The first thing Eli noticed was the sky—it was purple.
Not the kind of purple that slips into the horizon during a weird sunset. This was deep, saturated like someone had spilled violet ink across a canvas and never cleaned it up. Three suns hung in the sky like slow-moving lanterns, casting soft light in different hues—gold, blue, and a pale pink that flickered like a dying fire.
He blinked. Once. Twice. The grass beneath him shimmered faintly, like it had been dusted with crushed glass. It was soft, warm even, though he didn’t remember lying down.
He sat up slowly. His backpack was beside him—same worn strap, same frayed stitching, even the same cracked zipper. But everything else was... not right. Or maybe too right. The air smelled faintly of oranges and something sweet he couldn’t place.
He rubbed his temples, waiting for the headache. It didn’t come.
In fact, the usual tightness in his chest—ever since Dad died—was gone too. Not dulled. Not buried under grief or distractions. Just... gone.
He stood. No dizziness. No anxiety clawing at his ribs. Just calm, strange and whole.
“Hello?” he called out.
His voice carried through the field, across distant hills, into a quiet that felt too thick to be natural. Then a whoosh—soft, slow.
Eli looked up just in time to see a school of glowing fish glide overhead, their translucent fins undulating like silk in water. One of them, a bright orange one with a spiral tail, turned mid-air and looked at him with a blinking, intelligent eye. Then it swam back into the sky.
“What the...?”
“Careful. The skyfish are curious,” came a voice behind him.
He spun around.
A girl stood there barefoot, wearing a cloak that shimmered like oil under sunlight—green one second, deep blue the next. Her skin was bronze, her hair a messy braid streaked with silver. She didn’t look older than him—maybe seventeen, eighteen at most—but something about her felt ancient.
“You’re early,” she said.
“Early?” he echoed.
She nodded. “Most don’t cross until the tether breaks completely. You...” She looked at him closely. “You still have threads holding you to your world.”
Eli took a step back. “I think I hit my head.”
She raised an eyebrow. “That’s the usual excuse.”
“I was just... I don’t know. At home. In bed. I went to sleep and now I’m—” He turned in a slow circle, taking it all in. “Here. Wherever here is.”
She knelt beside a strange-looking flower with translucent petals and a glowing center. It chimed softly when she touched it. “Some call it the Between. Others, the Stillspace. I call it Elsewhere.”
“That sounds made up.”
She shrugged. “So does Earth, if you think about it.”
Fair.
Eli crossed his arms. “So, what is this, then? Am I dead?”
She looked up at him. “No. But you stopped living.”
That hit him harder than he expected. He looked down at his hands, the same ones that hadn’t touched a sketchbook in six months. The ones that used to draw every day before the funeral. Before everything stopped.
“I didn’t choose to stop,” he muttered.
“No one does,” she replied gently. “But the Between calls to people who linger. Not dead. Not truly alive. It gives you a moment. A breath.”
Eli looked at her. “A moment for what?”
“To decide.”
A breeze swept through the field, carrying a soft hum—music, maybe, or memory. It made his chest ache.
“You have a choice,” the girl continued. “You can stay. Begin again here. It’s quiet. Safe. No pain, no guilt.”
He felt the pull of it then. The weightlessness. The peace.
“But if I stay,” he said slowly, “what happens back there? To my mom? My sister?”
The girl said nothing, just looked at him with eyes like still water.
“I haven’t spoken to them in weeks,” Eli said, more to himself than her. “I don’t even know what to say anymore. Every time I try, I feel like I’m choking. Like I’m not the person they need me to be.”
“You don’t have to be anyone,” she said. “You just have to be there.”
Eli sat down in the glowing grass. He picked a blade and watched it dissolve into tiny sparks in his palm.
“Do I get to remember this place if I go back?”
“Only what you’re meant to,” she replied. “But the feeling? The stillness? That stays.”
He looked at the horizon. The sky was shifting now—twilight and dawn dancing in the same space. It was beautiful.
But he thought of his mom’s tired eyes. His sister’s silence. The way he left his sketchbook face down on his desk, pages blank.
“I’m not ready,” he said. “I don’t know how to fix anything.”
She reached out a hand. “That’s the first step, Eli.”
He looked at her. At her smile. At the world that had somehow reminded him what it felt like to breathe again.
He took her hand.
And everything shimmered.
Eli woke up to the sound of his alarm. His ceiling was the same, cracked in the corner. His window rattled slightly in the wind. The sky outside was pale blue—not purple—but beautiful in its own, boring way.
His chest ached—but in a good way, like something soft had been sewn in place.
He got up. Went to his desk. Pulled out his sketchbook.
And drew.
React
