FL0007
"RENVERSITA"
DATELINE: THE ISLAND OF THE READERS (4:07 AM, year unknown)
Fellow passengers, it’s another beautiful day in the Limoverse. A murmur of waves as they rush toward rocks. A pause to pry open our eyelids and let letters of light slide through the slots…
Morning then. We unfold to meet the sun. Musty down surrounds us. It’s a comforting smell, but unwanted: this so-called bed is just an old feather pile. Still, it’s been ages since we slept like the dead, like this.
A bell tolls far offshore, along the barriers. “Mail call,” squawks a Reader. It tucks its beak under a wing and waits. Bobbing along in the distance, beyond the labyrinthine lanes of orphaned buoys and dead lines, a ship’s stovepipe breathes in, breathes out, exhales a poof of perfect white smoke, outlined in black, a cartoon cloud, some memory clipped from the future.
“Hey,” says the Reader:
“…think about it.”
Its monopod claw sinks squelchingly into the sand, first with resistance, then smoothly, heavily, printing every tarsal detail into the muck of the earth as the Reader falls asleep. We blink.
With the click of a winch and the flash of a knife blade the cool scent of apple fills the air. Far away, across the water, smoke rises from the embers of a long-forgotten windmill on a faraway island. We find ourselves back on a boat.