Escapism IV - SCP Foundation

Chapter IV

by Faeowynn Wilson

At the closing of the portal, there is a mourning. Some reality crashes into the dream-like procession of the citizens of Alison — they realize, now, that there is no waking up. This is how it is, from here on. The cheerful talk ceases, the sobs redouble.

It is short, but it is sharp. Soon after, Mr. Leber takes a stage, created in the bed of a truck, and speaks into a microphone, calling to order a celebration for the founding of New Alison.

As the sun sets, the dances begin in earnest.

The vehicles are arranged to make stands, and resources are doled out at no cost. The people exchange gifts and establish connections. The agrarians meet each other, a group of mostly men look to be sharing guns and motioning towards the open plain. A procession of people in the middle distance look to be returning from a scouting trip to the shoreline.

Lights are strung up, Queen-given generators run while making little sound. Mr. Leber, his assistant, Amity and a contingent of a few Queens make chatter in the shadows, bearing serious looks, before Leber breaks off and joins the festivities.

Speeches are given about people and places Alison knows nothing about, yet which still make her cry.

The Queens largely gather off to the side, more as observers than partiers, though they share a celebration of their own. They pour from a wagon holding casks sour drinks that Alison politely sips at but enjoys little. Much like her welcoming party, many eyes and voices are tilted her direction, though she appreciates the attention more this time than last. It feels earned. She gets more drunk on that than the drinks, and laughs and dances, sometimes with the people of New Alison, sometimes with the Queens. She gets taught card games and social games. She shares stories of her life and invites others to do the same. She connects with those life-savers — the Queens with strong drives and senses of personal responsibility.

By the end of the night, after the bands have stopped playing and the people have largely sorted out into the beds of trucks, tents, mobile homes, or even some in only sleeping bags beneath the stars — many of these things Alison is only seeing for the first time — Alison finds herself on the slope of a hill, seated, overlooking the beginning of the settlement. She smiles to herself, and then smiles wider, as she sees Bea and Cobra, with a little drunken sway to their steps, coming up the hill.

Alison raises a hand in greeting, and they raise one back, the moon bright this night, their faces blurry but recognizable.

"Hail, town saver!" Cobra calls out.

"Hail, portal opener!" Alison calls back. Cobra laughs, and they close the distance.

Bea and Cobra wear party garb, both having left at some point to dress up and come back. Alison never left, and so wears the more rugged, utilitarian outfit she put on to help everyone move in and get set up: brown overalls and a green plaid shirt, the latter a little big on her, both found in the Queens' personal stock.

"Hey me!" Bea asks, a little loud for the close quarters. Alison winces but chuckles. "How are you doing?"

"Good! Very good, in fact."

"I'm glad!" Bea gives a sour look before sitting directly on the grass in her nice emerald dress — though in this light, its color is missing. Cobra looks less upset to be dirtying her own dress pants. "This has been a really great time, actually!"

Cobra nods at that. "A really good break from routine. Nice to be appreciated, too — I get a little giddy every time we open a portal and the Alisonians jump."

For a second, Cobra looks properly venomous, her smile as thin as her eyes.

"Feeling powerful, big girl?" Bea asks.

"Yes."

"Well, good," Alison gives. "You should. This is exactly how power is supposed to be expended — you get to show it off, when it's for the good of everyone."

Cobra points at her and nods, smile parting to show teeth.

"I agree!"

"Thank you, Bea."

"This was a great — I mean great social event, I even saw Yuri, who I haven't seen in ages —"

"I think I danced with her."

"— and the Goths showed up, when they constantly are saying they're too busy for anything —"

"Were those the really tall ones?"

"Yes," Cobra clarifies, before Bea continues.

"— and Amity wasn't even the only A-name! Though of course Alison — by which I mean, Alison the first, little miss prime, she still neglected to show her face, because she never does, I swear she's practically a myth."

"We've talked."

"Well whoop-dee-doo for you, Cobes."

"We have regular meetings, us techies."

"Uh-huh."

"I'm really glad!" Alison interjects, sensing that the conversation is soon to stray far off-topic. "I hope we can put together things like this regularly. I mean, how quick was the turnaround on this? A month, less?"

"Less," Bea says.

"Kind of," Cobra clarifies. Bea rolls her eyes — or her whole head, more like.

"Well it happened fast. I've… never done anything this big and meaningful in my life, and it happened in a single month? That's… insanity to me."

