The creepy boy wasn’t making any sense to me, so I switched the subject,
“You’re bleeding a lot,”
“That I have noticed,”
That topic seemed to be a dead end already. I tried reverting back to my original tactic, “Why am I here?”
“We already covered that,” said the boy, idly picking at a scab on his arm.
“Well, how long am I going to be here?”
“Just a few minutes. Look, it’s getting warmer already.”
“What happens when I leave?”
The boy fixed me with a baleful stare,
“Well aren’t you full of questions . . . stop and smell the roses.”
“There aren’t any,” I pointed out.
“It’s an analogy oh simple minded one,” said the boy sarcastically, spreading both of his skinny, battered arms and circling, “rather like this.”
“Wait . . . you mean this place isn’t real?”
The boy’s eyes widened in mock surprise, “Why yes, that would seem to be what I said . . . did you figure it out all on your own?”
I was about to respond, when a sudden, sharp pain raced through my body, I looked down to see my feet on fire, burning up as the ground heated,
“My feet are burning,” I announced.
“The boy had started walking away, he paused,
“Stings doesn’t it?”
I returned to what I had been saying earlier,
“Wait! If this place isn’t real, why am I still here?”
“That would be because you aren’t,” replied the boy, or more specifically, the boy’s voice. The boy himself had disappeared, as had everything else I could see.
