Sonder

Jessica sat with her back against a tree that rose out of the ground like a mossy, ashen monument. Dark makeup was streaked below her stormy blue-gray eyes, smeared on the back of the hand that had wiped it from her face. Her nails were a wreck, her hair a mess, and her outfit had been dirtied beyond salvation. She stared at the phone held out in front of her, squinting in order to read the blue and gray streaks of text messages across the screen. Wiping another absent sniffle away, she weakly typed another message before sending it out into the void.

[Fri, Jul 6 at 5:58 PM]

“I’m scared I’ll forget the sound of my own voice.”

Her slouched posture then snapped up straight, remembering there were more uses to her phone than simply texting, in spite of her devotedness to it. She swiped up, trailing a small line of dirt behind that was promptly wiped away with a jacket sleeve. The top read 32% battery. The photos app sprang to life with a touch.

Admittedly, there weren’t many ‘people’ photos besides an abundance of ones she’d taken of herself, but as the cache of fond memories flew past, a video caught her eye. The date read April 16th. Her birthday from a couple months ago, with a little heart in the tile’s corner marking its importance. It disappeared beneath her finger as she pressed down with bated breath. And then there they were, just as she remembered them. Celebrating the day just as she remembered they had, having bought a box of sprinkled donuts and a glittery pink ‘15’ candle at the nearby grocery chain before enjoying them at the park around the corner. Rows of smiling, happy faces sat around a patterned picnic table prepared to sing the sacred birthday song. Becky, Kelsei, Joan, Stella, Maddie; each individual begging to be remembered this way. Jessica stared through blurry eyes as she made them that promise. A part of her hoping that, wherever they were, they had each done the same.

She closed her eyes as she hit play, ready to be serenaded by the sweet, familiar voices of those closest to her whose presence had been deeply missed.

…

Of course. Of fucking course this would happen—ugh! Jessica turned the volume up all the way to a hundred. She pressed its speaker directly to her ear. The small device vibrated with the vigor of her friend’s mismatched singing and yet remained helplessly inaudible.

Maybe it was the hunger, the broken promise of hope, the adrenaline that never died down or the frustration always building up. Everything exploded out of her all at once in a frustrated, spit-flinging shriek, kicking her tennis shoes and pounding fists into the dirt with a desire to rip apart the world for how it had wronged her. To teach it to suffer as she had been, alone, for six agonizing days. Of course, none of it made a sound. The earth remained where it was, unimpressed. Jessica’s frenzy of movement collapsed into a low slump, breathing heavy through her chest as she tried to collect her thoughts. What now? The question hung utterly useless in the air, knowing there really wasn’t much she could do about the situation. So, naturally, she chose to complain to Becky about it.

[Fri, Jul 6 at 6:23PM]

“Whatever’s wrong with me must’ve screwed my phone up too. None of the audio from our old videos will play no matter what volume I’ve got it on.”

“Fuck this shit to the max.”

Soon the only light illuminating her surroundings began to fade again, the sense of dread over being thrown into such complete darkness relenting more with each passing day. Jessica sighed and slipped the jacket off her shoulders before pulling it back over herself like a blanket. The faint summer heat keeping her from, supposedly, freezing to death out here. She leaned her head against the least comfortable pillow in the world and urged her mind to sleep. Which to no surprise, refused to come for a long, long while. Before her mind drifted into some nightmare softer and kinder than the one she was in now, she shot one last text out to her best friend A question that only now was playing on her mind, imbuing her with a dread that dug into her ribs like hungry teeth. The thought that despite her current loneliness, she may not be alone.

A bottle crashed and shattered against the wall below. Luis woke with a start, instinctively reaching to unlatch the blanket he was under from its cushion. Both of which he quickly recalled weren’t there anymore. He was wearing exactly what he fell asleep in roughly two days ago; plain white socks, star-patterned pajama pants, and his favorite green hoodie. A fresh headache buzzed around his eyes, which lifted languidly against the urge to sleep as he took in the space around him.

Yesterday must not have been a fever dream then, seeing as this still was not his living room.

Dusty light spilled out in uneven strips across the warped wood floor, coming from the tall glass windows on the wall opposite to where he had situated himself. His back was pressed against a wooden shelf that spanned the length of the entire wall, filled with bottles adjacent to the one he’d heard shatter earlier. Glass pieces now lay scattered across the surface of the countertop a few feet below him. The whole place smelled strongly of a dust, must, and alcohol blend. But not the fancy fruit-toned stuff his aunt drank out of champagne glasses and kept a flask of in their kitchen cabinet; this was the sort that gave the impression it was made to treat physical wounds and was not, in fact, intended for human consumption.

