Once I managed to make my way out of the wreckage, I realized that I’d crash landed in a cartoon.  My body and what was left of my ship looked normal.  But everything else appeared like an old cartoon.  The bushes surrounding me didn’t have any branches or leaves, they were just flat, green surface. The ground was horizon-to-horizon carpeting in a slightly different shade of green than the bushes.  The rich blue sky created a ceiling above me that stretched out to the horizon that I thought I could reach up and touch.  But, when I tried, I couldn’t feel it.  It seemed just out of reach.  A perfectly still, large, odd looking brown bird soared by me with its wings outstretched.  I heard a noise, and the bird fell straight down to the flat green ground.  I turned my head and saw a hunter still holding his gun to his shoulder.  He wasn’t a cartoon.  He was a real person, like me. 

The hunter lowered his gun and asked, “Is that your ship?”  I answered him, “It’s borrowed.  I’ve just crashed it.”  The hunter walked to the wreck and then walked around it.  He tugged on a landing gear support that came off in his hand.  “It’s in better shape than mine.  Between the two, we have a pretty good chance of putting one good one together.”  Then the hunter walked over to where the bird was laying on the ground, wings still outstretched, frozen in the position they were in when it was flying past me.  He wrapped a cord around its wings and body in an X shaped pattern, picked it up, and threw it over his shoulder.  The bird’s wings stuck out from each side of the hunter, giving him the appearance of an angel, or Icarus, or some guy with cartoon wings sticking out from his sides.  I sat down. 

The hunter told me that there was no time for sitting down and encouraged me to get up by turning away from me and briskly walking toward a patch of darker green that was on the horizon, between where the blue ceiling met the green carpet.  I got up and hustled over to my ship to see if I could reach far enough inside through the window I’d broken to arm the security system.  As I stretched, I heard the Hunter yell, “Whatever you’re doing, you should stop it and follow me now.”  I was able to flip the switch, push the button, and then flip the switch back.  A light went on, indicating that the security system had been activated.  As I turned to follow the hunter, the ship’s alarm horn sounded. 

I reached in through the window again to stop the noise and then disengaged the alarm system.  When I looked at the hunter, he was about fifty yards away from me, still walking.  Then, he disappeared.  I started to run in the direction he had gone, and then I saw him again.  I stopped and rubbed my eyes.  When I looked again, he was gone.  I started moving again, and I could soon see him. Instead of losing sight of him again, I ran until I caught up with him.  As my shoulders lined up with his I told him that I thought I saw him disappear.  He stopped walking.  “I wondered if that would happen to me.”  I watched him and waited for him to say more.  He started walking again. 

I thought about asking him what he meant by what he said about disappearing, but instead, I asked him where we were.  He turned his head as far as he could toward me without twisting his torso, looked me in the eyes, smiled at me and said, “I don’t have any idea?!”  He seemed confident of his ignorance and was happy to have an opportunity to say so, as if knowing that he didn’t know was the only sure thing that he had to hang onto.  “Do you know how we got here?”  Same response but with a bit more certainty and a slightly wider smile.  “Do you know if it’s possible to get home?”  Same again, up another notch.  “Do you know where we’re going?”  He stopped smiling and said, “Yes.”   
 

I asked him if he could tell me where we were going and he told me that there was no point.  “Would you like me to tell you where we are going topographically?  If so, what sort of references would you like me to use?  Should I say that it’s about three kilometers from the one place here that you are familiar with?  Then, we turn left at a tree that you’ve never seen before?  And, when we arrive, you’ll recognize it at once as being just the way you imagined it?”  I told him that the “about three kilometers” bit was helpful, but I understood what he meant.  “Well, maybe you could tell me if we are going to a house, or a base, or a complex, or. . .”  It didn’t seem like he wanted to answer me.  I felt a bit panicked and ended my sentence, “. . . someplace safe?” 

The smile returned to his face and he said, “We’re going someplace safe.”  I was pretty sure that he was doing an impression of me with the way he said, “someplace safe.”  And, it wasn’t flattering.  I wanted to kick myself for giving him that one.  “OK.  Back to the three kilometers and the tree and all that.  Was all that true?  Or was that part of your explanation as to why there was no point in telling me where we are going?”  He confirmed that it was true, other than the part about the tree.  “There’s no tree.  I made that up.”  I asked him why and he said, “You have to understand.  I’ve been here a long time.”  The smile flickered on and off quickly for a couple seconds, and then turned off for good.      

I kinda liked the guy.  And, not just in a “he’s the only other person in this universe and I need him to keep me alive” kind of way.  He seemed honest, and good natured, and unable to hide it very well.  I trusted him and decided to shut up and walk wherever we were going.  I had been noticing everything we were walking past while we had been talking, but I hadn’t let it all sink into my head.  Once I was solely focused on my surroundings, I found it all difficult to believe and wondered if I had died in the crash or at least knocked myself unconscious and was having some sort of coma-induced hallucinations.  Before I got around to pinching myself, I realized that wondering about whether or not you are dreaming must be some sort of deciding factor in the “Dream VS Awake” test. 