"Welcome to insanity!" Bea cries.

Alison laughs. "I'm happy to be here!"

Cobra raises a bottle Alison hadn't noticed yet. "Cheers to that!"

"I'm good, thank you."

Cobra turns to face Bea, who raises a hand. "I'd love to, but I have to be done, I want to be alive tomorrow."

Cobra scoffs. "More for me, I guess."

"Don't tell me you're going to drink that whole thing. You're so small."

"I have ways."

"That's not exactly what I was wanting to hear."

"She's not that small," Alison comments, "is she?"

"Small for a Queen," Bea clarifies.

"No no, I think Alison's right."

Cobra pulls a plastic cup from a satchel she had put down, and begins to pour herself a drink. Alison reaches over to steady the bottle as Bea reaches over and steadies the cup. Cobra laughs, which jostles the arrangement and makes their efforts largely useless — she still spills plenty on the ground.

"Okay, okay, that's enough for you," Bea says. Alison takes that cue, and doesn't let go of the bottle, pulling it free of Cobra's grip, to her weak protest. The runt grunts, but says no more before taking her first swig, cutting the cup's contents by a third.

Alison's smile lingers, but in the pause her eyes drift down from the visage of the few remaining lights of New Alison, to the spot in the grass where Cobra's drink had spilled. Her smile softens, and her lids fall heavier over her eyes, as Cobra and Bea engage in an antagonistic back and forth.

She looks up again, this time at the ocean, glittering with moonlight like it used to glitter with the brown-yellow beams of the city of her home. She listens to its distant roaring, audible still, even as Cobra and Bea raise their voices. Soothing, familiar, even if its timbre is changed.

As she looks back at the settlement, her lips begin to move of their own accord, the paths between brain and mouth lubricated by the little alcohol still in her system.

"The only sad thing today is that I found this beautiful place, and I wanted to show people it, I wanted people to go there, but now that they're here, it will never be the same, because part of its beauty was that no one was here, and that was new and brilliant and…"

She loses the words, but Cobra and Bea have shut up, Bea letting go of Cobra's collar to pay attention.

"But now it's going to become another human place."

"You can visit another like it," Cobra offers.

Alison shakes her head. "It won't be the same."

"Yea —"

But Cobra interrupts Bea: "No I mean, just like it. The same place."

Alison cocks her eyebrows. "What do you mean?"

"I mean like, literally, we could sit on this hill, looking out at this place, but with no people around, that's what I mean."

"Cobra —"

"Show me."

Bea looks less than pleased as Cobra tries and fails to roll up her sleeves, then fiddling unsuccessfully with her cuff links until Alison reaches over and helps her get them undone.

"Thank you," she mumbles, as she pulls up her sleeve to reveal a bracelet-device. She fiddles with the interface for a moment, then leans down and speaks into it: "Could we, a portal to the nearest one please? Same place and everything, thanks."

"She's such a lightweight."

"Shut up, Bea."

A portal opens a few meters to Alison's left. She stands immediately, with Bea following shortly after, then helping Cobra to her feet. Cobra points to the bottle sitting in the grass: "You're not going to leave that here, are you?"

"Cobes you need to re-fucking-lax, it'll be here when we get back, come on."

Cobra allows herself to be led to the portal, but makes small noises of protest.

As they step through, the sequence of ego-death erases the drunkenness as well. As Alison pulls herself together on the other side, she decides to let go of that aspect altogether, as she's learned to be able to do. She arrives sober, a moment before the others, stepping down onto the grass with bare feet, her eyes adjusting to existing once again.

She looks over the field, listens to the ocean — and all their effort is erased. No more caravans, no more vehicles, no lights and no conversations. Clouds pass over the moon, just as bright as before, but they hide no shapes — no dancing figures. They highlight no spots of glowing orange where someone smokes. The wind carries on it no moans of sadness, nor distant frightful whispers, nor more distant still sobs of crying joy.

Alison stands still as a statue, as Bea's hand alights upon her shoulder.

"See? You can come here any time, any time you want," Cobra slurs.

"Where did it go? All of our progress?"

"It's still there, back, through the portal," Bea says. Alison can hear it in her voice that she's dropped the drunkenness too.

"Then… where are we?"

"The same place," Cobra says.

"But somewhere else," Bea specifies. "The same place, but as it would be, if we'd done nothing."