A bar. Luis was inside of a bar. Except this bar was unlike any he had ever seen. Given, he was still underage and hadn’t actually been inside a bar before, but he’d watched enough subtitled episodes of Cheers to get the picture.

The most uncanny thing about this place (apart from where on earth it was or how the hell he got here) was that all the tables and chairs were positioned against one wall only. And there were no belts on the chairs to keep the customers in or even the old-fashioned anchored bars meant for hooking your feet under, like the kind they had at home. How was anyone supposed to sit down? From Luis’ point of view, this place appeared very poorly established. And sure, interior design flaws were pretty far down on the list of unanswered questions right now, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t worth noting.

Eventually he began to call this overriding wall on which all the furniture was placed ‘the pull-wall.’ Not that he was feeling especially creative today. His stomach wailed for something to eat.

Luis pushed off the upper shelves, his hand returning slightly stickier than it was before as he drifted nearer to the surface behind the counter. This, as he discovered last night, was where all the helpful stuff was. He’d eyed the mini fridge sometime around then, though already that whole day had become a choppy, cacophonous blur in his memory. He only felt the remnants of his panic in the full-body soreness it left behind.

The door to the bar’s mini fridge swung open with a reluctant whoosh of room temperature air. No light turned on inside. And then his eyes began to water.

The pure stench of it hit him way before he could register what it was he was looking at. A discolored heap of mold, growing on something that perhaps at some point was considered food. He hurriedly kicked the door shut, covering his nose and mouth with the neck of his hoodie to brace for the inevitable secondary rush of air.

Nope. Not going anywhere near that again. There’s got to be something edible elsewhere, Luis assumed through wishful thinking. He looked around the room. Despite the absence of people, this place didn’t appear deserted—just forgotten. The fridge was obviously left alone to rot, there were glasses stuck to the tables and bottles on the shelves. It was as if whoever lived here vanished just as abruptly as he had. Only, a much longer time ago. That was when he noticed a door near the back end of the bar. Windowless and obscured by a few of the tables. It stood directly opposite the tall and menacing barricade of windows at the front, which was a win in his book. Digging his nails into the loose planks of the ceiling, chipped from overuse of this same transportation method over and over again, Luis began clawing his way toward it.

He twisted the doorknob once, twice, a third time in the other direction. Locked. But he had lost the keys to his family’s apartment enough times to know that there was more than one way to open a lock. Considering everything he’d come to know about this area and it’s deteriorating state, Luis regarded the situation as an opportunity to use the standard ‘brute force’ method.

Underneath a section of the counter sat two rusty red fire extinguishers of varying sizes. The bigger the better, right? So Luis grabbed the larger of the two. Yes, this would work perfectly. He held the latched handle with one hand, using the other to support it from underneath. A sharp exhale escaped him as both he and the container were propelled a few feet toward the pull-wall with a heaving thud. Holy hell that thing was hard to lift. Clearly whatever force was keeping it attached to this wall far surpassed his own strength. With a sigh, he reached for the other, smaller fire extinguisher to see if the result would be any different.

Shockingly, he was right. This one lifted with a lot less effort. Weird, he thought, making a mental note to himself before carrying on. Larger = stronger pull.

Be that as it may, he still had to lug the thing across the room. He resolved to use the pull-wall to his advantage, kicking off of it for a few solid seconds of airtime before the extinguisher dragged them both down again. Honestly, this whole awkward bunny-hop maneuver felt embarrassing as hell. For once he was grateful no one was around to watch. Hop, thud. Hop, thud. He watched out of the corner of his eye as the door grew closer and closer. Just one more should be enough to reach it. Hop, thud—

clink.

Luis looked down. Something glinted in the dusty light. A small, metallic pin. Before he even got the chance to react, a cloud of white exploded out of the canister, sending its victim rocketing backward. And headed straight for the windows.

The most immediate sensation was the thundercrack of hurt emanating throughout his already sore body, knocking the wind out of him as he hit the glass with extinguisher in hand. Next was the shock he felt upon opening his eyes, his field of vision swallowed by a sky that seemed to stretch on forever outward in every direction. His heart beat, his mind raced. If the window were to have fully cracked just then, he could’ve been shot out into the street with nothing in the vicinity to grab onto for leverage or movement. In other words, this grimy pane of glass was one narrow wall standing between him and a slow, defenseless death.

But it hadn’t. He was fine. Luis shut his eyes and remembered to breathe. In, and out, then in again. Carefully, he peeled himself away from the glass, refusing to look back.

At least the locked door was open now.

He let go of the canister. Predictably, it crashed against the pull-wall with a hollow thunk the instant he let go of it. Though, strangely enough, it happened a lot slower than it did before. Once again he made sure to take note of the new information. Emptied out = less pull, somehow?

