Jules steps out onto the pale suburban porch, echoes of the dying house party dissolving into the fall-chilled breeze distantly whistling between swaying trees and silhouetted houses. Her arms goosebump near instantly. She holds herself tight, beginning to tap her foot as she waits for her friend to catch up. The last of the straggling trick-or-treaters mill by.

Kara eases out next to her at last, the scent of spiced punch lingering on her. For a fleeting moment it mixes wonderfully with the crisp note of decay on the wind as she steals her thousandth glance of the night. Intricately painted runes trail down the contours of Jules’ sharp face and slender arms covered only in flowing black sheer. Kara shudders despite the warmth of her neon-orange Velma sweater.

A teasing I told you so dies on her tongue as she watches Jules cringe against the cutting cold. From behind thick costume glasses Kara could practically watch it sapping her energy, deepening the late-semester exhaustion. Threatening to prematurely end their evening. Anxiety spirals dense in Kara’s stomach and her gaze drops to the paint glistening dully beneath a jack-o-lantern’s flicker. Jules glances down at her, painted brows furrowing.

“C’mon, Kar,” Jules elbows into plush orange sweater, chill-set jaw loosening to a smile. “Night’s still young is it not? Besides,” she reaches into her bag and unfurls a billowing black cloak, “You don’t think you can shake your big bad with a bit of cold, do you?” Kara chuckles.

She’d been teasing Jules that Coachella witch (as she had deemed it) barely counted as a costume, with its striking resemblance to the pseudo-goth’s usual wardrobe—and it certainly didn’t match the Scooby Doo theme. “Course it does!” Jules had shrugged, spreading her arms, “I’m just the baddie of the week.”  She looked away, and the joke dropped with her arms. “It’s not about our costumes, anyway. It’s our last hurrah, right?” Kara had nodded, a tight throat choking her reply.

To say that the ticking of the clock weighs on Kara would have been an understatement. Kara’s heart has been counting the slipping seconds with its every nervous beat on this final night, this final semester—these final, graduating finals. This Halloween night is the last bastion before Kara’s overrun with November’s onslaught of academics, before she’s walking across that stage in December, and before she leaves everything behind. Everyone.

Jules turns at the bottom of the stairs. “You coming? We’re still hitting my dorm for drinks and a movie, right?” she cajoles, knowing the answer already.

“Of course,” Kara smiles, hardly forced.

“Good!” Skipping ahead, Jules stops dead at the end of the driveway, pivoting toward the edge of the neighboring house’s yard. Gesturing with her thumb, she calls out to the girl still lagging behind, “Oooh, we could cut through the woods!”

Kara glares over false frames, cocking her head at just the right angle for a distant street lamp to accentuate the deep bags under her eyes. “You think? Well jinkies, should the gang split up, too?”

Jules’ scoff turns hapless giggle. 

“Come on, people pass through all the time,” she whines. “It’s like five minutes to campus. Going around takes twenty, and it’s cold as hell out here,” she tempts. The October breeze picks up. Even with the sweater, Kara’s skirt and short orange stockings aren’t doing her goosebumped knees any good. 

“And it’s dark as hell in there!” she rebuts, but Jules has already turned to march for the treeline.

“Your call!” the witch yells over her shoulder. Kara chews her lip, glances around the empty street, and follows her friend with a huff.

Jules doesn’t have to look in order to see Kara’s eye-rolling relent, followed by a soft smile.

Kara watches Jules half-jog down the quiet forest path marked only by the hundredfold effort of flattened leaves and worn ground. Shoulders tense and eyes wide with the instinctual need to perceive all, she lags behind. Her gaze follows the lone leaf of a red maple drifting down from the thick canopy, the only movement stirring in the dark. In tracking its descent, her eyes linger on the small of Jules’ back growing slightly more distant with Kara’s every hesitant step. 

It’s always like this. Kara had become very accustomed to watching Jules walk away. Not walk away, really, but walk on. Jules isn’t looking to leave anything behind; she’s just over-eager to be on to the next thing. Kara only wishes that the next thing included her. It’s difficult not to be frustrated sometimes, when it felt as though only she was aware of being right here, trapped in the balance of being too far and just close enough. 

And right now even that balance strains. The woods have grown silent. She slows even further with each footfall, cringing with every snapped twig as if a deadly giveaway, while Jules boldly marches on. Kara yearns for the familiar offer of blasting music or a footrace to dance from the witch’s tongue, but it doesn’t come. The unsettling nothing begins to overwhelm her senses, pricks at the back of her neck, and her instincts disallow even the notion of the boldness required to join Jules’ side, now. The evening’s dead breeze no longer carries the drone of insects to mask the sound of crunching leaves. Kara shudders in the stilled air.

