Brighter Futures

WINNER: "Moving On" by Evelyn Reid

The room was dark. Holly couldn’t see five inches in front of her. Then a light switched on and revealed her surroundings. She was in a kitchen. Holly had run through the door, not knowing what was behind it. She was running from something. Something she hadn’t seen, but rather had heard. She ran from it because she knew if it got her, then she wouldn’t make it home again. How she knew this, Holly did not know. The kitchen had one light hanging in the center of the room and there was another door across the room from the one she had entered by. There was no switch on the wall and no one else in the room, so she couldn't fathom as to how the light had turned on.

As she was thinking about the light, the handle on the door behind her creaked. That shadowy something was back. It had found her hiding place and she needed to run. Holly dashed across the room towards the other door and wrenched it open.

This door did not lead to somewhere inside the building she was in, but where it led was not quite outside either. There were massive trees, stretching high up beyond the point where she could discern details. This part made her think she was outside. As did the river she could partially see about twenty feet away from the door. The trees weren’t densely packed together, but they were just close enough to make it difficult to see very far. Their leaves and branches didn’t start until about fifteen feet up the trunk, but tons of vines cascaded down from the canopy. The part that made Holly feel like she was inside was the ground. It was unnaturally smooth and light grey. It was also hard underfoot, but felt like sand when she bent down to touch it. She also couldn’t see past the edge of the trees. It was just a wall of smoke, but not dark grey. It was light, like the ground. She could see individual tendrils breaking away from the wall and dissipating before they reached five inches.

Off to her right, she saw a house. A little hut of sorts with a frond roof. There were no fronds anywhere in this odd place, but the roof had fronds so green they looked like they must’ve been just picked from a tree. She made her way over and saw there was a little fenced-in yard where grass and flowers grew. This looked like the only natural part of this place. The flowers grew wherever and the grass level was uneven. Turning back to see if that thing had followed her from the kitchen, Holly saw that it was gone. There was no door, just more of the smoke wall. This wall was different from the others. No tendrils broke free and it was dark grey. Quite ominous looking, Holly thought. She decided to get closer to it and see if she could see through it, but the closer she got, the worse she felt. She felt dark. Angry, sad, slow. She hated the way she was feeling. Holly turned around and made her way back to the hut before she had gone ten feet.

Something moved to her left and she snapped her head toward the movement. A man was walking toward the hut with his nose in a book and a case in his hand. One side of the case was glass, and Holly could see that inside of it were insects. Some were massive while others were too small to discern any features from that distance.

The man looked up and noticed Holly for the first time. He gave a yelp and dropped his book. Looking disgruntled and a little embarrassed, he bent down and picked it up.

“What are you doing here?” he asked her.

“I was being chased, so I ran this way,” she told him.

The man glanced behind her and responded, “There’s no one there.”

“I know. I lost it,” she explained.

“Lost what?” he asked her.

“The thing that was chasing me,” Holly said.

“But there’s nothing there,” he pointed out again.

“I know. Because I lost it,” she explained once more, getting annoyed.

“You lost something? I can help you find it. What’s it look like?” the man asked her.

“I was being chased by something and now it’s not chasing me because I got away. I don’t want to find it again and if you ask me one more thing about it I’m just going to ignore you!” Holly snapped at him.

“Well that’s not very nice. I was merely offering my assistance,” he said.

Holly groaned and rolled her eyes. This man was being difficult on a ridiculous level. She wondered if perhaps he was being difficult on purpose just to mess with her.

“What’s in the book?” she asked him.

“My research. I collect and record every insect I can find here. I have another book for the fish from the river over there,” the man told her, pointing in the direction of the river.

Holly looked towards it and saw that the river was not where it had been before when she first came out of the kitchen. The river was now ten feet from the front of the hut. She could see that this river was also not natural like most of this place. The sides of the river were perfectly parallel to one another, and upon further inspection Holly saw that the depth was consistent throughout. It looked like someone had carved it into the ground and filled the hole with water. The current looked lazy, as none of the water appeared to be moving very fast, if at all. Holly bent down to feel the temperature of the water and almost got dragged in. The current was not lazy, but faster than any river Holly had ever encountered before. A group of fish zipped by almost too fast for her to process that they were in fact individual fish and not one object.

“Why is everything in this place so weird?” she asked the man, who had followed her to the river’s edge.

“What’s so weird about it?” he asked her.

“Everything! You can’t see past the tree line, the river doesn’t even really look like a river, and the trees’ branches start unnaturally high! And the vines look like they’re moving in the wind, yet there’s no breeze,” Holly pointed out.

