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and beneath the torn and flapping rags of a canvas ceiling.
I now stood beneath an open sky, from which tumbled the
remains of the day—illuminating the ruin of an ancient
circus that stood crooked and ruined amid the sprawl of a
dead forest. I clapped until my hands stung. Here was the
Great and Vanishing Nowhere.
I was thrilled to think of this new world as a ripped hole
in the universe, a fracture in the mechanism of solidity,
allowing for passage into everywhere and perhaps nowhere
all at once. I might very well have been strolling through
an inversion of a perversion of a petrification of dream.
And despite the perhaps deliberate attempt at melancholy, I
found the aesthetics of the Vanishing Nowhere to be likeably
bittersweet, a blackened toy in the basement of the universe.
The dead forest gradually vanished into a field of
diseased corn. There was no sun that I could see, save for a
few fractured remnants of daytime, scattered here and there
throughout the mostly dark and clouded sky. Occasionally,
I glimpsed the passing of orange and gray balloons drifting
high overhead. Out of idle curiosity, I decided to backtrack
their course. Perhaps I would stumble upon fresh wonders
to behold.
The landscape slowly sank into a sea of widening
shadows, and a single beam of dimming daylight became a
mere vertical horizon in the vanishing distance. I noticed that
in areas of most concentrated shadow, I could feel a slight
bit of resistance to my movement—a pleasant otherworldly
physics, that.
The wind blew just right, bending the stalks of a nearby
wheat field sufficiently downward, and I saw a man standing
midway into the swept-back turf, behind what looked like
a carnival booth festooned with orange and grey balloons.
He appeared to be holding one out for me. Having found the
source of the high-flying oddities, I made my way over to
what I soon realized was a poorly made-up clown.

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