Luis barely peeked past the doorframe into the room, the adrenaline hadn’t quite subsided yet and was keeping him on edge. The space was far too dark to see by, but something did stand out. Crates. Lots and lots of crates. The lid on one of them had been opened previously, revealing a cache of canned goods inside. There were beans, carrots, peaches, tuna—and tons, literal tons, of spaghetti. Okay, it did sort of sound gross when you said them all together, but Luis nearly broke down right then and there. It was the best and most relieved he’d felt these past couple of days.

Another object caught his eye. It leaned against a crate. Tall and narrow; steel frame reflecting the scarce amount of natural light that found its way into the room. An old shotgun. Zero took what cans he could stuff into his arms and hoodie pocket before shutting the door softly behind him.

The now-vagabond teenager watched from afar as this world put on yet another mystifying show. Countless drops of water emerging from the sky and crashing against the pull-wall outside the bar. The tender symphony it created seemed to muffle his thoughts awhile. It was actually sort of peaceful. He’d placed the fire extinguisher beside the mini fridge in the designated “don’t touch this” corner. Meanwhile, he rubbed absently at his aching sides, taking in another hefty forkful of spaghetti. Admittedly, he did drop the fork a few times. As well as the can and some other stuff. His senses were focused on satiating his hunger that he continuously forgot about the pull-wall’s existence. He sat and watched nature’s show in silence.

“No no no no, Jessica, please—” Zero strained, making futile efforts to evade her grasp by means of thrashing his arms and legs around like a fish in outer space. He knew where they were headed. Apparently not even the use of her real name was enough to convince her otherwise. Mute had him by the back of his beloved green hoodie, faded and worn down with daily use, his weightless body dragging supinely behind.

Mute would call this an intervention. Zero considered it more of a premeditated attack.

There were no footsteps to mark their presence as she trudged down the hallway, pulling Zero along, and the front door made no effort to noisily creak open the way it normally did. At first Zero despaired that Mute’s condition meant there would be no sound to alert Grey or Parrot as to what she was doing. He then let out a sigh of defeat, which also caused him to tilt backward a bit, upon realizing how much more likely it was that the two of them already knew about this. Probably encouraged it, even.

Mute tugged hard on the hem of his hood so he wouldn’t smack the doorframe on the way out. How thoughtful. He couldn’t see her mouth at this odd angle either, so there was no real way to tell what she was saying. But she was making more of a statement with her actions than her words at the moment anyway.

The sky hung infinitely above in an array of overcast, blotchy grays. Always gray. Oppressive in its emptiness. The air outside was just as suffocatingly open. Zero shifted from trying to escape her hold to clinging desperately to it, both arms wrapped around hers in a sort of begrudging hug as her march toward oblivion refused to stop. Not as they left the door, stepped off the front porch, or made their way down the narrow pathway through the fields. After at most ten seconds of his relocation outdoors, Zero dared to unhook one arm from Mute’s jacket sleeve in order to shade himself against the blinding wash of sunlight assaulting his unaccustomed eyes.

It was a long trek to the train station. Typically, residents occupied one of four locations within Sonder. There was the City, the Garden, the Junkyard, and most relevantly, the Community, where the majority of Sonder resided. And even then, residencies were as widespread as stars. Once Mute and Zero had passed over the hillside, their neighbor’s place came into view. A small stone structure with an old greenhouse attached, its broken glass walls loosely patched up with a tarp that was flapping in the subtle breeze. At least now the endless sweep of rustling grass gave way to some variety, as Mute spotted two kiddish figures by the stream beside the distant house. She and Zero knew these two well enough by now to recognize them instantly, back when their living situations hadn’t quite settled yet and the pair of duos would regularly swap residencies with whoever was willing to take them for a while. Toad, hidden beneath his bucket hat, was squatted down near a patch of dirt where she assumed some type of bug must’ve sat, staring at it with the intensity of someone unearthing an alien species. Shark stood a few feet away from him, splashing and stomping through the water in her red rain boots to test just how high it could go.

Mute went to wave down at them before forcibly remembering that her arm was preoccupied, having been repurposed as a safeguard as of that morning. Though even as she waved down with her spare one, the kids failed to take notice, too engrossed in whatever it was they were doing. It was then that Zero piped up.

“Hey!” He shouted, “¡ustedes dos!” voice echoing off the hillsides in a way Mute envied deep inside. Shark’s head whipped around half a minute before her counterpart’s did, squinting at where the pair stood from afar. The little kid then swiftly sprung to her feet, swinging both arms enthusiastically up and down in a full-body greeting. Toad raised his hand halfway up in a timid wave. “Privet, Mute! Hi, Zero!” she screamed in reply at the very top of her lungs. And only then did they register who exactly they were speaking to.