“Right, so what’s not normal?” the man asked, confused.

“Are you serious?” she asked in disbelief. Was this man so oblivious to his surroundings? Or did he really not get it?

Holly turned around to walk away from the man. He was giving her a headache. When she turned, she saw that once again, something had changed. The dark grey wall had moved up and now obstructed the hut. A deep growl resonated from within and Holly stumbled back.

“What’s the matter?” the man asked.

“Did you not hear that?” she inquired.

“Hear what?”

“That growl!” Holly exclaimed, exasperated with this man.

“I didn’t hear a growl. I’m going back to my hut to work on my books,” he told her and turned away.

Holly turned around to watch him go and saw that the river was now about twenty feet away again and the hut was back, but not where it had been. In relation to the river, it was in about the same spot. But where it had been when she stood at the river, the hut was not there anymore.

She turned back to the wall of smoke and saw it was gone. Now there was a stone wall with a door in the center of it. The handle turned and the hinges creaked as something from inside pushed the door open.

Holly turned to run from the door, but found the wall with the door opening slowly that she had just turned away from. She whirled about to face the original place in which the door had stood and found another door that wasn’t opening. The weird jungle was gone, and with it the annoying guy. She darted through the door and slammed it shut behind her.

Once more, Holly was in a dark room where she couldn’t see five inches in front of her. A crack of light appeared at the opposite side of the room and the door was opening outward. Beyond it, she could see the jungle and the man with his back to the door. A figure was silhouetted against the doorway and it exited the room. The door swung shut behind it without it needing to touch the door. Holly stood for a moment in the dark, silent. She was catching her breath, but she couldn’t hear herself breathing. It was silent to a point that it was downright eerie.

A light came on in the room, and Holly saw the kitchen she had into earlier. She didn’t want to be in this room if the thing found her again, because it was smaller than it had been before. She turned and opened the door she had come through.

As the door closed behind her, Holly heard the door at the other end of the room open and close. She began walking as fast as she could without making noise, noticed she couldn’t even hear her breathing, and broke into a sprint. She was in a hallway, but a different one than the one which she ran through before to get to the kitchen. There was a door at the other end, but as she neared it Holly noticed a gap in the floor. It appeared to extend down forever, but that wasn’t possible. There was a bottom somewhere in there, just out of sight. The hallway wasn’t very well-lit to begin with, so seeing the bottom of a deep hole was not likely.

Holly stepped back a few feet and ran towards the gap. She jumped, and just as she jumped something swung at the air behind her. The thing was back and it had almost caught her, just missing by an inch. Holly landed on the other side of the gap and wrenched the door open, running through and slamming it behind her. She noticed a lock on this side of the door and turned it. She stood for a moment, resting while she could. Then she noticed the door start to ripple. The metal began to look liquid and something dark was beginning to push through.

“Are you kidding me?!” Holly yelled at the thing before turning to run again.

She got about two feet away from the door and she stopped herself. She was sick of this thing chasing her and sick of running. She didn’t even know what she was running from! Holly turned around to see that the shadow had pushed fully into the room. She could see now that it was far taller than her and needed to somewhat stoop in order to fit in the room, which was about eight feet tall. Because this thing had to stoop at eight feet, she guessed it was probably about ten feet tall. It had long, thin arms with four finger-like appendages at the end of its arm. There was no discernable hand and the same was true for its feet, only those four toes were longer than the fingers. It looked like a shadow at first glance. Looking closer, Holly could see that it was made of dark smoky tendrils, like the wall in the weird jungle that obscured the door at first.

It moved swiftly towards Holly and it loomed over her, reaching with its long, thin, claw-like fingers. It slowed as it reached and Holly stood her ground. The thing seemed to be waiting for her to turn and run, but she wouldn’t do that anymore. Finally, the fingers reached her face and the room around them instantly dissipated in a whirl of particles.

She could still feel the floor beneath her, but she couldn’t see it. She couldn’t see anything but the faint outline of the creature before her. It was almost as dark as their current surroundings, and that made it hard to focus on it. Holly could feel it’s fingers on her face. She could feel the tendrils of smoke slithering over her skin where the thing touched her. They were cold and a faint breeze came from them. At first the breeze smelled sour and unpleasant, but the longer it held her, the less she could smell it.

The two of them stood there in the darkness like that for what felt like half an hour. The sour smell had completely subsided by now and another smell was beginning to arise from the breeze. It smelled...fresh. Like blades of grass, fresh with dew on a crisp spring morning. Like a light storm blowing in and about to drop its rain down on the Earth. Holly tried to reach up and remove the fingers from her face, but she couldn’t move her arms, or anything for that matter. She was stuck like this.

