Joshua Shelton stares at the trapdoor. It shouldn’t be there. His caravan doesn’t have a trapdoor. After all, where could it lead to, but to the ground half a foot below? And yet he can see that there is a staircase leading down from it, gripping the side of the trapdoor like a claw. It’s too dark to see how far down it goes, after the fourth rung it’s lost to the blackness.
He pinches himself to see if he is dreaming, and the pinch hurts, but that doesn’t prove anything, he could be dreaming that the pinch hurts.
He looks at Ruth, and she’s still fast asleep. He doesn’t want to leave her. But then, he won’t really be leaving, will he? This is all nonsense. He puts his hands to the rungs of the ladder. They are hard and metal and cold.
Slowly he starts to descend.
And he’s soon underground, or so he supposes — but it doesn’t feel like underground, the air is fresh, there’s no hint of mud or soil, there’s wide open space. He begins by counting the number of steps, but pretty soon he’s lost his place and gives up. And very soon he can’t see anything; he looks down to see how much farther he has to climb and he can’t even see his feet, and when he looks back up there’s no sign of the caravan at all. And suddenly he feels all alone, and that he’s clinging blindly to something he can’t see and can’t trust and that might give way at any moment, he’s clinging to the side of the world and the world has turned the wrong way round, and if he just lets go he will fall forever, he’ll fall right into the bowels of the earth, and no one will ever find him, no one could ever find him, he’s just a speck in a void without end and it seems almost arrogant that he’s pretending to be alive when his life has no point. And the only reason he doesn’t panic, the only reason he doesn’t let the claustrophobia overwhelm him and he doesn’t take his hands off the ladder and he doesn’t give himself to the pitch blackness — the only reason is that he knows this isn’t real, none of this is real, because if he believes this is real that would make him mad. And what would happen to his poor Ruth then?
So still, still he goes downward. Because upward now seems more frightening. Because he fears he could climb upward and never reach the top.
Only at the last few rungs is there any light. And the light is so sudden that it blinds him for a moment. It’s like he’s dropped into another world, and there was never any dark, there’s light all about, there’s no room for darkness here. All above him the blueness of the sky — it’s a thicker blue than he’s used to, gloopy like syrup, dripping down impossibly through the air — and beneath him an expanse of green, green in all directions, grass green and yet too green for grass, it’s as if someone has taken every blade of grass and painted it to make it greener still, and Shelton thinks why would they do that, why would anyone want to do that, he wants to scream it out. His fingers are sweating. They slip, they slide. He misses the rung beneath him. He lets go of the ladder. And it doesn’t matter, there’s no distance left to fall. He lands on the grass, and it is grass, and it’s wet with dew. And when he looks about him the ladder has gone.
He dry-heaves. The brightness hurts his eyes, and he screws them tight, he cries out for it all to stop. And maybe it does, because when he dares open his eyes again the pain has gone. And maybe it hasn’t, maybe he’s just got used to it.
Nothing but colour wherever he looks. The blue above, smashing into the green below. And himself, jammed fast beneath the two. And then, then the animals come.
Some of them float. At least, some of them try to float. But the air is escaping from their bodies, and as they lift off the ground they bump right back on to it in a stumble. He hears the air escape, it’s like a hiss that surrounds him. Some of them limp. The stronger animals try to help the others, sausage dogs carrying exhausted little rabbits on their backs, elderly elephants, constructed from a dozen different balloons, supported on the shoulders of the young.
Shelton wants to run. But there is nowhere to run. There’s just the sky, the grass, the animals all around.
They speak as one, although they have no mouths, he has never given them mouths. They speak, and there’s no anger, no irony. “Welcome,” they say. “Welcome to the Popping Fields.”
And now he sees them properly. The misshapen creatures whose limbs have been twisted into the wrong positions and cannot walk. Heads lopsided, ears and tails askew, what was he doing when he made them like that, was he drunk? The older animals who had once swelled full with air, now sagged and wrinkled. Shelton cries then. He can’t help it. He looks upon all these beasts that are suffering and he cries. And they urge him not to cry. Don’t cry, because he can help. And they ask him for that help now.
He tells them he doesn’t have anything sharp. They don’t seem to listen. They crowd about him on all sides, bobbing on top of each other to reach him first, they’re eager for his touch in a way he hasn’t known in years. His fingers are thick and blunt, but he tries his best — he picks up a dog, and he digs his fingers into its rubbery skin as far as they can go, and he can feel the dog howling in his head, and he doesn’t know whether that’s in pain or in anticipation — he claws at the rubber, he tries to break the surface of the balloon, and then, at last, at long last, he’s done it. And the dog pops. Thank God it pops. And it isn’t a loud pop, it sounds to Shelton like a sigh of relief.
He gets better, faster. And as he squeezes some animals with his hands, he’ll step down hard on others, and there is popping in the fields that night, there is so much popping.
And at times he thinks that he’s done, that there are no animals left to pop. And he can stop long enough to wipe the tears from his face. But when he looks again there are still more, they’re stretching into the distance as far as he can see.
He does not know how long he spends in the Popping Fields. The blue sky stays blue, there’s no sunlight here, no dark at night. His hands begin to blister, his tired arms ache. And the green grass beneath him is now hidden under a blanket of spent rubber — scraps of yellow, red, orange, all the colours of the rainbow. “No more,” he says. “Please. No more.”
“No more,” the animals agree. “No more. For now.”
And he turns, and there is the ladder again, and it has always been there. He need climb only a few rungs, and there he is, hauling his exhausted body into the upper bunk, Ruth still sleeping peacefully below.
The trapdoor is there the next night too, and the night after. Joshua Shelton feels the stirrings in his bladder and knows it must be time. The animals don’t mind him taking a piss on the green before he starts, they’re not proud. Each time he goes down the steps it’s a shorter climb, and as the weeks go by the Popping Fields seem ever closer to him, sometimes in the heat of the afternoon, as he sits outside his caravan making rabbits for the children, he feels he could close his eyes and drift back there and pop what he’s just created. He isn’t frightened. And he isn’t ashamed.
He doesn’t rely upon his fingers any more. He’s selected the sharpest knife he can find, one with a blade so keen he’s sure the animals don’t feel the slightest pain as he slits them. And he sleeps with it, tucked under his pillow, ready each night for when he awakes.
One evening he goes into the caravan and there’s Ruth — and she’s not cleaning, she’s sitting on her bed and playing with a pack of cards. He decides not to say anything. But she sees him watching, and she starts, and turns red.
“I’ve been practising a magic trick,” she says, lightly, as if that’s the most reasonable thing in the world. “Would you, do you want to see?” She tells him to pick a card. Wordlessly he does so, tapping one randomly with his finger. She shuffles the pack, smiles so charmingly at him. “Is this your card?” she says, holding up the nine of spades in triumph.