Field of Mabels
This is the first of several entries for the June 2026 edition of World Building Wednsdays hosted by Maryellen Brady 💗📚 a community adventure taking place in, (or tangent to) Millcreek Village.
I’d also like to mention that this story was partially developed using Gary Mucklow’s Echo Grove Editor / Writing Studio which I am currently beta testing.
Previously, in Jack Vale’s increasingly questionable decision-making process:
After spending entirely too much time contemplating matters of personal significance at the edge of Vivian Vaughn’s swimming pool, Jack experienced a brief but consequential loss of vertical stability. He subsequently fell into the deep end, encountered what may or may not have been a vortex, and regained consciousness on an unfamiliar beach in a place known only as the Beneath.
Since arriving, he has learned several important facts:
Time is apparently flexible.
Trousers demonstrate poor interstitial resilience.
The Beneath contains talking crabs.
One such crab has adopted Jack for reasons that remain unclear. Thus far it has provided a steady stream of unsolicited philosophy, several increasingly dubious explanations regarding the nature of reality, and masterful protection from aggressive seagulls.
Armed with little more than a black T-shirt, a pair of shoes, and a growing suspicion that none of his questions will receive satisfactory answers, Jack has agreed to follow the crab inland toward a place referred to only as the Field.
If you missed part 1, you can find it here: Beneath the Above.
Episode
C’mon,” the crab said, gesturing with a pincer before scuttling off. I watched him track across the wet sand, irritated by the ease with which he abandoned our conversation after spending the better part of an hour lecturing philosophy at me.
I was waterlogged, sun-flushed, and currently debating the tactical utility of a black T-shirt as a makeshift loincloth. I was wearing black Nike SB Dunk Lows and mid-shin socks, also black, but somewhere between arriving here and waking up, my pants had egressed into some other dimension.
The crab had said, Textiles demonstrate poor interstitial resilience, and while I still hadn’t fully grasped what he meant, I’d accepted it as the cause, due to a lack of reasonable alternatives, and the end effect was that I was naked. Not completely, but in the only way that I thought mattered.
The immediate area appeared to be little more than water and sand. I had little faith I would find any kind of sartorial rescue so I would remain without pants until I found a reasonable way to cover myself. I took some comfort in the fact that there didn’t seem to be other people around. Humans, specifically. I wasn’t overly concerned about the crab or the gulls. They’d seen plenty already and, as far as I could tell, had grown numb to it. If I ran into anyone, I’d have to decide whether a diaper-like T-shirt arrangement was an improvement over being the guy who lost his pants.
The crab continued sideways, a relentless, clicking blur.
“How long will this take?” I called out.
The crab didn’t break stride. “How long will what take?”
“Getting home.”
He made a dismissive flick with his left claw. “I have no idea.”
“You seemed pretty confident about everything else a minute ago.”
“I am confident about many things, Mr. Jack. Returning home is simply not among them.”
I sighed, stood up, and started walking.
The sand was hot beneath my feet, suggesting that the day had already been underway for some time before I arrived. Or perhaps before I woke up. Those were not necessarily the same thing.
Now that I was on my feet and moving, I winced; I’d accumulated a considerable amount of sand in uncomfortable places. The ocean was to our left and I veered into the surf, ignoring the stinging salt in my various abrasions and letting the waves slap at the tender areas while I lifted, shifted, and separated things to rinse away as much sand as possible.
The crab was already a speck in the distance, trailed by a cadre of gulls. Every time a bird got too bold, he’d snap a claw in the air, a miniature samurai protecting his perimeter. I caught up to him, and as if I had been beside him the entire way, he did not note my arrival.
We walked in silence, not uncomfortable, exactly—the kind of silence that settles in when two people have exhausted the obvious topics without making meaningful progress toward the difficult ones. After some time, I decided to break it.
“How long have you been here?”
The crab paused, as if weighing a heavy thought. “That is a difficult question to answer.”
“Because of the time-corridor thing?”
“The corridor metaphor was yours.”
“No,” I corrected, “the corridor metaphor was yours.”
“Ah, but don’t you see? It became yours the moment you accepted it as truth.”
I considered arguing, then let it go. Arguing with a crustacean was a losing game. “Just give me a ballpark. How long?”
