They Forgot

The chasm had gotten larger since the last night. Selkie stood on the edge of the cliff and surveyed the fresh damage. She estimated that about five more feet of earth had chipped off and fallen into the bottomless trench since her last observation. The whole town was pervaded by a feeling of dread. The apocalyptic trench was literally gaining ground, but ever since the police had quit trying to stop the encroaching cliff, there had been an unspoken agreement among the people of the town not to speak of the danger that was almost in their own backyards. 

Everything about the town of Dorcha was average. The ratio of adults to adolescents to children to senior citizens was average. The average number of children per family was two, a number that lined up neatly with the national average of the country Dorcha was located in. The scenery was average, relatively flat with some rolling hills and a few mountains scattered on the horizon. The grass was an average shade of green and there were an average of two trees per yard. Most of the houses were painted a standard off-white color, the elementary, middle, and high schools were all built of orange-ish-red bricks with an average of one window per classroom, and the cars were painted the muted colors that seem to come naturally to cars. Of course, no one enforced the uniformity of Dorcha. When Selkie first walked into the town with just a backpack on her back and yellow chickadee perched on her shoulder, all the predictable YA dystopian future novels that featured a perfectly controlled population and rigid rules enforced with fear flashed through her mind. How could a town be so incredibly average all of its own accord? But, the longer she stuck around Dorcha, the more firmly she believed that it really did manage to be normal all on its own.

Selkie was never sure why she hung around such an incredibly boring place. Every night as she drifted off to sleep, looking at the stars through the branches of the sycamore that she slept under, she resolved to pack up her scanty belongings and walk right out again the next morning. She explained this simple plan to the yellow chickadee that slept with its head tucked under its wing on her chest every night, but every morning it sang her awake and still she stayed.

The people of Dorcha tolerated Selkie. She was something they really had no mental space for. She, with her vibrantly colored patchwork skirt and paint-splattered jean jacket and knee-length black braids and odd foreign name, was a creature in such stark contrast to the placid normality of their average-sized town that they simply did not know what to do with her. But, while almost infuriatingly normal, the people of Dorcha were not unkind, and while they did not embrace Selkie, neither did they expel her, and while Selkie did not love Dorcha, she also did not leave.

Unfortunately, Dorcha was in danger of falling right off the map. A week or so after Selkie set foot in the town, a small fissure had appeared about one hundred yards away from the “Welcome to Dorcha, Home of the West High Wildcats” sign. The fissure had lengthened from a few feet to a few dozen feet, then a few hundred. The fissure was only about the width of a child's palm, but it continued to grow in length until, a month or so after Selkie’s arrival, it had formed a ring around the town. It did not stop there. Having surrounded the town it began to widen. Earth on the town side of the crack began to fall into it. The fissure widened from a few inches to a few feet. That was when the people started to take notice. The average-sized police force composed of police officers who liked to eat average glazed donuts put up standard yellow caution tape around the town, warning away people who might stumble into the growing ravine. Much to the police foreman’s dismay, within a week every inch of the yellow danger tape had fallen into the ravine. Still, it grew. The people of Dorcha took to calling it “the ditch” whenever mentioning it was entirely unavoidable, but that was a comically optimistic term for it. It did not have a visible bottom. It went down, and down, and down. Now, three months after Selkie had arrived, the “Welcome to Dorcha” sign had fallen into the chasm. It was almost four hundred feet wide, and extended all the way around the town. Dorcha had become a land-locked island. 

There was, however, one strip of land that bridged the gap. It was about six inches wide, and extended in a slender, isolated line all the way across the divide. It was no stone or wooden bridge, but simply a grassy strip that appeared to be just normal ground left behind in the great fall, complete with a few dandelions among the average green grass. Selkie’s sycamore happened to be quite near this bridge. The encroaching chasm did not bother her in the least. She knew she could cross the bridge any time. Whenever she felt like it, the world outside of Dorcha was waiting for her. But somehow, she wanted to see what would happen to this incredibly average town when it fell. It must eventually fall, mustn't it? She thought it must. She had become rather attached to this town, despite, or perhaps because, of its mind-numbing boringness.

Even as she stood on the edge, a few more pebbles fell into the gaping hole. It was only a few dozen feet from the outermost house of the town. Sighing, she sat down, legs crossed, two feet from the steep drop. She sat like that, serenely tossing pebbles over the edge just for the pleasure of seeing them vanish, until the chasm had encroached to a few inches from her resting place. With a dull wistful ache and a brief stab of loss, Selkie saw that her sycamore was now teetering on the edge. When it falls, she thought, then I will leave. 

All that night she kept a vigil at the cliff’s encroaching edge. She stroked the yellow chickadee’s head and hummed to it until the first shades of pink and orange crawled up the horizon. At eight o’clock sharp, a ripping sound heralded the parting of the sycamore’s roots with its patch of earth. It fell.