Above, the suburban forest’s sparse canopy thickens quickly, a growing thin mist barely visible through the remaining gaps. The horizon is black, Jules almost vanishes into it. They should be able to see campus by now. Kara should have been able to see the diffused glow of campus’s LED streetlights above the trees by now.

Kara stumbles and almost falls into Jules, stopped in the middle of the trail. She stares past Kara’s shoulder, and no glow of distant sodium bulbs reflects in her hazel eyes.

Kara turns to look. The neighborhood is gone.

Behind is nothing but a wall of trees, mist pouring like molasses from between pinprick gaps in foliage. The trunks lurch and wind in the women’s vision, stealing all sense of depth. A sickening sense of vertigo weaves branches into an impossible wall. The longer they stare, the more their vision spirals into kaleidoscopes of twisted bark. The only way to be free of this sensation that churns their stomachs is by turning their backs on the way they had come. 

Ahead isn’t much better. The fractal trees seem to have swallowed everything but the girls themselves. Their ears ring with absolute silence, and the world gets no darker when Kara squeezes her eyes shut and reaches out for a tree to collapse against. Beneath her fingertips, the bark is shapeless and without texture, the trunk a pillar of pure weight. Little more than the concept of a tree. When she loses focus on it, her palm sinks into what her brain tells her must be wood.

Soon, a hand finds Kara in the nothingness. A real hand—soft and warm. Kara greets it with her own, giving it a little squeeze, pleading a silent question.

“I don’t know,” Jules whispers. She’d expected it to echo, but the sound was strangely muted.

The girls watch the phantom glow on the back of their eyelids pulse in rhythm with their heartbeats, beginning to form into the shifting impression of a forest path. Shape without image, the graphics of a text-based adventure. Far ahead, the forest splits into a clearing.

Jaw set, Jules drops Kara’s hand and takes a step forward. The tree wavers and fails. Sent stumbling, Kara scrambles for balance while all at once their vision lurches. The path ends and the woods split wide at the edge of the clearing, completely empty—an unrendered fever dream.

They sit in it.

Cleaving the darkness, the roof flashes—its edges bursting, flickering neon orange. It’s blinding, but even before the girls’ eyes adjust they’re staring out at a misshapen halo hanging five yards above the ground. Short, even columns alight the asphalt beneath the glow in lonesome intervals, murmuring with inaudible familiarities. Ahead, high above the far corner of this place, a row of white digits blink on and off, boasting their price-per-gallon.

It’s a gas station.

Jules freezes, mesmerized. The place holds its breath with her. Soft orange blurs together past and future, leaving only present place. The neon halo reflects a transitive law on her subconscious’s underside. She’d been here a hundred times before. Everyone had.

Her body itches with adrenaline. It breathes deep and wets her lips, desperate to express the profound wrongness of this place. She stands dream-light in the wrong gravity under the wrong, empty sky. The wrong stale air—no temperature at all. The wrong ground, now paved at her heel. A null space, barren and lifeless. 

But the back of Jules’ mind refuses to lend her any words, any action beyond floundering instinct. Running, screaming, waking up—it was all heavy with the futility of swimming against the current of a dream. But then again, there’s nothing for her to react to. She’s only passing through the orange glow again. She’d just always been first before. She hadn’t ever really stopped to take it in. To take anything in. It’s breathtaking. She can’t breathe.

Kara steps into her friend’s hollowed periphery, the single footfall cracking the still air. Raising a phantom hand, she reaches for cloaked shoulder. Jules expects the touch to phase through. It doesn’t. A shiver runs her through. Her throat loosens, settles, into the melancholy of wait.

“Come on,” she feels Kara tug gently at her shoulder. “Let’s go.”

“You sure?”

“What choice do we have, Jules?”

The lights of the convenience store flicker on in reply. Jules forces a heavy foot forward. The next is easier when Kara follows suit.

A single Cadillac sits lonesome at pump three, all but its driver door wide open. The nozzle sits in the fuel tank. The digits on the gauge spin randomly. Jules averts her eyes and pushes inside.

Kara slinks into the small, packed store behind Jules, breathing in stale coffee accented with a hint of lingering industrial cleaner. The bell above the door dings pleasantly, announcing their presence. Without a glance, the boy at the counter with slicked-back hair nods at the girls from behind his retro car magazine. His “Hi, I’m…!” nametag is blank. Peering around the store, Kara finds herself strangely let down by the lack of seasonal spirit. Then she can’t help but scoff at herself for missing plastic pumpkins and black cats in a place like this. Without them, though, the place is just so much emptier.

