We knew it the instant it happened. The world around us went pure white for an unknowable number of seconds and every sound was silenced: the clacking of the Machine, the whining of the children, the chanting of the Gumm-Gumms. We became weightless, as if yanked into the sky by parachutes, and there was the usual slight elastic sting of passing through a dimensional doorway, except that instead of walking forward we were soaring without direction. When color drained back in, soft like the lifting of eyelids, what I saw was not the soot and shadow of the underworld but the startling green and white of a manicured field beneath floodlights. Sound came back to me just as gently, the twittering of referee whistles, the dull collision of protective gear, the collective gasp of a huge crowd of people, and a single hissing voice that overwhelmed it all:

“IT ISSSSSS FINISSSSSSHED.”

38.

So this is the story. With two minutes left to go in the biggest game of the season, at the culmination of the Festival of the Fallen Leaves, after a week of missing children that had citizens desperate to cheer for anything, the Saint B. Battle Beasts were up by six points thanks to the superhuman heroics of Steve Jorgensen-Warner, though the team was down several key players and struggling to stave off a comeback by the Connersville Colts, who were at midfield and driving. Not one person at Harry G. Bleeker Memorial Field rested on her or his butt; they danced upon the feet of the saved, clapping their Steve Smackers with such furor that the environs became a deafening world of madness—so mad, in fact, that it took the townspeople a good minute to register the white blast that shot throughout the neighborhood and the scattering of grotesque monsters that were deposited upon the turf.

The second-down-and-six play, a sweep to the right with number thirty-three of the Colts getting the pitch, dwindled to a halt as the halfback came up against not the expected Saint B. cornerback but instead a yellow troll wearing a vest and swinging a barbed mace. The halfback stopped, thought for a second, and offered up the ball. The troll, discombobulated but also hungry, took the ball and crunched it between its boulder teeth.

The abruptly cut-off sentence of the announcer reverberated through the speakers—he was unequipped with the vocabulary to describe such an unusual play. The jumbotron operator finished a full-color animation but lacked the wherewithal to begin the next, and the pixels faded out until the screen was as empty as a blackboard.