Money Can't Buy More Time

...they found his body covered in gold. A crude kind of Midas’ touch — his limbs twisted grotesquely at the bottom of the canyon. He permanently wore a face of remorse despite his apparent riches. No missing person’s report was ever filed. The money and notebook were handed over to the police and him and they were never heard of again. The woman weeping at the edge of the cliff might as well have not existed.

THE END.

The words are punctuated with a now-dull pencil and the slap of her black notebook shutting. For days, Avarice has slaved over this story. A story that will change her life.

Squeezing the Moleskine confidently to her chest, she’s sure the only thing standing between her and $20,000 was simply transferring her scribe to Vocal’s online interface. She’d always preferred the written word despite the extra work, so sprawling the notebook in front of her laptop, she began the transcription. Before her second indention, however, her fatigue got the best of her, and she found herself fast asleep, face down in her ink.

Circling the ads that did not prove completely awful, Russ scans and rescans the classifieds for something to keep the roof over his head. Settling on the best of the lot -- carpenter, cook and cat-sitter, with a promise to apply the following morning, he flips to the comics to decompress. Tucked in between, an obituary grabs his attention.

“H o l y shit.” He swore his eyes deceived him, but with it right there in black and white, he could only swear so much. Blinking hard to prove he wasn’t dreaming, he saw flashes of peeling wallpaper and piling bills transform to lush carpet and high ceilings. It seemed hard to deny this was not some divine intervention giving him a chance at a better life. Abandoning the warning for an analytical approach to the poem, he determined the location lay in the lines:

I could only take my fortune so high

nest egg

cliffs to climb

crows

look high

Despite having no hard evidence, Russ was sure he knew exactly where the treasure was located. Ironically enough, it was in a place he long ago treasured -- the peak of an unnamed mountain his family used to picnic at every Sunday. The last time they went, he recalls climbing to the top of the tallest tree he'd ever seen on the edge of a cliff. He remembers his mother’s scolding being muffled through the branches and silenced by the view. Swaying high above the entire town, he never wanted to leave. Maybe if he had, things would be different. He tries to forget.

So, with nothing left to lose and everything to gain, Russ lays out what can hardly be considered hiking gear and a plan to leave at sunrise.

Avarice wakes up with the sun shining brighter than it should have been able to through her blinds. Confused, she opens her eyes to see her blinds gone. Along with her windows, walls and every other piece of her bedroom. Jolting up to feel the slats of a park bench, her blood ran cold despite the pleasantly warm atmosphere. Not only did she not know how she got there, but she had no clue where she was. Completing all the telltale signs of dreaming, she pinched her arm, winced and tried to will herself awake. She considered sleep-walking the only feasible culprit, but with mountains in the distance, she knew she wasn’t in Kansas anymore.

Frantically, she rushed about the early-morning joggers and dog walkers, holding back the urge to manically question them of her whereabouts in fear of alerting the police of the crazy person hassling park goers. “Aha!” she rejoiced, picking up an abandoned newspaper. However, the relief that had flooded her body vanished just as quickly as it arrived when her eyes met the front page: The Hedgecastle Hub April 3, 1998. Her heart sinks as the paper flutters to the ground, unaware it had just delivered the most hard-hitting news of its publication. She is in a town that should not exist. Today is the day her protagonist was to set out on his expedition. Today is the day that he dies.

She frets what is to become of her when the story ends and promptly sets out toward the treasure with an omniscience only the author could have.

On the opposite side of town, Russ, having donned his work boots long before dawn, spent the early morning wearing holes in the already worn-down shoes as he paced, impatiently awaiting the sun rise. He approximated it to be five more hours before he was filthy rich. His fingers fiddled. He could feel the money between them already. Great things come to those who wait, he reassured himself with empty words he'd heard along his life. Though, as soon as Apollo raised his sleepy head, Russ rushed out of the door toward a new horizon. Stopped short, the sound of his car turning over was matched with equally ear-splitting explicatives as he kicked and cursed the lemon. All the lights on his dash were likewise enraged, cheering him on in red flashes.

Usually he’d give up when met with such resistance, exclaiming it was just his luck and how the whole world was against him. But today was different. Today he had a fighting chance. He was sure of it. With the reassurance that soon he would have enough money to drive brand new cars in demolition derbies if his heart so desired, he departed on bike, abandoning what little provisions he’d packed, save his black notebook with a shorthand copy of the poem. He did, however, continue to carry a peculiarly large amount of hope (perhaps more than he could handle.)

