If I thought my blades would take take it, I would have smashed this helicopter into the walls by now, but it would do no good, the steel would bend and snap, I’d crash and never soar again.I’d do anything to see the perfect enfolding design of these maze walls sundered and ruined, I hate them more than I hate myself.

If I thought it wouldn’t kill me to land just anywhere, I would. But the ground is treacherous, pure fields of colored energy, and I know as soon as I stepped out onto them I’d be disintegrated.

My body has been in the cockpit for so long that I don’t know where it ends and the chassis of the helicopter begins.

But then there’s the Pink Cross. It’s the only place I know that’s safe to land. When I see it coming, from around a corner, I get so excited, I get so relieved. I say to myself: “This time I’m going to rest there forever, make a home. No more roaring of this copter engine. Quiet and harmony. Maybe find there’s soil underfoot, plant something. Maybe I’ll dismantle the copter and use its pieces to build a device with which to safely traverse the energy fields below. Maybe there’s even someone else like me I’ll run into? Who, like me, was once a maze-roamer, who has finally touched down to start a new life? There it is, I’m going to land. I’ll never fly again, I’ll never ever fly again.”

The truth is, I never stay for more than an hour. I look around, get bored.

I don’t even bother getting out of my seat.

The stillness makes me nervous. The silence does, too.

I’m flying over my hometown.

I’m flying near the grocery store.

The water sparkles but it’s not sun, it’s eyes watching me, and they need to stop.

I have so many bombs.

I have so many bombs, they’re waiting in me like eggs hungry to get born.

I’ve never felt so free.

It’s not my womb, it’s God’s.

What’s below me is life, but what’s in me is life, too.

Ghost Boy refused to move.

“Go,” called out the Mouth, “You’re out of the forest now. You’re free. There are mountains, rivers. There is open sky, no more the claustrophobic canopy. Clouds, wind, rain. This is for you. You chose this, I’m proud of you.”

Ghost Boy still couldn’t bring himself to move.

“I’d like to go back,” said Ghost Boy finally, with decisiveness, “I don’t like it out here and you will take me back now.”

The Mouth laughed sadly. “You can’t. It’s done. You stepped into me like an inhalation, and I breathed you out into this new world. It’s for you, all of this. You can’t reverse what’s done. I know it’s strange and scary. But you have to trust that you did the right thing for yourself.”

With that, the Mouth vanished.

Ghost Boy looked around. His arrows were gone, and his magic items: his chalice, his potion, his small powder skull. He felt naked. The sun warmed his skin and he heard the distant call of birds.

He took a deep breath and began to walk down the hill. It was different out here. No maze of a forest, forever forcing his path. Here there was openness, possibility. Ghost Boy was frightened of all the options he now had. He could do anything, walk anywhere, maybe head over to those mountains, with their promise of vistas and clean crisp air.

A few yards away he spied a pond. He walked towards it carefully, unsure of what it was.

He gazed into the reflection.

Instinctively he reached for his bow and arrow.

Behind him he heard a voice.

“It’s just your reflection,” said the voice. “Don’t attack it. Where are you from that you’ve never seen such a thing? The desert?”

Ghost Boy turned around, and there was a woman dressed in blue, eyes of blue, hair black, olive skin, teeth like pearls. The woman smiled.

“What is desert?” asked Ghost Boy.

“It’s where things are dead, there’s no life, no growth, just wandering and sand,” said the woman, concealing her surprise.

Ghost Boy paused, thinking.

“I am from the desert,” he said, and scooped up a palmful of water.

Ghost Boy watched the feast.

The Blue Eye hovered over the corpse, dropping white milk-tears. The tears corroded the flesh, souping it to a frothy gel which was easier for the green medusa to lap up.

The Medusa in turn fed the eye, coating it with the liquefied flesh. The Blue Eye soaked it up like bread soaking up vinegar.

Ghost Boy was shaking. He’d expected this of the Medusa, which he’d never trusted. Those slinky snake mouths with their winking venom-wet fangs.

But the Blue Eye — this was different. He never imagined the Blue Eye would kill and eat like this, do something so base, so visceral. Ghost Boy had thought the Blue Eye was one of the good guys. A wanderer like Ghost Boy, stuck in the forest and just trying to survive. Without a thought to eating, killing, devouring. Just another lost spirit. A friend to have, confess to and hope with. Not this. Ghost boy felt sick inside.

“How could you do this?” he suddenly yelled from his hidden copse. “How could you eat another living thing like that?”

Both creatures started, and dropped their food.

“He was dead when we found him,” said the Medusa. “And we’re hungry. Why are you so upset?”

“Blue Eye, I’ve been looking all my life for you,” cried out Ghost Boy, “and now you’re here, right before me, sucking up the flesh of the dead, feeding on flesh like a fungus, like a rot, a buzzard, a parasite. I wanted you to be something different, something better, something to help get me out of this forest, a friend for me, not a beast, a bug.”

The Blue Eye stopped dropping its acid-tears and wept real tears of sorrow. “I’m sorry,” the Blue Eye said, “I was hungry, and there was food here to eat. I never knew you were looking for me. I never knew how much I mattered to you. I can still be your friend, even if I’m not as perfect as you thought I was.”

