Tales of the Goblin – Boyishly Running
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“It’s time for boyishly running!” whispered the goblin that lives on my elbows.
I looked at the map; it had spiky lakes and a pretty flap. I loved it dearly. I loved Darling. I did not want to take the map from them. Dear, I especially, loved the lid.
I examined the idyllic map. I studied the ill-meaning sandwich, which ate like a nippy maggot.
I remembered gyrating calmly at the goblin’s will and knew I would comply again.
The drizzle made me tremble like a stripy sole. Suddenly…
Crash!
The map was destroyed.
The goblin that lives on my elbows ate darkly. It glared at me with its pointy eyes in rage. But then something strange happened: the goblin began to sing and dance, but only because it couldn’t eat the map anymore.
A month later, back home in London, I found a piece of paper on my doorstep. On it was only two words. They read simply, “Dear.”
⁂
Do you wish to return?
The lights are bright here now. When I step inside they shine across my face, shining down over me as if I’m on an alien planet. Or a human one. The whole room is full of light, and when the door closes behind you it seems like all the light can come through onto your skin so that you’re shivering even though there’s no air conditioning, and the floor is cold against your bare feet. There’s an awkward silence before anyone speaks.
You don’t know what to say to anyone, or how much to tell them without giving anything away. You’re aware that you look different, somehow. Not just from the other people here who have also changed since this morning.
From everyone else, really. Your hair has been cut, and a few strands of new growth peek out from the top where your head was shaved. But that’s not it. Even in the little mirror on the wall by the sink, you don’t see yourself clearly. You feel like everything is wrong with you. That’s probably why the first person you meet isn’t a nurse, but someone else you haven’t seen before.
“Hello,” says a woman with greyish blonde hair sitting at the table nearest to the front door. She doesn’t smile, she looks quite stern. Her accent sounds American. You wonder if she used to be famous. You weren’t told her name. “Are you ready?”
She points towards a doorway on the far side of the room and you follow her hand to go past the reception desk and into another office. The room is almost completely empty except for a chair and a desk, and there’s a glass window that lets you peer outside.
It’s covered with a frosted film. If you stare hard, the colors are visible for a moment before they disappear again. It takes you a while to work out what you’re looking at. This must be a garden. A large one, judging by the size of some of the trees.
There are flowers too, lots of them. Some of the plants grow straight up out of the soil, others have bulbs in pots, and there’s a tree that spreads its branches wide enough to shade the ground below. It’s hard to see around it, but there might even be a pond behind those broad leaves.
Most of the garden is hidden from view, but beyond the pond, there are paths winding between shrubs and hedges.
After taking a seat in the office, the woman asks what happened to you and you start talking.
“I went to the hospital…” you begin hesitantly, unsure whether to mention your parents yet. “…because of this fever, I’d had. I was hoping they could help, but they gave me some medicine instead. I took it, but then I started feeling dizzy. I collapsed and woke up here.”
As soon as you’ve finished speaking, the woman pulls a sheet of paper out of her drawer. It’s blank until she runs her finger down it. Then it fills with writing. The woman smiles and hands it to you. It reads:
You are suffering from a rare condition. You have no recollection of the last days before the accident. During that time, you underwent treatment involving surgery, which resulted in temporary memory loss. We cannot undo that. However we can offer you hope, and comfort in the knowledge that you will recover.
We believe the cure lies within the garden. By following the path you discovered you may find a way back to normal life.
We care for you as best we can.
Your friends and family await your return.
If you wish to leave, please speak to a member of staff.
The woman smiles at you and offers her hand once more. As you shake it, you notice that there’s something odd about her fingers; they seem longer than usual. Perhaps they are long. Or perhaps they’re missing the tips. Either way, you think they’re weird.
But when you get back to the ward you realize that everyone else has their own strange features: small noses or green eyes. Everyone else has a different set of fingerprints. No one looks alike. And because you can’t remember much of what happened, none of it feels real anymore. Everything is still very confusing. You don’t know where you come from. You don’t know where you belong.
At least they let you bring your bag with you. In it are a spare pair of clothes, some toiletries, and a book you borrowed from school earlier. You also left a letter for your parents and siblings. You didn’t want them worrying and staying late to wait for you when you eventually got home, but now you need to write another message, although it’s not easy to explain what’s happened.
So you’ll probably send one to the news channels as well. Maybe you should try to contact your grandparents too. They would worry if they heard nothing from you.
Then you take out the note that Doctor Greene gave you after he operated on you. It contains instructions about sleeping and eating patterns and medical advice. All very important, but at the moment you just can’t concentrate on anything. Not even reading. You feel tired all the time.
Maybe you shouldn’t have stayed up so late working on your science project. After studying for hours, you were finally able to finish it: you’d designed a robot car made from scrap materials, and programmed it to do tricks like an acrobat. If only you had been able to test it properly, maybe you could have brought it along to show to all your new friends.
What if you never got the chance to tell them how amazing it was?
Another day passes without you having the energy to talk to anyone. When you eat lunch alone in your room you spend most of the time staring out of the window, thinking about your parents and siblings and wondering what they’ll be doing now that you haven’t come home. There’s a knock at the door. You look up and then let your friend in.
“Hey!” She smiles at you. “Didn’t think I’d ever see you again.”
“Yeah, sorry,” you reply. “I’m really… I mean, I missed you.”
“Me too! Thanks for leaving me a note. It helped me a lot. I guess I thought you weren’t going to make it, or… something.”
“Well, I did get pretty sick,” you say. “But apparently it wasn’t as bad as it looked…”
“I can see that.”
