So after I posted earlier today, I started flipping thru writing prompts on Pinterest. There are so many! I found one I like while waiting for the dentist to call me in. By the time my drilling and filling was done, I had worked out most of the story. I rushed home to write it out and here it is! The prompt was a 'first line prompt' which means it has to be the first line of the story. It was "The house shouldn't be this empty." Read on and leave me a comment letting me know what you think!
“The house shouldn’t be this empty” I thought as I walked down the hall to the bedrooms. Where was everyone? It’s Thanksgiving and all the family should be here. The house should be bustling with activity: cooking and table setting and kids running and playing.
When I pulled up to my grandma’s house, nothing seemed out of the ordinary. The circle drive was packed with cars. Sleds were thrown haphazardly on the ground near the front door. Obviously, my cousins had all been sledding earlier in the day. It couldn’t have been a great sledding excursion though. The sleds were in terrible condition. They were dirty, dented, some had cracks. “Time to get the kids new sleds, guys” I thought to myself. I knocked on the door, but that was just a formality. Family was always welcome at Grandma’s and she always said to just come on in. So, I did. I pulled the door open and it creaked on its hinges. I made a mental note to find a can of WD-40 later. I called out “Hey guys! I finally made it!” I hung my coat on a hanger and crammed it into the over-stuffed closet. Twenty people’s worth of winter gear made the closet door nearly impossible to close. “The roads were pretty snowy, and icy in spots, but it wasn’t too bad. I was only white-knuckling it a couple times,” I continued as I walked toward the kitchen. It was quiet. Quiet? I stopped. On Thanksgiving? I took a moment to listen. It wasn’t just quiet. The house was totally silent. No yelling or laughing coming from the kids’ playroom. No clanging of pots and pans in the kitchen. There was no welcoming smell of turkey dinner in the oven. In fact, the house smelled dusty and moldy, as if it had been closed up for years. The hair on the back of my neck stood up. What was going on? I had spoken to Mom on the way here. The expected noise of a big family gathering in the background had been clear on the phone. It had been so loud, we were having trouble understanding each other, and we had to cut our conversation short. I was going to be here shortly anyway, we could talk then. I stepped into the kitchen. Nothing. No one was there. Pots and pans were hanging from the rack, plates and cups were stacked in the cupboard. The sink was empty. I continued into the dining room. The table was empty. Grandma’s china sat in neat rows in the china hutch. Everything was just as Grandma liked it: neat and orderly. Except, there was a layer of dust on everything. A thick layer, the kind that accumulates in an abandoned building over the course of twenty years. What the hell? My heart was pounding. I felt like the victim in a horror movie, who hadn’t yet encountered the crazy masked murderer, but was about to.
I continued through the house. “Hello? Where are you guys?” I called out as I walked up the stairs and down the hall to the bedrooms. Opening each bedroom door, I saw the family’s suitcases and bags thrown on the beds but, like the kitchen, everything was covered in dust and cobwebs. I ran back down the steps and back to the front door. I was starting to panic. Something was very wrong. Outside, I saw things that I hadn’t noticed when I first arrived. Subtle differences that hadn’t caught my attention the first time. Sure, the circle drive was packed with cars, but the tires were all flat and there was rust creeping into the paint jobs. Grandma’s beloved garden had the leftovers of that summer’s flowers, but also the frozen shells of weeds that were moving in and taking over, as if the garden had been neglected for some time. I looked around the side of the house and saw the swing set was in the yard, right where it should be, but the swing was hanging from just one chain. The other had rusted and broken, and now lay in a heap in the frosty ground.