"And… if we did something here? Made a cabin, to overlook the sea —"

"There'd be another," Cobra says. "There's always another, it's beautiful it's so good."

"Cobra —"

"How does —"

Bea and Alison begin at the same time, but both stop to give the other space. Alison feels a hollowing in her chest as she considers something and changes the direction of her statement: "Does that mean… the world we saved those people from? Is there… another Alison? Another town?"

Alison finally looks back at those two, and sees Bea incline her head, looking at the ground. Cobra stares at Alison, and seems to have finally connected two dots.

"You didn't know?"

"Shut up, Cobes."

Alison looks at Bea. "You didn't tell me?"

"I wanted you to have your moment!" she declares. "You were happy to see New Alison, we did good work! Can't you be happy about that?"

Alison pauses. "Cobra."

"Yes?"

"Bring me to the other Alison."

"Alison —" Bea starts, but Cobra is already excessively shaking her head.

"There's no 'other Alison.'"

"Oh?"

"Sorry," Cobra clarifies, "I mean, there's not the one, there's, like, stupid many, way too many."

"Then there's no time to waste, we have to—!"

"Alison," Bea growls.

Alison shuts up. Bea takes a moment, and avoids eye contact.

"So fucking many."

"Cobra," she says in roughly the same voice.

"Sorry."

"It's… it's not that there's a lot, Alison. It's that there are infinite."

"Technically —"

Bea shoots Cobra a death glare that makes her take a step back and put up her hands.

Before continuing: "Not infinite."

"Cobra, do not speak again until you're sober, okay?"

"Okay."

"Infinite?" Alison asks.

"As in, unending. You could spend your entire life saving townships and you'd never run out, and you'd never run out of places to put them, and you'd still not save a fraction, not even one out of every thousand towns that are going to die in that atmospheric catastrophe. Not even one in a million. Name a number."

"A trillion?"

"Not even one in that."

Alison's heart beats heavy in her chest. She was already conceding, focusing on only one town in that world. She already felt bad saving only a fraction, there — this…

"So… everything we did, it was nothing?"

"Alison," Bea's tone is sweet, and she takes a step forward, but Alison steps back. Bea looks hurt at that, her reaching hand dropping to her side. "Were you for nothing?"

Alison considers.

"Was I?"

* * * * *

"This," Cobra motions to the diagram, "is the multiverse. Well, a simplified version, but a useful one. This is how we visualize our travel through dimensions, and how we demonstrate our place in space to new Queens learning our tech. The y-axis is time, the x-axis is number of dimensions."

"Worlds," Alison says.

"Yes. In essence."

The diagram takes up a large screen, and looks like an upside-down cone. Cobra zooms in on the bottom-most point, which is represented by a bright orange star.

"This is the big-bang. Or, the start of the multiverse. Heard of it?"

Alison shakes her head.

"It's essentially the beginning of everything. There may have been something before it, but due to its very nature, it's impossible to know. Think of it as the multiverse being born, and to us we don't really care about its mother."

"Cobra," Bea says. "K.I.S.S."

"Right, sorry. If I just say it's how everything started, is that good enough?"

"Sure," Alison says, voice low.

"And at this point there's one dimension. One world."

"Okay."

"So this," Cobra zooms in even further, to a point where one distinct line comes off of the star going straight up, until it splits into two lines at 45 degree angles, "is the smallest unit of time measurable. Inside it, the world has split in two."

"Why?"

"Because a choice was made. So like… when you get up in the morning, you ever sleep in, later than you would normally? But you're fighting to get up, you'd like to get up on time, right?"

"Sure, I can picture it."

"When you got up, that was a choice. So, let's say you could either get up on time, or sleep in. Whenever a choice happens, the world splits in two, one where you slept in," Cobra points to the left branch, "and one where you got up on time." Cobra points to the right one. "Following so far?"

"No but I think if you keep going it'll become clearer."

"Alright. So, in interdimensional sciences, of which the Queens are the pioneer, 'choices' aren't necessarily made by conscious things. A dust particle, for example, can be blown one way or another, and that's a choice, that's going to split the world in two. And you can imagine, that multiple choices can be made at once. Like, now that you've woken up, what breakfast are you having, cereal or leftovers?"

Cobra zooms out just a smidge, and points to the next branches, coming off of the first two.

"So over time, more and more splits happen."