It was really hard to tell how far away anything was.  Everything seemed like it was on the same vertical plane until suddenly, something like a tree or a bush was right next to me, having changed from being flat and in front of me to being flat and next to me.  There was no depth.  My body and the hunter’s body looked normal.  But even the bird on his back had a bizarre flatness to it.  Even when I adjusted my vantage point, the bird looked the same.  But, if I stepped behind the hunter, the bird went from being flat and to the side of me to flat and in front of me.  And there was a point where my view of the bird went from side to rear.  With my movements, I could make the bird appear to flip back and forth from a profile to the view from behind the bird proudly displaying its full wingspan.  Even with all of this, the thing that finally freaked me out was when I realized that I didn’t cast a shadow. 

The hunter pointed at a bush ahead of us and said, “There’s where we turn left.”  I asked if he meant “At the bush?”  He said, “Yes, at the bush.”  And, once again, I was sure that he was mocking the way that I had said those words.  I’d assumed from what he’d said that the “turn left at the tree” bit had all been made up.  But I realized that he had exaggerated the bush into a tree for some reason.  We kept walking until the bush changed from being in front of us to being next to us.  Then, we turned left.  I jokingly asked the hunter if he lied because he thought I would be more impressed by a tree than a bush?  “No.  I’m tired of the bush.  I was imagining that it was a tree.”  I had nothing to add, ask, or argue. 

We walked quietly for a while and then a tall, sheer wall of rock appeared in front of us.  There was an opening in the wall, just a little to the right of the direction we were walking.  We walked until I smacked, face-first, into the wall of rock, next to the opening.  The hunter had been walking a half a step behind me and stopped when he saw me hit the wall.  “Here’s the tricky bit.  You’re gonna hafta kinda jump to the side and forward at the same time to get in there.”  I was right next to the opening and tried to reach my arm inside.  According to my eyes, there was nothing there to stop my hand from going in the opening, but it was met by a hard surface that I couldn’t see.  The hunter repeated, “You’re gonna hafta jump.”  As I turned to look at him, he grabbed me by the shoulders, pulled me back towards himself, and then gave me a shove through the opening. 

Once I’d steadied myself, I saw that I was inside a cave.  I couldn’t find where it was coming from, but the place was bathed in a soft, blue light.  I was knocked forward when the hunter jumped into the cave and hit me from behind.  “Sorry!”  I looked outside through the cave’s entrance and all I could see beyond it was the blue sky.  No ground, tress, bushes or anything other than flat blue sky.  I tried to stick my head out of the opening but no matter how far I leaned forward, my head was still inside the cave.  I asked the hunter if he could explain the cave, or the opening , or anything to me.  “Some things, I can explain, and some things I can’t.”  Then he added, in his most insulting impression of me yet, “The main thing is that we’re someplace safe.”  I said that I assumed that that meant that it was a good place for me to sit down.  Then, I sat down. 

End of Part One 

The hunter set the bird down near his feet, pulled the magazine out of his gun, and leaned the gun against the wall of the cave.  He dropped the magazine into the cargo pocket on his left leg.  Then, with the other hand, he pulled some fire sticks out of the pocket on his right thigh.  With his feet, he pushed some charred debris into a pile and then used the fire sticks to spark a fire.  If the stuff he was burning had been like the rest of the cartoon stuff, it wasn’t now.  It looked real, like the hunter and me.  However, the fire’s flames were in the form of cubes.  Different sized and colored blocks of oranges and yellows. 

The hunter hooked his toe under the bird and flipped it onto the fire.  Where it was in contact with the debris it started to glow.  Then, different parts of the bird started lighting up in different colors, at different times, flashing like Christmas lights that were in a hurry.  There was a cracking noise and then the entire bird settled into a deep, dark red.  The hunter said that he needed to go outside before it got dark.  He told me it was best that I use the corner of the cave.  I asked him if he had a bucket or anything.  He said that he didn’t. 

The hunter jumped out of the cave.  I watched the bird glow for a bit.  I wasn’t ready to use the corner.  I decided to take stock of what I had on me.  I had everything that one would expect to find on a flight suit: beacon, fire sticks, water pills, lamp, knife, etc.  One of the pockets had a letter in it.  It was short and sweet.  It just said, “I love you.  Come home alive.”  It was addressed to “You” and signed by “Me.”  I thought about the owner of this suit and wondered what sort of person he was.  All I knew about the guy was that he wore the same size as me. 