Zero’s grip hadn’t loosened, not even by a fraction of an inch, and the feeling in her right arm had already started to fizzle out.

Toad whispered something into Shark’s ear, who then turned back toward the others. Acting as the shy kid’s spokesperson, it would seem. “Are you okay?” She ask-shouted. Zero felt Mute’s snicker through her shoulders as they turned to face each other. “I don’t know, am I?” he mocked, eyes narrowing.

“Come on, man,” Mute groaned, turning around and upward a bit to face him more directly. She made no effort to mime or gesture her way through each sentence, Zero knowing full well he was the only person she didn’t have to do that for. “You’re literally not going anywhere,” she insisted, readjusting her grasp so that she had him by the wrist and not the back of his hood. “I got you.” Giving a too-confident smile of which Zero absolutely did not trust. “Trust me!” She said.

He then exhaled for what felt like the first time in ages as he managed an “Uh-uh,” out of his tightened throat. “Trust—gone,” he stated, simple as fact. Mute rolled her eyes at him and sighed as if she’d merely forgotten it at home and would return for it later. She turned back toward the two kids and gave a passionate thumbs-up in light of their concern. They seemed satisfied with that answer, ready to return to their important work of playing around in the muddy stream.

Zero lurched forward a little as Mute continued on their stroll. He saluted the kids from behind as he pivoted horizontally. He caught Shark’s squeaky giggling from afar and the sound of it made him warm.

“Where are we going, anyway?” He asked, less dejectedly than before.

Mute seemed to process that for a second, mouth opening and closing as if the answer were obvious and it was Zero who just wasn’t getting it. Her gaze then darted back and forth between Zero and the space around them, a look which simultaneously meant outside and we’re already here. Zero knew better by now than to believe Mute’s first response would be the full answer. And with a sudden “Oh!” his beliefs were confirmed pretty much immediately.

“I’m taking us up to the station for some much needed sightseeing!“ She wiggled all the fingers on her freehand at that last word in order to give it a little pizzazz, as if that would help Zero feel any more inclined. He’d never tell her that honestly, the sheer lack of seriousness with which she treated the situation kind of did help. Art of distraction. “Grey wants us back before dinner, though,” she added. “So we better make this quick.”

Right on schedule, Mute took her own words of advice and ushered for them to continue on. Her knees marching up and down like that of a cartoon solider, free arm pointed outward at their destination somewhere behind that silvery midday horizon. Because of it, Zero, against his better judgement, relaxed his shoulders a little, now holding onto her wrist one-handed instead of swallowing the entirety of her right arm with both of his. Weirdly enough, it actually started to feel somewhat relaxing, allowing himself to be pulled along for once without worry.

At first glance it was often assumed that Zero, with his uniquely displaced bodily physics, was another mistranslated resident like Mute or Cliff. But in truth this weightless way of being had forever been the teenager’s one and only reality. Somehow still managing to accompany him into the next.

Ever since the multiversal collapse that brought him here, he consistently found his grasp on physics shattered, left picking up the pieces into whatever amalgamation half made sense in his brain. This bizarre world was not defined by any common rules, he learned, but by the many exceptions to those rules. Usually in the form of outliers like him.

Gravity was, and is still, one of the hardest things for him to get used to. Second being the updated vocabulary. These are the walls, up here is the ceiling, and the floor is that wall objects are pulled toward if you let them go. And it’s not actually pulling, it’s falling, and it’s not just letting go, it’s dropping them. Rules on top of rules he now had to keep up with. But surely the worst adjustment, the one thing he truly believed he could never get used to no matter how long he was stuck here, was the sheer emptiness he saw everywhere. Where were the grips and handholds to keep someone steady? Where were the loops and bars and handles to leverage himself along? Why was there no structure in place to block the unforgiving, insatiable sky?

Sonder’s open air was close enough to a death sentence to scare Zero indoors indefinitely. Leaving would be akin to an astronaut venturing the outside of their ship without a safety tether. Mental health be damned, he thought. I’d rather stay alive than choose to risk my life. Except this was a choice ruled by fear, and the only thing it succeeded in doing was killing him in a different, less obvious way.

It had been three and a half months since he and Mute moved in with this tight-knit lovey-dovey couple, Grey and Parrot. The two women were generous enough to take them both in after it was determined they were too young to be living on their own. And honestly, it had been nice so far. Mute couldn’t believe they’d built the house they were in by themselves. Well, fixed up the skeletal remnants of one. “Kinda makes you feel inspired,” she ranted to Zero one quiet afternoon. “Or just lazy. More the second thing.”

