An Oblivious Balancer

Lorena stepped outside, waving goodbye to me as I closed the door behind her. I watched from the window for a second as she hopped into her friend’s car, then turned myself back into the house.

It immediately came to my attention that Lorena’s cat, Jasper, was sitting on the stairs. He was just staring at me, flicking his tail up and down. We never bothered each other much in the few months that I lived with him before I moved out, and I didn’t have allergies or anything, but he just never seemed too pleased to be around me. He scratched me pretty badly when I tried to pet him the day she got him, and we avoided each other ever since. I swear I never did anything though, he just didn’t like me for... some reason.

I walked past the stairs, somewhat creeped out by him slowly turning his head to keep his eyes glued to me. After a moment, I noticed the new dining table that my parents got.

Dang, I remember thinking. They got rid of the old one? Man… There were a ton of childhood memories inscribed in that table, from constantly scrubbed - but never disappearing crayon stains, a countless amount of scratches, and more than a couple dents.

My phone buzzed, my mom finally getting back to me.

“Oh, that’s nice. Ask me if you can’t find anything for your trip!” the text read.

I replied, “I will!” and sent it. To my surprise, it struggled to do so, and it came up with an error message after a few seconds. Finally, I looked at the service bar. There was none. It was extremely confusing, especially considering it had just sent a text just fine, and then received one just a few feet away from where I was currently standing.

I turned around to go back to the front door, taking a glance at Jasper as I walked by. Now he seemed furious, whapping his tail against the carpet of the step. That, and… his hair was standing up. Not like he had just scratched himself against the stairs, but it was his entire coat, it was all standing up, like someone had just rubbed a balloon all over him. Which I totally had never done. It was at that moment I felt the static in the air. I reached up to my head, and felt my own hair oddly standing on end. I hurried to the window, opening it to look outside for any clues. After opening it, Jasper jumped down four steps, up the chair next to the window and against against window’s screen in panic. Thankfully the screen wasn’t made of the cheap stuff, otherwise Jasper would’ve torn right through it.

“Whoa, hang on a second there, buddy,” I said, grabbing him around the torso, trying to calm him down.

He hissed at me, tore himself from my grasp, and jumped down the leg of the chair, at my own limb. I managed to move it far enough away to keep his teeth from my poor jeans, but he was extremely pissed, and managed to give me a two inch cut with one of his claws on my lower left leg. He then ran away from my screams.

“OW! YOU LITTLE BASTARD!” I yelled, semi-hopping back a few strides. The odd events were all just starting to add to my confusion. He ran back up the stairs the fastest I had ever seen the fat cat go, probably back to Lorena’s room.

“Damn it…” I winced, just fully realizing the pain. But I had to go on, this was far too weird at this point to just stop. Hobbling back to the door, I reached for its handle.

“AOOOWWWWW!” I screamed as my hand came close to it. It shocked me bad, and I will swear to this day that the arch between me and that door was three inches long. Of course, it was pretty stupid to reach for a metal handle when my hair was sticking up.

I looked at my hand, a dazed look of fear on my face. I breathed a little heavily, still recovering from it, and said “I mean… Good God… what the hell’s gonna happen now? Is the house gonna be struck by lightning?” I looked up and out through the window, with a hint of apprehension on my face. Thankfully, a nearly perfect clear blue sky is all that I saw. Well, there was a slight yellow tint, but it was still somewhat early, so I assumed it was just the angle of the sun’s light.

“I don’t understand…” I said, befuddled by everything that had happened. I grabbed for my phone again, and pointed it towards the sky. Nothing. No service. It made absolutely no sense. At first, I thought the cell network must have gone down at the weirdest time possible. I took a glance outside again, and saw the car Lorena got in coming back down the road.

“She isn’t gonna believe this…” I said to myself, while wondering why she was coming back.

After having watched for another second or two, my eyes definitely noticed a certain... glow, was added to my vision, and it certainly wasn’t coming from the sun, even if it was a yellow glow. I decided that at this point it might be best to go outside for a second to just take a breather. Maybe my phone will work out there, I said to convince myself of my decision. I took a step onto the front deck, probably looking ridiculous with a pained look on my face, my hair standing up and a bleeding leg to go nicely alongside the torn up left leg of my jeans. It would’ve fair to say I looked like a zombie extra for a TV show. The car was getting close, and I also started to notice that it felt pretty hot out there, in the shaded porch.

“Sheesh, how hot can it get in ten minutes?” I muttered to myself. It was quite cool when I had arrived.

