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Things need not have happened to be true.

-Neil Gaiman

The day was truly perfect. A blue sky lightly dotted by clouds, birdsong dancing from tree to tree, the far-off muntain range majestic an-

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The day was truly perfect. A blue sky lightly dotted by clouds, birdsong dancing from tree to tree, the far off mountain range majestic and serene, their rocky faces peering down at the scene before them.

“Isn't it wonderful, Mel?” A woman spun around, head turned up to face the sky with a mouth split open as if a laugh were about to bubble forth at any instant, yellow dress twirling and shimmering in the midday sun. “Isn't it so amazing?”

“Beautiful,” a man replied. He was climbing the hill with a wicker basket to where the woman in the yellow dress was standing. “We should come out here more often. Now come on and help me get the picnic out.”

The woman, whose name was Carol, skipped down to where Mel was and pulled him up the remaining few feet where they both stumbled and fell onto the soft, cool grass. Smiling at each other, the newlyweds began taking items out of the basket and placing them in a natural divot in the ground.

“What do you say we go for a strol after this?” Mel asked.

Carol finally laughed. “Oh, you silly goose, don't you mean stroll?”

“Oh, you're right, I- Woah.”

“What? Why do you look so shocked? Did…” Carol followed Mel’s quavering finger and her jaw dropped. The mountains were swaying, churning like they were no more solid than the ocean. The land began to follow along, spreading instability across the fields and making everything upon them look as if they were only ripples in a pond.

It was only after the wave of madness reached them that the couple was shocked out of their stupor. In a futile gesture of resistance, they tried to run, even when the ground beneath them began to crumble and fall into darkness. In their last few seconds of lucidity, Mel and Carol reached for each other, shared one final embrace, and then were consumed by the void, eternally falling until their world was nothing more than a distant memory.

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“Isn't it so amazing?”

“Beautiful,” a man replied. He was climbing the hill with a wicker basket to where the woman in the yellow dress was standing. “We should come out here more often. Now come on and help me get out the picnic out.”

The woman, whose name was Carol, skipped down to where Mel was and pulled him up the remaining few feet where they both stumbled and fell onto the soft, cool grass. Smiling at each other, the newlyweds began taking items out of the basket and placing them in a natural divot in the ground.

“You know, Carol, I have the oddest sense that we’ve done this before. It’s not even just déjà vu, it’s like I… You get what I'm saying?”

“Maybe. Is it like one of those dreams that you know you had but can't remember the details?”

Mel’s face lit up. “Yes, that's exactly it!” He then paused, realizing what had gone unspoken. “Do you feel it too, then?”

Carol nodded, looked out at the mountains with an odd expression, and said nothing more. Mel took the hint and kept quiet. The two sat together for a few minutes and soaked in the scene before Mel remembered why they were really there and handed Carol a sandwich wrapped in wax paper.

They ate together in silence.

The mountains began to shimmer.

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He passed Carol a sandwich wrapped in wax paper. The only sound as they ate was the distant chirping of birds and the wet crunch of lettuce.

“Oh, I can't take it anymore!” Carol burst out, throwing the last few bites of bread down the hill. “This whole day should be so amazing, but there's just this presence, this, this- you feel it, you just said so! It's like a, a, like a terrible thing has happened but neither of us will ever know about it. Tell me you feel it, Mel, please tell me I'm not worrying for nothing.”

The man next to her cleared his throat. “Um… Katrina, my name isn't Mel…”

Carol turned to the man and gasped in surprise. It wasn't Mel sitting next to her… At least, not… Well, no, he did… But his face was wrong, in the same way Carol just knew something monstrous and horrible had happened. It was Mel's face but not Mel at the same time.

Carol fell to her knees as an awful wave of nausea came over her. Not-Mel was immediately beside her, asking what was wrong. She pushed him away. He was wrong, the day with its fake cheer was wrong, everything felt totally and utterly perverse.

Her vomit had blotches of red in it.

Not-Mel jumped away from the blast of bile while Carol rolled over on her back. She felt weak, like her body had been robbed of energy along with her happiness. As she stared at the sky, spread-eagled, she could have sworn she saw little cracks beginning to appear in the blue above. And if she laid very still, she could feel the world begin to tear itself apart.

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The day was truly miserable. A grey sky overcast with clouds, the cawing of crows echoing from among the skeletal trees, the far-off mountain range looming and foreboding in the false twilight. A pair of figures looked at the desolate landscape from a lonely hill with wide eyes.

“Oh my god, Katrina, what happened?”

Carol glanced at Not-Mel, then to the tall black grass they stood in and saw with recognition the liquid that laid in it only a few feet away.

“What happened?” Not-Mel repeated. “Just a second ago, it was… Did we get put through some sort of time loop or thrown into another dimension, or-

“No,” Carol quietly interjected. “I know what's happening. I wasn't sure at first; I thought we were in a time loop as well. But look over here.” She pointed Not-Mel to the disgusting black puddle of sludge that she was looking at.

