[PRESS TO START]
Your name is Iphigenia and your late father left you a fertile plot in the delightfully pastoral municipality of Dewdrop Fields. Puffy-cloud, cherry-red, farm-fresh fantasy. No olive trees here. No rugged rocky beaches. No cliff dives and no marble altars. Just a warm breeze as you, carefree Iphigenia, a yellow bandana over your dark hair, push the edge of a comically oversized shovel into the damp soil. You wipe a light mist of sweat from your brow and peer into the distance. Bland, blurry, eternal, restorative, wheat-colored flatness. The horizon, only briefly marred by the serrated edges of a black pine—
Though you never once see a postal worker, some mornings you awake to find letters in your mailbox. The envelopes are perfectly folded and oddly soft to the touch. Baby animals are printed on the foiled stamps pressed to their corners. A calf nosing at the ground, a fluffy-looking duckling floating among reeds. Occasionally, an infant Cupid with an arrow behind his back and a chubby finger pressed to his pursed lips. The first envelope you receive contains a handwritten promotional pamphlet for an Educational Reading Seminar at the town library. The second is a coupon for a free slice of cherry pie at the neighborhood bakery. The third is a formal request, signed by the Mayor, to register your residency with the local government.
You hold this summons delicately. Printed on the stamp is a teddy bear rolling on the carpet, holding its feet with its tiny paws. Your mailbox is painted a charming shade of lilac. The patch of grass at your feet is wild with clover and heart-shaped flowers. Your hands tremble for reasons beyond your recollection.
[SAVING…]
Paperclipped to the Mayor’s message is a small map on cream-colored cardstock. A tidy series of dotted arrows indicate the path from your farmhouse to the meeting point. You follow these directions through your flourishing rows of corn, squash and strawberries, then over a stone bridge spanning a dry riverbed, then past the brick facades in the neighboring town. The paved paths are clean and the box hedges, glossy and dutifully maintained though by whom, you do not know and cannot discern.
The directions from the letter end not at a gray, blockish government building, as you had imagined, but at a white clapboard house in a grove of fragrant apricot trees. You ascend a set of gleaming wooden steps. The Mayor opens the door. You have barely registered her presence when quickly, forcefully, she pulls you inside. You fall into the shadow of the landing. She closes the door.
Your eyes adjust slowly to this new darkness. Shapes resolve into objects. You are in a foyer. To your left is a purple velvet divan and a floor lamp that emits an unsteady green light. The door to the next room is ajar and through that opening you see the Mayor—how did she move so fast? Wasn’t she just behind you?—sitting at the faraway end of an oak dining room table. She writes, head down, by flickering candlelight, in a book large enough to span the entire breadth of the table. The shades on every window are fully drawn.
You approach the Mayor. You examine her. She is not beautiful, but she has the skin, posture and clothing of a stylish, prepossessed woman. This seems appropriate, even necessary, for a woman. You know that style is second only to power, sometimes synonymous with it.
“My logbook,” the Mayor says, by way of explanation, without looking up from her writing. She taps the pen against her pursed lips, frowning theatrically. “Iphigenia is too long,” she says. “How about Jennie?”
You open your mouth to protest, but nothing comes out. She scratches Jennie into the lambskin page.
[SAVING…]
Your neighbor to the south is a baker named Polly. She lives in a two-floor cabin with bay windows and a wraparound porch. You rest against her picket fence after a taxing day, watching the bees lose themselves to a velvet paradise of honeysuckle. Polly wears a pink-checkered apron and a plastic visor with a matching pink strap. On the first floor of her cabin, she operates her storefront. On the second floor is, presumably, her living space, though you have wandered that space before and found that it contains no personal items and is almost entirely bare of furnishings.
Polly sells cartoonishly elaborate desserts, all wrapped in bulbous plastic and stickered with her logo, a pleasantly chubby pony with a pink-checkered bridle. In her polished glass cabinets, her wares are studiously arranged. Three-layer birthday cakes covered in sculpted ganache, tiny and laborious chocolate truffles, labyrinthine lemon meringue. When, in the spirit of idle conversation, you ask who buys all this, she, taking it as an attack on her abilities as a baker and as a saleswoman, starts to tear up. In an attempted conciliatory gesture, you buy an improbably purple blueberry muffin and begin eating it immediately. It tastes weird, gamey.
While you chew and try not to gag, Polly talks about herself. The introduction starts off strong, with the cadence of a well-rehearsed monologue, before descending into repetition and rambling. You learn that the Mayor changed Polly’s original name too and that, alarmingly, she no longer remembers it.
“Pol…” she mutters, frustrated. “Pol…” You look around frantically for something to rest your eyes on.
[SAVING…]
Your favorite townie is Frog the librarian. She does not speak—none of the townies do—but nonetheless she seems to have a kindliness about her, or at least a cutesiness that is, to your mind, suggestive of kindliness.
Frog leaves slim, glistening trails of slime wherever she hops. Her chestnut-colored hair is bobbed and her skirts, masterfully tailored. She watches you from behind a large wooden desk that comes up to her neck. She has tortoiseshell glasses that magnify her huge, wet eyes. Frog’s webbed froggy hands are surprisingly dexterous. You notice it when, eyeing her as you peruse the books, she begins brushing down her bangs with a small plastic comb. She checks her face in a compact mirror and makes a little sound of dissatisfaction.
