Category: Dreamscape IN series

Read the Prologue: here Wordcount: 431 Part: 4/ongoing

The Cub

It had been too cold to leave the window open last night, but I still didn’t shut it. The chill awakened me before my alarm and I lay quiet and still for a while, staring at the pale sky. I sighed and pushed my comforter back, stretching and combing my hands through my tangled hair. I liked to give myself an hour and fifteen minutes to get ready for school in the morning. Well, at least in September, I did.

I brewed a cup of chai and mellowed it with milk. The creamy white clouds roiled up in the amber darkness and swirled to fill my cup with the soft color of autumn. For a while I sat and stared out the steamy kitchen window watching black squirrels race up and down the trees in the backyard.

This would be the year I became an all-A’s student, I told myself. I told myself that every year, but a couple of B’s always found their way in. Did it really matter? School? I don’t know. But maybe I had better pretend it does for one more year.

I finished my tea, washed my face, combed my hair, put on the outfit I had laid out the night before. And when I went back out into the living-room, a little tiger kitten was sitting on the outside windowsill looking in.

It was gray and white with soft downy fur that caught the early morning light in a halo around its little figure. The eyes were still dark and blueish, not yellow yet. When I opened the window, it came right in.

“Do you think we can keep it?” I asked Mom after we fed it some scrambled eggs and before I went out to catch the bus.

“We’ll see if anyone else knows where it came from, but I doubt your Dad cares. It could be nice to have a cat.”

She was still at the house when I got back from school that afternoon, and she followed me inside as if it was our little habit to come home at the same time. We called her Tigerlily, and every time she heard her name, her soft oversized ears lifted, and her eyes grew round. It was like someone had called her that before. I’m convinced it’s not the only word she understands.

Strange thing about the kitten: No one we asked had ever seen her before, and there aren’t many strays or drop-offs in our neighborhood. She was too young to have traveled far by herself.

Maybe she fell from the sky.

Read the Prologue: here Wordcount: 521 Part: 3/ongoing

They Were Saying

“Hey, Sarah!”

I swear I had never even seen the girl before. I had no idea how she knew my name or recognized me from a distance. She called to me again as I waved hesitantly to her from where I stood preparing to jump on my bike and head home. School was over. The busses were dispatching on the other side of the sprawling high school building. It was a bit of a workout getting home on my bike, but I preferred it to the noise of the buss at the end of the day.

The girl sprinted up to me, fluffy black hair tossing in the crisp September wind. She had a checkered black and white backpack over her shoulders with a plush white tiger charm dancing on the zipper. “Hi,” I said as she jumped up onto the sidewalk next to me.

“Everybody thought you we’re leaving town. Everybody said you wouldn’t be back this fall.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Everybody? Who?”

“No. Everybody.”

That was the funny thing about it. I only had a few friends in school, and yet this new girl told me the whole school had been whispering about my rumored departure. Kayleigh was her name. Somehow, she already knew all the cool kids. But how was it that suddenly, all the cool kids seemed to know me?

“But I never said I was going anywhere. Not even after graduation.”

“Weird. Guess I’ll tell them they were wrong.” She shrugged and snapped her gum. “See you Monday, then.”

“Nice meeting you,” I called after her as she went to join a couple of other girls on their way out.

“You too.”

On the way home, I often stop off at a little gas station that sells muffins. The lady behind the counter knows I’m never leaving town. As she reached into the case to get me a blueberry muffin, I noticed, for the first time, the tiger tattoo on her forearm. I passed her two dollars and fifty cents in exchange for the oversized muffin, and she threw a sharp glance at the prices on the sign. She shook her head. “Almost twice what it was,” she said, “when I started working here two years ago.” She closed the case. “You could get a ticket for fifty cents more.”

I laughed in response because I didn’t fully understand what she was referring to. I guess, in retrospect, I still don’t know for sure. But I have a feeling.

I coasted home with the muffin in one hand and the other hand on the handlebars only half the time. The air was slowly losing its summertime softness, and every here and there, a shower of brilliant yellow walnut leaflets fluttered across the road. Along the telephone lines, rows and rows of blackbirds faced into the wind. It wasn’t time for that yet, was it?

There was music somewhere. As I cruised into my driveway, I could hear laughing. I looked up at the sky and saw a glowing blue break in the smokey gray clouds.

And, for an instant, a jet passing over.

Read the Prologue: here Wordcount: 583 Part: 2/ongoing

Between Water and Sky

I thought I saw it as I jumped off the pier into the lake.

The air was already cooling as afternoon slid into evening. Summer doesn’t last long in Dreamscape. I tossed my towel off my shoulders and ran down the weathered dock, my bare feet pounding the weathered gray boards as I sped toward the horizon. The wind thundered in my ears and my hair tossed against my sunscreen-slathered shoulders. My skin was rough with goosebumps. The water would be cold, but I ran faster. Faster! This might be the last dive of the season. Go!

My feet left the end of the pier and a sudden silence rushed around me. I was flying, launched into the air from the sheer energy of knowing the whole sky was watching, waiting.

High, high above and many miles long, it trailed on and on toward the west. The cars flashed back the reddening sunlight as it coasted faster and faster over the curve of the sky. Away it went, and I hit the water.

The roaring chaos of the broken surface gave way to the humming jingling teal-black depths. I plunged through the shock of the cold to a dark secret world. This world calls me, too. It always disappears when I touch the soft oozing sand at the bottom and kick off. I was bound skyward again.

My face erupted into the biting breeze and lapping waves, and I dragged my hands across my blurry eyes. A seagull screamed and I searched the sky. It was gone.

For a while I swam around under the pier, weaving in and out between the slimy supports and the zebra-mussel reefs like an unglorified mermaid. I watched the others with only my eyes above the water. They would be cold soon. We wanted to stay until sunset, but we would see.

Maybe it was strange for a girl my age to care so little about what her friends were doing. But they never talked about the train. They never really talked about what they wanted to do. I was ambitious. Or something. I’m not sure what it was. I just knew there was music in my head, always changing and building. I was bound for somewhere.

Even if I never left Dreamscape.

Mom picked us up and drove us home, letting the others off at their houses along the way. Then finally, it was just me and her in the car. I told her about the train.

“Why do I see it?”

“Everyone does, honey.”

“But nobody talks about it but us.”

“Nobody dares to hope. Most people seek security in other things. Hope…it’s too hard to control.”

I let my hand ride the wind outside the window. “I suppose I’d better focus on this last year of school, so I can have something to hope for, myself.”

“Hard work is good for you,” she said. “All your dreams are there to get you out of bed in the morning. But outcomes can be chaotic in this world. So much that you can barely claim the credit or take the blame. Do your best. Make your plans. Don’t give up. But at the end of the day, if it helps at all, try to remember everything this life has to offer can be gotten by accident.”