“Long enough to develop opinions.”
“About what?”
“Everything.”
“That’s not helpful,” I muttered. He didn’t respond.
Gradually, the shoreline shifted. The sand began to yield to pale, scrubby vegetation, forming irregular patches against the dunes. We kept to the water’s edge until the sun was pinned directly overhead, and then, without warning, the crab veered inland.
He didn’t signal; he just pivoted. It caught me on autopilot, and I nearly tripped trying to match his abrupt turn.
As we moved through the dunes, the landscape grew stranger. The grass didn’t just grow; it organized. Some patches spiraled in perfect, mathematical tight coils, while others formed geometric patterns that seemed to shatter into static if I stared at them too long. It was as if they had grown around invisible obstacles. Perhaps a rock that had been moved, or something that one day had decided to get up and walk away.
I stopped dead. “What’s up with the grass?”
The crab clicked, a sound like dry stones rubbing together. “Oh.”
“What do you mean, ‘oh’?”
“It’s grass.”
“Yes, but what happened to it?”
“It does that.”
I waited. The crab kept clicking his mandibles, waiting for me to catch up.
“Any idea why?”
“Nobody knows. Grass is one of the Beneath’s more controversial subjects.”
“Why on earth would grass be controversial?”
“For the same reason most things become controversial,” the crab said, resuming his march. “Too many competing explanations.”
To me, that sounded like a hollow answer. Or, perhaps, it was the only one that mattered. I was starting to suspect those were the same thing here.
Soon, the ocean vanished behind a rise, and the grassland stretched out into an endless, rolling expanse. The rhythmic thrum of the surf faded, replaced by an unsettling, grassy silence. A breeze rippled through, and I saw a shadow shift in the distance—something small, agile, and gone before my eyes could focus.
I stopped.
The crab’s antennae twitched. “What now?”
“Now?”
“You keep stopping. Then you ask a question. It is a tedious cycle.”
I wanted to tell him that his tedious answers to my questions was the real issue, but I bit my tongue. “Where are we going?”
He looked back at me with the weary patience of a creature that had been asked this a thousand times. “A field.”
I stared at the horizon. “A field. We’re going to a field?”
“We are going to a field.”
“Okay. What’s in the field?”
The crab considered this, his eyestalks waving independently. “Mabel.”
“Mabel? Who’s Mabel?”
“An excellent question.”
“Do you know her?”
“Certainly.”
I looked down at my bare legs. “You may have noticed I’m not exactly dressed for a social call.”
The crab blew a stream of bubbles that sounded suspiciously like a laugh. “I noticed.”
“I’m not sure I’m comfortable meeting someone without pants.”
The crab stopped and turned to face me. “Mabel will not be wearing pants.”
I blinked. “Wait. She’ll be wearing clothes, right?”
“No.”
“Is Mabel a person?”
The crab thought about this for a long time. “Yes.”
Then he resumed walking, leaving me to scramble after him.
The field emerged so gradually I nearly missed it. One moment we were crossing low hills tangled with strange grass; the next, the land had flattened and stretched outward in all directions. It was an immense expanse of pale green, swaying beneath a sky so flawlessly blue it looked corrected. Its only boundaries were the distant, heat-sick shimmer of the horizon.
The crab stopped. “We are here.”
I looked around the empty space. “This is the field?”
“This is a field.”
I didn’t like the distinction, but I knew it wouldn’t be elaborated upon.
My eyes drifted across the landscape, scanning the sea of grass, until they snagged on a figure standing motionless a short distance away, staring upward. At first, I took it for a child balanced on a rock. It was roughly the right height and shape. The proportions were close enough to grant a general human impression, but the head seemed too large, the arms slightly too long, and the legs entirely too short.
“Is that Mabel?”
When no answer came, I turned. The crab had already wandered away.
The figure did not acknowledge me, utterly content to scan the empty sky. I moved slowly forward, casting my own gaze upward to follow its line of sight.
Just blue.
We stood there together in the rustling grass for a moment before the figure finally spoke.
“Cloud.”
I looked up again, squinting. “I don’t see any clouds.”
The figure nodded once. “Correct.”
I waited, but nothing followed.
