(I wrote this as a sample piece in an effort to win a commission to write an Enid Blyton-style children's book. Nothing came of it, but I wrote the goddamned book in my head and I don't want to write the rest of it on paper, so here let it lie, on xomba.com. These fragments have I shored against my ruins, etc., etc.)

Laney warned him not to do it, but over the hedge Carlton went anyway, the dull grass stains on the rear of his loose overalls disappearing last as he fell into the unknown field beyond. Laney stomped her foot, thought of two or three bad words she could say, and then, worrying that she wasn't supposed to be thinking of bad words, quickly tried to forget her anger and calmed down. She couldn't hear Carlton anymore on the other side of the thick, matted leaves that separated their property from the dark forest. What was waiting behind there? Carlton loved to talk about it. Perhaps dragons, he thought, or an alien landing site. A buried treasure, haunted by whirling gray pirate spirits like wisps of horsehair clouds. A secret government rocket lab and robot construction project. "That's ridiculous," said Laney. "We'd hear the rockets whenever they blasted off."

"Not if Mom was doing the dishes at the time, and they were rattling real loud," Carlton replied.

Laney told him that he was an idiot, although she wasn't sure precisely why: it seemed right, though. She felt queasy now when she thought about that exchange, the same way she felt when she went on her first trip with her father alone to the grocery store and looked back behind her through the car's rear window only to see Carlton waving at her, mouth turned down and getting smaller and smaller until he disappeared from sight.

The leaves in the hedge rustled. Laney pulled her red ponytail, pulled down the brim of her lucky black cap, and climbed up and over, after her brother.

It was lucky that she had already swung herself over the hedge when she looked up for her first glimpse of the forest beyond the hedge, because the sight of it made her gasp and lose her grip on the leaves. She scrabbled to get her hold back, but fell into a pile of loose brown leaves that had drifted with time to the base of the hedge. It was as if no one had tended to the garden over here for some time, but that couldn't be true--not if she had seen what she had seen from the top of the hedge. Laney rubbed her eyes, brushed the leaf flecks from her red cheeks, and took another look. She closed her eyes, rubbed them, and looked yet again: still the same. What she was seeing was real.

All of the trees had shining silver bark where they burst from the ground, climbing five or six feet from the earth before dulling and turning to the dark wood that Laney and Carlton had glimpsed over the top of the hedge from their own backyard. But it wasn't quite dark wood, Laney noticed when she squinted her eyes at it: it sparkled in a strange way, and seemed too smooth to be bark, and she felt her mouth dry up suddenly when she realized that the trees were made of gold. Even the leaves she was sitting in, she realized, were nothing but cracking sheets of curling gold. She stood up quickly, took another look at the golden forest, and fell back down into the pile of golden leaves. Just on the far side of her property, a forest had grown worth millions, billions, uncountable sums of money.

But had it grown--or had someone grown it? Every tree was perfectly in line with every other, forming an unbroken stream of silver and gold trunks that stretched along flat land to the horizon somewhere far away. There the lines of trees all came together into a single dull metal point. It was a hallway of golden trees, like the pillars of a castle: a golden castle, just over the hedge. Laney wondered what her mother would think about the property values she was always complaining about now.

And somewhere along that gold and silver forest hallway was Carlton, entirely vanished from Laney's sight.