Unreal City by A. R. Meyering

we should get together again, this time just to hang out instead of do work. She and her boyfriend, Kyle, were going to take a walk in the woods to the Wishing Tree, and she asked if I wanted to come. I didn’t feel like staring at a blank page while telling myself to start my homework, so I agreed to tag along.
    It was drizzling, but Joy and I had a decent talk when Kyle wasn’t butting in. He seemed to be the sort of person who was desperate to prove his intellectual superiority to anyone in the vicinity. I learned right away he loved correcting trivial mistakes and slips of the tongue in a condescending tone. Scoffs and eye-rolls were his go-to response for anything that a person said, even something as harmless as “Wow, it’s cold outside” was met with “Oh, how original”, and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what Joy saw in him. I guessed that their relationship was the sort that begins out of a need for comfort and affection when forced into a new environment devoid of close friends or family.
    I anticipated the Wishing Tree to leave me feeling as empty as before. Instead, as Joy and Kyle scribbled wishes on scraps of paper, I heard a sound that was like hundreds of soft, slurred voices. My heart picked up tempo as I was assailed by a bundle of emotions, none of which belonged to me. It was like all the feelings, all the longing, aching, hoping, wondering, and hungering that people left by that tree, their wishes surging toward me. Powerful emotions wrapped around me, and my breathing grew laborious.
    Joy noticed my hand clawing at my throat and stopped writing. “You okay, Sarah?” she asked with a worried tone, and I tried to offer a convincing smile.
    “I’m good, but something just went down the wrong pipe. ”
    Kyle scoffed, a cynical smile spreading across his face. “Hah. I think you mean that you’re experiencing pulmonary aspiration ,” he said, raising his eyebrows as if this were common sense.
    I stared at him, deadpan, until his sneer faded and he resumed writing his wish.
    That night, for the first time since the day the police had come to the door with the news about Lea, I couldn’t sleep. Usually for me, sleep was a sanctuary of rest from my hyperactive twin demons of anger and depression. I ran to it willingly and fell into it effortlessly, but that night was different. I tossed and turned for hours, peeking up every so often to see Felix watching me.
    “Don’t you ever sleep?” I asked him around three in the morning.
    He prowled closer, looking thoughtful. “I can. Do you want me to?”
    “Well, yeah. It creeps me out how you just sit there and watch me. Quit that, will you?” I requested.
    Felix blinked his lantern eyes. “If you say so, Sarah.” He curled up and went to sleep without further ado.
    Feeling a bit more at ease, I lay my head back on the pillow and sighed. I was beginning to slip away when the sense that Felix was watching me returned. As I glanced over to check, a dark silhouette on the other side of my window startled me. I screamed as the blurred figure that looked like a man with antlers growing out of his head fled from my vision.
    Felix sprang awake, his gaze locked on where my shaking finger pointed.
    “Wh-what was that thing!?” I hollered, pulling the blankets closer to my chest. “Felix, go see!”
    The feline spirit obeyed at once, pushing his head under the curtain and peering out into the night. “There’s nothing out there,” he said after several tense seconds.
    “But you felt it too, didn’t you? There was something standing there. You had to have felt it.” My voice sounded like the shrieking breath of the wind whistling through a crack in the window.
    “I’m sorry, Sarah. I was sleeping.”

    I SLEPT THROUGH my class Friday morning, awaking without a hint of guilt but a great deal of anxiety. One day left. One day until I went back to Unreal City. One day until I was going to enact my plan to see my sister again, even if it