by Molly Malone

Created on: April 23, 2010

Losing your mind isn't that bad.  No, not really that bad.

He looked into the hole again.  That thing is deep.  "Hellooooo!"  The word seemed to be swallowed and choked away by the very immensity of the space into which he threw it.  

"Why did we have to come here?"  Tyler sat against a rock a few yards back, holding the toes of his boots and rocking back and forth.  "We're gonna die, Jesse, we're gonna die!"

"Idiot."  Jesse plucked a rock from the very edge of the hole and threw it at the cowering stranger.  What's he calling me "jesse" for?  That my name?  

"Come away from the edge!  You'll fall!"

"Does it matter?'  He leaned a little further, the very blackness of that space was intoxicating.  He felt that giddy smile spreading over his face, like the first time he got sloshed at the age of sixteen.

"You'll just keep falling forever."  He looked aside to see a pair of hiking boots beside his hands.  Lifting his gaze upward, he followed a pair of dusty blue jeans to an untucked white t-shirt and a dingy hoodie - unzipped.  Above that was a head with a queer smile plastered on the front of it.  

"Really?"  This close to the edge, he wasn't surprised to find people appearing out of thin air.  Somewhere behind them Tyler moaned.

"Don't do it yet."  

The world tipped.  He tottered for just a moment on the brink.  Then he stumbled backwards against the rock that was really the guardrail of the bridge.  A car passed on the road behind him.  Shaking his head, he stumbled back to safe ground, rubbed his eyes, and began staggering toward home.

-

"Jesse!  Where have you been!"  He grabbed his friend's shoulders with the grip of a man just past sanity.  "You ran off like that..."  Tyler shook his head, blinking rapidly to clear terrifying images from his mind's eye.

"I was at the end of the world."  Jesse looked vaguely over Tyler's shoulder at the man who seemed to stand there, that queer smile moving up and down in a nod.  "But I came back."

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