"Exactly right," Cobra smiles lightly. "But it's happening every ruptosecond, which is a really annoying word referring to the amount of time it takes for a universe to split in two, or in other words for a choice to be made, which happens to be several magnitudes smaller than a Planck time, which is another really unsatisfying term to say that refers to what used to be thought of as the smallest useful measurement of time —"

"Cobra."

"I'm just saying, if Planck gets to name a measurement of time after himself, why aren't we calling it the chaosecond? But you're right, you're right," Cobra raises her hands, "that's neither here nor there. I'll get on with it."

"So, the number of worlds gets… exponentially larger, every ruptosecond?"

"Yes! Except even more than exponential. Every time a choice is made, the world gets more complicated, more choices are able to be made. So it's not just a clean 'every world splits in two' every ruptosecond, which would be basic exponential growth, but instead each choice can make a variable number of possible next choices, which means that it's —"

"Keep it simple. Stupid."

"Yeah. Just, even bigger. Think of it like, the exponent itself gets exponentially larger with every iteration. That's how big it is. Like, before the first second of the multiverse is up, we are left with an uncountably large number. Literally never been accurately calculated. We know a range it could be in but we don't know what it is. And that's why we operate under the assumption that the number of universes is infinite, or, endless."

"But it's not."

"Technically not."

"Which means… the world we saved them from, the New Alison we've made —"

"There are already a countless number of New Alisons."

"So if you think about it," Bea interjects, "you've essentially saved an infinite number of people, a number that will get bigger and bigger as the universe splits and splits."

"But we've left even more behind."

"To leave them behind implies that you could have taken them in the first place. Alison, you physically can't. You are one person."

"How… how come I am? How do we fit into this? Were there infinite parties? Are there other mes right now, who didn't get this rundown?"

Cobra smiles, a little nervously. "I don't think I could get into that while keeping it simple, stupid. Suffice it to say we interact in ways that keep us more singular than the average person."

"Which means, we're a bit more valuable," Bea states.

"More. Not truly. It's more like we're really good at keeping up an illusion that lets everything make sense and —"

Cobra pauses. Bea stares her down.

"I don't care," Alison says, a slight tremor in her voice. She clears her throat. "I've heard enough, I get it."

Cobra zooms out to take in a larger view of the lumpy cone that demonstrates the multiverse. Eventually, a thin line shows up orange against the dim monochrome of the rest of the display.

"This," Cobra points to it, "is roughly where we start to care. This line is the beginning of the universes where earth appears in a recognizable fashion."

She zooms in on the line until it has some volume, and suddenly the entire display is a mess of orange webbing, within which a scintillating midnight blue shows up.

"This is roughly the beginning of recognizably human life."

"I —" Alison pauses. "We weren't there from the beginning?"

"Ah, whoops. Yeah, no, we weren't."

"How were we… created, if not?"

"That's a whole other conversation. Can we for now just accept that humans come into being a bit after the universe does?"

"I… sure."

"So you can already tell, if I zoom back out…"

The blue line is lost nearly immediately, followed shortly thereafter by the orange line, until all that's visible is the gray depiction of the cone.

"You can't even see, from here, the section of the multiverse we care about. It is small. And yet it is still unimaginably larger than anything you could explore. And unimaginably more universes are getting made every, well, ruptosecond. You can't even visit universes faster than they get made."

Alison stares blankly at the diagram.

"Alison… are you alright?"

* * * * *

"Are they?"

Out of the window of the spacecraft, the earth's clouds turn a mottled green, and the rest of the atmosphere begins to follow.

"Well," Bea says, her voice small, "no."

"I don't see why I should be, then."

Alison's skin prickles with the cold air conditioning of the bridge, but she makes no motion to warm herself. On the darker half of the earth, bright flashes of light mark explosive conflict as the world's most frightened organism fights itself to not go extinct.

The clouds plume outward, and the seas join their tint.

The bridge is silent, but for the hum of electronics and the hiss of the vents. The death of the Alisonians is invisible from this far away. The earth's atmosphere becomes thick and misty, until nothing can be made out except the glows of cities. There are no screams, no grand gestures visible from this high up, this far away. Several more flashes of light mark sudden violence. The earth begins a long settling into a new configuration, one which has no more humans in it. The few survivors, as Alison has been informed, stand little chance of long-term survival, though they may pass some generations in bunkers and get to enjoy their creature comforts for a little longer.

Alison wonders idly what her own world looks like from this high up.