It truly had been nice. Except, during these past few months, not once had anyone seen Zero leave the house. Sticking to the shadows like a spider in the corner when he wasn’t sleeping the hours away. Mute had been stuck herself in a way, inside an endlessly recurring dream of bygone weekends and long ago mall trips with friends. She wasn’t lying when she said she missed it. In short, she was desperate to get out of the house these days.

Rain pelted the windows, emerging from somewhere within that inky black nothingness. Soon the sun would rise over the rolling fields and cloudy skies and the stranded would get back to work. But for tonight that truth mercifully faded. Almost enough to convince you that this world was only a prolonged dream, that you would soon wake up in your bed, meet up with your friends or family, and resume the life you had before it was so rudely interrupted.

Almost. The duplicate moons hanging low in the sky argued otherwise.

These were a handful of Zero’s thoughts as he stared vacantly out the window, having settled cross-legged in the air above the antiquated fridge. He drew his plastic fork from the can and took another halfhearted bite of cold, wet, packaged spaghetti. He focused intently on the taste, on his chewing, on the raindrops racing one another down the glassy window. To live in the here and now, as he put it to himself. Since all daydreaming seemed to do was make him feel worse. Anything to avoid dwelling on the past. The moons shone brightly. He took another bite.

Too late.

All at once that night came flooding back.

He thought about shotguns and bar rags and how much he hated fire extinguishers. He thought about the man once known as Luis Balseiro. About a hundred other nights spent eating leftovers over the fridge alongside his little brother. The smell of their dad’s black coffee. That split-second of memory that somehow still stuck with him, watching the living room fade to black as he allowed his eyes to close and his mind to drift away with sleep. Catching, at that fleeting moment, a reflection framed by the pitch dark television screen. Himself in the middle, his brother Diego asleep on the right, and their dad to the left, comfortably passed out as they sat hooked onto the cushions in front of the tv for the very last time.

The thought was stifled by yet another faceful of pasta.

Meanwhile, across the narrow hallway separating their room from the kitchen, Mute was lying in bed, also awake. Although beds were a rather loose term for the pile of pillows and blankets thrown onto the floor of Grey and Parrot’s spare room. She held her phone in both hands, pink case coated with a thin layer of dust and grime from having sat untouched in a drawer for weeks.

At the top of the screen, the ‘No Service’ and critical low battery warnings continued their relentless flashing as she told the dying wall in the shape of her friend all about her plans to finally get out of the house tomorrow and how she wished Zero would come along. Plus some other, not-so-neatly-put statements about his habit of moping over the fridge in the middle of the night with his hoodie pulled up tight, sniffling over his spaghetti cans while Mute pressed a pillow to the side of her head to drown it out. Tonight was clearly no exception.

She could’ve easily told him how much it bugged her, and he’d understand what she was trying to say. He somehow always did. Not to mention in a language that wasn’t even his first. Zero had become the person others looked to for interpretations on Mute’s behalf, and he was the first person Mute went to in order to be heard. Call it some freaky, transcendental interconnectedness, or blame it on them having spent practically every second of every day together, the duo were nonetheless inseparable at this point. Which is to say she’d already accepted a while ago that this was clearly his alone time, and Mute of course had hers. So she kept her noise complaints to herself, opting to turn over in bed and scrunch her face up into something tired and peeved, like maybe she could get the world to shush by sheer force of will. Reinforcing the pillow around her ears when, out of nowhere, inspiration struck.

Mute leaned in close to the cool glow of her cracked screen, frown twisting upward into a vaguely threatening smile as she did. Another quality that Zero would come to recognize just as well as he could read her soundless, mile-a-minute speech. “That’s it,” Mute typed as she eyed the dim light emanating from the kitchen entryway for any unforeseen movement. Regardless, she typed quicker. The text thread was a solid sea of blues.

“I’m dragging dipstick outta this house.” She declared, using a nickname of which Zero, if he ever took the time to scroll through her message-thread-turned-diary, would discover replaces literally all instances of his name.

Something tinny clattered out of sight, the tragically familiar sound of an empty can being set down. She quickly shut the phone off and shoved it beneath the covers. It had to be a surprise tomorrow for her plan to work. Zero entered the room that same instant, braced against the edge of the doorframe closest to the ceiling. He regarded her with a drowsy squint, unable to focus in the dark.

Then, with an amazing lack of hesitation, Mute reached under the covers again, reopening her phone for the purpose of shining its flashlight directly into his face. Zero let go of the frame and shielded himself from the flash behind the bend of an elbow, the other busy swatting at her to quit it. "¡¿Qué chingados!?” He muttered, forced-whispering through a clenched jaw so as not to wake both homeowners up this late. In response, Mute turned the flashlight on herself, positioned beneath her face as if to tell a campfire story the way Zero had seen people do on tv before. She then stuck her tongue out at him in an act of lighthearted defiance. “Go to bed,” she commanded him, flashlight purposefully showing the movements of her lips so he could read them in the dark. Zero rolled his eyes and went to hold onto the wall again before drifting off too far.