“Oh, what is that?!” Not-Mel wrinkled his nose.

“My vomit. That's what it used to be, at least. Isn't it clear, now? We're in the same place we’ve always been, but the world has been changed.”

Not-Mel was quiet for some time, trying to figure it out. “But how?”

“I don't know. Just five minutes ago, you were someone named Mel, and you looked like you do now but in some sort of way different, and I was sitting here eating my sandwich when something happened and I suddenly was back with an entire sandwich in my hands and I knew, I could just feel that something had gone terribly wrong. And that's when you appeared.”

“Um.” Not-Mel chuckled softly. “So I'm a, um, I'm the thing that went wrong? That doesn't really make me feel very good about myself.”

“Oh, no, no, I didn't mean it that way. It's that… well, everything around me is being tweaked in small, subtle ways, and I don't know how much time I have until I'm revised too. I-” Here she paused and took in one shuddering breath. “I'm scared. We're at the mercy of powers that seem to be beyond our control or comprehension. And…”

The two met each other's eyes, and a silent understanding went between them. “So what do we do?” Not-Mel asked after a while.

“Remember. It’s hard, like there’s some force trying to make me forget every… iteration, but I think… I think we can do it...”

“I… Okay. Okay. Remember,” he said more to himself than to Carol. He took a deep breath in, held it, and sighed, releasing all the tension he had held in his face since he entered the current landscape. “I can do that. I, I’ll do that. So I, um, take it that your name isn't Katrina, then?”

Carol permitted a melancholy smile to slip onto her face. “No, it's actually Carol. I never did catch yours, either.”

“Paul,” he replied.

After an awkward handshake, the odd duo sat in the black grass and talked about various things they thought they remembered while waiting helplessly for the world to start another iteration.

When the mountains began to tremble, they did not flee.

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“Oh, Paul, isn't this view so gorgeous?”

Paul gaped at the robot standing next to him. His mouth opened and closed, but no words came out because he no longer had lungs with which to speak; he had become metallic himself. The other robot kept talking.

“I just knew a cruise in the Orion system was worth it! The pamphlet said you couldn't get a view like this anywhere else, and were they right!”

Paul finally figured out how to use his voice box and croaked out, “Carol?”

The robot turned to him and cocked her head to the side. “Carol what? Christmas carolers? It's April. Christmas was two months ago.”

Paul began to speak, then stopped when he took a look at the stars outside the starship’s viewport. He only had time for a breathless “oh no” before the world undulated around him and fell apart.

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“Honestly, Paul, it's April. Christmas was four months ago.”

Paul stared at the stars. His mouth moved with the soft hiss of hydraulics, but if he had activated his voice box, he would have whispered, “Remember, remember, you have to remember.”

“Paul? Is everything okay?”

He turned to the robot, mouth opening and closing as he figured out what to say, settling on, “Katrina?”

“Yes? Is, is everything okay? Is something wrong?”

There was another moment of silence as Paul’s jaw moved up and down. “Do you… Did you feel that?”

Katrina looked around as if searching for something. “Feel what? Paul, what's wrong?”

“I… I think we were just revised. Edited.” He looked around at the floor and noted with grim satisfaction the puddle of what was now radiator fluid.

“Edited? My, what are you going on about? You sound like the world just ended, look like it too.”

He looked up and stared at Katrina, his metal face stony and mirthless. “It already did.”

Movement in the distance made both of their heads jerk towards the viewport, but only Paul recognized it for what it was. “No! What did we do?! We didn't do anything wrong!”

“Paul, what are you doing? Why are-”

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The day was truly perfect. A green sky obscured by clouds, nuiksong dancing from bush to bush, the far-off mountain range majestic and imposing.
Katrina swiveled around in an attempt to get some bearing on where she was. “P-Paul? Is this what you meant by editing?”

“Cassandra. You have a perfect memory. Who is this Paul you speak of? I do not recall this name.”

It was Katrina's turn to have her jaw drop. The… thing in front of her was the strangest animal she had ever seen. Yet even as she moved to get a better look, the world shimmered and swallowed her in a void where she was falling, falling, falling…

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“Cassandra.”

“Mattim.”

“Shall we hunt?”

“We shall.”

And the two creatures bounded off down the hill as the craggy mountains stared down at them while the puddle of vomit glittered in the light of a dying sun.

But then time stopped and the pair stood there, unblinking yet unseeing, and the world began to crumble, oh so slowly, and the sun broke apart and vanished, and the peaks of the mountains were sheared away, and a wind blew through the fields and turned them to dust, and the pair that had lived a thousand lives together stood in a void, unblinking, unseeing, until they too, hair by hair, bone by bone, disappeared.

And the void vanished.