"This torture is pointless," Erma states from the far end of the room, behind and out-of-view of Alison, who neglects to respond.

Nothing changes across the earth's surface. It resembles an opaque, green, cloudy marble. The stillness of it frightens Alison more than anything. Her chest tightens, and her breath shudders before she regains control of it.

Her eyes search fruitlessly for some sign of life, but she gives up soon enough. "I'm sorry I could not be there for you," she says under her breath, too low to be heard. Her eyes linger. And then they drop, to the panel in front of her. She activates a pre-programmed sequence with a single held press of a button, and the ship's hum redoubles. A bright point of light appears beyond the window, and they drift forward towards it.

Reality dissolves and reconstitutes upon a familiar scene. Alison's eyes adjust, and the window beyond the cockpit shows another earth.

"I can't do this," Belle whispers, barely caught by Alison's ears. She hears a portal open, and assumes Erma and Belle's exit.

Silence.

"How long will you be here?"

Alison takes time before responding. "As long as it takes. To get it."

"There's nothing more to get," Bea says. "Please. Come back, take a well-deserved rest."

Alison shakes her head. At this scale, what is deserving? She feels she hasn't earned anything. The comforts she enjoys have been gifted to her by chance, by a connection she had no say in. Her personal power ballooned beyond anything she could ever have imagined, but the scale of her responsibilities ballooned by unimaginable magnitudes more. In the scheme of it all, she wonders if she has a responsibility at all. What is one human life in comparison to one-thousand human lives? In the scale of the multiverse, they might as well be the same — they are both so meaningless and small. Perhaps her only responsibility is to herself.

"It was a good thing to do," Bea soothes, voice soft. "Nothing here diminishes that."

The clouds turn a mottled green, and the rest of the atmosphere follows suit.

* * * * *

The crickets sing. The heavy blankets press Alison down into the bed, into the orange pillow with her head's imprint at its center. She stares into the swirling light of the cottage, blue and black at the edges with dancing phosphenes and floaters in her vision. Light leaks through the crack between the bed and the wall, as Bea reads a book below her. She simmers in frustration, blaming the light for her inability to sleep, but realistically doubts she could have drifted off anyways.

There's too much on her mind, and it all lacks nutrition. Calories are spent whirring over the same details over and over — replaying images, reconsidering thoughts. Cycles and cycles, her brain is congested with thoughts of New Alison and the Alison of old. Ruminating. Nothing seems to help, and everything seems to be tinted that cloudy, misting green, more horrible for her own power to stop it and her incapacity to wield that power. She used to be able to discard her worries for those current sufferings of mankind, when she felt she had made a meaningful impact against them. Now, there are no more meaningful impacts. What could she do to earn that peace of mind?

"Bea," she starts, a tired croak in her voice.

There's a pause, as Bea finishes a paragraph, then puts down the book. "Yes?"

Leaves rustle in the wind outside. The cottage creaks gently.

"Yes?" Bea repeats.

"Where did you come from?"

Bea sighs, and it joins the sounds of wind rushing through the canyon. Alison hears a thud as Bea places her heavy book, with bookmark inside, on her bedside table. Bea shuffles in bed for a moment.

"Vaieli saved me. I don't think you two have properly met, but she was at your welcoming party." Bea speaks slowly and deliberately, as if the words are fragile and require more care to say aloud. "I lived in a world like where the Alisonians are from. Urbanized, cities. I lived in a suburb, like, outskirts of the city, where all the little houses are."

There's a pause. "What was happening there?"

"A lot of things, I guess. Wars, food shortages, climate catastrophes. A lot of death, but, much larger population than your world, still with its wilderness, breathable air in most places. I dunno. It felt hellish, but, I guess it's all a matter of perspective, because most Queens here have had it a lot worse than me. My world actually resembles the original Black Queen's world, or so I've been told. So I guess what I'm saying is, I come from somewhere normal. There aren't a lot of utopias, and I certainly didn't live in one."

"Normal," Alison tries the word on. "So you were racked with war, short on food?"

"Not my family. No. We were doing okay. Not great, but okay. Warfronts far away. We made enough money, we were fine."

"Oh."

The air smells of pine and cedar, the logs sitting by the fireplace.

"I thought not having family was one of the constants," Alison says with a questioning tone, when Bea doesn't resume speaking.

"They weren't really family. After everything… not really. Family's supposed to support you. That's what the constant is, really. That we're all alone, at heart."