All this because Mute noticed his swollen, reddened eyes as they searched the room. All this because these antics worked on him. Putting to use the trick she’d learned from Cliff back when all this was still new, back when the need for answers still meant something to her. A reminder to breathe, to rest, to let go a while. Such was the art of distraction. That as Zero moved along the wall into his blanketed corner for the night, he did so with a reluctant smile on his face and a safe comfort in his chest. All this because she hated seeing him be sad alone. Because she hated being sad and alone.

Jessica collapses onto her bed, hard, having just returned home from wasting the Saturday away at the mall with her friends, and she doesn’t bother taking off her shoes or untying her hair because she’s too busy chatting on the phone with her lifelong bestie Becky about that weird green coffee drink she ordered and about the mixup that morning with whether the group was supposed to meet up at north or south entrance and when Becky mentions the homework she still hasn’t gotten around to Jessica groans, hard, because she also totally forgot about it, and the more she thinks about that day the more she starts missing the comfort of her bed all over again and she misses hanging out with her friends over the sugared up taste of mall coffee, even when it came out a kind of sickly green instead of, like, any shade of brown, but most of all she just really, really misses the sound of Becky’s voice, because one second Becky’s ranting about that algebra test they both have tomorrow during first, then as Jessica rolls onto her back the line cuts short and there’s this awful blinding sunlight in her eyes, which is weird because she’s sure the sun set hours ago, and once her eyes adjust she’s not lying on her bed anymore but in an empty swimming pool in the middle of the woods, vines reaching down and lacing the cold, hard tile under her back, her thoughts only catching up to her after she sits up because her mind is still muffled by the all-consuming flood of panic, so of course her instinct is to open her mouth to shout ‘hello??’ and her lungs exhale and her mouth shakes with noise but her ears don’t catch a thing and for the first time she realizes that, while her breathing’s gotten rapid and heavy, she hasn’t heard a single sound escape her lips, but she can definitely still hear the rustling of the leaves overhead and the wind blowing through the trees which means she hasn’t suddenly gone deaf, so she tries to scream out again, hard, not a help or a hello, a simple ‘ahhh’ and once more, silence, so she snaps her fingers and claps her hands over and over again and yet still nothing, until eventually Jessica claws her way out of the pool using those rugged vines to pull herself up, ruining her pretty polished nails in the process, and its as she looks around at this unfamiliar expanse of sunlit green that she reaches for her phone like she always does and starts texting Becky, because, well, that’s what she’s always done, but also because she doesn’t know where she is or how she got here and she doesn’t understand why none of her texts are going through and that test tomorrow is now the furthest thing from her mind and oh, god, please Becky won’t you please pick up the phone cause I’m really scared and my phone’s only at like forty and I’m pretty sure it’s gonna get dark out soon and I really miss my bed and I miss the sound of my own voice but most of all I just really, really miss the sound of yours.

“Are you familiar with string theory?” Cliff asked. That wasn’t their actual name. Mute knew that. Her name wasn’t ‘Mute’ either. As of about a month and a half ago, her name had been Jessica. Jessica Mattisson. But those old things held no place here in this borrowed world. A world that, like them, had been granted a new title. Its residents all came to know it as Sonder.

Mute looked up, and up further still, at the towering figure she was told held some kind of insight into their cosmically fucked up situation. But Cliff was no scientist in a pristine lab coat. They wore a plain white tee and ripped gray jeans that, surprisingly, made them look more or less normal. With a pair of doc martens and dark, shaggy hair down past their shoulders that were clearly more for aesthetics than practicality. Apparently this guy had been a musician or something. Before, well, everything. And they weren’t standing in some lavish white medical lab either but outside in the middle of fuckall nowhere. Trees loomed overhead as if their only purpose was to cruelly remind Mute of the day she first arrived here. She could’ve easily made herself sick forcing away the unwanted memory if she weren’t so profoundly distracted by the figure ahead, somehow looming even more menacingly despite their best—and painfully obvious—efforts not to be.

Mute stopped herself short right as she opened her mouth to answer that no, she hadn’t heard of any theories yet besides her own. Instead she shook her head forcefully from side to side, blonde hair swishing back and forth in tandem. She hated having to do that.

