Driver’s Ed Daydream Sara Manzano Davila

from the deck. Though no one could hear him through the wind, rain, and his exceptionally dense beard, everyone knew the goal was likely not to be in the middle of a terrifying storm. Sails were brought in, the masts taken down, and men steered futilely with an oar, trying to return to shore. At this point, they were willing to beach the ship if it meant survival.

artholomew was doing his part in the chaos, frantically bailing water from the ship with an old chamber pot. He was also simultaneously composing heart-wrenching pleas of mercy to every god he’d ever heard of, promising to give up piracy for a life of honest privateering. In the middle of composing a particularly tearful line to Allah, Bartholomew heard a peculiar roaring noise in his ears. He paused from his work to look around, and with utter terror, realized he could not see so much as

a glimpse of land. The storm had swept them out to sea and appeared to urge the ship still farther and faster than ever as the vessel bucked and plunged in the strong current. artholomew was lucky. While his panicked shipmates were occupied bailing water, he got the full, unspoiled view of falling off the side of the earth. At a glance, Bartholomew thought he had finally spotted land, but the closer they careened, the stranger the line of blue and black looked. Suddenly, there was nothing in front of him but stars. Right before the ship flew over the edge, some wonderful instinct of Bartholomew’s told him to hang on for dear life. He quickly scrabbled for the deck’s railing, and not a moment too soon. For a split second he felt the ship soar gloriously through the air—before the vessel tipped into a nosedive, and he felt his stomach flip into his chest.

ll around him, falling water and debris beat the ship mercilessly. He squeezed his eyes shut, half against the stinging spray and half against the cries of men as they were flung from the ship. Something hit him on the shoulder, and he cracked a grudging eye open, only to meet the mirror gaze of a giant eye staring right back through railing. It is always hard to know exactly what one would do when faced with a mammoth eye from the void.

n Bartholomew’s case, he made a noise a little like “!?,” which can only be pronounced by

those truly experiencing Lovecraftian terror. For, of all the people who have fallen off the earth, Bartholomew may be the only one who truly comprehended what he saw. Anyone wiser than him would have assumed they were sick or injured, dreaming or hallucinating. Anyone smarter than him would have gone mad trying to rationalize it or give it any semblance of meaning. Instead, Bartholomew simply accepted what he saw, which was the fact that the world rested on the backs of eight elephants, (or, since he didn’t know what elephants were, some kind of malformed, wrinkly boar). He watched, entranced, as the eye disappeared and the tip of a tusk passed, then a ragged ear, a wrinkled chest, and finally, a massive toenail, before the ship smashed into something hard, spraying wood and flesh. artholomew woke with a pounding headache, nausea, and a sense of utter confusion. Other than that, he remained miraculously unharmed. A few hundred feet away, he could see the bodies of his more unlucky crewmates alongside the ship. He considered going to search through the wreckage, but it all felt meaningless now, somehow. Instead, he rose and walked aimlessly, observing that they had landed on the edge of a vast, dark plain. The ground beneath him was hard, stratified, and formed ridges in the distance, as if the earth was divided into massive plates. Beyond that was a starry void, but filled with strange, unfamiliar