Then the creature started to change. It’s fingers started to feel like actual fingers instead of smoke blowing across her face. The arms were no longer smoke either and the smoke was changing to flesh, moving up from the feet and hands of this thing to its head. Once the change reached the shoulders, it waited for the change below the shoulders to finish before moving onto the head. The smoke continued to change to skin and golden hair flowed from the creature’s head. Its face still hadn’t changed, but Holly could tell it was a woman. She also wasn’t ten feet tall anymore. She was about five and a half feet.

The surrounding darkness faded to reveal a clearing in the middle of a forest. This time, the trees looked more natural. So did everything else. There was grass on the ground and sunlight shone down. There also weren’t any smoke walls here. A small river trickled somewhere to her left and a dragonfly flitted about to her right before landing on a leaf.

The smoke was almost completely gone from the woman, but her face still wasn’t a face yet. The tendrils were curling away from her, moving from her chin up to her eyes. It had passed her nose and moved towards her eyes. It was moving slower than ever, as if the smoke was thinning for itself and saw how much Holly wanted to know who this woman was, so it was taunting her. She told herself that smoke taunting her was ridiculous, but that’s genuinely what it seemed like. The woman seemed familiar to Holly, but she couldn’t quite place her. Not until she could really see her.

The smoke finally evaporated completely and she could see the woman’s face. It wasn’t long enough to place her in her memory, though, because as soon as the smoke left the woman’s face she was gone. One second she was touching Holly and the next she was nowhere to be seen. When the woman left, Holly got an empty feeling, like something important was missing. She knew that she needed to find this woman again and find out what was going on.

She turned around and took in her surroundings. The forest she was in seemed to go on forever. There were no buildings or paved paths she could see between the trees. There was so much overgrowth outside of the clearing that it was hard to make progress through the trees. Holly made her way towards the river and followed it in the direction it was flowing. There was less vegetation at the edge of the river because of sand along the river bed. There was also evidence of a recent storm, which would’ve raised the water level and washed out the loose rooted plants.

As she made her way along the river, the trickling began to grow in volume. It became a rush, then a roar. Up ahead, Holly could see a dropoff. She reached the cliff and looked down, seeing the waterfall and water misting as droplets broke off and sprayed through the air, creating little rainbows in the evening sun. She could tell it was evening and not early morning because the sky was starting to become deeper in colour instead of becoming lighter and more blue. Some purple was forming opposite the sun, which was behind her.

Rocks sticking out from the cliff created a sort of natural staircase down to the riverbed at the bottom of the falls. Holly made her way down and at about halfway she looked up and paused. She had heard something. Well, not really heard, but there was something there. She could feel it. Something had hit something or stepped on a twig, which should have made a sound. It didn’t, though. The woman stepped out from the trees and walked into the water. She didn;t seem to make an impact on the water’s oath despite the fact that she was touching it. The woman walked into the waterfall and after waiting for about five minutes, Holly continued on her way down to follow the woman into the falls.

She reached the bottom and jumped into the water. It wasn’t very deep here and the spraying water made it difficult to see, but she made her way to the cliff behind the falls nonetheless. Holly knew she was in the water and she could feel it touching her, but she could also feel that she wasn’t wet. She tried to think of how that made sense, but it just gave her a headache so she continued towards the cliff.

She passed the waterfall and faced the cliff before her. The woman wasn’t there anymore, and Holly hadn’t seen her come out, so then how was she not behind the falls? Holly looked up and she saw an opening in the rock face about two feet above her head. It wasn’t very big, but it was big enough for a person to climb into. She noticed another natural staircase on the cliff face and walked over to it. Holly climbed the stairs to the opening and walked inside. It was larger than she had first thought, but it still couldn’t be considered big. It was about...medium.

The opening led to a small, dark tunnel that led into the cliff. Holly made her way down the tunnel and the light behind eventually couldn’t reach far enough for her to see what was ahead. She kept moving forward nonetheless. The tunnel was getting smaller width wise, but the height either didn’t change or was getting higher because Holly could still stand at full height without feeling rock above her head.

The tunnel reached a point where it was difficult to move forward because the walls were so close to one another. Holly kept pushing on, though, and she made it past the thin part to a spot that was much larger than the entrance to the tunnel. She reached out in the dark, but she couldn’t feel rock anywhere except for below her and the direction from which she came. She was only able to orient herself because of the one side she could feel rock and the tiny speck of light that was the entrance at the other end of the tunnel.