Clinging to her resolution, Selkie shouldered her backpack and nestled the chickadee safely on her shoulder. Turning her back to the chasm, she took one moment to observe Dorcha in all its boring glory. The first average colored cars were beginning to hum down the streets. Elementary-aged children waited on corners for school buses and older ones walked toward West High, home of the Wildcats. Selkie heard the distant sound of someone mowing a lawn and a few birds dutifully singing and the distant chatter of children. The yellow chickadee raised its tiny voice to meet the very average birds of Dorcha, and at its call, a little more life came into the songs of the birds perched on the weather vanes that crowned each house and in the trees of average height. When the chickadee was silent, Selkie whispered to no one in particular, 

“I almost feel as if I’ll miss you.”  

Then she turned her back on the town and carefully began to balance across the beam of earth that was left untouched by the apocalyptic cliff.

When she reached the other side, she did not plan to look back. But the resounding crashes that began to issue from the opposite side of the dark chasm forced her attention back to the landlocked island. It was as if her exit had floored some invisible cataclysmic accelerator. Massive chunks of earth were cracking off of the edge of the island town and plummeting into the unseen depths below. The first house shuddered, buckled, and fell, swallowed up in the blackness. It was soon followed by others. The dark clouds of dread that had been gathering and hanging ever lower over the population of Dorcha broke all at once, and people began streaming out of their uniform houses. A tsunami of screams washed across the chasm and broke over Selkie. In a matter of minutes, it looked as if the whole town was gathered at the slim land bridge. Cupping her hands to her mouth, Selkie screamed,

“COME ACROSS! IT IS SAFE HERE!”

She doubted they could hear her, but it was all she could do. It was too far to tell, but she could have sworn she saw people shaking their heads. They backed away from the edge, drawing away as if they had the same magnetic polarity as the start of the bridge. 

“PLEASE! THE BRIDGE WILL HOLD YOU! JUST COME ACROSS!” Selkie thought her throat might tear with the painful volume of her plea. Her next word was just a whisper.

“Please…” 

Ten seconds of silence elapsed. Selkie made no sound, clenching her fists, willing the people on the other side to be brave. She hadn’t known until that moment how much she cared about this ridiculously boring, pathetically uneventful town.

The screams of the people of Dorcha had ceased. A silence charged with hesitancy spanned the immeasurably deep cavern. For ten long seconds, no one moved. No muscle twitched, no sound was made. The very Earth seemed to pause in its rotation. And then the island collapsed into the waterless ocean around it. Colossal chunks of the town cracked and fell, sweeping the people away like ants under a hose. Selkie sank to her knees, bloodless hands clamped over her mouth, caging the scream that threatened to escape. When Dorcha was gone and her tongue seemed to come unglued from the roof of her mouth, she whispered to the chickadee,

“All they had to do was be brave.”

One tear fell down her cheek. She forced herself to stand up and turn away from the gaping hole that had once been the most peaceful, boring town she had ever known.

But just as she took her first step into the world, a teeny, tiny voice reached her. 

"Help me!"

Had she imagined it? She whirled around, straining her eyes and ears to find the source of the nearly inaudible voice. Squinting and listening like her life depended on it, finally she made out a miniscule point in the center of the black hole. One tiny pillar of land still stood in the center of what was once the town of Dorcha. On it stood a child.

"Help me!" 

The high, screeching cry floated across the dry black ocean. Hope leaping in her, Selkie screamed for all she was worth. 

“HELP YOURSELF! BE BRAVE!”

For, she realized, the slender bridge still connected her to what was left of the town. Willing the child to try, she trained her gaze on the farthest point of the bridge from her. Was the child coming? They did. Out of the haze of dust and overcast clouds, a small figure emerged, arms outstretched in a careful letter T, body taught with concentration, balancing along the bridge of earth. When the child made it to her, he collapsed, gasping. He had held his breath most of the way across, afraid that the slightest tremor of a muscle might send him teetering off the bridge into the blackness below. 

When she was sure that he had finally collected and expelled enough oxygen to speak, she dropped down on one knee so she could look him in the eyes. 

 “What is your name?” Selkie asked the boy. 

“It’s Jack.” he answered, meeting her hazel eyes with solemn gray ones. 

“Mine is Selkie.”

Jack seemed to ponder for a moment, then asked in the tone of a young child questioning their parent about death for the first time,

“Selkie…why is the town gone?”

“I don’t know, Jack.”

Selkie gazed out at the blackness before her, the opposite rim just barely visible, then added, 

“I think, perhaps, the Universe didn’t like Dorcha.”

“Why? Nothing bad happened there!”

“It seems that peace is too much for the universe to handle. And I think…” she paused, waiting for the right words to find her, “I think, because nothing bad ever happened, the people forgot how to hope. Because they were never faced with darkness, they forgot how to be brave. But you and I...we remember."

The pair was silent for a moment, shielding their eyes from the sun and surveying the unearthly crater, contemplating the destruction. Finally, Selkie spoke.

"Would you like to walk with me, Jack?”

The boy looked at her quizzically.

“Where are you going?”

“Somewhere where people choose to remember. I think it will be beautiful.”

Selkie took Jack’s hand, and they turned away from the black depths. They walked away, into the world, where the colors were brighter, and nothing was certain.