You all know the storytelling game.

Someone starts a story, tells a bit of it and then stops in midsentence. “The quicksand sucked her down and as it lapped around her neck…” The next person has to take over and keep it going.

Usually they blithely ignore what’s already happened. “She got out of the quicksand and went to a party.” Giles was always the guy who tried to bring everything home, who remembered that the hero got into quicksand because he was trying to find the map to the buried treasure and that a talking zebra had brought it to him, and who tried to use everything in the story. Now he tried his best to use everything in the story so far to weave the Chaos into a sensible whole.

He knew where the story was supposed to go: after cutting away the sky, Killington the mad scientist searched back through time and space until he found just where and when to cut Cloud Rock free and cast it into Chaos. His demon son Gerald fell comically from the cliff, plummeted to splash his brains out on the rock as he had in a thousand realities – and the ground was not there.

He was still falling when he should have hit. Then the ground drifted up to touch his back with feather softness and he was on Cloud Rock. A repressed young man surrounded by new age hippies in all states of dress and undress, he gawked and lurked shyly and crept around the edges, a perpetual outsider. Until at last his father found him, grabbed him from the edge of the circle as Giles had seen Killington do, and then…

The story collapsed like a dried-out sand castle with the wind blowing it away bit by bit.

And then they started a storytelling festival? To learn what the demons were up to when they were both demons themselves? It was crazy.

Pulses of dizzy energy ran through his fevered nauseated body. The world lurched and his muscles kept quivering as he sat in that chair facing the poison of Killington … or stood on the stage feeling the audience slipping like dried bits of sand out of his hands.

What did the audience want?

They had learned that Killington had ripped the sky away and put the Chaos in its place. Half of them didn’t care about details. They just wanted the sky back and they’d happily accept something as dumb as “and then she got out of the quicksand and went to the party” if it meant the world could be normal again.

But the other half of the audience saw all the plot holes and weren’t satisfied.

For a moment, Giles was completely in the “real” reality, where he stood on stage with dry mouth and wrenching guts. The audience waited, not rebelling yet but restless, about to spill from his hands. Then he was back in the swivel chair with orange fabric, facing Killington and Jerry. Tiffany sagged in the chair beside him and the burly guards waited for Killington to tell them what to do. Killington’s breath was brimstone as he recovered from the shock of hearing his own son say he hated him and wished he had not been saved.

He was going to order the guards to do something terrible. Tiffany, after her one incisive rattle of words, sat silent. Perhaps, just as Giles had feared, she had no power left.

At that dark moment, Giles felt a bright spot of joy somewhere. He stopped trying to weave a story, let go of everything else and focused on that light. It was nowhere in the room with him, in the building with him. It was not on the stage where he really stood or in the audience or in the town. It was Elsewhere. In long endless tunnels laced with red writing…

It was Jasmine! Oh dearest child, shining little spirit! Somewhere in the dark Jasmine worked her elfin magic.

He wanted to be the hero of his story but he just wasn’t. Jasmine was the real hero.

***

Jasmine’s eyes popped brightly open on that last day.

This was the first time she had slept anywhere other than her own bed. Her mind was like the Colorado river, running swift and complete, sending little arms probing into side channels but mostly scouring, scouring out the way through the dome of stone which had pushed up in her way. Far away Yako and Popster sadly missed her and worried but held her in such loving support that she was never alone no matter where she went.

Pushing aside the blue and gold scratchy wool blanket, she sat up. She got a sweaty whiff of how she smelled. Sheesh! She hadn’t had a bath in two days. And she’d slept in her clothes.

A smell of savory food made her hungry. And her body suddenly let her know that she could not wait for a bathroom much longer. But here a terrible problem posed itself. Jasmine, who wandered into other people’s apartments and knew she was welcome, had never used the bathroom in anybody else’s home.

Shyly, and squeezing so hard she walked funny, she tugged on the old woman’s dress. “Can I use the bathroom?” she asked in a small shy voice so unlike her normal speaking voice. But Mrs. Benz just gestured with her head to a door and a relieved Jasmine found a stained, cracked but perfectly clean toilet and a stained, cracked but clean sink with two faucets for water. She couldn’t get the temperature right and alternated between scalding and freezing her hands but they got clean.

With food in one end and poop out the other, you can do anything.

Jasmine’s spirit pushed at walls of rock, probing like the scouring flood of the river. There was something she could do and she’d surely know it when she found it.

She spent that day like a butterfly in the wind, running here and there, not like her quiet self. She wanted to get her hands on pottery clay and shape something. She wanted to escape back into the warm quiet of the tunnels but she was waiting for that something. The tunnels weren’t warm and safe anymore anyway. The demons were loose and that pair lurked just on the other side of whatever opening she could make. If she could make one.

She felt her reality like a ratcheted toy skipping and skipping, trying to latch onto some time stream. The day stretched like some days at school, even though Jasmine liked school usually.

Evening came and the old woman, who had not pestered her to leave or find her parents or do anything, started fixing a meal. She had barely looked at Jasmine since telling her last secret. Jasmine wandered out to the ketchup and mustard climbing set with the peeling paint and watch the red rock hill get dark.

Suddenly, boom! Jasmine knew what she was waiting for. Her storyline had latched onto that other timeline and in that other timeline, Giles Hammond stood on the stage of the storytelling festival and started to speak. And if she crouched low and put her hand on the earth and held real still, Jasmine could hear his voice, coming as though through a long corridor to her. That was what she’d been waiting for!

Mrs. Benz came to call her to the table, stood silently watching for a long time, and walked back inside.