“This isn’t right, either.”
The Editor stands over me, dozens of books piled between us. This represents a few boxes’ worth of her collection of ‘Shitholes,’ which supposedly includes a single copy of every edition. The books arrived by mail on the same day, each in its own padded envelope. It’s standard practice, she told me, for her company to send her a published copy of a book she’s edited. Usually just the one, though. The Editor believes she stands at the nucleus of a supposed multiverse.
We all want to be special.
“What’s not right?” I ask.
“The chronology,” she says, “I think we’ve cut out as many good endings as bad ones.”
Alice’s pick breaks between my teeth, the shattered middle soft as a paintbrush against my palate.
“I thought…”
“I know,” she says, “I thought I had it too. There’s just too many to keep them straight and every time I read one I think I remember why I put it in that particular order and… Why are you looking at me like that?”
“You’re still trying to kill me,” I say.
“What?”
“You’re still trying to kill me,” I tell her.
And the second time I say it, I know it’s true.
‘Save for those that wind through the larger, carefully-tamed National and State Parks, most beloved trailheads are crowned with what appears to be a low tangle of rusted barb wire, as though the way were once forbidden but time and negligence have thrown open the doors. The wire reappears often, in twisted piles at the bottom of unexplained pits and in creaking strands, half-absorbed by the cancerous bark of old trees. This is ‘the Devil’s Grapevine,’ an American weed so widely spread as to be subtle, but as mischievous as poison ivy.
The great North American network of ‘Devil’s Grapevine’ maintains a core in western Alabama, a well, of sorts, from which all its tendrils spring. Wind passing over the well greets the human ear like whispered intimacies. Some would have you believe these are rumors, snagged from the skin of clumsy hikers. To visit the core is to submit yourself to the shallowest concerns of all who have felt the sting of its thorns, twisted, as they are, by the paths that brought them there.’
“Don’t be an idiot!” the Editor shouts, “It’s just the wind.”
She throws a copy of Shitholes at my head, its pages exploding across the field. The spine snaps down on the bridge of my nose and by the time my eyes regain focus I realize she’s right.
“Sorry,” I say between my fingers, “But you were trying to kill me.”
“You should hear what it’s been saying about you,” she says, sneering from behind a hardcover.
“I said sorry.”
“A fifty-fifty reduction isn’t that bad,” she reasons, “It means we haven’t done any harm, and we’ve narrowed the future choices down a bit…”
“But…”
“But,” she admits, “The majority of the remaining good timelines, the ones where you live, they all take you back through the ‘City of Strangers.’”
“What? Why would I go back there?”
“It’s different now,” she says, “The city is moving. It’s like a… barricade. And it’s standing between us and the end of this book.”
-traveler
