When Pink returned, several hours later during which Luna sat and stared dumbly at the floor, her eyes were red and Luna knew her mother must have been crying. She looked like that after she cried. Luna hadn’t cried. Whether Pink realized that or not she didn’t know, but her mother handed over a cell phone and said, “You can watch things on that.” She also deposited white plastic bags on the little round table. “And take this.” A gummy candy that came from a bottle.

Luna knew that Pink assumed she was oblivious, that she believed herself to be doing a good job of hiding the truth about their life. She was wrong on both counts, but Luna didn’t tell her that, never let on. Instead, she wandered over to a corner with an outlet to plug in the phone. There was a video app and a web browser and the device was already connected to public Wi-Fi. The phone was an old model, too heavy and the screen too small, but it was better than nothing and Luna wasn’t about to complain.

Life without anything to watch was clearly cursed.

"There’s food in here,” Pink said and Luna glanced up at her. She’d reapplied her makeup. “Put your blanket on the bed. I’ll be back,” she paused a beat and added, “later.”

Left to her own devices, as was the daily routine, was the way Luna liked it. She didn’t know any other way to live. Her earliest memories saw her entertaining herself with dust bunnies and shadow puppets. The introduction of moving, talking pictures was revolutionary and opened a door to previously unknown wonders. Luna watched everything; from children’s shows with talking bulldozers to cooking competitions featuring swordfish, she thought she’d seen it all. Real life and fantasy were available with the click of a button, at her beck and call. Horrors in the mist and giant snakes in the Amazon. Also in the dense jungles of the Amazon Rainforest were tribes of cannibals who killed unwitting visitors with poison darts.

All of these things she knew, but with her new window to on-demand entertainment, her very own internet-connected cell phone, came more. More stories, more ideas, more questions than answers. Shows the likes of which she’d never seen before.

She quickly skipped bright colors and playdough, she already knew numbers and shapes. Those infantile offerings were of no interest to Luna. She wasn’t a baby after all. She wasn’t sure exactly how old she was, but she was far beyond the alphabet song. She found herself intrigued, instead, by skeletons and tombstones. Ghost hunters and pranksters. There were so many things to watch, in fact, that she was quickly overwhelmed by it all. Thousands, no millions, of choices were now before her, right at her fingertips.

No longer was she at the mercy of nameless, faceless randos setting a schedule of shows for her to watch whether she liked it or not.

Paralyzed by the plethora of options, Luna sat for several minutes staring at the device before deciding, after taking a look at the digital clock in the upper left corner, that it didn’t matter what she watched first. She had all the time in the whole world and she could see it all if she set out to do it, which she would. She would watch anything and everything interesting there ever was.

But, before that, she was hungry.

Up from the floor she stood and to the tiny kitchen area, defined by a few peeling paint cabinets and old appliances, she went. Pink had set microwavable meals on the counter and, pushing over a wobbly chair, Luna got one open, per directions, and into the microwave. Three minutes, a pause to stir, and two fifteen later her macaroni and cheese with nuggets and a brownie was done. She took a juice box, cranapple, from the refrigerator as well and set herself up, back on the floor, prepared to dive headfirst into the bottomless lagoon that was the internet video website. Would she find monsters or treasures and how far down could she go?

Monsters, Luna thought, were treasures in their own right. The stuff of mysterious legend, less likely to be found than gold or jewels because who went looking for a monster? One might be found incidentally while on a quest for riches, but everyone hoped that wouldn’t happen. The fewer monsters the better or so they thought. Luna believed forest beasts would be better to find than some dumb old crown or something. You couldn’t do anything with a crown, but with a monster, a real, live hairy jagged thing, anything was possible.

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It was a search for monsters that led her to a thirty-seven-episode animated series featuring a high school boy with ambitions to rid the world of evil. Aided by a monster, whose image she first saw in a list of ‘Best T.V. Monsters Of All Time’, he got close to the goal, only to fail in death.

And wasn’t that just the way of the world, Luna thought.

She was one to wonder, prone to long-distance travel on various trains of thought that never seemed to reach their destination. The tracks rattled below open floors and rivers flew on white wings overhead. It was then that Luna realized she’d fallen asleep and to sleep was to dream and dreams… Dreams were more real than anything.

She knew she’d been asleep before, then awake again; how many times she couldn’t say. The worlds bled one into another. She was with Pink in the new room, ate food by herself, but her shadow ate too. Behind her. She knew it sat munching on grapes like she did because they were on the space train together. Crossing galaxies to the very edge of the edge and the train didn’t stop but was so long that it would never be swallowed by the monster, Ink Pen. She was at the end of the train, as far back as anyone could be, and even though she knew Ink Pen wanted her to come, she wouldn’t go. It would be simple to do it, to flow ahead and she would be taken in, but instead, she opened a window and hung halfway out to shout, “Not today, Satan!”

Whether Ink Pen appreciated the name or not she couldn’t tell. You never could tell with Ink Pen. It was a formless beast, at least as far as she knew, on the outskirts of everything. For now, Ink Pen was pushed by the train ever further from the things that were alive; someday the train would stop and she would get off and Ink Pen would win, then lose, because when Ink Pen won, the game was well and truly over.

She could never remember what game it was or why she was the principal player besides Ink Pen, but Luna kept playing. It was The Game. The game of all the things that were. Even Ink Pen. Because nothing was still something until it wasn’t and when that time came, no time would be at all.

Her head was bigger on the inside and Luna recognized this every time she dreamed. There were doors and staircases, shelves, and glass on the floor. There were places she had never seen before, but not one had a name. Ink Pen was hiding. He wanted the dust because dust was people so she didn’t keep any in her dreams. Dust or people. The train was empty except for her and every inch of it glittered spotless and silent. Ink Pen hated silence more than anything.

What Ink Pen wanted most was the noise of the mind because minds were the noisiest places that existed. There were so many minds. In her dreams, Luna could hear them all, but she chose not to listen. Listening gave her a headache and tempted her to get off the train. To pull on the brakes and stop pushing Ink Pen. Minds were so loud about everything.

Wouldn’t it be better? If it was quiet?

“Shut up, Ink Pen,” she told Ink Pen.

She knew it wasn’t time yet. Though the quiet called it wasn’t time. When it came, when Ink Pen won the game, the silence that descended would have neither beginning nor end. It would be…

As she woke once more the images drifted away and softly floated off to the deepest reaches of her mind. Luna’s brain went much further down than the lowest depths of the profound, but she was only passingly conscious of that. There were memories within; thoughts and ideas running like streams down haunting cliff-sides, pulled apart by toothed, jutting kaleidoscope rocks and flowing into one another over and over again until they were indistinguishable.

Splashes of color once bright and independent now bound to black as Ink Pen.

Maybe, Luna thought as she swayed between life and dreams, that was the truth of Ink Pen. He could be the massive, monstrous conglomeration of all the things that ever were and ever would be. Put together they were no good to anyone and put together all they could accomplish was annihilation.

“The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.”

Luna looked to the doorway to see it stood open, revealing a woman older than Pink, dressed in a shawl of red and orange. It had fringe and wooden beads. She wore hoops of gold all over. Her pants were big and flapping and her feet were dressed in white socks with brown sandals.

She looked like a sage old hippy, but Luna had been warned about strangers in the past so the situation was iffy.

Still, she was willing to listen from a distance.