Free The Annihilation of Foreverland by Tony Bertauski

poked out like his skin was hanging on him like an old shirt. The tracker bulged on his neck.
    Danny started to say something but the sound of the surf blotted out his hesitant words and then he just didn’t know what to say, so he swallowed the lump and looked at the water, too.
    “What do you think’s out there?” Reed finally asked.
    Danny squinted, shading his eyes to search the horizon but nothing disrupted the flat line. No ship or island or rock, just water.
    “Home,” Danny said.
    Reed didn’t tell him if he was wrong or right. He got the feeling he was wrong.
    Danny continued to search the horizon. Just because he couldn’t see it didn’t mean it wasn’t there. He came from someplace and it wasn’t the island. Out there, somewhere, were his parents and a place he called home. And when he graduated, he would see them again.
    “Tell me what home looks like,” Reed said, without looking up. “Better yet, tell me about your favorite Christmas. Think about the best Christmas you ever had, when you got everything you asked for and the world was the greatest place to be. Tell me what it was like.”
    Easy.
    It was the time he got a skateboard half-pipe. He came down the stairs rubbing his eyes and his little brother was opening these big boxes from Santa and all Danny had was a green envelope. It was a message to look out the kitchen window. Danny pressed his hands on the cold glass. There, standing six feet tall and filling the back yard was the thing he wanted most in the world.
    The half-pipe was covered in all his favorite stickers – Fallen and Zero and the fiery red head of Spitfire. His mother, wearing her pink robe with dyed blond hair hanging in her eyes, went onto the back deck with him.
    But when Danny went through the back door, he stepped in three feet of snow. His mother was wearing a coat and her hair was black and short and she was smoking a cigarette. And his dad was there, too. He was fat and unshaven with a cigarette stuck in his lips. He handed Danny an air rifle and said Merry Christmas and aim for the cans he set up in the back yard. The yard was empty except for a dozen Budweisers.
    Danny looked back to his mom because he had a half-pipe, not a rifle, but now she was shorter and wearing a tank top and the snow was gone and there were palm trees next to the house.
    “They didn’t erase our memories, Danny Boy.” Reed still hadn’t looked up. “They filled us with random ones, layered them one on top the other until we don’t know which ones belong to us, which ones are false.”
    He was right. They didn’t feel like his memories. And they were never the same parents. But Foreverland, that was different. “In the Haystack… I remembered…”
    “They put your memories inside the needle. Every time you go ins ide, you get more of them back but you come back to the flesh, they get mixed with an ocean of random ones that aren’t yours.”
    “Why?”
    “The more you go inside the needle, the more you feel like yourself. The more you like it.”
    Danny tried to remember Christmas again. He knew who he was, he remembered getting what he wanted. He remembered the half-pipe covered with stickers and the sound of the skateboard clapping on the metal coping. But then he couldn’t actually remember skating.
    Then he realized he didn’t know how to skate.
    “She sent you,” Reed said. “She told you to come find me, didn’t she?”
    There wasn’t a hole in Reed’s forehead, only a scar where it used to be. He went into the Haystack and endured the suffering without taking the needle. After Danny went to sleep, Reed stayed in that dreadful room. He’d done it before, Danny had been told. Reed was a sick puppy, he was told.
    “How do you know that?” Danny asked.
    Reed remained still and quiet. “You can trust her,” he finally said.
    “Do you know her?”
    “I did, once upon a time.” Again, quiet. A slight shrug. “Or maybe I just think I do. It’s an ocean of thoughts,