The Wish Belly Part XX
June 1, 2023
Shane Kimberlin
The Wish Belly is an original fiction serial. If you missed prior installments, you can catch up with the links at the end of this article.
“If you use it too much, you’ll lose it, but if you don’t use it at all, you’ve lost it all the same.”
“How many guesses do we get?” I asked Fitto.
“None,” he replied, “because they’re infinite. if you could keep guessing, then it’s just a matter of pure endurance, which is a different category of being altogether. I used to, honest truth, keep people to the Three-Strikes-N’-Yer-Out-Rule, but after a hundred years and not one person guessing even remotely correctly, you get more lenient. So you can guess, as long as ya want, forever and ever.”
I have never liked riddles. “Voice,” said Leo. “What’s that?” said Fitto. “The answer is ‘voice.’”
Fritto rocked his chair back and forth in a great violent motion.
“What? How did you...? That is...right.”
Leo shrugged.
“Wow. You’re the first. Okay, then, what’s done is done. The game’s been won. Yes, your price is you can walk through, yes, yes, I reckon, a thousand times over. So hasta menana, monsieur (it’s the only word I know for sure), I’ll see you on the other side.”
We stood there at the end of the hallway. Nothing moved, no door opened.
“Well, aren’t you gonna go, pardner?”
“Just waiting,” smiled Leo, “for you to open the door.”
“No. You just walk through.”
“What?”
Fitto rocked his chair harder back and forth.
“Just walk on through. You see a wall and you think you can’t go through it, and nine trillion times out of nine trillion and one that is, yessir, true. But that one time you can, and right now is that time.”
I put my hand on the wall. Its surface was too warm. I recoiled.
Fitto laughed.
“Just push on through. It’s not a normal wall right now. Or ever.”
“What will you do here?” said Leo.
“I’ll get by,” shrugged Fitto, “Say, when you go through the wall, be careful with your thoughts. You need to get where you’re going and that requires the proper kind of focus.”
“Okay. Take care.”
“Thanks guys,” said Fitto, “I know we didn’t spend that much time together, but this has been one of the most meaningful conversations I’ve had this millenia.”
“Are you crying?” said Leo.
“I can’t. I’m a drawing. But if I wasn’t art, I’d make some with my tears. Now git, ya’ hear, git.”
I placed my hand on the wall and pushed in. My palm and fingers disappeared slightly.
“I feel like a ghost.”
“Don’t we all,” said Fitto, “but a running start helps.”
I backed up ten feet and Leo jumped into my arms.
“This way we won’t get lost,” said Leo.
I nodded.
“See ya later,” I said to Fitto.
“Good luck,” he said, “with wherever you’re going, however that may be. And above all,” said Fitto, “if you end up somewhere you don’t wanna be, just keep running.”
I took a deep breath and held it into my lungs. I pushed off. I was running straight into a wall.
My eyes closed. Closer and closer and gone.
“Hey.”
Darkness covered the face deeply and I couldn’t see anything. Blank. Grey. An exhausting amount of nothing.
“Hey.”
“Listen,” she said, “if anything happens...”
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” she said, “but you’re in danger.”
“I know I’m in danger.”
No,” she said, “it’s worse than you can see.” “I can’t see anything right now.”
“The closer you are...” “Am I close?”
“...the greater the chance...”
“I must be close.”
“...of the end of all things.”
I woke up on my face. My nose itched from the reeking sulfur.
Sulfur?
“We have problem,” said Leo.
Loud noises abounded. The sound of metal and industry, gears moving, and a terrible howling wind. I picked myself up.
We stood on a circular metal floor that measured three hundred feet across on all sides with no fence. Around and above us on all sides were a thousand stars barely shining on a hazy cover of orange and yellow sky. We stood on the edge. Behind me was a wall the shape of a door, eight feet high, gray, and completely smooth. Across us stood another wall in the same shape and hue.
I looked over the edge to find there was no bottom, no earth below, just the tower’s exterior edge that descended hundreds of feet down into the mist.
“Look at this,” said Leo. In the middle of the metal floor was a circle etched into the floor. Inside the floor were lines that went every which way of different sizes. On the side, in a rectangular box, were symbols of a tree, a house, a train, a clock, and a ship.
“Are those ... .subway lines?”
“Yes,” said Leo, “and these symbols. They are all in this box.”
“The tree.”
And then a scream scuttered through the sky.
“We should go,” I said.
We walked across the metal floor, across the hieroglyphic map. I looked down again. Some of the lines ended with the heads of snakes and others as sunflowers.
“Where do we go?”
I nodded towards the other blank board.
“Through the wall,” I said, “the other wall is where we came. So, we have to jump through it.”
“Or get hit by board. Fall off side.”
“It makes sense here.”
“We can go back,” said Leo.
“No, we have to keep going.”
“But where will we go? To a place worse than here?”
I stared at the smooth rectangle, the door with no knob or hinges. It stood against the infinite burning sky.
“It’s a map,” said Leo.
The scream echoed out again, this time closer. A black object flicked in the corner of my eye.
I took out my phone. “What are you doing?” said Leo.
“Taking a photo.”
Leo nodded. I put my phone back in my pocket. And then I saw it. From the tower’s edge, and on my right side, a giant head stared at us. of a creature that looked like a snake. Its skin reflected back the tower, Leo, me, everything like a high-end mirror. Its bright eyes, the color of burning brick, stared at us, encased by clock cogs rotating clockwise.
Nothing was said and nothing was done. If I didn’t move, then maybe it wouldn’t move back. Paralyzation. Rabbit staring at the wolf. When you neither fight nor flight, the veins tense up and your bones ossify.
“What do we do?” said Leo, finally.
The serpent breathed in low combustive bursts. Its head eased backwards.
“I need you,” I said, “to jump into-”
Leo hopped into my arms. I ran.
“I was going to say,” I yelled as I stumbled forward, “‘on the count of three.”
Flame shot out of the creature’s mouth and I felt the heat on my back as I ran ran ran from the flame following heat increasing into the solid piece of wall.
Wish Belly Installments: