There was a white gate at the back of their yard separating the Manor from the forest that sat darkened and unknown behind the twelve feet of thick white lawn poles. He had always wondered if he could open the locked gate into darkening woods, described as ominous by those who kept it locked but never seemed so ominous to him, take off at stride into the trees letting his fingers brush every piece of bark and every pine needle that stuck out at his hands. But they never opened it. They were nothing more than a part of that gate they so firmly kept locked. They were a part of the thing he dreaded as he became a part of the gated world that only had a one path in mind for itself and its next generation. He decided to play along to walk along the side of the gate he had to be on, agree to agree with them till they turned away long enough for him to climb over and run in flight toward the dark trees. Letting himself go father and father into the unknown, ignoring their screams for him to come back. To rejoin them, to join them on the side that he belonged, where he knew he didn’t belong there. But he stayed where he knew they would want him to, and lived the lie he knew they wanted him to live.





He was getting sicker. It wasn’t just the headaches anymore, that burned the edges of his skull blocking every sensation other than pain, it was something else. Yesterday as he was watching Kendra play on the floor with her little poppets and dolls, his stomach suddenly twisted and flopped which sent him running to the bathroom. He wretched up burning black, smoldering puke into the toilet. He sat on the floor, sweating and whipping his mouth trying to figure out the unnatural shade of upheaval in the toilet. Finally after shakily standing, he went back to his blonde-haired, blue-eyed daughter who had not moved from her spot on the carpeted floor.No event planned for the afternoon had been possible after that sudden sickness. He was not even able to complete his usual wanderings down along the gate with Kendra teetering behind him. He attempted his own nap after she finally dozed off in her white crib, but he lay untouched by sleep, staring up at an empty ceiling.


Sicker, he was sicker now. A week after the toilet incident, he had to call the perky teenage girl who lived across the street to watch Kendra as he watched pile after pile of blackened liquid fall from his mouth into the now darkly stained toilet. Ever single drop that slide from his mouth and into the bowl seemed simple and still at first. But as it hit the clear water and the white edge, it spattered, suddenly chaotic, smearing and smashing against the pure water turning it blacker than the night sky with only little white flecks gleaming through. Every time he thought he was finished he would stand up, stiff from being curled on the floor for such a long period of time, and flush away the tainted water, watch as the bowl became clean and pure again, began to wash his hands, and then with another ripping twist in his stomach, restart the process all over again.



Indi came home and took Kendra from the exhausted girl’s arms, paying her double for coming on such short notice. She went upstairs to find out exactly why her husband had called a babysitter instead of watching Kendra himself. She found him sprawled out on the bedroom floor, the bathroom door slightly ajar in case sickness again struck him.



She poked him in the side, Kendra balanced on her hip. He opened his eyes and explained the babysitter and his stomach sickness, but he didn’t specify the shade of his vomit, for he knew it would just worry her. Indi asked what he thought made him sick. After a seconds pause he answered.


“Everything.”


She coyly offered him soup, he accepted even though he didn’t want it, knowing it would just make him sick again. Placing Kendra on the floor, she helped him into bed. He lay half dazed as Indi bent down and picked Kendra up. Something caught his eye. He pointed, one weak finger at the white diaper his daughter donned, making a soft moaning noise to alert his wife of his bewilderment. She frowned as she looked down at the black splotch, at which he pointed, that stained Kendra’s white diaper. Indi shook her head. Just grape juice. She chuckled at the horrified look on his face and left the room.
The soup he had unwilling choked down to please Indi, had come back up a few hours later in the secluded bathroom away from her watchful eye. It didn’t matter though, because the soup wouldn’t make him better. The sleep that he had been trying to force on himself in these past weeks wouldn’t make him better. Realization had dug its teeth into his eyelid keeping his insomnia alive. Indi lay soundly asleep next to him, with Kendra passed out in her crib in the room next door. But here he lay. Feeling sick. Feeling awake. Feeling….alive. He was always going to be sick, not just little bouts of coughing, but the black charcoal that he had been flushing, almost every day. This wasn’t just something that could be chased away with pills and physical rest. It was something deeper than that.



He turned away from the Indi to look out the window into the sullen grey light that placidly stretched through the glass almost touching the edge of his covered feet. The tops of the trees seemed to glow in the moonlight, creating a company of shadow dancers on the carpet. How enticing the trees looked, the light, the supposed blackness outside. He stepped out of bed, placing his feet in the liquid moonlight showcased in his bed room. It seemed to lead him out the door, past Kendra’s room, past the bathroom, down the stairs to the backdoor. In the room that was usually pitch black, he was able to see the details of the window sill through the grey moonlight.


On that frozen night, he stepped bare foot into the silver grass. How different it was outside without a window pane in-between him and the night air. He didn’t bother shutting the door, he walked forward, breathing in the light and smells, and stillness of a world he‘d thought had been forgotten. He didn’t want to walk along the gate that separated him from the hidden quiet of the trees, anymore. Instead of slowly wandering parallel to it as he had done before, he moved towards it, his arms outstretched to touch the white poles that help the iron railings in place. They were freezing; they stun his hands as he grabbed them and heaved himself up. The gate was not hard to scale. Foot here, foot there, hand here, hand there. He pulled himself up the twelve foot gate, till he was on the top. The height should have made him sick, should have made him vomit….but it didn’t. He was suddenly feeling not so sick anymore. As the silver moonlight washed over him, he dropped down, his bare feet lightly hitting the grass of the other side. The underside of a superficial world.



Walking through the trees, checker boarded with pieces of white moonlight, he brushed his fingertips along the edges of leaves, and came to stop in a little glimmering clearing. He heard nothing here, all he saw was the shaded trees that made him his own barrier between him and the gate. Back through the darkness behind him, he knew the gate was still there, if he turned around he would be able to see it. No. he didn’t want to know it was there. He didn’t want to know about its existence. He was going to go further; he was going to get as far away from everything as possible. He was going to get where he was not able to see the gate or know what was behind it. Because what was behind didn’t matter anymore. They had fallen too far for him to follow. If he went back he would always be outside their perfect bubble looking in. He would always be sick with the black sludge that had infected him before he decided to leave. He would never go back. He would disappear forever, and never let anyone find him.



A young girl walked along the gate, trying not to look at it. The dirt road ahead of her would slowly become a dead end and she would have to turn around and go back home. Whenever she looked up all she saw were the posters stuck to the telephone poles, and occasionally on the ground, stained with dirt and oil. She reached the end of the road and slowly turned around and began to walk back the other direction. She could feel the slight pull of the trees behind the gate. A pull she always felt since she was little. But she wasn’t like him. The one showcased, smiling, on the dirty posters no one had bothered to take down. She wasn’t reckless, or thoughtless, or…….brave. She would reluctantly stay on her side because of her fear. Her entire life she would stay where she was supposed to, always wondering never acting, always dreaming, but never doing. She would stay in her world always trying to figure out what exactly was on the other side of the gate.