Meanwhile, Mute remained a deer in headlights, staring upward at this ‘Cliff’ person even while they sat cross-legged in the grass and she stood up straight in her dirt streaked tennis shoes. A voice in the back of her head berated her with the thought of how dumb she must look right now, what with this slightly awestruck expression across her face. There it was, she thought, that term for her and them. That label, staring at her head-on. Mistranslated. The word was still relatively new to her and yet already it had latched onto her very existence here, shortening the existential dread of having your own body turn against you into such a sweet, simplified phrase. As far as anyone knew, which really wasn’t a lot, Mute and Cliff were the only two cases of mistranslation around. At least among the twenty-something known residents that had been discovered so far.

When this fancy-speaking friend of Cliff’s insisted she meet them, that maybe they’d have a digestible answer to her mountain of questions, Mute allowed herself that hopeful feeling for a while. Albeit buried under all those not-so-hopeful feelings she pretended weren’t also there. A hope that maybe she and them would take one look at each other and it’d be this incredible, indescribable, instantaneous moment of connection. Something along the lines of: ‘you’re like me. And I’m like you. And you may be the only person in this whole entire world who knows exactly what it is I’m going through.’

Except, in actuality, Cliff hadn’t dared look another soul in the eyes since she got here. In fact, they were acting considerably more nervous than she was. Posture slouched over, shoulders hunched, one hand rubbing absently at the back of their neck as if trying to crumple themselves into something smaller, more approachable. Mute thought it a strange look on someone two, arguably three times the height of any regular person. But then, who the hell counted as regular anymore when no two people hailed from the same reality? The fact that they both even spoke the same language was already an impossible stroke of luck. And at least Cliff still counted as human by Sonder standards. A few of the others, even those without mistranslations, were less so.

“Right,” Cliff mumbled, catching the look in Mute’s eyes with a flash of sympathy before deciding to just look down at their own hands instead. They seemed to organize their thoughts for a moment before picking up from what sounded to her like the very, very beginning.

“So, uh, basically, all string theory proposes is that instead of atoms or molecules being the essential foundation of the universe, they’re made up of even smaller, wobblier one-dimensional ‘strings.’ Which kind of makes sense since, at such a small scale, they’d look a lot like zero-dimensional points.”

Mute wasn’t exactly encouraged by their use of words like “basically” or “kind of,” but while their tone hadn’t conveyed much confidence, their intensity certainly showed through. It seemed that the longer she stuck around, regardless of her fading attention toward long-winded lectures, the more Cliff allowed themselves to relax. The shake dissolving from their voice, from their eyes, the tension and the fidgeting eventually slowing to a near stop. Replaced by something Mute only recognized in the voice of her friend Kelsei, whenever she would deep-dive into what her and their other friends generally referred to as “nerdy comic book shit.” Yet always uttered with a surprising amount of affection packed into such a biting sound. Mute wished Kelsei were the one in front of her now. Stuff always made more sense when she was the one explaining it. More often lately she would find herself wondering where the girl may have ended up.

“So if you can imagine the universe being made of strings,” they gestured outward, Mute momentarily catching her reflection in the jet black polish of their nails. “…Then it’s not so hard to picture the multiverse as being like a web, right? Worlds closer in reality being physically closer to each other on the web…less similar being farther apart…uh, you get it…”

Mute blinked slow. She wondered why she felt now the way she used to in science class, suddenly longing for a desk to drop her head against.

The not-a-scientist positioned their right hand palm-up, meant to represent this multiversal ‘web’ they were talking about some stretch of time ago. “…the collapse, or—the end, or mix-up, change, whatever it is you like to call our situation…” Their remaining hand pinched together tight as if grabbing onto some unseen piece of thread. “If you were to tug on a web like this one and then let go…” They then tugged the invisible strand sharply upward before releasing its hold, rocking their flat hand around as if shaken by the action of the other. “—kind of like that, the web would bounce back in response. Tossing all the stuff that may have been loose on it randomly elsewhere. Which I guess consisted only of living things and not the worlds themselves. So you, and I, and everyone else—we just happened to end up in this location on the…” Cliff paused for air. “Here.”

“That’s, ah, pretty much it” they hastily concluded. And just like that, their flow was lost and the old Cliff had returned. Anxious and fidgety. Mute wondered if their mistranslation had made them this way, or if Cliff had always been like this around others. “Sorry,” they added for no reason Mute could discern. She shook her head from side to side once again and raised an outward hand in an attempt to say: ‘don’t be.’ Cliff just let out a quiet huff of a laugh that was the weakest she’d ever heard.

Companionable silence was apparently not an option around this guy. “So, you’re…um, voice? Was what mistranslated?” They asked with more punctuation than was necessary, half flinching as if she might execute them on the spot for asking such a silly question. What Mute really thought right then was: ‘finally! The one other topic I’ve been wanting to discuss with you this whole damn time.’ She smiled and nodded even more fervently, wavy strands of hair falling into her eyes as she did, flattening them back into place as she tried to maintain what ounce of composure hadn’t yet melted away. Cliff beamed in light of her response as Mute took in a short breath of air and began to speak aloud. “I assume yours has to do with your…” she trailed off, the words stirring inside her throat and yet refusing to emit the sounds.