All that I had of my own was my wallet and a sheet of paper with codes written on it.  I found a receipt while digging through my wallet.  The receipt was for a wet/dry vacuum I bought from Home Depot.  The date on the receipt was the day I lost my brother.  I was excited to get home and try the vacuum to suck water up off the basement floor, in front of the laundry tub, which was clogged again.  I’d always wanted a wet/dry vacuum but hadn’t bought one until then. 

When I got home from the store, I stopped the car outside the garage to unload the vacuum.  I set it on the driveway and was reaching up to close the trunk when my wife came out of the house and told me she had bad news to tell me.  Then, immediately said, “Your brother was in some sort of an accident and is unaccounted for.  And, presumed dead.”  I closed the trunk and walked towards her. 

Inside the house, my wife hugged me, and I cried a little bit, somewhat out of grief and somewhat out of relief.  My brother was a test pilot for a private Sea-Air-Space company.  I spent a lot of my free time wondering when he was going to die.  Every time the phone rang, I would be sent into different degrees of panic by different phone numbers.  I took a breath and told my wife that I left the wet/dry vacuum in the driveway.  When I went to get it, I discovered that someone coming through the alley must have decided that they needed it more than I did.  I still don’t have a wet/dry vacuum. 

There wasn’t much else in my wallet.  ID, currency transaction card, a contact list card, and a Steve’s Sandwiches punch card with nine of the ten punches needed for a free submarine sandwich.  I started to wonder how long the hunter was going to take and I decided that maybe I’d prefer to use the corner before he returned.  Once I had, I realized that it was more embarrassing to do alone than I thought it would have been and would have been much worse if I’d waited until the hunter came back.  It wasn’t long after I was done that he jumped into the cave, almost like he’d been just outside, waiting for me to finish.   

The hunter turned the bird over with his feet. “It’s just about ready.”  The hunter sat down and told me that he had been flying home from a business/hunting trip when he lost control of his ship, blacked out, and came to in this cartoon world.  He asked me and I told him that I had a similar experience.  Something caused my ship to shake violently, and was pulled into a black cloud or a black hole or something.  “I must have passed out.  I don’t remember landing.  I just remember climbing out of the wreckage.”  The hunter used his knife to scrape meat off of the bird.  He ran the knife along the side of his hand, filling his palm with poultry.  He held his hand out and motioned for me to put mine below his.  He dropped the meat into my hand.  It tasted like chicken. 

We each ate two handfuls of the bird.  I wanted to ask the hunter about the bird, but he pointed over my shoulder, at the cave opening.  “There it goes!”  I turned and the sky was now black instead of blue.  The hunter stood up and told me to follow him.  At the opening, we stood and stared into black emptiness.  He said, “There’s nothing.  Really nothing.”  He told me to take off my suit.  He tied one of the sleeves around his wrist and tied one of the legs around my wrist.  Then, he said, “Check it out!” and pushed me out of the cave. 

I looked back in the direction of the hunter and there was nothing.  I realized that I couldn’t see the space suit at the end of my arm.  Worse, I couldn’t see my arm.  There was nothing.  Not even me.  I felt a sensation of being stretched and then I was back in the blue cave.  The hunter untied the sleeve from his wrist.  He smiled and said, “Someplace safe.”  I wasn’t bothered by being made fun of this time.  I’d just experienced the absence of everything.  The absence of me.  I told the hunter that I had to use the corner. 

End of Part Two 

After my death walk, I was happy to roll my suit up into a pillow and shut off for the night.  When I woke up, the hunter was digging through a toolbox that I hadn’t seen the night before.  “Where were you hiding that?”  The hunter told me that it had been close by.  His crashed ship wasn’t far from the cave entrance.  I asked why, if it was close by, he waited until morning to go to the ship.  He explained that he doesn’t exactly know when everything outside the cave goes dark and didn’t want to risk it.  I asked if he thought that he had the right tools. He said that he thought that every ship’s toolbox is filled with all the tools that were needed to fix pretty much anything on that ship. 

The hunter pointed a multidriver at what was left of the fire from the night before.  “Hungry?”  I couldn’t make out any of the mess on the burned debris as being the bird I’d seen the previous day.  The bird had transformed from the static, cartoon image to the same sort of debris that had made up the fire it was cooked on.  Inspecting the fire closer, I confirmed that that fire that cooked the bird, was in fact, made from birds that had been previously cooked.  I told the hunter that I wasn’t hungry. 

After the hunter inspected all of the tools that he thought he would use, he picked up his toolbox and told me that he was ready to collect the parts from my ship that he needed to fix his.  We left the cave and started back toward the spot where I’d crashed.  I asked if we could look at his ship.  “We should just go get the parts we need.  You’ll have plenty of time to see my ship while I’m fixing it.  It’s not far from the cave and easier to get back from if it starts getting late.”  I thought about being caught outside after dark, and it gave me a chill.  I followed him. 

