one

Spenser Kane wakes up in the middle of a patch of green, a forest almost like the one back home. The one that the highway cut through, where he always pretended that he knew every path through and out of it. The year after he moved into the city he tried to camp out there for himself. Try to pretend that he could survive on his own. He broke his leg the first night.

He immediately fell back asleep. Whatever this world was could wait another hour or so.

—

Waking up again, he takes inventory. It’s particularly easy, when the only thing he was wearing was the Red Sox tee he wore to bed. The gun lay at his feet. A nearly full clip. He couldn’t look at it for long, simply picking it up and stuffing it into his boxers.

It was his now. No one else was going to have it but him.

Aside from that, nothing else made the trip. Or if they did, the wax woman took it from him. Though she didn’t seem the taking type, if anything. Honestly whatever she wanted, it had to be some sadism thing, bringing him here and using him as some sort of…toy. An experiment. A rat in a cage with…

Spenser waits, reaching for his chest. There was the brooch, still almost welded to his chest, still pulsing to the beat of his heart. Something inside of him wondered if it was gonna be stuck like this forever. A bigger part wondered what this thing was doing to him, why it’s decided he was the person it decided to bring to…whatever this is.

Mostly he thinks that he should’ve brought it to a pawn shop the second he found it back home. Maybe a museum would’ve known what to do with it. Maybe he could make a good buck once he got the hell out of here.

Wherever here was.

Stepping on the ground, it didn’t feel like any dirt that he knew of. If anything, it was more like a rock. Just a solid hunk of rock with moss growing on its top. The trees had that shimmer too - he saw the trunks grow out from the ground like tumors, but he couldn’t see the treetops. However tall they were, it didn’t matter, all that mattered was that Spenser had to go. Find something. Find food, some animal, something that could help him…

Church bells began to ring in the distance. At least he thinks they’re church bells. This was another world, anything could’ve happened in here, the bells could be from a fast food place, or something.

Did they have fast food in fantasy worlds? How could he even tell if this was a fantasy world?

It didn’t matter. All that mattered was that he had to keep on moving.

—

At the very least there was a town. Small. Quaint. Not a single building higher than a story, save for the church. Like a suburb, if all the houses in the suburbs were carved into the grass-tree-moss stuff. And was empty. And smelled almost too much like compost.

So not much like the suburbs at all. A part of Spenser almost felt relieved. At least it wouldn’t be boring.

That wasn’t the point - wherever the people who lived here were, they probably wouldn’t take kindly to a weird lanky twenty something in his goddamned boxers, no amount of being in another world is going to change the fact that no one wants to see any of that. Whatever path to survival he had to take, he had to break and enter.

Okay. He could do that. He doesn’t need much to live anyways, he could just nick a few bits of food from their storage and crash in an attic. No one would notice. He’s not a noticeable person, he has that in the bag.

There’s a window left open in the first house he found. Which was convenient for him - he couldn’t remember the last time he went to the gym. Probably when he was living on his own.

A lump forms in his throat. He doesn’t wait much longer to get into the window. He can keep moving, he probably needs to eat or something. If he can get like an apple, or some toast…do toasters exist in this world? He should probably pick up the first thing he sees before he starts going into a mental loop again.

He was starving. He didn’t want to feel like this anymore.

They still had bananas here. At least they had similar food here. They could probably have cows somewhere in here, and cows meant steak, or burgers, or something. Something better than this, something he’d have to figure out how to get once he has something in his system.

He’s supposed to become a king, like this. He takes a bite from the banana. It’s a little overripe.

—

The attic had a shrine. He thought. He had an ex who was Catholic once, he’s seen saint shrines before. If he remembered it right, she worshiped an auxiliary god, that’s probably what saints were called, and that’s probably what this shrine was worshiping. The only wrench in that theory was that most saints had human forms. Whatever this world was, it worships shapes. Frankly, if there was any way to worship a god, Spenser would prefer to worship shapes. Anything more human than that and anyone could believe He’s fallible.

The shrine was made of wax. Nothing looked like the woman. He didn’t know if that was a relief or not.

What he did know is that he had to go to bed, again. It’s probably been a few hours. Maybe it was just one. It didn’t matter if he didn’t do anything but trudge himself across a few miles and eat a banana. It wasn’t like he could do much else. It wasn’t like he was worth much else at all.

Maybe he could just…wait this all out. Wait for the right answer to fall into his lap. Wait for something to go his way, for once.

The gun slipped out of his boxers, thudding onto the ground. And Spenser could only spend his last moments awake staring at it. Contemplating.

He never had the guts to do anything past surviving, you know.