Carl’s immediate urge was to dismiss even the possibility of everything he was being told. There was no way that he’d just stumbled into this completely removed magical world and was suddenly talking to this different version of his not-so-baby sister. The issue of the endless forest nagged at the back of his mind, though. Was any of this even possible? It was almost like he’d gotten shot again, but this time he hadn’t woken up. He was just stuck in some loop of thoughts that didn’t have any real rhyme or reason to them.
Except everything was too vivid for that. Everything felt real even though it didn’t seem it. There was no easing of one moment into another; just the tense awkward reality of him silently staring at the woman claiming to be Judith.
Carl reached for the hatchet when she held it out and let his hand run over the handle. He recognized it, but that was just as illogical as all of the rest of this was. His gaze moved over it for a moment before returning to her face. The eerie familiarity he’d noticed earlier was making his skin crawl now. It wasn’t possible for Judith to be this old. It just wasn’t. It wasn’t possible for people to travel through time. He may not have gotten very far in school, but he knew that much.
“You’re Judith.” He repeated as his hand dropped away.
He tried to think of anything that he could possibly use to dismiss the claim and make it clear that that familiarity was just his mind playing tricks on him. There was too much left for him to piece together and too little for him to use to verify any of this. His sister was still a toddler. What could he possibly ask that Judith would have been able to tell him the answer to years later? What had they done in their time together that only she and he would know? There was nothing he could draw on. It would all have to be on faith.
“It’s kind of hard to believe that,” Carl finally said in frustration. “It’s hard to believe any of this.”