Cliff blinked down at her, completely clueless as to what was just said. So much for that. In lieu of words, Mute embraced Cliff’s habit of gesturing, positioning a palm flat over the top of her head. Height. Next, she pointed a finger directly at them, with a sharpness that was much more accusatory than inquisitive. Thankfully, the message got through this time. “Mm, yeah,” they confirmed her statement with a sigh. “I’ve…also thought a lot about that lately. But, uh, to be real with you, this part is so, so much dumber sounding.” A curious half-smile formed across Mute’s face at that, taking a single step forward in what hopefully came across as a request to keep going. Cliff gladly followed in her lead and leaned in a bit further. “Well, same principle. Except, if your universe is made of string, and apparently everyone else’s is too, then maybe mine was made from, I don’t know like a… yarn, or something.” They actually laughed at themselves then, half amused and part shameful, hiding half their face as they spoke. “Oh wow, no, saying it out loud is… that really doesn’t make any sense, does it.”

‘None of this makes any sense!’ Mute wanted to shout. She wanted to smash that embarrassed, self-conscious part of them with a hammer. She wanted to look them in the eyes and say, ‘yes that does sound very dumb.’ Hell, what she really wanted to tell this needlessly tortured soul was ‘If, like you say, there exists a universe out there for anything—literally anything imaginable—then maybe your idea isn’t as dumb as you think.’

Mute didn’t say any of that out loud. Instead, and perhaps unsurprisingly for her, her speech tumbled out before her brain got the chance to think it. She sounded out her next words slow and deliberate, hoping Cliff could read the intentions on her lips rather than having to play another whole game of charades about it. And to this complete and total stranger who would perhaps understand, Mute confessed her deepest fear.

“I’m scared I’ll forget the sound of my own voice,” she told them all too honestly. Actually it took a couple of tries for Cliff to understand what she was trying to enunciate, but once they had— “God, I miss chairs,” they abruptly blurted out. “And cups and forks and soap, headphones, my glasses—“ their list spiraled into a frustrated grunt that almost could’ve been a swear if Cliff had it in them to do so. But although she’d hardly gotten to know them, already she highly doubted it. And against her better judgment, Mute laughed with them. A bright, noiseless laugh that lit up like the sun through a rainstorm. The subject of her amusement only realizing it once they’d peeked out from behind the hiding place in their arms, taken aback by her innate ability to rip the heaviness right out of the air. “You—oh, come on,” They cracked, possessed by the silent girl’s infectious spirit. “This is funny to you?”

The light soon faded from her eyes, then her smile. It had been an unbearably long time since she’d spoken with anyone like this. Opened up like this. Not since home. Not since Becky. Mute only wanted to think about her right now. What she might be doing. Where she may have ended up. What world in all this universe is deserving enough of my best friend? She thought. And yet, despite this matter being on her mind constantly, it somehow hit different this time. She didn’t feel hot or angry or particularly vicious. There was no longer an urge to destroy the first thing in sight. There was only a hollowed out pit in her stomach where the anger had been, followed by this stinging sensation behind her eyes. Mute fought back against the memory for a second time throughout this conversation alone. Now it was her turn to avoid making eye contact, infuriated by the impossibly soft sympathy Cliff offered as they attempted to comfort her in their own way. With distraction.

“What’s something you miss?” They prompted innocently, ignorantly.

Too late. All at once that day came flooding back.

She thought about trees and friends and opening her mouth to speak. The ghosts of sunlight in her eyes and cold pool tile against her back, which were maybe here to haunt her forever.

Mute crumbled fully into this stranger she met for the first time today, staining the white fabric of their tee with makeup she still bothered putting on for a friend who wasn’t even there anymore. Cliff, a bit stunned at first by this unapologetic show of trust, froze still as a statue, neglecting to breathe. A few drawn-out seconds passed before they shifted to reciprocate the hug as best they could with all the caution of somebody navigating a minefield. There it was at last. The incredible, indescribable, instantaneous moment of connection she’d envisioned. Well, this wasn’t exactly the way she pictured it, sobbing quietly into someone else’s shirt, but the sentiment came to her all the same. ‘You’re like me. And I’m like you. And you may be the only person in this whole entire world who knows exactly what it is I’m going through.’

All of a sudden her questions didn’t seem to matter much anymore. Mute no longer wanted any half-baked answer as to how she got here, how any of them got here. Screw the strings. Jessica just desperately, violently wanted to go home.