She is a tiny Glitchen, but then all Glitchen are tiny. She dresses in dark green, and her hair is the color of the sunset. At least, one of them: there are a million colors in the sunset and it would take two million Glitchen lifetimes to name them all.Nobody ever sees her because she never goes to places where people go. Because of this nobody remembers her name. And she doesn't have a piglet to hum to, or a doll to talk to, or a funpickle to scold, so she never speaks, and she's forgotten her name too.
She used to be a regular Glitchen and she had a house in Marrakesh Meadow and every day she came out to water her trees and plant strawberries. She always planted strawberries.
Then one day the houses began to change and Glitchen began to disappear. She went to Cebarkul and Ajaya Bliss and Neva Neva and Groddle Forest Junction and Gregarious Grange and even tried to die so she could find Glitchen in Hell One but they were never there. Then she realized they had all gone to their homes. Their new homes.They had imagined new homes. She thought for a while and then suddenly she had imagined one too, and she was there. There was a little house and a little garden, much littler than her own strawberry garden, but she planted strawberries in it anyway and then she planted pretty herbs in the herb garden, at least the glitchen who had sold them to her said they would turn out pretty, and she decided to wait and see. After a while she checked and the herbs were pretty, they were really pretty, all silvery and blue and she planted some more, shucking two of them for four seeds, though it made her cry because she was destroying the pretty herb. But she planted the seeds anyway, even the seeds were pretty. Back in her meadow home her strawberries grew up but nobody harvested them and her piggies emptied out the piggy feeders but nobody filled them. Her fruit tree was nibbled out by the piggies; its delicate pink flowers began to fall. Cherry pits lay on the ground in her meadow home.
Only she had forgotten.
After planting her silvertongue again she walked out of her house and set her signpost to Anywhere. She landed in another Glitch's yard. She found more trees there, harvested from them, and picked up a butterfly cubimal that lay near a note saying, "FREE". She turned around to go back to her own home, but the signpost had changed.
She was lost.
So she traveled to another street, harvested more trees, and went to another one, and found icons there. She ruminated over one, revered another, and left to another street. There she found piggies. She nibbled them all.
(Chickens in an abandoned meadow home pecked among stacks of meat and milk.)
Months passed. Zilloween came, but she never noticed. She mined metal rocks, harvested trees, squeezed chickens, nibbled piggies, and milked butterflies, and the whole time never stepped out of the Glitchen-imagined region. A region shimmering with sunset, a place with an unreachable forest but unlimited houses, a place with too many metal rocks and trees to count. Where icons where everywhere, waiting for a Glitch to tithe and replenish herself.
Despite all of this she is sad. Her mood is plummeting faster than usual. She never speaks. She doesn't know if she can. Her only companion is a cold butterfly cubimal. She's forgotten her own name. And if she ever had a heart, surely it's faded by now.
All she wants to go back to her own shimmery sunset place, but she can't find a signpost there.