"The key to the door is lying on the floor, a meter and a half to your right," it instructed. The more it spoke, the more unnatural it seemed to Jolene, the more artificial. Synthesized.
Slowly she followed its directives, feeling along the stone-cold floor in the dark. "Be quick," it admonished her tonelessly.
Finally her fingers brushed it; her pounding, she seized the key and stumbled her way back to the door. She took a deep breath, forcing herself to be calm, and carefully inserted the key into the lock. To her relief, it turned, and the door moved...
The voiceless aberration toiled within his thoughts. Where was he? What purpose? Why? The words seemed to jumble within his mind as he gazed out of the tank his eyes out upon people that seemed blurred. He could hear them speak but could not understand as a young girl walked towards the tank her small frilled white gown running to the marble floor. She seemed to smile at the aberration and lifted her small hand up to the glass and smiled even wider seeing it turn to face her. "Da what is that?" The young girl asked innocently staring at...
"Do you like the cats, young one?"
Lilibit pressed her white, lacey gloved hand over her throat, "Yes, my Lord," she breathed. "I've always wanted to see them, since my childhood!"
Sajin laughed, the bells at the bottom of his robes jingled, "You are a child yet, Little One."
Lilibit scowled, "I am a young woman. At the very least. I am not a child."
"Do you feel such?" Sajin asked, squinting, his dark skin shining from cheek to forehead in the way everyone did in this humid, emerald land. Lilibit for her part, felt sweat from head to toe...
The bottom of the fountain was a shimmering mural of pennies, the dapper man reached in and picked up a penny, this particular one caught his eye, something gleamed differently about it, something that niggled in his memory. He had a vision of walking this route as a boy, knickers and plaid, a little beret on his dark head.
As the memory became clear he saw his mother, in her radiance that was lost as he got older. The years withered her frame emaciated her skin mere parchment covering frail bones. Cancer. She had died not long after his fifth...
"Do you think we'll be there in time?" Annette didn't care but she felt as though she should say something to break the awkward silence in the car.
"No." Paolo answered. Annette waited for him to say something else. He didn't so she just continued staring out the window, watching the world pass by outside the car.
They had been traveling for two days, stopping only briefly at a run down motel on the outskirts of some city to catch a night of sleep. Yesterday had been Annette's birthday but the occasion passed by without so much as a balloon....
Sandy was impressed. Her son, John, had never thrown a ball back like that before - so hard and fast that it bypassed her completely and flew over the wall at the bottom of the small garden they shared. "Nice one, Johnny!" she yelled. "Let me go and get it, I'll be right back!"
She yanked open the wooden gate recessed into the red brick wall and entered the narrow alleyway at the back of her house - and all the other houses like it. She looked left and right and spotted the ball rolling away from her, towards the...
They crouched to peer beneath the stairs. The space was empty. Hiller swore quietly. Where were they? Benson stod up, rubbing his lower back. Well, the house is empty, he said. We should get going. Nothing we can do here.
Hiller nodded absentmindedly. Something was nagging at him. Something wasn't right. Let check the back room one more time first, he said moving towards the back of the house. They entered the small cupboard like room at the back of the kitchen and stood there silently. They both hear it at the same time. A faint noise coming from beneath...
They were trapped for seven days. Susan would have laughed if you told her should would never be trapped that long. She had grown up in Alaska and had only even been trapped indoors for four days when the snow gathered past the roof and the tunnel they had shoveled to the car collapsed.
But here they were, seven days later and still trapped. She sighed and walked around the periphery of the bedroom. When they realized they would be trapped for quite a while, they had assigned everyone with a room, to ensure privacy. Susan thought it was silly...
The first few days she hadn't noticed the bars. She'd noticed very little about her surroundings other than that they were wrong. As her head became less fuzzy and she began to understand why they were wrong, that this wasn't where she was supposed to be she tried to learn everything there was to learn about this unfamiliar environment.
It was on the tenth day that she'd counted, that the sun shone for the first time. Whereas it had looked grey and dreary outside, the glowing sunlight made it look full of possibilities. The bars were on the inside of...
Waves. Waves lapping at the scarred coast line, the sound of gulls cooing above, the smell of the salty seawater.
The therapist had told her to imagine her happy place, every time she felt a panic attack coming on. Every time she felt stressed, which she was prone to, she came back here.
Her happy place.
She was nine years old, her strawberry blonde hair in pigtails, her jade green coat pulled tight to keep out the bitter wind. Balancing atop a weather warn log, she had pretended she was walking the tightrope at the circus.
She had always dreamt...