When we arrived at my ship, I was a bit shocked at how bad it looked and was relieved that I lived through the landing.  I wondered if I had blacked out during the crash, or if I just blocked it out of my memory.  The hunter pointed at the SASKraft markings on the bow.  “This who you test for?”  I explained that after I left National Service, I had worked for a few different companies but that I had stopped testing when I got married.  “SASKraft came together after I grounded myself.”  The hunter pulled his head to the back of his shoulders, raised one eyebrow, nodded his head slowly, and took a breath like he was preparing to say something, but didn’t.  Instead, he loosened the bolts on the starboard access panel. 

The hunter pulled the parts he needed and then replaced the access panel.  He replaced the panel and secured it in place like it was a matter of life or death. I asked him why he did that.  “Best to not leave anything undone around here.  I don’t know what happens in the dark.”  Then, he inspected what was left of my landing gear.  After about a minute he stopped and said that it was time to head towards his ship.   

I asked if the landing gear wasn’t worth salvaging.  He looked at me with some contempt.  “It’s not a priority.”  “You don’t plan on landing?”  “The only plan I have is to get out of here.  I’m not too terribly worried about what happens after that.”  I figured that crashing and dying after we escape this cartoon wouldn’t be counted as a successful escape.  But I didn’t argue with him.  I decided that from here on out, I’d just be agreeable and hope for this to all be over soon.  Why wouldn’t I? 

We each tied our flight suits in a way that made them into sacks to carry the parts and then started walking towards the hunter’s ship.  Neither of us said anything for a while.  Then, the hunter asked, “How did you end up flying that ship?”  I confessed that I’d stolen the ship.  I explained how my brother had disappeared while testing the same model and that after going through his belongings, I found his journal that detailed his test flights.  In his journal, he had written about some odd situations that turned out to be similar to what happened to both the hunter and me before crashing into this cartoon.  I thought that there was a chance that he survived whatever caused his ship to disappear and since no one else was looking for him, or even curious, I decided to give it a shot.  So, using his credentials, I bluffed my way onto the SASKaft testing campus and managed to get away with the ship.  I followed the same course that he did, blacked out and woke up here. 

We walked past the cave.  I assumed that we’d stop, and I started towards the entrance only to have the hunter tell me to keep moving.  I asked the hunter why we weren’t stopping.  “I don’t care if I never set foot in that cave again.”  I knew that the hunter was serious about leaving but until he said that I wasn’t aware of his timeline.  I figured he’d spend a day or so fixing his ship and then another day or so making sure that it was up to the challenge.  He wanted to leave today.  Now. 

When we arrived at his crash site, I was overwhelmed by how staged it looked.  In the center of a small clearing in the cartoon forest the ship sat vivid, three dimensional, real, like me and the hunter.  The hunter laid out all the parts from my ship on the ground and went straight to work.  I stood close by, ready to help.  But he didn’t say anything to me.  He just attached the parts from my ship onto his.  He had removed the non-working parts at some point before this, like he was preparing for my arrival. 

I was amazed at how fast the hunter worked.  He picked up one piece after another from the ground until there were only a few parts left.  I started thinking about leaving, which caused me to focus on and take in everything around me, so I’d be able to explain what I’d seen once we were back home.  This world was far more bizarre than anything I could have dreamed.  In so many ways it was fascinating, but it was frightening in so many other ways. 

The flat views all around me forced me to focus all the more on what appeared real, which was the ship and parts, the hunter, and most of all, me.  Everything seeming to be simultaneously within and just out of reach had been disorientating at first.  But now that I’d become somewhat accustomed to the situation, I felt oddly comfortable knowing that what I perceived wasn’t as important as what was reality.  And what was reality here was starting to sink in.  The abnormal was becoming normal.  I had only just arrived, and I was starting to accept this world for what it was, whatever it was.  I was surprised and maybe proud of myself for adapting so quickly.  Perhaps it was only because I was preparing to leave this world that I found it so easy to adjust my expectations of reality and accept what was around me. 

Once the hunter had sealed the access panels on his ship, he put on his flight suit and climbed into the cockpit.  As I started to put on my flight suit I saw the hunter reach up to get hold of the canopy handle.  “It’ll be getting dark soon.”  I stopped zipping up my flight suit when I heard the ship’s engine start.  The hunter stared at me with a hint of pity on his face as the ship rose off the ground.  It tilted towards the flat blue sky and then shot upwards.  After a few seconds it disappeared. 

I stood, staring at the point where I last saw the ship and waited, hoping to see it reappear.  After a few minutes, I walked to the cave, sat down, and started going over everything I’d experienced.  I told myself the story of everything that happened since I arrived in this cartoon world over and over trying to make sense of everything.   

Once I managed to make my way out of the wreckage, I realized that I’d crash landed in a cartoon.