Ellie turned and looked away from me, looking out the boarded front window, as if it wasn’t boarded up and had a nice view. “Mrs. Snodgrass, the high school counselor, turned me onto it. My grades were dropping, and she couldn’t get a hold of my parents anymore.”

Ellie didn’t have the proverbial nuclear family. Her mother had left years ago, and her father was an alcoholic who drank away his paycheck. That’s why Ellie started working part time at the pizzeria behind her house. She needed to pay her own way.

“So how do you do it?” I asked.

“It’s pretty simple. You find somewhere quiet, you get comfortable, you close your eyes and you breathe.”

That can’t be right. “You just… breathe?”

She shrugged. “Yeah. You just breathe, and concentrate on your breath. Don’t think of anything else.” She turned to me, a wry smile playing on her face. “But you’re going to start thinking about something else, and that’s okay. But as soon as you realize you’re thinking about something else, you pull your concentration back onto your breathing. And you just… rinse and repeat for a while. It really helped me.”

That sounded really weird. But what wasn’t weird now?

“Thanks”

We were both silent for a while, and then Ellie said, “I really am glad you’re back.”

“Me, too.”

And I was. I didn’t have a handle on how I was feeling about… well, anything. About dad being dead, and now mom. About the world getting destroyed, and aliens and monsters and me being stuck in a fucking thirty-seven-inch tall terracotta gnome.

I blinked. That was weird. I knew exactly how tall I was. Hell, I knew how much I weighed, all my dimensions, and every ingredient that was used in manufacturing me. Including the dizzying array of chemicals used in the paint used on me.

Jesus…

I tried to push that all out of my head. I had things to do, right? I may not be able to sleep, but I could spend that time doing something productive. And now that I had a recipe for meditation—and the aliens couldn’t torture me with nostalgic music anymore—I was going to take it out for a spin.

I was already in a quiet place, and since I didn’t feel much—physically—anymore, I was ready to start. But… then came the fact that I don’t breathe. Not only don’t I need to breathe, but I can’t physically draw in breath. How I could speak was an utter mystery, but it was definitely not caused by exhaling air in any way, shape or form.

Okay. That was a problem.

But what do they say? Fake it until you make it.

Okay… got it. I sat there, with my eyes shut, imagining that I was taking in breaths, and then exhaling them. Breathe in, breathe out. Breath in, breath out.

Before I knew it, a thought barged right in on my fake breathing. I was still pissed about how dad’s family had just ghosted me and mom after he’d died. I guess they didn’t want to think about it too much. But mom could’ve used the support. And I could’ve used someone to talk to.

But, I had had people to talk to. I’d had my friends. And I couldn’t even count the times that I talked to Oz about dad dying, and how mom was, and how I was.

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It hadn’t been long since I’d woken up as a gnome, but I had already missed being able to talk about what had happened—mom dying, me dying and coming back as a yard ornament—with Oz. He’d been my first best friend. He still was my best friend, blood sucker or dating my ex-girlfriend or not. That hadn’t changed. At least not in my heart.

I still wanted to punch him in his zit-free, freckle-free face, but I also wanted him to be with us, not out there all on his own.

Okay, I saw the whole You’re going to think of something else, shit. I tried to push it all out of my mind, and concentrate on taking fake breaths. And that worked for a few breaths. It really did. But then I started thinking about my parents being dead.

I wanted them back just as much as I wanted my old body back. I cringed. Not my old body, with the rot and ruin, and bugs living in it now. I wanted my body, from before I died and became road kill, back.

Road kill…

I remembered someone saying that. That I was road kill. Who…

Again I tried to push that all out of my head. I really wished I could shake my head. But I had to admit to myself that all that, getting my family back, that wasn’t going to happen. No matter how much I wished for it, I was not going to get mom and dad back. And time was not going to flow backwards so I could. So I could be happy again.

I decided to concentrate on something not dead parents related, and not about my now rotting corpse. I needed to somehow… someway… get this body to become human. To get it to bend and reshape itself into what I wanted it to become.

I wanted to be human again.

I wanted to be able to smell, to eat, to drink, to sleep, to breathe… to turn and shake my freaking head again. I wanted to feel… and I wanted to feel flesh instead of hand-painted terra-cotta. I wanted to have to go to the bathroom again. I wanted to feel the wind on my face, on my arms. And I wanted to feel my heart beating again.

Part of me knew those were all things that wouldn’t happen. Couldn’t happen. It was like traveling back in time to have mom and dad back. It was impossible.

But I needed something to want, something to wish for. Something to keep me going. And if that whole cultivation thing I remembered them talking about was true… maybe I could turn myself human again.

I felt a weird ache in my chest. I knew there was nothing in there, and it was probably just my mind playing tricks on me, but it almost felt like the ache of yearning. A physical body ache caused by my yearning to have a body, to be human again.

Talk about crazy, transcendental mind-fuckery.

As the sun came up, and Ellie got up and headed back into the pizzeria to get cleaned up for the day, I went over to where she had been sitting, climbed on top of the stool and looked outward like she had. There was a small sliver of space between the boards that secured the window. And when you looked out it, you could make out the bed-sized spaceship that the city had placed in the town Square, all silver and round and surprisingly untouched.

I wasn’t so sure that was the best thing to have a view of.

***

We started the day with shrimp flavored Ramen. They were some of the things that Teddy had found in my kitchen, and put in his inventory. I couldn't smell it, I couldn't eat it, but it seemed like my friends really enjoyed it. They'd already gone through what they’d scavenged from the Mars Giant Eagle’s stock of ramen in the last 2 weeks. They hadn't made it out the five miles to the closest Walmart. So this was a treat.

After they all ate, we started looking through our prize boxes. There were only bronze boxes. As avid gamers, we understood that the further we progressed, and the harder it was to kill our opponents, that our prize boxes would get better. Our leveling up would stay at the same pace, and experience points would probably accrue at the same rate, but the boxes would get better. Most everybody got healing potions. Most everybody got extra scrolls of potions that would temporarily boost their magic. Though, none of my friends had much of a mana quotient yet. Ellie received a strange necklace that was made out of what looked like chicken bones. Supposedly it would raise her strength, and her constitution. Very useful, if not completely ugly.

Me? Well, my box had a piece of coal in it. And a note from Santa that read, “Morty's been a bad, bad boy.”

Funny.

But, when I pulled up my stats box to put the piece of coal in my inventory, I saw that the piece of coal had a special designation. It was actually a bomb. All I had to do was say “the accompanying message” before lobbing it off at whatever I wanted to blow up.

Accompanying message?

I picked up the note from Santa again, and sent a silent fuck you, and a thank you for the piece-of-coal bomb. I put both items in my inventory, placing them in a new folder headed, “Things that go boom!”