I ran back to my car, jumped in and locked the door behind me. The panic finally won, I couldn’t fight it anymore, and I started sobbing uncontrollably. What had happened? Where was my family? And why does it look like it’s been ages since they’ve been here? Crazy ideas started flitting through my head. Time traveling? Bad joke? Ha, really bad joke. If this was someone’s idea of a prank, I was going to disown them. Bad dream? I latched on to that one. It had to be it. I was dreaming. I wiped the tears from my face and took a deep breath to calm myself. “Get yourself together Rebekka, it’s just a dream. You’re in your apartment, in your warm cozy bed, dreaming. Now you know you’re dreaming, you can wake yourself up, right?“ There had to be a way. I pulled my sleeve up and pinched my arm, hard. *beep* What the hell was that? *beep* I looked around trying to find the source of the high-pitched noise. *beep* My car was off and the key was out. *beep* No power going to any of the car’s electronics. *beep* I lifted my butt off the seat and took my cell phone out of my back pocket. *beep* There were no notifications. *beep* I sat still for a moment, listening. *beep* I needed to figure out the direction the beeping was coming from. *beep* I turned my head this way and that way. *beep* Direction didn’t seem to matter; the beeping was very close to me. *beep* Very close, like it was coming FROM be! *beep* What the hell? *beep* I opened the car door and stepped out. *beep* It followed me out. *beep* I took a few steps away from the car, onto the grass of the front yard. *beep* It was…..in my head. Beeping in my head?! Great.
I tried to ignore the incessant beeping as I looked around some more. It had been a couple years since I had made to Grandma’s for Thanksgiving dinner. It looked exactly how I remembered it. “Of course, it does dummy. This is your dream, remember?” I laughed at the conversation I was having with myself, feeling just one step shy of a loony bin.
“Rebekka?”
I had barely heard it; the voice was so soft. Who said it? I turned slowly, on the spot, trying to figure out where the voice had come from.
“Rebekka!?”
It was slightly louder this time, kind of far off and echo-y. It was like someone had lost me and was searching for me. My heart raced as I tried to tell which direction the voice was coming from. As my heartbeat increased, so did the speed of the beeping in my head. It punctuated every heart beat like those monitors you see in TV hospitals.
“Rebekka, can you hear me?”
The voice was loud and clear this time. It was my mother’s voice. But where was she? I started running. “Mom?!” I didn’t know where I was running to, but I had to find her. Somehow, I knew she was the answer to waking from this dream. This nightmare. “Mom!”
“Rebekka! She mumbled something, but I couldn’t understand it”
“Mom! Can you hear me? Mom!” I was running without paying any attention to where I was going. I passed tree after tree. Some branches whipped my face as I flew by them but I didn’t stop. “Mom!!” By the time I saw the edge of the cliff, it was too late to stop, but I tried. The ground was slick with frost and I slid right over the edge.
I tried to catch myself from the fall. But I wasn’t falling. I was in a bed. My hands were clutching the sheets. The beeping matched the frantic beating of my heart, but it was no longer in my head. I opened my eyes to bright lights above me. My mom was standing next to me, smiling and crying at the same time. A searing pain shot through my temple and I closed my eyes again. I was so confused. The short glimpse I saw looked like a hospital room. “What happened?” I asked, but it was mumbly and came out sounding like “wh-hapn?”
Mom took my hand. “You were in an accident. Do you remember anything? You were on your way to Grandma’s for Thanksgiving dinner. The weather was nasty. Snowy and icy. You called to tell me you were about a half hour away. Do you remember any of this?” I nodded slightly. The dream was merging with bits of real memory. The phone call, it had been too loud there at Grandma’s, we couldn’t hear each other very well. “At a particularly icy spot, another car lost control and hit your car. Your car flipped over, you hit your head really hard. You’ve been unconscious ever since. You’ve got a couple broken bones. We’ve been so worried.”
“How long?” I asked (it came out much clearer than the first time I spoke).
“You’ve been out for about a week. For a day or so, the doctors weren’t sure you were going to pull through. I’ve been talking to you the whole time. It wasn’t until yesterday that you started mumbling a little, and your legs were kind of twitching this morning.” My dream! The beeping had been the heart monitor here in the hospital! And my legs twitching, that must have been when I was running. It had only seemed like maybe twenty minutes. It had been days?!
