Tuesday, July 26, 2005

Chapter One -Part One-
. And so there I was, alone. This wasn't surprising. I was doing my homework, which, being as I was home-schooled, this was all my schoolwork. I looked at my books in dismay, their bland covers stared back at me, cursing me. I cursed them back. I wasn't the best of students. But I wasn't the worst either. I made my grades, but my grades didn't make my life. My life hadn't been made yet, I knew that much. I anticipated growing up. No. That is incorrect. I anticipated having a life of my own, free from parental and social restraints. I kicked the books off my desk and looked out the window. And at that moment, something strange happened... The window looked back at me.

. I thought about that moment for hours, even as I lay awake in my bed for hours into the night. It had to have been just my imagination. Here I was, only fourteen, and already suffering from dillusions. I sighed. I ran my fingers through my light red hair and sat up, looking out the window of my second-floor room and into the forest. I thought of going outside in the darkness, running to my secret place (all children have these, or so I'm told) and screaming my lungs out. I wanted to know something, anything about my life, about who I was or where I was going. I allowed myself to fall backwards onto the bed, slightly bouncing off its soft mattress before resting in the now-disordered sheets. I closed my eyes and wished for sleep to come. But secretly, I wished for an escape, a way out of my ordinary boring life. Sleep didn't come. The escape did.

. I awoke, or so I thought it was awaking from sleep that I felt no relief from. I was lying on the grass. I must be outside, I thought, in my forest out around back the house. I stood up and looked around. I felt no different. I felt tired is the most I can remember. I did not even make notice of the odd surroundings. If I had been more alert, I would have been able to tell that the forest was not the sparsely wooded regions of my Atlanta subdivision, but in fact the dense growth of a real rural wood. It was a minute later that I realized something was odd. That was when, after walking several hundred meters, I realized I was staring at a stone cottage, about a fifteen meters away from me.

. It was about like any cottage to be honest, but to someone used to twentieth-century housing architecture, it might as well have been the most bizarre thing ever constructed. Sure, I had read my fairy tales and history books, looking at the pictures all along, but this was real. There was real smoke coming out of the chimney. I gaped in awe. The first thought that came into my head was to wonder what had happened to my house? Had it been burned down in the night? Then how did this building (if it could be called that) get here? What had become of my parents? My brother and sister? (Good riddance.) I was overwhelmed with thought. Then the door of the cottage opened and from within there stepped out a large being appearing to be part crocodile and part lizard, standing on his hind legs as if he also had some strange misconception of being civilized. He opened his maw and spoke some slithery sentences. I fainted...
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