He was back in his condo.
Jess was gone. Mr. Reynard was gone too.
The acorn sat on his kitchen counter.
The days began ticking away faster and faster. The sun leapt and fell outside his windows in time with his breathing. Day. Night. Day. Night.
The acorn grew more and more vibrant as the colors of his home dulled and faded to a photograph in an old newspaper. It was absorbing the vitality of the place, becoming more real as the life Green spent his best years building withered.
How can such a small thing take so much?
The acorn shuddered once and began beating like a heart, filling the room with a pounding rhythm.
Lub-dub. Lub-dub. Lub-dub.
Day-night. Day-night. Day-night.
The condo walls flitted away like ash. Crickets chirped. Old trees stretched their branches and cracked their knuckles like fighters preparing to brawl. Mushrooms split his tiled floor with their passing, soft and unstoppable.
He started awake. This time, the car was too warm. He was sweating. He’d fallen asleep again before turning off the engine. He ran a dry tongue over chapped lips.
Sipping warm, flat soda, he cracked the window. The air was cool and smelled like autumn. It smelled utterly unlike the city.
3:32a.m.
The night wore on in fits of sleep and fear.
Green bobbed up and down in rolling tides of contrasting sensation, exhaustion, and tense alertness, until that, too, became familiar. He slept in twenty-minute chunks chained together by moments of confusion as he struggled to remember where he was and why he was cold and uncomfortable.
He walked through a dream of grocery shopping, the store shelvespacked with items he didn’t recognize, but he felt immense pressure to buy.
One of these things is the thing that’s been missing.
One of these things will fix me.
One of these things will tell me who I am in a way I can finally trust.
Something tugged him back to wakefulness.
He was shivering again.
A press of a button and the engine was warming.
4:59a.m.
Nearly dawn.
A light moved in the trees beside the lane. Green looked up to see a luminescent figure stitching its way through the woods forty feet from his window. It was a deer, though it didn’t look like any deer he had ever seen. Its skin was translucent and shone with a pale glow akin to bioluminescent fungi. Within, its dark organs were visible as shapes pulsing with rhythmic life. It looked like an anatomy illustration escaped from the pages of a zoology text.
The deer paused and looked at Green, stepping toward him. Its dark eyes found his. There was something inexplicable inside its head. It was too distant to see, but he could feel it. A shape.
The creature took another step closer.
Green’s breath fogged the glass and the deer became a patch of moonlight through smoke. He raised his sleeve to rub away the crystallizing condensation.
The glow sprang off into the darkness, though its legs weren’t participating in the movement.
“Heads up,” Dylan said from a memory.