Kara shudders in the quiet air conditioning, the uncontested buzz of freezers and fluorescents feeling almost quieter than outside’s absolute silence. It was kind of odd, she thinks, for a gas station not to have any music playing. By the time she finishes considering it, the speakers sputter to life, already halfway through a song anyone would almost recognize.

Kara glances back at the counter. The cashier girl in a vaguely workplace-inappropriate cat costume stands texting on her flip phone where the boy just stood. Kara is sure she would have heard them switch. 

“Um, excuse me…?” Still the girl types away. “Hello?”

“What the hell’s going on?” Jules hisses.

The cashier doesn’t look up from her phone. Blowing a bubble of gum, she jabs a thumb over her shoulder. Hanging behind the counter a giant poster reads, “BUY ONE. GET ONE.” 

While Jules starts trying to explain their journey in halting, uncertain bursts of imagery as if recalling a dream, Kara accepts that the employee would be no further help.

Turning to the rows of snacks and drinks, the store looks perfectly normal on the surface. But, by now the gut feeling that knows better had made its way to her surface mind. Adjusting her fake glasses and smoothing out her fuzzy orange sweater, Kara begins cataloging the store’s every strange detail—the nameless cashier, the shifting environment, and how the products (including non-edibles) all boast zero calories, the nutritional information instead providing percentages for statistics like “crumbliness,” “preference,” and “Dad likes these, doesn’t he?”

But, really, no phenomenon this station could conjure would be stranger than the sight of Jules giving up, and browsing. Never one to linger in an aisle, never one to even read a menu, the witch inexplicably seems lost in thought at the chip rack. Kara stares for too long.

Jules glances up, looking caught. Kara leans over the chest-high shelves. 

“Find what you’re lookin’ for, Coachella?” Both girls winced at how loud the words sounded here. Kara looks to the counter, but its attendant is still unbothered. Jules holds a bag of sour cream and onion Lay’s—a staple of Kara’s campus dining. Jules hated them. Kara’s eyebrows rise above her thick frames.

“Hm? Oh, yeah, I—” Jules begins, still unable to find the words. Kara starts to tell her about how all the fine print in the store is just lines of vaguely Latin-looking symbols—when all at once she becomes acutely aware that the music had vanished again. Or, had grown muffled. Muted. Her ears ring, and a familiar feeling almost audible fills her—Mom’s about to check out. Or, her brother’s flight is soon. Or, no, her friends are growing impatient. 

Not yet. Just a little more time—

It’ll be okay if I just…

The light takes on a sickly hue and the fluorescent buzzing fills her ears, a deafening drone. Her head feels light, and none of the logos look right anymore. Jules’ face furrows. Kara knows her darting eyes look like a cornered animal’s. She closes them, but it’s all still there urging her to hurry, hurry up.

…Stayed?

What, here?

The tension in Kara’s face drops, a quiet epiphany. The lights recede, and she can hear the music again. She finally recognizes the song. 

“Uh, I think I’ll just get something seasonal, right?” She nods at the jack-o-lantern bucket now at the front counter by the register. Usually she’d wait for an answer, but Kara breezes down the aisle and blindly fishes out a candy bar. A witch’s brew Kit-Kat. Jules cocks an eyebrow, smiling quietly as Kara abruptly takes the lead.

At the door the cashier calls Jules back, Kara already a step outside.

“You’re not leaving yet, are you?” It isn’t a question. “Here, take our— award card.”

Jules stares down the smiling employee, uncertainty darkens her eyes as she tentatively makes her way back, taking the yellow plastic card handed to her. It’s about the size of her student ID, but the image is a candid CCTV still of Jules smiling to herself at the chip rack. Through fuzzy, crystal clear static she spots Kara looking over her shoulder with a baffled grin. The orange halo frames the picture. “You were home,” the text reads. “10% off select items.”

Jules looks up. “When do you get to leave?”

“Not my turn,” the cashier replies. 

Jules nods.

Back at the threshold, with the customer service tone of have a nice day, the employee calls out, “Don’t forget—!”

They cut themself off, a complete statement.

The worn, barren road stretches long beyond the station, a path winding beneath a thick canopy of trees, and dotted with warped reflections of their university’s old streetlamps. Just barely beneath the girls’ perception the mist begins to fade, a chill begins to bite again, and the quieted autumn insects slowly speak up between beats of conversation—ambient chatter about this final project and that upcoming play. Their words fill the unstilled air, but the content is in their pace. Strolling together at an even flow, talking in lockstep.

Jules notices the lightening of the sky long before her friend. Kara had lost her focus on time and the world, preferring the way their voices echo through the woods. Surprised to see it shine in rays through the thinning tree cover by the art building, neither could decide whether the morning had come much too early, or much too late.