"Oh."

There's a pause, but Alison doesn't fill it.

"My dad, he uh. He came down hard. Illness, really early, really young. His muscles deteriorated pretty fast, needed help to get out of bed. Mom, she left. She didn't want him like that, she wouldn't be around him, so she pulled all her support, acted like he never existed. That ruined him more than the illness — it's like it accelerated it. Things he could do on his own, he needed help with all of a sudden. Eating. Had trouble talking. And he didn't have any other family. I was in college — school, like, you keep going to school to get a better job."

"I know."

"Right. Well, I pulled out, to be a caretaker for my dad. I got a job I hated to be at home and support him financially. It took way too long for the government to offer any aid, and then they offered way too little. Me helping my dad alienated me from my mom. I lost friendships because I was so busy. I couldn't maintain relationships. I lost my scholarships — aid in going to college. I reset my life back to square one for my dad. And then he died."

"Oh."

"And all that time he spent before he did was all pain. It was four years of pain and suffering. And I got numb to it, day in and day out, he couldn't do anything he liked to do anymore. And when he tried I had to stop him, until he was so stiff and dependent he couldn't even try. And that just made him cry and made him resent me, for stopping him from hurting himself, like, 'no, dad, you can't carry anything that heavy, you'll drop it, no, dad, you can't fix the plumbing, dad, where'd you get that black eye, that's 'cause you fell because you tried to go down the stairs didn't you,' and I started to see him as this big child, and I had to be the adult, and if I left him alone he'd hurt himself. And he stopped liking me, started comparing me to my mom. And it was just that, for four years, dropping everything for someone who didn't even like me, and then he died, and, like, I was just… hollowed."

"Oh. I'm really sorry you went through that."

"It's okay. I never really hit the ground again after that. I spent a few years just wondering if I even should have done it. Did I really save him any pain and suffering? Maybe he should have just been left to his own devices. Maybe if he got stuck in the car trying to fix it, breathing in whatever chemicals are in there, he'd at least have died doing what he actually wanted to be doing, instead of in a bed next to his cold daughter, mad at the world and cussing me out, throwing fits when I gave him food because that's the only way he gets to exercise control over his life anymore. I think I should have left him to die. That's… that's really how I feel."

There's a long pause as Alison lets Bea breathe, perhaps compose herself to speak anymore. When she doesn't: "I'm sorry."

"It's okay, really. Vaieli found me. I had no idea how to get out of… of my life, honestly. But I needed to. So she came and got me, and I got my escape. I came here, became a Queen, and it was like I could finally breathe. Releasing all that responsibility, not… not having to give my all for nothing, day in and day out. Access to… all this! All this world, and life, and like, just… stuff. I dunno. I'm not even the same person anymore, I'm free, it's… it makes me cry if I think about it. I needed that."

"That's great."

"Isn't it? Isn't it all?"

Alison smiles into her pillow, hearing the joy reenter Bea's voice.

"I love that you found that."

"It found me, more like. Vaieli and I, we really connected. I don't want to speak her life for her, you know, but, we connected, about giving everything for nothing in return. It's… it's noble, but, if you never get anything back, you stop being… I dunno. A person? You cease to have anything to give. I stopped having anything to give, for my dad. He was an asshole but he deserved someone who cared, and I stopped caring. I was rough with him, I was unkind with him. It felt like the only thing he'd listen to, but I wasn't gritting my teeth when I did it, I was just… doing what needed to be done, to get through the motions, so we could both stop this awful experience. I mean Jesus Christ I had to wipe his ass. It would have been nice if I cared. So… so Vaieli, she saw herself in me, and came to my rescue."

"I'm glad."

"Yeah."

"Bea?"

"Yeah?"

"Do you see yourself in me? Do you think of me… as you?"

Bea thinks over her response. "Yes. I do. You're your own, of course, but yes, I do, in part."

"Which part?"

"Hmm?"

"Which part of me do you think of as you?"

Bea takes a deep breath. "The endlessly giving part. The thankless toil, the dead end."

"But you wanted to get away from the endless giving."

"I — yes."

Alison breathes, warm in her sheets, staring into the darkness of the cottage, listening to the wind and crickets and frogs.

"I think I'm going to go to sleep. Thank you for sharing your story."

"Of course. Goodnight, Alison."

"Goodnight, Bea."

It doesn't take her long to fall asleep.

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