Quincy was a tired little town in a tired little state in a tired little country, and at the age of eighteen, Raine told her mother she was tired of her life, that her savings should be spent on experiences. After a gap year-and-a-second of working in service and engaging in less travel than she’d imagined, Raine was left with the impression that she ought to plan the entirety of her life in the following six months, to integrate back into the set trajectory of expected education, despite not having any inclination on how to find fiscal payoff in a stagnant economy.

Droplets dressed the borrowed car, whose windows lay uncharacteristically splayed open. Over the hood of its neighbor, Raine could see the stars and the ugly half-moon. Clouds crowded the illuminated grin in patches, a sudden burst of weak moonlight dusting the old tree that stood like a sentinel at the entrance to the old high school, its fat green leaves only a slightly different shade of dark than the sky. She clasped her knees with laced fingertips, bracing her shoulder against the door frame and the thoughts threatening to take her composure.

Around the parking lot, the thinned deciduous forest rattled its percussive leaves like a muffled rain stick. After a day of I-love-yous and hand-holding, Raine’s gentleman love broke her heart. She had known him well. Probably the well-est she’d known anyone, other than her mother. Now, it seemed like a monstrous distortion; she had ultimately come to find she’d barely ventured past his shallow end. Two years of intimacy in a teenage life are especially nothing to scoff at.

True to the downpour, the day was not done with her yet. The wave of mail that contained the recruitment documents had come without warning and so, seemingly to her uncle, had her angry phone call. It was silly to feel annoyed at a complex human being, at someone who had a whole history and experience unique from her own, she knew. She knew this, but she still wished she could meld with the seat and disappear the outside world from existence. Thoughts hung in an unspoken stutter on the cell line.

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“Matter is composed chiefly of nothing.” - Carl Sagan, Cosmos.

The thing she liked best as a child was her private spinning game. She would tap her tip-toes quickly in the twinkling twilight, tightening her arms against herself to gain as much momentum as possible. On the nights when the stars hung from the sky and her young mind could see the strings connecting them to the ceiling of space, Raine McAllister with her white straw hair would orbit in circles around her own gravity until her legs ached. Just before the moment when she would stumble from exhaustion (legs unable to keep up their dance, tangling downward), she sprang, airborne as her limbs stretched outward: half to break her fall, half to go as high as possible.

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Kn:Farley’s original work in progress City of the Dead, part of a larger series called The Park City Series, follows Raine as she navigates through some very odd situations involving the living dead and an amusement park where things are not always as they seem.

CHAPTER ONE. @Wiki.
Introducing Raine McAllister, the Carnival Wing and the Nothing. Raine’s hair turns black to her eyes, her father breathes life into the dying (then dies himself), she reads a book from his collection before leaving her home town for a year and a half. Timothy Danes, her uncle, discusses her invitation to the Carnival Wing while a creature called the Nothing inhabits a corpse for mysterious purposes.
Part One
Part Two

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