On your second visit, Frog hops over to you, an unmarked, leatherbound encyclopedia heavy in her arms. She drops it on the ground, where it opens on its own, as though instructed, to a page straight down the middle. She looks at you pointedly. You kneel to examine the page, mostly out of politeness, because the text is written in a glyph-based language that you can’t read. Certain words have been underlined, with so much fierceness that, in places, the tip of the pen broke through the yellowing page and left a star-shaped inkblot.
Frog ribbits gently and then with increasing urgency. You look up at her and smile mildly. She pushes the book toward your feet, with growing insistence. You smile back at her frustration because you don’t know what else to do.
[SAVING…]
You often find artifacts in the soil, when you dig. An ancient utensil, a clay jug with a lamb head. A circlet of tiny blue and pink stones. A scrap of lacy and beribboned white fabric, torn from a sleeve. Whatever you find, you show to Frog, who turns them over in her webbed hands, brow furrowed.
When you have found a total of twelve artifacts, the Mayor summons you to her house with a letter. How she knew about your artifacts, you never find out. On some level, you expected that she knew all about you, like a God, or a particularly competent spy. You imagine her peering through your windows with binoculars. You arrive at her clapboard house with dirt plastered wetly to your rubber boots.
The Mayor leads you through the foyer, through the dark dining room, into a backroom. It is carpeted along both floor and walls in bright yellow brocade. You don’t know how, but your outfit has changed; instead of your farmer’s overalls, you now wear a olive-green gown with a square-shaped neckline and puffy sleeves. At the center of the small backroom with its yellow walls, floor and ceiling is a chest of white pine, straddled by a heavy chain and lock. The Mayor produces a brass key from a sleeve and turns inside the lock until you both hear a metal click. She reaches in, her arm entering the entirety of the drawer. She interlaces fingers with something on the other side and heaves, and then out comes a human-sized teddy bear.
She gives the bear to you as though bestowing you with a fragile but frighteningly powerful item. A chalice of layered gold, a thick belt inlaid with fist-sized rubies, a thousand-year-old book made of sealskin. You hold the stuffed bear in your arms, struggling against its size. It is heavy, plush, and smells of dust and vanilla extract. It has a kindly expression, despite its beady eyes and stitched mouth. You inadvertently squeeze something inside it, a hard squarish thing that activates a recording. Out comes your father’s voice and though you scream, the Mayor does not let you leave, and pins your hands behind your back when you try to cover your ears.
[SAVING…]
You and Polly decide to run away together. On the appointed day, you wait on your farm porch, watching the sunlight fade through the rows of green-sleeved corn and glittering grain. When at last the darkness is total, you walk south, to collect Polly at the door to her shop in its clearing. She is waiting on the porch holding a lantern that casts her face in a purple and yellow chiaroscuro. The grayscale mountains in the distance could tell you the future but you are too faraway to hear.
East, to the town square, the cobblestones bare except for stray yellow leaves shaped like disfigured hearts, and then to the Mayor’s house in its intimate grove of apricot trees. Windows shuttered against Polly’s lantern. North, to the forest-lined road into the hills, which crosses over the dry riverbed. You wrap your arms around your chest and run down the sloped, almost vertical banks. You kick at the limp moss that grows at the dry bottom. You pretend not to notice the battlefield cross planted in the dust. This is as far as you have ever come and you are determined to go even farther.
“Jennie, how do your crops grow?” Polly asks, suddenly.
You turn. Her face seems to float, unattached from her body, in the lanternlight. You ask: “What do you mean?”
“Well,” she says, confused at your confusion. “It doesn’t rain here, does it?”
“Oh.” You swallow hard.
“It never rains in Dewdrop Fields,” Polly continues, in a whisper. “Though sometimes I think I hear thunder.”
When you turn back, which you do, eventually, and will continue to do, on every subsequent attempt, it’s not out of hunger or fear. You walk back in silence, not looking at each other, over the sloped banks, across the stone bridge, through the silent town, into the rows of winter grain, gold-flecked like a host of arrows.
Only once do you indulge the desire to be open, vulnerable, childish, even. “Don’t I deserve to be happy?” you say, wetly.
You thought Polly would need a moment—possibly an infinity—to reply, but she is quick to speak and when she does, it is plain and cutting.
[SAVING…]
Your name is Polyxena and your late mother left you a pastry shop in the charmingly tiny town of Dewdrop Fields. Sugar-sweet, peach-pink, oven-baked fantasy. No red sunsets. No men at at war. No battle lances and no torn bedgowns. Just a gentle breeze as you, diligent Polyxena, a checkered apron around your slim waist, tilt a saucepan in one hand, watching as a melting pad of butter bubbles against the edge. You look out your window, at the honeysuckle rows, and your gaze zeroes in on a dragonfly perched on a leaf. Something is chipping away at your mind and you don’t fight it. Somewhere in your body, the frame of the pyre still crackles and you bend over to stack the wood of the pile.
[SAVING…]
You watch them try to go from your window, shelves of glyphs all around you. You wait there, unmoving in the deepening dark, until they return, heads bowed. Your name is F??? and all you remember is that you tried to end it your way, but you were transformed before you hit the ground.
[END CREDITS]
A rosy-cheeked bear in denim overalls and a ballcap stands by a red barn, forking hay into a pile over and over. Across the fields of corn and wheat, a pony shucks off its pink-checkered bridle and wanders its pen. In town, next to the boarded-up library, a gap-toothed piglet serves coffee in blue and white porcelain cups. Outside, a tiny pond flickers gold and citrine in the last of the light. It bristles with lily pads, with long-stemmed flowers, with tadpoles, with a black-eyed frog, with sleepy orange fish that rise from the bottom when shadows pass and bring their lips to the surface, to feed.
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