Though he’d only been there once, there wasn’t a doubt in Joe’s mind about directions. He felt as if the earth itself in the pumpkin patch was summoning him forward. His mind was racing nearly faster than the speeding car with the extraordinary events of the last twenty-four hours. It all seemed less fact than fiction and yet he couldn’t deny what his gut was telling him. That he’d essentially been asleep for the majority of his life, a slave to societal expectations and a creature of habit. Only by methodically deconstructing his existence was he able to finally begin to recognize that what he and so many others viewed as the real world was, in fact, the illusion, a complex and maintained system of beliefs and practices designed to keep people distracted from the truth that life was in fact much more mystical and lethal when one dared to remove their blinders. He wasn’t sure which he liked better, to be kept in the dark or to enter into the darkness of true knowing. The thin veil that separated the two, and this life from the next and the one before, was dissolving like sugar lace dropped in warm water.

Joe slammed on the brakes and skidded to a dusty stop, nearly missing the turnoff into the field. Artemis appeared nearly half-full and had risen low on the horizon so it seemed she was a brilliant body of light cradled in the branches of an oak tree. Moon dogs encircled her and stretched her aura out in an ever-widening circle with their teeth. Joe took a deep breath and saw Xerxes’ eyes pleading with him, reckoning with him to set them free.

“I’ll come back for you,” he’d promised, “if you wish.”

“I do wish,” Joe whispered as he grabbed the black bag filled with golden cuffs and hopped out of the car. His shoes sunk into the soil, and he steeled his resolve, vowing not to let them down. He slung the sack over his shoulder and trudged again into the field. It was quiet, without even the whisper of a wind to tickle the curly pig’s-tail vines of the pumpkins. Arbitrarily he selected a small rise in the soil and fell on his knees to dig. Having forgotten to bring a shovel, Joe clawed into the dirt with his bare hands, feeling it work its way under his fingernails. Like a dog after a buried bone, he diligently flung the soil in every direction, creating a hole deep and wide enough to conceal his cryptic treasure.

Joe reached for the sack and his hand sunk into churned earth. Spinning around, he scanned the ground unsuccessfully like a dog after his own tail. Certain now that he must have accidentally covered it in the fervor of his dig, he pushed at the newly formed hills with his hands, bulldozing them this way and that in a frantic search.