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Monthly Fantasy Challenge for March.
Walking the beach, you're drawn to a legless man staring up at you like he knows you. You've been in a bit of neutral mood lately, not up, not down, but teetering on depression. Everything is just, well, boring. Looking at the people on the promenade: Happy couples, or loners, heads down in their phones, or the occasional mountain bike cop chasing a thief. All of it is a wisp of a fleeting nothing... When you reach down to set some change in the legless man's cup, you see it is full with coffee, and he grabs your wrist, whispering up to you, "Show us, then." When you pull free, you turn around and see nothing, no beach, no people, just a white smear. Back around and down, you see there is no legless man, either. As you look up where you once felt the promenade, your mind makes one appear, and you realize you've been either cursed or gifted to create your own reality. If you don't first think it, it simply will not exist. Bring us with you. Winner is decided by likes, and will recieve a crisp $10.00 -Make it a place to take us.

Gone.

"Show us, then."

I can feel the pressure of his hand on my wrist disappear as my vision goes white. My immediate thought was that I was having a seizure, that my brain had finally decided to send me back to the void that my childhood had plagued me with. Yet, my consciousness remained and I realized that this was something new, something different. I was standing on a similar promenade as to the one that I had been on before, but beyond the five feet where I stood, there was just a white expanse in every direction.

Was I on drugs? It didn't feel like any trip I'd been on before, just an endless sea of nothing.

I peered into my surroundings desperate for a glimpse of something, anything. Minutes, seconds, and hours passed as I stared into the expanse. I was desperate for something to track the time that I had passed, and as the thoughts of my wish crossed through my mind- a speck appeared in my white surroundings. It was a dull recreation of a stopwatch as if I pulled from my faded memories of gym class and wondered how much longer we would have to run around the track at school.

Had I done this? Had my wish for a way to figure out how long I had been in this odd vision created what I wanted?

I wished for more things now. A place to sit, the perfect meal, the mansions that I had dreamed of as a child. The more I wished and thought and imagined, the more items appeared. A bench akin to the ones I would pass by in the park. The taco I had been craving since the week before. A tall building, with a moat and spires, as if pulled from my childhood dreams.

But as I sat on the bench, it collapsed under me. I took a bite of the taco, and it felt like sawdust. I crossed the bridge towards the castle-like building before me, and as I opened the door, the inside was nothing but endless gleaming white. It was nothing but a 2D recreation of childhood drawings.

I didn't know how to create a world. I wished desperately for a way back to mine. I wanted a ladder, a trapdoor, a portal, something, anything, that would get me out of this nightmare.

A door appeared nearby, wooden and glowing with purple light. I rushed for it, wrenching it open. But inside was just another white expanse. My mind not built for the creative ability to make a passage back to the world that I remembered. Could I recreate it? I thought about my friends and my family, pulling on my memories, desperate for them to join me. Shapes started to appear beside me. My mom, my best friends Marie and Douglas, and my coworker Grace. They looked almost correct. But as I stared closer, I started to doubt myself. Were Marie's eyes really that shade of blue or were they darker? Hadn't Grace gotten a haircut recently? Was her hair really that long?

And as I started, these questions ran through my head - they started to change in front of me. Marie's eyes turned just a few shades darker, Grace's hair shrinking just a few inches. My thoughts were changing them. Whoever "them" truly was.

I was terrified. I wanted it gone. I didn't want to create the world. I wanted my world back. The recreations I had made of my friends, of my family, of my favorite places - they were lifeless imitations.

Gone. Gone. Gone. Gone. Gone.

The word echoed through my head. I wanted it gone. All of it.

Gone. Gone. Gone. Gone.

The people, and the places that I had created started to fade. The expanse of white slowly returned.

Gone. Gone. Gone.

I could see shades of black creeping out the edges of my vision, overtaking the blank canvas that had been laid out in front of me.

Gone. Gone.

Maybe I hadn't been able to create my world. But I certainly was able to end this one. The black enveloped me, enveloped everything. I could feel the pressure and tension slowly leave my body.

Gone.