Passing Strange Read Online Free

friends were already under the water. I was the only one left on the beach, but I didn’t mind. I was having fun, like a new mother watching toddlers splash around a kiddie pool.
    And then they started coming out of the water. I think Tommy might have been the first.
    But he wasn’t a zombie anymore. No one that came out of the water was a zombie anymore. I remember seeing Popeye and noticing that all the awful things he’d done to his body had healed. I saw someone I didn’t recognize and then realized it was George—but George restored! He was actually really cute!
    Everyone walked by me and headed back into the forest or jungle or whatever it was until I was the only one on the beach, and I thought, well, here I go. I’m going into the water so I can be healed and whole and won’t that be wonderful, and I took one step and thought I could feel wet sand squishing through my toes, and when I looked up again there you were.
    The one I love.
    You were so beautiful and strong and clean-looking, the water glistening in your hair. The sight of you stopped me in my tracks.
    I haven’t laid eyes on you since I killed myself. I never got the chance to tell you the things I wanted to say. In what passes for “life,” I had no idea how you would react to me.
    But in my dream you were smiling. And you spread your arms.
    I looked at you and you started to speak and then I woke up.

CHAPTER THREE
    M AYBE I SHOULD HAVE BEEN happy—everything in the dream had been so nice, and just the idea that I could dream was nice—but instead I was very, very sad.
    Once again I didn’t get the chance to say all the things I needed to say. Once again I’d been so close to you, and now you were gone.
    A moment later, I realized that I was lying on my bed with my shirt ripped open and my black bra exposed. I got another blouse from my closet, and while buttoning it up I started sifting through the dream, looking for meaning. I’m not as witchy as the Weird Sisters, maybe, but I’ve always believed in signs and portents. And what else could the first zombie dream be but a cryptic message to be deciphered?
    I felt like crying. I’d have been crying if my stupid body worked the way it was supposed to.
    I tried to remember as much as I could about the dream, about the parts of the dream that weren’t you. I thought about the ocean water, how incredibly blue it was, as if it were being lit from below as well as above. How it healed everyone who had stepped into it, and how I didn’t get the chance, but of course as soon as I thought that, I thought about you and how you stepped out of that healing water, and I wasn’t sure but it might have been a you I’d never seen before—you as you might be today, three years older than you were when I died. But then I wondered how that could be; since then I haven’t seen you anywhere but in my mind’s eye.
    I happened to walk by my vanity at that moment and glanced at myself in the mirror. That’s a testament to the ability of dreams to transport you from all your worldly cares—I’d completely forgotten that my face was a shattered ruin.
    But that isn’t what I saw in the mirror. What I saw was my eyes, which had gone from diamond clear to a brilliant blue, like two sapphires filled with sunlight.
    “Like two sapphires filled with sunlight.”
    Do you remember when you said that to me?
    I remember everything about that day. We’d ridden our bicycles to the edge of the woods of a forest very much like the one where I spend most of my time now, the Oxoboxo. We took off our shoes and socks and followed the grassy path that led into the forest and the lake.
    We were holding hands, and walking, and talking, and everything we said seemed to be silly and important at the same time. I remember one of us saying—and it really is hard for me to remember who said what because we were so simpatico, so in tune with one another’s thoughts—something about how different the woods would be if the