600 Creative Words 04/08/18

I slid the glass door open as mouse-like as I could, deciding to leave it open behind me for a quicker getaway.  Creeping up the back staircase, I paused near the top, peeping over the last stair to make sure the coast is the clear.  I made my way past my brother’s room to my door, my sisters’ rooms are the two doors at the other end of the hall.  I froze up for a moment, thinking about what I was actually up there doing.  Had I lost my mind?  Then I felt the dagger, almost vibrating, in my pocket.  This snapped me back to my apparent reality, and I pushed my door open, rushing to close it behind me. 

I walked around with a somber energy.  The posters and skateboards, my video games and rock climbing gear, all the things that I had loved for so many years, I was preparing to leave behind.  My eyes made their way over to my nightstand and I spotted the necklace Piccolo was talking about, its gem glowing like a lighthouse on the shore. 

“Hurry up, Adam.  I feel a presence coming and it isn’t good,” Piccolo shouted in my head.  I snatched the necklace, stuffed it in my jacket’s breast pocket, and made my way to my door.  Flooded by emotions, something that had become foreign to me, I froze up again and took one final look around my bedroom.  The thought of not knowing what the hell was going on, and the fact that I was not about to see this place for who knows how long overwhelmed me.  I went back to my nightstand and grabbed an old school Polaroid of me and my family.  It was from one of our awesome family vacations to the beach seven years ago.  Back then, reading Harry Potter books growing up, I hoped and prayed so many times for magic to be real.  Maybe those wishes were coming back to haunt me right now.  I opened my door and almost went into shock from my younger sister standing there surprising me.

“Jeez Alice, what the hell are you doing just standing there like that?” I asked trying to catch my breath.  Alice didn’t reply.  She was looking down at the floor, some of her hair hiding her face.  She sort of sounded like she was crying, but I wasn’t sure.

“Where are you going, big brother?” a voice from Alice’s body asked. 

“Alice, are you ok? What’s wrong?”  Ice filled my veins again.

“Adam, get out of there right now! She’s possessed by a Naki soldier,” Piccolo shouted in my head.  As if she could hear my internal conversation, Alice looked up at me.  Her eyes black, just like in my dream, my nightmare.  I was puzzled how until my mind flashed back to downstairs.  We must have made eye contact in the brief second before I came inside.  She lunged forward at me knocking me back to my bed.  God this is insane.  What the hell is going on here?  She’s stronger than anybody I’ve ever faced on the wrestling mat in my life.  Can this really be happening right now?

“Bahn-ti!  Time freeze,” Piccolo says, this time from inside the room.  Blue sparks filled the air, like snowflakes falling in the middle of a blizzard, in a complete frenzy, but still somehow patient in their landing.  Alice had ceased moving, frozen in place like a gargoyle.  It was then that I noticed how her teeth had become razor sharp, like a monster’s from one of those horror movies.

600 Words Creative 04/01/18 Happy Easter!

It was a grey Monday, just like every other Monday had been before it.  The only difference was that by all accounts, especially listening to my mother crying over the phone about it to my Aunt Tracy, it was a miracle that I was alive to see this one.  It was three months ago when my accident happened, if I can even call it that.  It was more like fate.  Fate that I missed my school bus, fate that I almost died and ended up here, wherever here is, in a scene straight out of the pages of a comic book.  Scratch that, not even Stan Lee’s imagination could have come up with something like this.  To be honest with you, I’m still not even sure if I really haven’t gone crazy.  In the dreams, or rather nightmares, since the accident, according to my Guardian Angel who looked just like my pet cat, Piccolo, I’m now actually seeing the worlds for what they truly are.  Who am I to disagree with a talking cat?  There’s more that happened, but that’s the only part I cared to remember.  The rest of my dreams made it hard to sleep at night.  

I tried counting all the light poles on my side of the road on the way home from the hospital.  It’s a longer ride than you’d expect, all the rain in Seattle slows things down more times than not. The entire car ride was the embodiment of how it looked outside and how I had been feeling inside, numb.  Not because when you slip stepping out of the shower, crack your head on the toilet on the way down, and almost end up dying on your own bathroom floor they give you a lot of pain killers to deal with all the trauma and surgeries.  No, it wasn’t that at all.  It was the head injury, the damage to my prefrontal cortex from what the doctors say, that left me feeling like this.  It took away everything that made me who I am, at least who I used to be, Adam Carter.  Before the accident, I was a eighteen year old state-bound collegiate wrestler who was always on the honor roll and the proud vice president of his senior class.  Now, I can’t find an ounce of care for any of those things.  It just all seems kind of pointless.  Doesn’t anybody else see how false all this feels?  The little snippets of my dreams feel more real than what’s supposedly reality.  My mom keeps trying her best to get me to talk, or at least smile, going on and on about how everything is going to back to normal before I know it, how the doctors say injuries like this take time to heal and that I need to be patient.  She also uses this as the opportunity to inform me that we are going to have a “small” celebration dinner with all the family for my homecoming.  Small is my mom’s way of saying, “Seating for one hundred, please.”  And what is normal anymore?  If I told anyone the dreams I’ve been having, that’s the last thing they’d say I was.  I just kept staring out the window counting the light poles. Eighty-seven, that’s how many I counted on the car ride.

            We pulled into our driveway and I could already see shadows dancing against the curtains, too many for my liking.  I started feeling tense, burying my clinching fists deep into my Columbia jacket pockets, shielding them from my mother's eyesight.

            “Mom, you said this was supposed to be a small dinner thing. Why is half the block lined up with cars?”

            My mom looked at me with tears in her eyes.  “I know, and I’m sorry.  Everyone just loves you so much and we came so close to losing you. Please don’t be mad at me.”

             “I know, I love you too.”