I was still in the misty pce as I recounted this story to myself. Suddenly, I stopped. There was no one else around me. No more ghosts, no more people, not even any shadows. Just the cold and oppressive darkness that surrounded all things in this awful pce, as well as the trees. I stumbled through the mist and into the dead forest, which appeared to be a pce where vegetation went to die. The trees were completely bare and bck, and they were surrounded by bck shrubs which crumbled under my feet. I reached out and touched one of the trees, and I both touched it and did not, and I both felt the tree crumble and did not. I reached down and picked up a shrub. I held the dust in my hands, and I blew on it and it did not blow away. I picked up one of the pieces of dust and it blossomed into a flower which bore fruit. Not thinking, I grabbed one of the fruits off of the stem and bit into it. I was suddenly ravenously hungry, and so I ate the whole thing. It was the size of a grapefruit, red, and entirely edible, with no seeds at all. I held the hand with the dust back up, and the dust was still there. I looked ahead and thought I could make out some color in the distance, and then I saw it coming slowly towards me. I saw the outlines of people, and I could hear them talking quietly, as if they were trying not to be heard although there was absolutely no one around besides me. And, who was I going to tell? It’s not like I was getting out of here anyway. I saw them as they broke through the mist and came close to me. They were two men and a woman, one of the men being the woman’s partner and the other being a friend. I felt them pass through me, and I felt a rush of cold air, like the dead had just communicated right to me. As I turned around, I saw another man, about thirty years old, wearing a hat and mask and ramshackle clothing. He pulled a gun out of one of his pockets and shot the woman and her partner dead, and the friend ran away as he fired two more shots after him and was then tackled to the ground. I ran over to the two victims, and I saw that they both had my face. I recoiled, but did not feel frightened, perhaps because this was the path that the forest had chosen for me. I then stood, and when I did, the two bodies and the shooter, as well as the man who had tackled him, froze. They stayed there for about two seconds and then disappeared. I ran back to the flower, which was still floating in midair, and ate another fruit as quickly as the st. The man that appeared was disheveled and looked to be running from something, but I could not see what. He was beyond scared, and he seemed to be trying to tear his clothes off his body, and I did not understand why. I shouted out to him, “Don’t do that! It’s so cold here!” He looked past me for a moment, and I almost thought he had heard me, and then he tore his shirt off of his body and jumped into an abyss.

  I watched him fall and I saw him disappear. I imagined what he looked like in the flesh, to see him really die in slow motion. I thought about Abraham, who I’d seen fall off a cliff much like this and enter a state of mania before he hit the ground. I remember reviewing the footage with psychiatrists as they tried to posthumously diagnose him. They pored over thousands of hours of documents and files and videos and it all led to one conclusion. A personality disorder and suicidal ideation, which was obvious to anyone who had seen even thirty minutes of the documents listed. I did not have to sit through all of the readings, but I did have to think about the case every day as the people in charge tried desperately to figure out what would bring someone to do something like this.

  That was a common issue in the policing in the ragged city. The w enforcement, or “peace officer”, as they conically called themselves, were complete fools, completely unable to understand the basics of why people did things in the way they did. It seemed to me like they were always operating under the assumption that everything would always be okay in every person’s life, and problems could be solved with a salve and a green tea. Naturally, addiction, mental illness, and even simple bad times were unable to be solved by people who had never experienced them. They had never seen the car crashes, the crumpled metal and blood sptters, so they could not know what the world was really like. Public executions like the one I had seen were rare, so they could not be faulted for that.

  The peace officers I had seen were almost all extremely weak, not like the dead man, but in a way that appeared like they had not exercised for years, or even moved in some cases. I walked through the aisles of office cubicles and I saw the people eating fruity pastries and trying to type on their computer screens by pressing the keyboard against the screen. They thought that if it was connected to the screen it was connected electronically, and sometimes a few of them pressed a button, so they kept imagining that this was working, they just weren’t doing it exactly right. I walked past them, most of them looking right at me because I was a woman in that kind of area, and I moved up to the watchtower. It was a gss case where the people who actually knew how a computer worked stayed, and from there I could see the actual magnitude of the space. The cubes with the workers seemed to stretch on infinitely, and I saw papers falling out of printers unseen and unnoticed. I turned to the Director and said, “Is this really efficient?”

  “If we made them any smarter, we’d have to pay them money. Can’t have that. So, yes, this is efficient.”

  They talked to me about the case and what they’d seen reted to what I had seen, and they repeatedly told me how sorry they were to bring me here even though they were grabbing me in pces that I should not have been grabbed. It didn’t matter to me, though, because at that point I had been grabbed so many times that I thought it best to just get it over with. I imagined what they were doing now in the ragged city, and I stumbled on a rock and fell on the ground.

  “Hey, are you okay? You were crying for a long time.”

  The voice that spoke to me was Audrey, and she appeared out of the mist along with Will and Sarah.

  “We caught up to you by the sound of your crying. Are you okay?”

  “I didn’t realize I was crying.”

  Audrey hugged me after I said that. She id on top of me and squeezed me tight, crying into my shoulder.

  “Audrey, what did you see in there?”

  “I didn’t see anything. Neither did Will or Sarah. We all just ran after you until you colpsed.”

  “The fruit…”

  “What fruit?”

  “I ate some fruit, and it gave me visions.”

  “Oh, sweetie…that didn’t really happen. I saw you eat what you saw and then start crying. I’m, I’m so sorry.”

  My head lolled and I didn’t say anything at all. I saw those people as sure as sunlight. I knew that they were there. They couldn’t take it from me. I was there. I was there with them.

  I looked up at the sky and started to scream. I was beyond words, I just tried to scream as loud as I could so someone would understand the misery I was going through. I tried to get people to understand what I had seen. I tried to tell them that I was only getting worse. They didn’t believe me. They didn’t understand, and maybe they never had. Audrey held me and Will and Sarah watched. I felt so awful, and I just wanted to sleep. I just wanted to fall asleep so this could all be over once again. If I could sleep, I could get away from everything and be okay again. I started snickering at that. I said to myself, “Okay? Did I really just say okay? There is no okay, there never was. Fuck better, I’m never getting better.”

  I then threw myself upwards and downwards and I pounded the ground as I looked up at the sky. I saw my life move past my eyes, the first things I’d ever done, my actions, my statements. I saw the people who had tched on to me, and the people who had thrown rocks at me. I reached out and pulled out their hair and then ate their corpses with a fork and knife. I dined with the people who had eaten the hanged man, and we reveled in our shared ecstasy as the meat went sliding down our throats. It did taste like pork after all. At least someone could be trusted.