Pedaling faster with each pump, he passed through the town he’d thought cozy as a child, but found each year and loss had caused his clothes to become more snug and the city claustrophobic. This pilgrimage would take him back to where the life he’d known and loved had ended, but also, with any luck, where a new one will begin.

Avoiding the temptation to gawk at the intricacies of a world solely she had fabricated, Avarice tread with good pace to the place she -erh- Silas Finch Harrington had placed his fortune. She honestly wasn’t sure how the whole free-will thing worked here, and began to ponder the possibility of own existence being someone else’s entry to an online writing contest as she sped down the street, noting details as minute and complex as her waking life. But the secrets of the Universe could wait. There were bigger matters at hand. She’d have to make it there fast if she wanted to stop him.

The base of the path, though brightly illuminated with afternoon light and wildflowers, held a darkness he feared would swallow him if he gave in. Dropping his bike to reach a finger through the threshold, he immediately jerked back as if burned. It was all in his head. He knew that. Following one deep breath in through his mouth and out of his nose, he composed himself and began the three mile trek to the top. He swore he saw his childhood self flit through the trees, weaving in and out with sticks and bugs and laughs. Memories that should have been warmly smiled at were wished away as he persevered through the brush. Despite having never walked this path alone, his muscle memory carried him rights and lefts and unders better than he would have expected, especially with Mother Nature having reclaimed a lot of her land.

Not knowing whether to curse or praise herself for the intricacy of the trip, Avarice continued on this quest until, scraped and sweaty, emerging from the thicket appearing rapid, she saw him standing at the base of the tree. For a moment she forgot her mission and couldn’t help but stare. He was exactly what she envisioned. This was not a lousy book-to-movie casting. Her thoughts had become reality, and she had to actually shake herself out of it -- knocking a few stems out of her hair in the process-- to return back to Earth (or wherever she was at the moment).

Russ was equivalently shaken. Seeing the last symbol of his childhood standing strong and tall while he was broken filled him with fury. In a fit of rage, he attacked the tree as if it were its fault he had refused to leave its branches until the sun set that day. Seeing red, he wanted to punch, claw and kick everything. The tree. The dark. The snake. The hospital. The funeral. The booze. The gun. The funeral. The entire foster system. Everything that had stolen his life and the lives of the ones he’d loved. With his vision blurred from sobbing and his ears deaf to anything but the sound of fists on bark, he doesn’t notice the woman at the edge of the woods. Ten years of pent up emotions release at once, and he collapses in a defeated pile onto the ground, hoping if a man hysterically cries in the forest and no one is there to hear him, he never really cried. Regardless, he sat, emptied, not even noticing the SFH scratched in the trunk right above his head.

Somehow, though so close, money was the last thing on his mind.

That changed as soon as he saw the woman in the woods. Standing nearly five feet from him before he realized her presence, upon seeing her, he immediately scrambled up the tree to ensure he didn’t withstand a life full of emotional trauma just to have his treasure stolen from under him.

Fearing for the sake of them both, Avarice screams out for him to stop.

That the branches will break.

That he’ll die.

Once again, Russ ignores the heedings of those wiser than him. Adrenaline in his body, blood in his ears, he bounds from branch to branch as he once had. At the top, a large bag sits in an abandoned crows’ nest. He grasps it, simbaing it to the sky in triumph. The celebration is cut short by the snap of the weight-bearing branch under him. He falls a hard fall, missing each limb he attempts to latch onto. Grabbing him by the wrist before he fell into the chasm, Avarice begged him to let go of the money. She couldn’t lift them both. But it was no use.

He

fell

to

his

death,

still clinging to the coins.

She braced herself for what would happen next. Would she blink out of existence? Spontaneously combust? Or would some other fatality befall her? The answer was nothing. Nothing happened and it was almost worse that way. For days she slept in the boughs of that tree. No longer wanting to see another square foot of the world she’d created. Was shock value really worth someone’s life? Was any of this real? Is she even real? These questions ate and her while wildlife ate on him, until finally his body was discovered. Until finally he received a proper burial and

She woke with a gasp to light streaming through the window. Avarice yelped with joy. It was a dream after all. Checking the time, she realized she’d better get back to work if she wanted to get it transferred in time. She resumes her notebook to laptop glances before realizing the words in her journal had changed. They introduced a character she had not written in.

A woman in the woods.

Suddenly money was the last thing on her mind, and she heaved into the trash can, reliving the moment. The moment