THREE

Norman looked at the unfamiliar face and wondered if he was dreaming. He had an eerie sense that this was not the real world. Yet, at the same time, all of it looked like the real world. All the details were the same, from the sharp corners of the city to the colour of the sky. The girl in front of him was a sight for sore eyes. What was her name, he wondered. So he asked her: "What's your name?"

For a moment, the figure in front of him froze, not knowing whether to tell the truth or to lie. She decided to tell the truth. Her name was Andrea. They shook hands and looked at each other. They talked about schools and found out that they both liked badgers. It was a start. There was no door and no way out of that room. They might as well take the time to know each other, their likes and dislikes, their preferences, their lives. All that could be known.

There was nothing in that room apart from themselves. Andrea and Norman knew that they were powerless, they felt just how strong fate could be. But they could not bring themselves to give up, so they chatted on, hoping against hope that someone would arrive, that some unknown hero would drop by and save them, and they would be able to be free again. The city was a distant memory, time seemed to stop in its tracks in that room.

+++

It was raining. But it wasn't water that was falling from the sky. It was a red substance of unknown qualities. The sky had been hurt, and it had been hurt badly. The moon was a shadow of its former self, the stars were gone. There was no Sun. A white figure woke up, had a shower, had some breakfast, went to work. He had a bad feeling about this day. He didn't like it.

ONE

He was all alone. He had no one. The birds were singing. The cats were running after mice, and the sun made all the sky-scrapers shine brightly. But Norman was sad, so all he saw was black and gray.

He was an average kid. 5ft 1, brown hair, brown eyes. He liked strawberry ice-cream and a good apple pie. He was alone because he had run away from home and not come back. Now, he was lost in a jungle of a city that he didn't know or understand, trying to figure out what to do of his life. He was too young to have run away, but the decision had been made, there was no turning back on it now. He'd just have to accept it and move on.

That room had been an unexpected blessing. He did not understand where it came from or what it was doing there, but it had been good to rest. He had been tired. Two or three more steps without even sitting on a comfortable chair would have meant unconsciousness, he was sure. But that room had saved the day, and all was pretty well now. Norman just had to find something to eat and he'd be fine. He knew he would. All he had to do was find a super-market, buy an apple or two, eat them, and his stomach would become less grouchy and stop growling menacingly.

Norman walked, calmly, through the streets of the city. The green pastures he had gone through to reach the city were far away now, and the room was soon becoming a small dot in his past. Norman had no map. His journey, which had started two days before the present day, had been an erratic search for a road to Eden, but Eden seemingly did not want to be found. So, after two days, he had reached this city, a nameless titanic mass of concrete cubes and concrete paralelograms. There were no round shapes in city, only sharp corners. The room Norman had sat in had been an empty room right next to a bus stop.

Norman's hands were sweaty, and so was his hair. He was beginning to worry he would not be able to find food in that wretched city. And then it hit him, he understood why he had felt so strange throughout his stay in that place.

That is exactly when Norman's eyes suddenly closed and he knew no more.