The nightmares had come every night this week—floating faces with ember eyes, silent mouths stretched in fury. But this one felt wrong. The cold was too real. Her fingers searched for blankets that weren’t there.

She remembered her grandmother’s bedtime stories about the flat man who slipped through windows to eat the eyes of children still awake. Sometimes nightmares don’t stay dreams, she had warned.

One eye opened.

Green. Not the soft pink of her bedroom walls, but vegetation—thick, angular, alive. The kind with teeth. The kind that moved after you looked away.

She sat up fast.

The hush around her wasn’t silence. It carried a low, layered sound, like breath passing through too many throats.

She checked herself quickly. Pajamas intact. No cuts, no pain. But the ring—the one that tethered her to the city collective, that placed her on ten million screens at once—was gone. Without it, she was unindexed. Unlocated.

Standing slowly, she turned in place. There were no maps of this. No one studied the expanse.

The green desert that separated the cities had been hostile for millennia, kept outside the walls where it belonged. And yet here she was, standing in it.

She wanted to cry.

Her father’s voice rose instead, sharp and practiced: Suspend emotion. Think. Survive.

He’d disappeared six months ago. Into this, maybe.

Above her, something mechanical droned past—a cargo carrier, its belly lights blinking green, green, red. Occupied airspace. It didn’t slow. Didn’t see her.

The vegetation rustled nearby, though the air remained still.

She needed to move. But there was no sun to read, no shadow to follow. The walls lay somewhere beyond the green, too distant to matter.

Her bare foot touched something smooth. She looked down.

A path. Narrow, deliberate—pressed into the earth by something that returned often enough to leave a memory behind.

The hush deepened.

She stepped onto the path before she could talk herself out of it. The ground held, firmer than the surrounding soil, as if it recognized the weight of a human body. Somewhere ahead, something shifted in answer. Not pursuit. Not welcome. A recalculation. She set her jaw and followed the line forward, carrying the quiet certainty that the cities had not lost her by accident—and that whatever had taken her ring had been waiting far longer than she had been alive.

—-

This was something I wrote during a Sci-fi Microfiction workshop that I attended recently with Marion Lougheed. I like how she gives everyone space to write and listen to what others have created - even if created within a short period of time. It’s often said that you should polish your work and submit it to various pub’s but perhaps I don’t want to feel the sting of rejection. Or maybe I just like the control oof self-publishing. Some writers also only share their very best work - I don’t want that kind of performance anxiety. I experienced enough of that as a musician.