Jody in the Woods and on the Moon

Jody went to sleep on Friday night like he would on any other night. He turned all the lights in the apartment out and crawled into the bed in the middle of his empty bedroom. While the world lay still, his racing mind drifted beyond.

. . .

Driving into the wilderness, he wore sunglasses with his truck window rolled down while the radio played country music. He'd gotten up that Saturday to go deer hunting and had packed and loaded the gear on time and as planned.

. . .

Crouched, quiet, and still... Jody and his rifle waited patiently for a deer to appear. When enough time had passed, he moved to a new spot. But no matter how long he waited or how many spots he tried, he encountered no deer.

Desperate and curious, he traveled to a part of the woods he'd never hunted in before. He walked carefully down a long, steep embankment that led to a stream. At the bottom of the incline, he followed the stream for some distance, hoping to intercept a deer drinking from it. But he encountered no deer there either.

. . .

However, as he trekked, he came upon a strange opening in the embankment on the other side of the stream. He could see it from the side he'd hiked along until that point.

It was a moderately sized, perfectly round hole in the earth, as though a culvert or caisson had been punched into the hillside, and then had its spoils removed and chamber powerwashed. It looked like an immaculate secret door to an escape tunnel built for children.

Intrigued, Jody crossed the stream to investigate the mysterious hole. Approaching it, he could see into the opening. It was a perfect tube inside, with an entirely curved interior surface on all sides, extending into pure blackness. It was large enough for an adult man to fit inside while in a squatting position, but not standing.

Slinging the rifle around his shoulder, Jody climbed into the hole. Once fully inside, on his hands and knees, he began to crawl.

. . .

Jody crawled for what felt like days. In fact, he crawled for exactly 11 days, though that went unbeknownst to him given how early in the long journey he lost all sense of time. Despite this, he kept crawling.

. . .

He crawled through portions of the tunnel which felt angled upward, requiring him to climb, interspersed with sectors which felt pitched downward, requiring him to hold himself back so as not to tumble forward. Other stretches seemed to curve or bend for long distances, as though the path of the tunnel were turning. But then it would arc again some distance later, either in the same direction or not, and would do so over and over until Jody, in addition to time, had also lost any sense of space. Yet still, he crawled.

. . .

On the 12th day, a light appeared. It grew brighter as Jody crawled, signaling to him that it represented the end of the tunnel. Reaching the light, he emerged from the tube's confined darkness to arrive at an eerily quiet, but brightly lit, expanse. Finally on the other side of time and space, he collapsed onto his stomach and lay still on the flat ground.

Having crawled for so long, his body hurt. Outside the enclosure of the tunnel, it felt good to stretch out freely, so he did for a while before getting up. Having been in the dark for so long, the light of the new place hurt his eyes, so he kept them closed for a long time before looking around.

. . .

When he finally did stand up and see the place, the first thing he noticed was the jet-black sky all around him. Despite the crisp, clear visibility of the place, wherever he was, it wasn't the daytime. He saw that the ground was made entirely of whitish, ash-colored stones of all sizes and granularities. There was no water or vegetation visible in any direction. To Jody, the place appeared most like a white gravel pit, only the size of a desert.

Scanning the sky more closely, he noticed light specks of varying intensity smattered across the black silkscreen by webs of stars and miscellaneous celestiana. It was only upon turning around that he saw the place's largest and brightest light source for the first time: the pale blue, swirling coverstock bowling ball called Earth, affixed to the cosmos above him.