The Town With No Name That Once Had One

Eleanor stepped down from the steps of the drab, gray bus, breathing in with a sigh as the acrid smell of exhaust faded from her nose and mouth. Rows and rows of faded white houses stretched out for what seemed to be forever under an unrelentingly gray sky as she took in what was soon to be her new life.

She checked the address slip again. Number four hundred and twenty three. Somewhere along this street was something she might one day call a home. It was a home that she had imagined to be a haven, a sanctuary from the troubles that had plagued her for longer than she could remember. Now that she was here, however, this place looked more like a prison than anything else, the dreary picket fences stretching on like the bars on hundreds of clean, white cells.

This is what she wanted, wasn’t it? She was free now. This was her reward. One of these houses would keep her inside, giving safety and comfort until her dying days. She could sit on the porch, sipping tea and staring for hours at the endless void of concrete and grass. She would sit there, day after day, year after year, with nothing to trouble her and nothing to put her in danger. The house itself would cradle her, keeping her functioning on that porch until one day laying her down into a slow, passive death. Her last breath would be drawn out of her without a single other soul around, pulled out of her body and becoming a part of the eternal curtain of light gray clouds above her.

A panicked rejection of her surroundings entered her mind, but then slid off the gray blanket of clouds that had taken hold of her head, numbing her thoughts to a dull whisper. She scanned her eyes back and forth, trying to gain her bearings and take in her surroundings, but the endless empty houses lulled her into a hypnotic trance. It occurred to her that perhaps there ought to be other people living here, that surly an endless neighborhood like this ought to exist for a reason. Logic, however, was not something she was in the mood for. That would require thinking, and she didn’t feel like doing that right now. In fact, she didn’t feel like doing much of anything.

Her eyes lazily checked the numbers, eventually landing on the number four hundred and twenty three. That was the house that she would belong to. Not that it really seemed to matter. All of the houses were the same anyway.

She tried lifting a foot to make her way over, but it just didn’t seem to want to move. She tried again, putting a little more effort into it this time, and the foot moved forward just a bit. Honestly, she had to agree with her foot: moving forward just seemed more trouble than it was worth right now. She had already been through so much, after all. Surly she deserved a little rest. Just a small, short, never-ending rest.

Her body sat down in the middle of the road. She wasn’t sure how she got on the ground, but she was there now. It was more comfortable than standing anyway. She liked it here. She’d always liked it here. Nothing ever had to change. She never had to do anything. She’d never have to go anywhere, not ever again. Why would she bother?

Her body went limp. That’s not what she wanted to do. She hadn’t told it to do that, it just sort of… happened. She was lying on the cold, hard street now, staring up into the sky of gently frothing gray. The sky seemed to stretch on forever. That was probably because it did. A never-ending gray sky to compliment the never-ending gray street. It seemed fitting, in a way. She stared up, searching the featureless clouds for… something. She wasn’t sure what, and she didn’t really care. The gray of the clouds began to seep into her, turning her senses and her mind into the same dull gray.

Every now and then she’d spot something. A shape, it looked like a face, breaking through the clouds to reveal itself to her for a moment, then disappearing back into featureless gray. “What was that shape?” she wondered. It’s funny, the faces in the clouds had been the first faces she’d seen here so far. Well, not really funny—just interesting. Well, not really interesting either. Just sort of a thing that existed. Just like her. She was also just a thing that existed. She would go on existing for years and decades, stretching on until finally she died and turned to dust, becoming just another face in the clouds. Then again, hadn’t she been here for years already?

No, wait. That couldn’t be right. She’d just gotten off the bus. She’d just been on her way to the house. The house that she would belong to, in the neighborhood that she would belong to, in the city that she would belong to, in the world that she would belong to. She raised a hand, all of the scant energy she could muster lifting it up. Her arm had changed; what was already a bit on the scrawny side had now atrophied to the point of being unrecognizable. Her eyes widened, cracking slightly as they did so from the dust and dirt caked around them. The clouds had darkened, threatening to consume her in their gaping maw, enticing her into the dreamless sleep of death.

She sat up suddenly, more suddenly than she could remember ever doing, and looked down at herself. With a shaking hand she slowly lifted her shirt to reveal a sickly stomach, sunken in and emaciated. She ran her fingers—now bony and dry—along her chest, feeling each individual rib as they wearily jutted out from the dry skin draped over them. The body she saw disgusted her. Was it even right to call it hers? This alien form, gangly and thin, was nothing like what she remembered existing in. If this was how her body looked, then what happened to her mind? She was still the same person, right? How long had it been? How long…

A thought began to take hold in her head. The thought had always been there, hadn’t it? She’d ignored it for so long that she had mostly forgotten, but it really had been there all along. She’d just never really understood it until now. She hadn’t had the capacity to imagine the scope of what it had meant, but now—now she understood. With creeping horror, she realized the situation that she’d willfully lost herself to. The truth of this place.

That this place would never let her leave.