You laugh. “Anyway, I was wondering if you wanted to go outside together?”
She nods. “Sure.”
Together you walk through the garden and stop beneath a large oak tree. Leaves rustle overhead as you sit cross-legged on the grass. It seems strange, sitting next to someone you met less than a week ago. Someone who you thought was dead. But it doesn’t feel like that right now. You’ve always felt connected to her somehow, even though you barely knew each other before now.
Maybe it’s because she reminds you of yourself. Both of you are the youngest children in your families, girls. You both have dark brown hair and blue eyes, and you’re both smart. You’ve done well at school, and your parents were proud.
Even though you studied hard and worked hard, you found it hard sometimes. Sometimes you questioned why it mattered whether you won an award or achieved high marks, or whether you wanted to go to university or work at the local factory. Then you asked yourself what would happen if you didn’t get to choose. Would everything become routine? Would you lose yourself?
Suddenly you’re struck by the feeling that the world has changed forever. Nothing is quite ordinary anymore. You wonder if this is how it will feel until the end comes. Your mind drifts back to the days when you sat around the kitchen table with your parents and older brother, drinking coffee and discussing dinner plans.
Now you can’t help thinking about the food that went into making it, and the people who grew it and harvested it. The same goes for the people who brought it to market, cooked it up, and served it to others.
How many meals did they make in a year? And what does a lifetime of cooking consist of? Thinking like this makes you realize there are countless thousands of things happening every second, on Earth and beyond. Thousands upon thousands of lives lived, moments shared and memories created.
For all intents and purposes, none of these things will end soon. Perhaps your life might even continue for another ten years, or fifty. Whatever happens, it isn’t likely to be as significant as what’s already happened.
“So what do you think?” asks your friend.
You turn towards her. Her head is tilted slightly, and she’s gazing at you with a serious expression. “What do I think? About what?”
“About everything.”
You pause. “It feels surreal,” you say. “Everything we know – all the little everyday details that occupy our thoughts. I’m surprised I’m not happier about it.”
“That sounds great,” says your friend. “And it can be difficult at first. It takes a while to adjust, but you’ll find you enjoy it once you start seeing it all as part of your past. Past events. Like a story. A few years ago you were sitting around the table with your family, and you’ll remember those good times fondly for the rest of your life.
But what about the stuff that happened five seconds ago? No one remembers that. Not even your parents – they probably don’t even notice it. We were born into a world of infinite possibilities, and yet it’s easy to forget that fact.”
Your friend looks down. “I hope it doesn’t take long for my mum and dad to get used to reality here.”
You smile. “I bet they’d love living in a place where nobody gets hungry and cold.”
“And no wars,” your friend says. “Imagine that.”
You nod. You can picture the future so easily now. People play sports, study history and science, get married, and have kids. You imagine visiting your grandparents on their farm in Tennessee, walking along the shoreline and camping beneath the stars, and taking a drive through the mountains with friends.
Life wouldn’t have been any different from this in the real world, except that everyone would live much longer and experience far more of it.
The days between birth and death might be shorter, but you’d spend them doing exactly what you want. Wouldn’t that feel good? It would certainly beat sitting at home eating dinner and watching TV with your family.
You look up at the sky. The clouds seem brighter than normal; perhaps you’re imagining things. But the whole day seems to carry a sense of wonderment. As you gaze up at the sun shining bright above, you’re reminded of your conversation with Professor Forth.
He said that something had happened to change the fabric of reality on Earth. Somehow the laws that governed the world were altered, meaning that time and space could be bent or broken to create new realities.
You close your eyes and take a deep breath. It feels like the air has a crispness to it, similar to autumn. Suddenly you realize how different things are. You decide to ask your friend what else she thinks about the future.
“Tell me,” you say. “There must be plenty of stuff you’d like to see happen.”
She hesitates for a moment before replying. “Yes,” she eventually agrees. “I guess I haven’t thought too much about what I’d really like in the future. All I’ve ever cared about was right here and now. I didn’t care where I ended up, and I never imagined anything greater. Like you, I’ve only ever experienced life as we knew it.
And although the change hasn’t completely taken effect, I can now appreciate everything else going on. If we get caught up in the moment, it’s hard not to see it all as an achievement in itself. What other people believed possible – space travel, quantum computing, artificial intelligence – I always dismissed them as impossible fantasies. Now I see the possibility is there.”
You lean forward. “Have you seen it yourself, though? Do you believe any of this stuff?”
“Well…” Your friend smiles. “If I hadn’t come here myself… I mean, if it wasn’t for my friend who brought me here, I wouldn’t know how to respond to such claims. But you have to admit, the idea makes sense. A lot of scientists have already started looking into these concepts. There’s a team researching alternative universes. They want to build a gateway between worlds, just like Professor Forth spoke about earlier today.
When they succeed, the barriers will come down and we’ll all be able to explore each other’s realities together.” She pauses. “Maybe your parents and the others aren’t convinced, but they should be open-minded enough to listen to what the scientists say. This is all very exciting.”
“Yeah,” you reply. “I suppose it is. So what else have you got planned for tomorrow?”
Her face lights up. “Professor Forth invited us all out to visit his laboratory. I’m sure he’s working on some incredible breakthroughs. I’m pretty excited about seeing it for myself. Hopefully, I’ll gain a better understanding of the future.”
You stare at your friend, impressed by her enthusiasm. “Sounds fun,” you say. “But I agree with you. It’s only when we stop and reflect on things that we begin to see how beautiful they truly are.”