Read the Prologue: here Wordcount: 384 Part: 5/ongoing
Anywhere Else
The soft flicker of my vanilla cinnamon pumpkin candle, the steady background of lo-fi music, and the continuous ticking of my little pomodoro timer should have been enough to keep my head in my books all evening. But maybe it was a bit much with my fluffy fleece blanket and Tigerlilly purring on my lap. Such a perfect setup to study. It must be my brain that has the problem.
Civil rights in the 60’s. Not the coziest subject, but definitely something that should hold my interest. I shuffled my little stack of index cards. Names, dates, events I was collecting. Each card would serve as a memory in the pastel fog of my mind. I would need paper to keep them for me tonight. Tomorrow I could refer to them and know I had actually been here.
I began reading a passage aloud to Tigerlily. She blinked up at me with her mystical eyes. She seemed a little board and eventually became a tiny loaf and fell asleep. My voice trailed off and I sighed, glancing at the timer. Thirteen minutes left in this session. I had to keep going.
Outside, the clouds were breaking up and beginning to glow softly. How big were those distant thunderheads? How far away? Were they over another city or just over the lake a few miles out of town? I was a poor judge of distance. Especially in the sky.
“If you could leave Dreamscape, where would you go?” Mom had asked me yesterday evening. I hadn’t been talking about leaving Dreamscape. Funny how it keeps coming up.
“Isn’t the whole world a lot like Dreamscape?” I asked. And that was why I couldn’t leave. It wasn’t because the whole world was so much like Dreamscape. In truth, Dreamscape was much like the whole world. Everywhere else was just another view of the same sky. Why did it matter what changed on the ground?
“Someday, you might want to go somewhere else,” she said.
“But Dreamscape is okay.”
“Dreamscape isn’t real.”
“Would you and Dad come with me, if I ever left?”
“Of course, we would.”
The timer was going off. I shook myself. Where had I been? Asleep? I had been thinking about a conversation I had recently had with Mom…or was that a dream?