Ch21: Searching
553 Words
The morning after the dream, Sari sat in the school office with her phone in her hands.
Classes wouldn't start for another hour. The room was empty, quiet except for the whir of the ceiling fan and the distant shouts of children playing in the yard. Sunlight slanted through the window, already hot, promising another humid day.
She opened the browser.
*Grey city skyline. Tall buildings. Cold lighting.*
The search loaded. Images filled the screen—New York, London, Tokyo, Shanghai. Grey skies, glass towers, rivers running through concrete canyons. She scrolled slowly, studying each one.
Nothing.
The buildings in her dream were different. Sharper. The sky was a different grey—not overcast, not stormy, just grey, as if color had been drained from the world. And the light was wrong. In the photos, sunlight caught the windows, reflected off the water. In her dream, there was no sun. Just a pale, sourceless glow.
She tried again.
*Futuristic grey city. No sun. Black windows.*
More photos. Concept art from movies. Renderings of unrealized buildings. Still nothing.
She zoomed in on one image—a view of Hong Kong from above, the buildings packed tight against the mountains. No. The scale was wrong. Her city was spread out, not clustered.
Another search.
*Skyline with no river. Grey concrete. No billboards.*
Her thumb ached from scrolling. She had been at it for twenty minutes. The bell for first period would ring soon.
She set down the phone and rubbed her eyes.
*It has to exist somewhere.*
She had seen it. She had stood in it. She had felt the cold air on her skin and the hard pavement under her feet. It wasn't imaginary. It couldn't be.
But the images on her screen were all wrong. Too bright, too dark, too crowded, too empty. Nothing matched the specific grey of that sky, the particular shape of those buildings.
She looked out the window.
The real world waited—green rice paddies, palm trees swaying, a line of mountains blue in the distance. The air smelled of rain and earth and something sweet she couldn't name.
Her dream city had no smell.
She picked up the phone one more time. Scrolled to the bottom of the search results. Clicked on a link she had skipped before—a forum thread about "liminal spaces," places that felt like dreams.
The first photo was a parking garage at night. The second was an empty mall corridor. The third was a housing complex in a country she didn't recognize, the buildings all grey concrete, the sky pale and washed out.
She stared at the third photo.
Close. Not close enough. But close.
She saved it to her phone, then closed the browser.
The first bell rang.
Sari stood, tucked her phone into her skirt pocket, and walked toward her classroom. The children's voices grew louder as she approached. Someone was crying. Someone else was laughing. The ordinary chaos of a school morning.
She stopped at the door and looked back at the window.
The rice paddies were green. The sun was bright. The world was warm and real and nothing like the grey city.
She stepped into the classroom and began the day.
But the photo stayed on her phone.
And the grey city stayed in her head.
- Writer
