Brooksville

A boy, who should have been in school, walks through a mist thick enough to hide the houses he knows he is walking past. He looks down at his feet and can barely see them. It is the knowing they are there, the knowing there is more than that which he can see, that makes him believe in things that most people can't believe. He knows that school is behind him, but also that behind him is where it should stay. He knows there must be other places out there that may suit him better. He knows many things, but these things are not what interest him the most. He is driven by the fact that there are far more things in the world that he doesn't know. Even this, however, is not precisely what drives him. What this boy searches for every minute of wakefulness, and even while he sleeps, are those things that not a single living person has yet discovered. This boy yearns to be the first. So he walks, one step after another, away from that which he knows and into that which he does not.

As each step carries him further along his path he wonders at things that not many people wonder. He thinks that maybe there is a place where the clouds part after a rain and it is not a blue sky that hides behind them. Maybe that sky would be a different color, or maybe there would be no sky at all but simply another world so close that, if you jumped high enough, you could grab on to one of it's trees and climb down it to a place that no one has ever been to before. Or what if there are secret passageways in this real world that he walks in to the worlds of which he is constantly dreaming? Maybe his dreams are a set of windows looking out at places to which all he has to do is find the doors. These doors could be all around him. They could be at the bottom of a hill just behind an old bush. They might be at the back of a cave yet hidden for hundreds of years by a pile of rocks. He wonders if these doors could be even more magical than that. They might be found simply by walking through a forest and stepping through the right pair of trees, but only if you step through the right direction. There could be fairies guarding these gates that will only let you through if you bring the right gift, or dance the right jig. The possibilities seem endless. Ideas like this, which have been called "rediculous" by many and "a fanciful waste of time" by the teacher who's class the boy just walked out of, are what keep him excited and sharp with the anticipation of the next possibility.

He has grown fed up with all the naysayers. He is tired of being told that everything he loves is fake, made-up, or unproductive. This may be true for them, but for the boy it is a reality that's just a little harder to see. He does not wish to have an ordinary job like electrician, or banker or salesman. He dreams being a blacksmith for knights, sailing on a galley to far away lands, and riding a horse down an old dirt road in a land where there is no such thing as a faster way. He wishes to learn how to fight with a sword and to shoot a bow. He will find a magician who lives deep in the woods and learn his trade. These are the stuff of his dreams. He believes them to be real. He believes he can find them. He knows that his soul is the type that will not quit its search until these things he has found. This world is no place for him. This is a boy who will search out a new world.

It has been hours since he started walking. He walked out of town long ago and immediately left the road. He is tired of things that he recognizes. It is still just as foggy as it was when he started walking. When he first left the road he was walking through a farmer's fields plowed in preparation for the planting season. After that it was a great plain of wild grass and mesquite. These things he also knew. After that he walked into a forest which seemed young. The biggest trees had trunks less than a foot in diameter and there were many seedlings fighting to reach the sun. The forest floor was covered with smaller plants. It was at this point that the fog began to lift. He could see that just a mile or so ahead the forest began to change. It was a place he did not recognize and that he did not remember from geography class. The trees were larger, they let very little light reach the floor which was covered only in leaves, and it was old. He did not know enough to know that there should not even be a young forest in this place, but he did know that a forest this old had not existed here for hundreds of years, if ever. He knew that it was the type of place where a boy his age should never go alone. He didn't care. There was nothing for him where he had come from and he didn't have anywhere else to go. His pace never even slowed and into that dark forest he walked until his shadow mingled with all the others and there was nothing left to see but an old silent forest.

A few days later the police got a missing child report from a local children's shelter about a kid who hadn't been seen for awhile. No one at the shelter knew how long he had been gone. It was a place notorious for not noticing when children went missing but this particular child was notorious for running away. They said that he usually came back on his own after a few days when he got too hungry to miss any more meals. This time he hadn't. The manager on duty was written up for not reporting the absent child earlier. The teacher told police that the child frequently walked out of class. She said that sometimes the child went to the library but more often went back to the shelter. She knew of no other place where he spent time. They found that the librarian hadn't seen him since the boy checked out an old fantasy book a few weeks ago. The librarian was expecting to see the boy soon because the book was a few days late and the child did not have a history of keeping them out past the due date. The police made a few halfhearted attempts to find out more about the child but after coming up with almost nothing they simply moved on to bigger problems. The truth was that children from these shelters ran away all the time. Sometimes they came back and sometimes they ended up in shelters somewhere else. This just seemed to be one of those children that no one cared about. He was quickly forgotten.

A few days later a farmer called in and reported seeing a set of child's footprints across one of his fields while planting his cotton. The report stated that the footprints left the road and crossed the field into a plain of grass that stretched for fifty miles before coming to other fields or small towns. The police called these towns and a few other farmers to ask if they had seen a small child they didn't recognized. None had. The report was written off as false when the detective assigned to the case found that the farmer called in at least a few times a month to report things such as gnomes raiding his garden, a coven of witches holding bonfires on his property once every third full moon, a tabby cat that regularly called him foul names, and more recently an old growth forest that appeared on the edge of his property only on foggy days. The detective quickly found that the farmer was the butt of most jokes that went around the station and that he was concidered by the whole town to be completely crazy. No one had ever backed up or found any proof to support the farmer's claims. The detective filed the case away and never thought about it again. The farmer never called in another report. Neither farmer nor child was ever heard from again. After a few years, when the plain of grass had taken over the plowed field, no on in town even remembered that there had been a farm there. Times were hard and there were only a few townsfolk left who hadn't passed on or moved to a bigger city. The police station closed down, the school was boarded up, and the only residents of either were mice who, with the help of water damage, quickly destroyed all records left behind.

The town no longer even exists in memory. Every now and then a car, lost due to a wrong turn, will drive down the dirt road that used to run through it and the passengers will look out at the tumble-down buildings and houses imagining that they see movement deep in the shadows past the broken glass. At the edge of the town they'll see an old wooden sign, almost unreadable, that says "Thanks for visiting Brooksville! Come back soon!". They'll have a laugh, the kids in the back will tell a few ghost stories, and eventually they'll find the Interstate again and be back on their way. After a few hours they'll all forget too. Places like this are easily forgotten.

This is where the story begins.