“Then why did you say cloud?”
“Looking.”
“For clouds?”
“Cloud.”
That seemed to settle the matter.
I studied the creature more carefully. Its skin was pale and unnervingly smooth, lacking the microscopic flaws my subconscious expected. Falling somewhere between plastic and flesh, it defied categorization. If this was Mabel, the crab’s had been correct: it wore no clothes. Based on the smooth absence of anatomical features, garments seemed entirely unnecessary. Perhaps absence was the wrong word—there were faint, smoothed-over suggestions of features if one looked closely. Deciding that close observation crossed into rudeness, I kept my examination superficial.
“You like clouds?” I asked.
“Cloud.”
“Right.”
Then a second voice spoke from behind me. “Future cloud.”
I hadn’t heard its approach, and I wasn’t entirely certain it had walked at all. One moment the space was empty; the next, it was occupied.
The first figure pointed a long finger upward. “Cloud.”
The newcomer nodded in agreement. “Future cloud.”
“You expect a cloud to form?” I asked, struggling to bridge the conversational gap.
The second figure merely stared at the sky, considering the premise.
Before it could answer, a third voice said, “Water.”
A new figure now stood several feet away. I turned toward it, reasonably certain it hadn’t existed a moment earlier.
“Water,” I repeated, trying to connect the words.
Another voice chimed in from the left. “Atmosphere.”
And another, “Temperature.”
More of them appeared, gathering around the base of the rock. Their arrival defied explanation; I could not fathom where they were stepping out from, but the effect was strangely organic. It felt less like a meeting of individuals and more like the scattered pieces of a complex machine gradually clicking into alignment.
“Why?” one asked.
The question seemed to startle the others. They reacted like students who had already opened their notebooks before realizing they had enrolled in the wrong class. Every oversized head turned toward me, waiting.
I looked around the tightening circle. “Why what?”
“Cloud.”
“Well, water evaporates,” I said, pointing toward the sky to illustrate. “Then it rises. Eventually, the air cools enough for that water vapor to condense into tiny droplets. Those droplets gather, and they become clouds.”
The figures froze, turning utterly rigid. Then, one of them bolted, running so fast its form blurred before vanishing into the distance entirely. The remaining crowd simply stood there, staring.
I scanned the grass for my companion. “Was it something I said?”
A dry reply drifted from the brush off to my right. “Almost certainly.”
“Should I be concerned?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
The crab reemerged from the tall stalks carrying a shell. It tapped the surface with one claw. “Based on my experience, they pose no threat.”
Several minutes passed in dead silence before the runner returned, accompanied by yet another figure. At first glance, there was nothing remarkable about this arrival, yet the crowd subtly shifted to accommodate it. The movement felt like mechanical calibration, as if each figure were a gear settling into its proper notch.
They all shared the same smooth, featureless template, but I could distinguish small differences. Hair color and style were the most obvious deviations, but their eyes varied in hue, and where visible, their ears possessed unique contours.
The newcomer stepped to the front of the group. “Why cloud?”
I repeated my brief explanation, keeping my voice steady. “Water evaporates. Air cools. Water condenses. Clouds form.”
They fell quiet. Then, like kernels of popcorn beginning to pop, different figures threw out a single word:
“Water.”
“Vapor.”
“Temperature.”
“Atmosphere.”
“Condensation.”
The newcomer seemed to consider each word before speaking.
“Visible cloud formation occurs when atmospheric cooling causes water vapor to condense into suspended droplets.”
Around the circle, heads nodded and shoulders eased. I looked from one smooth face to another, then back to the newcomer.
“Is this information new to you?”
One of the smaller figures tilted its head. “We knew.”
“No,” I countered gently. “I don’t think you did.”
Another figure tapped the side of its oversized head. “Not here.” It then gestured broadly to the crowd around it. “Here.”
The group fell into a collective, peaceful silence. In the far distance, other pale figures wandered aimlessly through the swaying green grass.
I looked at the crab. The crab looked back at me.
For the first time since waking up on the beach, I had the distinct feeling I had just witnessed something important.
I simply had no idea what it was.
Great to see EchoGrove being used.
philosophical, in an elementary sort of way. Not that it's bad, but that it's just enough to get you to ask more.