Meeting Mom

Meeting Mom

"BLEEEEEEEP." I woke up suddenly from the blare of my alarm clock going off. I quickly hit it with my hand to stop the beeping. Why oh why did I wake up at this ungodly hour of the morning? School didn’t start until 8:30 a.m. but I still felt the need to wake up at 6:00a.m. I was just a little OCD like that. I walked into my bathroom, and realised that I was still wearing my dress from last night. My Dad had dragged me out of the house, much to my distaste, and had forced me to go to some stupid party where I got paraded around all night meeting his boring friends. I quickly checked my face in the mirror for zits and pulled my ink black hair into a messy bun. I hopped into my favourite pair of comfy sweats and sighed in contentment. This is what I liked to dress in. Not itchy, tight dresses. I grabbed my book and blanket and headed downstairs.

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Tears welled in my eyes. I was reading Pride and Prejudice my all-time favourite book, and I was just at the sad part. I grabbed a tissue and put my book down softly on the coffee table. I checked the clock beside me, 7:30 a.m. Yuck, school was in an hour. I dragged my tired feet up the stairs and went to go and wake my Dad up.

“Dad! Its 7:30, wake up, you have to go to work in half an hour!” I shouted at him through his bedroom door. I opened up his door and flicked on the light switch.

“Fine Klarie, I’m up, I’m up.” He replied groggily. I turned on my heel and headed to the bathroom, if my hair was going to look nice today, I was going to have to shower some of this hairspray out from last night.

I wrapped myself tightly in a towel and started to blow dry my ink black hair. The noise coming from the hair dryer was deafening, but I guess that’s what you get when your hair dryer is from the 1960’s. When my hair was remotely dry, I stepped into my sweatpants, put on a shirt, and headed out of the bathroom. It was then that I heard my dog barking. I groaned, the neighbours were always getting mad at us because our dog just could never stop barking. I ran to the door and shouted out at my dog to shut up, but she still continued to bark. The weird thing was that when she usually barked, she had a good reason for it, like another animal was in our yard, but this time, there was nothing out there. The only things that were in my back yard at the moment were her and my tree, and I don’t think that a regular tree could cause such a big commotion.

I ran out into my yard and tried to calm her down. Her ears were perked up on the top of her head and her tail was stuck in-between her legs. She barked one last time and then ran inside. I looked at the tree that she was barking at, there was absolutely nothing special about this tree, what could she be barking at? I peeked underneath the branches, and just like that, I was falling.

My stomach felt like it was somewhere around my ears and my arms flailed helplessly at my sides. I felt like I had been falling for hours but it must have only been seconds. I landed with a hard thud and pain shot up my arm. I realised that I had landed with my arm underneath me. I looked around and strangeness surrounded me. I started to panic, where was I? I started to get up, thinking that maybe if I were looking at it from a different view, I would somehow see something else.

Getting up was painful, my arm was still throbbing and every other inch of my body ached liked I’d just gone through a really hard workout at swimming. I started to panic even more when I was fully up, nothing had changed, and the same weird scenery was still surrounding me. My breath quickened, strange creatures passed by me speaking in odd tongues. I must have fainted, I assured myself, this just can’t be real, and nothing like this can exist in my backyard. I stumbled through the crowds, dazed and disorientated. I searched, trying to find just one familiar face out of all the strange ones. Tears were openly streaming down my face now. What would my Dad think? He would have probably come down stairs by now. He was probably searching for me; trying to find me, when he couldn’t find me I knew that the police would be involved. I wailed and the strange faces looked at me quizzically, as if questioning my sanity.

Night came and with nowhere to sleep, I laid my sweater down on the ground and slept on the side of a little path. It seemed to be trampled out of dirt from so many people, well not really people, but things walking on it all day. Maybe in unconsciousness my mind would give me some ease, and I could finally escape from this weird world. With that thought in mind I slowly drifted to sleep.

I woke up with sweat on my forehead and my heart pounding. I closed my eyes trying to calm myself down, just a dream, I thought, just a dream. But then the ache in my arm returned and I realised that it wasn’t a dream, and that yes, I was still in this weird world, and that nothing had changed. I opened my eyes wide, and then something caught my eye, a familiar face, in the hundreds that weren’t. An uneasy knot twisted in my stomach, in all of the people that I could meet here, I had to meet her. I started to cry, this could not be happening. This person was supposed to be dead, not here walking around in this weird place alive. Unless I was dead. Was I?

I ran towards her and wrapped her tightly in a hug. “Mom,” I whispered. Emotion filled my voice, confusion, sadness, happiness, and more confusion. “Mom, where are we?”

“Oh Klarie, honey, you shouldn’t have come here,” she replied. What was she talking about, I shouldn’t have come, I didn’t have a choice, I just fell through a hole underneath my tree, and I didn’t come here on my own.

“Mom backup, what do you mean, I shouldn’t have come here? I didn’t have much of a choice, I just fell and then I was here.”

“Oh Klarie,” she cried, “You shouldn’t be here,” she said stubbornly. “You shouldn’t be here,” she half shouted at herself.

“Mom,” I whispered, fear settling deep in my stomach, “How do we get out of here? How do we get back home?”

“That’s just it Klarie, we don’t,” and with those couple words, my fate was sealed.