Jody in the Woods and on the Moon

Driving into the wilderness, Jody 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. And then another one even later. But no matter how long he waited or how many spots he tried, he saw no deer.

Desperate, 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 drinking from it. But he encountered no deer there either.

. . .

As he trekked, he came upon a strange opening in the embankment on the other side of the stream.

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 its chamber power washed. It looked like an immaculate 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 with an entirely curved interior surface, extending into blackness. It was large enough for an adult man to fit inside while in a squatting position, but not standing.

Slinging the rifle over 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 eleven days, though that went unbeknownst to him given how early in the long journey he'd lost all sense of time. Despite this, he kept crawling.

. . .

He crawled through portions of the tunnel that felt angled upward, requiring him to climb, interspersed with sectors that pitched downward, requiring him to hold himself back so as to not 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 (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 twelfth day, a light appeared. It grew brighter as Jody crawled, signaling to him that it marked the end of the tunnel. Reaching the light, he emerged from the the tube's confines, arriving at an eerily quiet expanse. Finally outside again, he collapsed onto his stomach and lay still on the flat ground. The light of the new place hurt his eyes, so he kept them closed for a long time. It felt good to stretch out freely, so he did for a while before getting up.

. . .

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

Scanning the sky, he noticed webs of stars and miscellaneous celestia sprinkling specks of varyingly intense light across the black silkscreen. 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.