Review: When are we?
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 01 16, 2012
In Theresa Weir's short story "The Pale Boy" a girl working in a cafe takes a business card from a boy and finds herself on a boat going toward an island from which she's heard that two people have not returned.  It is quite a strange story, and so I read the description again because the story made no sense to me.  The description has "time shift" and "alternate universe" mentioned.  These two things reminded me of the television series, "Lost" where there were time shifts, but the people weren't actually going back and forth in time, their minds were doing the shifting in time, thus the question was not, "Where are we?" but "When are we?"It's the only explanation that I can come up with that even vaguely explains what happens to the girl in the story.  As far as a dreamscape and an alternate universe, what appeared to be an alternate universe may have been what she experienced once she was on the island, but in reality she was still in the cafe working, as usual.  Somehow, the pale boy and the business cards, in my interpretation, were responsible for the girl's time shift in her mind.  No clue why.It's a very well-written story but a hard one to figure out.  I agree with a few other reviewers that it takes more than one reading to gather the information in the story to think about it.