“Justin!” I shout the second Justin appears on the deck of Bonny’s Revenge.
It’s only been a few minutes since I’d given up trying to cross the plank from the edge of the sun to Bonny’s Revenge.
He looks up immediately.
“The kids have gone off to another dream!” I shout. “They left Master Mind on the island.”
“Jesus Christ,” he says. A jetpack appears on his back.
He presses a few buttons and flies above the plank. He’s right beside me as the jetpack disappears and he falls and stumbles next to me. “Oh, right,” he says.
He straightens and starts running. “Do you know where she went?”
“I’ll show you!” I run behind him.
I’m getting older, and I was never in shape. I begin panting and I stop.
“All right, all right, Dad,” he stops and gives me a hand. “I gotcha.”
I try to walk as fast as I can.
It’s a short tunnel. We come out the other end quickly.
I can never get over the incredible vista of the Dream. The seemingly infinite space, the millions of Shrooms that stretch in every direction, the stems that stretch up to the bright sky past our ability to see where they end up, and the apparently endless abyss below us.
But there’s no time for that. I turn left and point. “Over there! The third Shroom!”
We both look at it. For some reason, the kids are coming out of that Shroom’s tunnel. Joy sees us first. Then Charlie.
“Dad!”
“Joy! Get over here now!”
“Dad! It’s a harmless dream! I’m okay!”
“Get over here now!”
Joy turns her back to us and says something to Charlie.
Justin takes a step back and jumps to the Shroom that’s slightly down and to the right, the one that will take him to where Joy is.
He lands safely on the Shroom’s round surface. He immediately jumps to the next one, slightly lower than the one he’s on.
If Joy and Charlie didn’t have jetpacks on their backs, they would not have been able to get back. But the path for Justin is made out of quick jumps sideways and downwards. Justin jumps again.
He lands on the very edge of the Shroom, and his leg slips backward.
“Yahh!” he slips back.
And with that, he loses balance and falls into the abyss.
“Dad!”
“Son!”
All three of us look over the edge of the Shroom we’re standing on. We see Justin fall between a sea of Shrooms into a seemingly bottomless abyss, as he screams: “Aaaaaaaaaaaah!”
He falls and he falls and he falls.
And now he’s fallen so much that we just can’t see him.
(To be continued.)
—Told by Grampa Walt