She was hesitant to move forward because of how dark it was. She was contemplating going back when a grinding came from ahead of her.

“Nope!” she said, turned around, and began to walk out.

She had turned around and walked two steps, then stopped. There was no little speck of light. She reached out, but there was no rock. Just darkness and the ground beneath her feet. She turned around again and saw the little speck of light. Relieved but confused, she made her way towards it. She expected to have to squeeze her way past the thin part of the tunnel, but the tunnel was much wider now. She began to think this wasn’t the entrance tunnel.

The light didn’t seem to be getting any bigger and the surrounding darkness made it seem like she was walking in place. Holly was about to stop walking and take a break, as she had a cramp now, when the light flickered out. It hadn’t been the entrance. It had been something else and now she was here in the dark with no sense of direction. She figured she might as well stop anyway as there was no point trying to find her way in the dark.

After about twenty minutes her cramp had gone and she started to make her way slowly toward where the light had been. The second time. She felt with her foot before she placed it down in case there was a dropoff in here. She made it maybe fifteen feet and the light flickered back on. Holly looked up, startled, and saw the light was getting larger. It was growing bigger and brighter. Then it flashed and she had to close her eyes to keep the light from hurting them.

The air felt moist around her. Opening her eyes, Holly saw that she was in a forest again. It was different from the one she had been in before she entered the tunnel behind the waterfall. This one had less overgrowth and the trees weren’t as close together. The other forest had appeared to be early spring, with the leaves bright, fresh green and the flowers just blooming. This one seemed to be in autumn, with leaves like fire on the branches. The ground was littered with dead leaves and an opaque mist swirled about the trunks, its thin wisps curling over the ground. Looking up, she could see that it wasn’t day anymore. It looked like the middle of the night, judging by the moon’s height. It was a full moon, too. It illuminated the mist and made it almost sparkle, giving the forest an eerie lighting. Something moved behind her, and Holly whirled around. The woman was walking through the trees away from where Holly stood. Her golden hair was flowing like in a strong breeze, but it was more subtle than that. The moisture in the air made her hair more wavy than before and the moonlight made it seem to glow.

Holly followed the woman’s path through the trees, determined not to lose her this time. The woman turned behind a trunk and when she didn’t show up on the other side, Holly began running towards it. She had watched the woman walk behind the tree, so why didn’t she see her come out from behind it? She reached the tree and looked behind it. The woman wasn’t there, nor anywhere else. She turned in a circle, confused and frustrated. She wanted to know who this woman was and why things kept changing in ways that weren’t physically possible. If she couldn’t have the answer to the latter she at least wanted to know the former. Angry that she had lost the woman again, Holly punched the trunk of the tree. Every leaf on the branches fell to the ground on impact, floating gracefully and slowly to the ground. As they fell, the leaves withered and became brown, dry, dead. The tree had withered, too. It was ash-grey now, not a speck of brown on the trunk or the branches. She stepped back from the dead tree and turned around, looking for something familiar. There was nothing familiar here. A forest, dark, illuminated only by the moon and the ground suffocated in a mist that was getting thicker and probably would be a fog soon. The ground would be completely enveloped in white and the dead leaves beneath would be obscured.

A streak of blue disrupted the swirling white. A single tendril or cerulean mist, slinking its way through the rest. It wound around the trunks and made its way towards Holly. She backed up, unsure of whether she should run from it or let it pass her by. She decided to hold her ground and it streaked past her. She turned around to watch it go, and saw it had risen up out of the white mist and stuck up straight to its tip, where it curled over to her. She looked up at the mist appearing to stand before her, if that made any sense. Then again, not much in the past few hours had made any sense at all. It was making a slight hissing sound, like leaking gas. It bent closer to her and touched her forehead.

Holly sat up. She wasn’t in the forest anymore. She wasn’t really anywhere anymore. She was back in that weird place that was completely dark. Not dark like the cave dark, but like when the smoke grabbed her and turned into the woman. Turning around, she saw the woman standing there, looking towards a little light. Holly couldn’t tell where the light was coming from. It kind of looked like the light from the cave, but it was a little different than that one. This one’s light had a bluish tint to it.

The woman still felt familiar to Holly, yet she couldn’t figure out why. She walked towards the woman and when she got within three feet of her, the woman turned around. That’s when she recognized her. The woman, with flowing golden hair and porcelain skin, had deep blue eyes, like the petals of a French Hydrangea. Once she saw the eyes, Holly recognized her instantly. The woman was her mother. She had been running from her mother when she was the smoke and chasing her once she was herself.