Joey Cifelli ’23
A&E Editor
February 10, 2022, Part 1 (Pictured)
There is a field of grass that goes on forever. In another place. There are no entrances and no exits. Sometimes, people can be found here. They arrive not knowing how they came, and they leave not knowing how they left. The grass is soft. The soft grass makes it easy to sleep in the field. Even so, no one sleeps here. They do not need to. Somewhere above the field lays a sky. It is blue during the day and black at night, like the rest. There is a monster here. A sun doesn’t shine in the sky, nor are there moons at night, but the days come and the days go anyway. The stars are lower here and they drift from their positions as if only pretending. 6.6/10
February 10, 2022, Part 2
Is there weather? Of course there is. But only a little. The weather is more like the field becoming restless and turning over in its bed, than anything to do with cycles. The breezes blow by like whispers and the clouds clack against each other like pool balls. Most of the time the sky is endlessly blue and empty and it looms over the field like a droplet waiting to burst and fall, held static just barely by surface tension, wiggling at the edges. There’s no rain either, incidentally. A shimmer of windchimes floats by which means the monster is behind you. You feel its breath wet on the back of your neck, and the crude pulse of its heart rising as the pulse of your heart rises. And sharp edges and teeth. And annihilation. The windchimes float away in the air. 7.6/10
February 10, 2022, Part 3
The topography is plain in every sense. Rarely gentle slopes breach the depths and form hills. Aside from those anomalies, the ground is flat. The grass is always one species. The field doesn’t seem to know what to do with life outside of its own composition. The people do not age in detectable ways. They do not eat anything. Sleep, again, is more of a choice. They walk the field because that is all they can do. They try to escape, naturally, but the field really does go on forever. No one leaves by walking. Then they dig into the ground. The rich, dark soil extends down for a billion years. But it does end, eventually. Below the dirt is a pitch-black abyss that swallows all light and sound. Those who reach this far are hardly human anymore. Some of them fall into the abyss, some even go willingly, and beyond that, no one knows. Not even I know what happens to those creatures. 7.7/10
February 10, 2022, Part 4
The people here are either bored or terrified. When total and desolate boredom drives their brains to the cusp of sanity, their primary state switches to fear, and then they are filled with the incomprehensible terror of endlessness, the twin stakes of infinity and eternity pounded deep into the calculating portion of the mind. Red-eyed, animal terror is not sustainable for too long, though, no matter the effort they put into it. Boredom’s lithe tentacles creep back in. Lukewarm, familiar, agonizingly insubstantial. Almost everyone breaks the pattern at some point, skips like a record into madness. The madness is comfortable and warm but it never stays long enough. They all get spit back out into the clean light of the field. Then boredom. Then terror. Boredom. Terror. Boredom. Terror. Chimes. 6.7/10
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