead, the light beckoned from far away. At this distance (though she had no way of knowing what that was), she could see the light had a bluish edge to it, and it flickered constantly, just a bit. Seeing the distance, she knew there was absolutely no way she could reach the end of the corridor anytime soon.

         Della glanced again at the apple pie on the window. It was steaming a little bit, and the aroma wafted in when a breeze blew outside. It made her mouth water. She hadn’t had a decent apple pie since her grandmother died seven years earlier. She’d decided to reach in with her fingers and take a bite when she saw Billy powerwalking down tHe street muttering to himself. He was a bit skinny, and tan from doing work outside, with brown hair and soft blue eyes. Della met Billy at an arcade, after eyeing his rear in one of many pairs of Wranglers that he frequently wore. On this day, though, he wore a pair of black slacks, with black dress shoes and a white button-up shirt.

         “What the—Billy!” she called. He didn’t seem to hear her.

         “Billy, I’m over here!”

         But he continued onward, and by now all she could see was his gorgeous back side receding into the distance. She called after him, growing louder and more desperate, and when she put her hands onto the window sill to climb up, she put her left hand in the very middle of the apple pie. Warm goo came up to her wrist. She didn’t notice immediately. She tried to climb out of the window, into the street, but the window was just barely too small.

         Billy turned a corner and was gone. Della sighed. “Well, jeez.”

         She looked down at her left hand. “Ah, JEEZ!”

         By now, the pie innards had started to dry a bit, so her hand was getting more and more stiff. Della bent her fingers in a loose fist and sucked the juice off of a knuckle. The pie was sublime. Flavors danced a symphony on her tongue. It was so tantalizing that she lapped the rest of it off of her hand. When her hand was as clean as she figured it would ever be, she felt her stomach turn. It was unlike any sensation she’d ever felt before. She felt that something was happening, but she wasn’t sure what.

         The window shimmered and began to stretch upward. Della gasped. She felt her heartbeat pick up. The ceiling of the corridor seemed to stretch with it. Della climbed up onto the sill while she could. She watched the dirt floor pull further and further back, until it was an impossible distance below her. The sill wasn’t any thicker, but its other dimensions had pulled with the corridor like taffy until they were ridiculously large. Della tried to look up at the ceiling. She couldn’t make the arches out anymore, they were so high, and she grew dizzy trying to look for them. She wobbled and fell backward.

         Della screamed. Air roared in her ears. Below, the ground came into detail bit by bit, and when she could count the blades of grass, she sucked in a sharp breath for a last prayer.

         She hit the grass. Her head hurt a bit, but she was otherwise fine. In fact, she felt like she’d only fallen a few feet. She looked up at the window, and found it a mere four feet above her. The pie was upside down on the ground beside her. Inside, she saw a neat little kitchen with dishes in water in the sink.

         “Well, that was inconvinient.”