Ghost Boy pulled out his bow.

“I don’t want your friendship anymore. Stop it now or I’ll kill you both.”

“What is it Ghost Boy,” said the Medusa, “What is it that bothers you so much? Is it that Blue Eye is eating dead flesh we came across by chance? Did you think he was a Spirit, a God, something above normal animal needs? Did you think he was insubstantial, removed from the normal objectives of living organisms? He is none of those things. He’s a simple creature like me, hungry when he’s hungry, thirsty when he’s thirsty, and if you aren’t willing to accept that, then you cannot possibly accept yourself, you who we’ve seen feasting on swine that you’ve shot and killed, roasting rabbit, and skewering sparrows on sticks.”

Ghost Boy drew an arrow in anger.

“Stop eating now, both of you,” he said, “Or I’ll kill you.”

“I’m sorry,” the Blue Eye said, continuing to eat, “I’m sorry I couldn’t be what you wanted. Forgive me.”

Ghost Boy shot the Blue Eye through the pupil, and sent another arrow clean through the Medusa’s mouth. Both creatures fell in a heap, covering the corpse they had been feeding on.

He stood still for some time.

Eventually he approached the pile, shuddering, cold. He squatted down, looked around to see if anyone was watching, then began filling his mouth with great handfuls of flesh, making sure to stir it all up, eye, medusa and corpse combined.

Ghost Boy watched as the mouth opened in the forest.

He had imagined he’d be overjoyed. At its perfect shape & stillness; its beckoning void.

Now that it was here, he worried.

He stood still for a long time, watching it.

“I once dreamt,” he thought, “about what was on the other side of the Mouth: A soft long meadow. Sunshine on my face like the lapping of sea against shore. Grass to sleep in. No weapons, no blood.”

“Now I wonder if there’s nothing behind the Mouth other than grinding jaws and gullet.”

He knelt on the forest floor. So much time wandering, wondering. Wasting his arrows on the defenseless trees. Leading the creatures of the wood astray, playing tricks, running away. And now, finally, the mouth was here. The holy mouth, the honeyed mouth, ready to suck him from this world and spit him to a place far better.

And yet he did not move.

The floating mouth suddenly spoke.

“Walk into me,” it said in a voice more felt than heard, “because your life has led up to this moment. There is no reason not to do it. Come.”

Ghost Boy felt bile curdle up in his throat.

“I’m staying,” he said, his voice not feeling like his, “because you ask me otherwise. Your need is repulsive. It makes you weak, it makes you soft. The mouth I’ve dreamed of is not these things. It doesn’t need me to enter it, and in my dreams, I enter it precisely because I am nothing to it.”

The mouth laughed. “Of course I need you,” it said. “Otherwise I wouldn’t ask for you. And I also wouldn’t have appeared here, in this glade of this forest, if you didn’t need me either, if I didn’t smell it on you like a lion smells blood. And so which is it you’re afraid of? How much I need you or how much you need me?”

Ghost Boy didn’t answer, but turned around and walked away, hearing the mouth shut behind him with a sound like a breath being taken.

Ghost Boy isn’t walking now, he’s dreaming.

He has two types of dreams:

- Dreams where he finds the giant blue eye, but instead of shooting it and killing it, he watches it, for a long time, from behind trees, and dreams of making friends with it;

- Dreams where he meets other ghost boys and is very happy for a time but then has to leave them behind when they learn his name, or share laughter for the first time, or give him a gift.

Tonight the dream is of the purple woods, with copses clawing out into skinny paths.

It’s a good dream. He stands still for ages and friendly things come close to him, slow at first and then with confidence, circling around him as in some kind of dance:

The green medusa, the beautiful white chest, the coffin.

Ghost Boy feels a soft warmth in his chest, he could stay here forever, indisputable & unremarkable as a column, being danced around. But he has the chalice, he has the arrows, he has the potion, and he could make everything around him break if he needed to.

Ghost Boy is getting impatient: it’s time for him to dance, too. But who will then be the Maypole?

-We’ll find another Ghost Boy to circle, says the Medusa.

Ghost Boy quickens his step, practices a jig, follows the three of them into the trees.

Whoever it is must learn to stand very still.

The little Ghost Boy in a big grey forest.

He never turns around and he never stops moving.

He has so many arrows, but no animals to shoot. So he fires into trees. The forest is everywhere quilled with his little sharp flags.

And in the morning his quiver is refilled with 20 more.

He has a purple potion of pale, milky liquid, and he’ll never, ever drink it.

And he has a little powdery skull he can crush between his fingers. He knows when he pinches it, everything will go black. His fingers never stop itching.

Lastly, his green chalice, empty. He wants to collect something in it: rain, blood. But the weather never changes here and nothing’s around to let a drop of itself. He leaves it in disgust sometimes on a tree stump, by the side of the path, sometimes behind a rock. But he always finds it days later, just as he’d left it, green-winking in the orange-halflight of the forest, and he always picks it up again.

Here’s the double doors, spreading like a fan, like a hole between eyes.