The car slowed, and Lorena opened the door before it stopped, obviously in a hurry. The glow was getting more and more thick with yellow. It was getting hotter too. She hopped out, and immediately looked stunned. At first, I thought it must’ve been a combination of how terrible I must’ve looked just five minutes after she last saw me, alongside the heat, and the yellow glow that she obviously saw as well.

“Lorena! Do you know what the hell is going on?” I belted out to her, distressed.

Then it happened so quickly. Before she could respond, my feet were nearly taken out from under me. It felt like an earthquake, or at least that’s all I can think of to compare it to. I’ve never even been in an earthquake, having lived in the midwest my entire life, so maybe that isn’t the best of comparisons. It was sudden and intense, and the glow got increasingly and alarmingly thick, while the heat was becoming more humid, like a sauna. A noise, a very high resonation, felt like it was playing all around me, and it was getting louder.

It reached a point where I couldn’t see Lorena through the glow, and I scrambled back inside, threw myself on the ground and covered my head with my hands, like we were always taught in school tornado drills. The shaking got more and more intense, and glass started breaking all around me. My mother would have spilled blood if she were there. Finally, I remember feeling like I was floating for a moment, and then like I was dropped. My head must’ve hit the floor, or something, because that was all I remembered until I woke up.

Vision slowly came into view, and I was looking at the slanted ceiling of my childhood home, only the picture it provided felt like it was missing something... I never knew how long I was out, it could’ve been just seconds, or hours. However long it was, my body felt terribly sore, like I’d just gone through a full day of physical work.

I rolled myself over, quite regrettably after the fact. There was glass littering the floor, and I felt a particularly sharp piece puncture slightly into my side through my torn up shirt.

“Ahhhh…. shoot...” my voice rasped in pain.

As my sight became less blurred, the light fixture, lying in pieces, came into view only a couple feet beside me. I audibly gasped at seeing the object that was so beloved by my mother lying broken in so many pieces beside me.

“She’s gonna kill someone when she finds out about this…” I grimaced, dreading the moment.

The pain in my side, combined with the general shock of what I thought had happened, led me to realize that my sister could be outside and somehow endangered still.

Instantly, I sprang up and opened the not-fully closed door.

There was a long moment of silence from me.

“Oh my God,” I finally said to no one.

What I was looking at was inexplainable in the rules and laws of physics in our then-current human knowledge. Unless it was a painting, or a prank of some sort, of course. That’s what I initially thought it, just a joke. My eyes darted across the front lawn, parts of edges of it were smoldered and charred, but thankfully not burning. However, there was no immediate sign of my sister. After scampering outside and looking around frantically for a moment, I couldn’t take the huge amount of immediate stress anymore. The chances that it was a joke depressingly decreased, considering there were huge trees surrounding my house that were not there before. Sulking, I walked back inside, the long moments I had to consider what happened incited hysteria in my mind.

The panic hit me like a brick. My breathing increased dramatically, I started crying uncontrollably, and I had literally no idea what happened, where I was, or what I should’ve done.

Unfortunately, my body felt like collapsing from the panic. So gently as I could, which wasn’t very, I laid down on the floor. Thankfully, none of the glass had made it quite that close to the door. Vision had started to leave me again, so I did what you were supposed to do while passing out. I raised my knees and just laid there, trying to ignore everything and not think too hard about anything.

After taking a few minutes trying to recoup myself, sight fully returned to me once again. I attempted to get up, and held onto the stair’s railing for support. Remembering what had caused me to collapse, I felt weak again.

“Oh God, I’m not dreaming,” I said to myself, feeling nauseous after taking another confirming glance outside.

Holding myself up by the railings, I shuffled towards the kitchen, looking out the windows on the way. A million thoughts were going through my head in that short walk, yet I still didn’t have the faintest idea of where I was. Frankly, the fact that the outside world looked so… cartoonish, hadn’t registered with me, just yet. I simply thought I was in a forest of some sort, somewhere far away from where my house should’ve been.

Jasper was there in the kitchen, hiding under the dining table. He was whapping his tail angrily, and I didn’t have any desire to disturb whatever was keeping him under there. My hands opened the refrigerator, I grabbed a bottle of water, feeling fairly thirsty. I shuffled back to the front door.

The door’s handle turned. My eyes began to adjust to the outside light. Down the porch steps. Again, I frantically looked around for my sister. I had no such luck in finding her. Treading across the lawn, I then took a step onto where the asphalt road should’ve been. A dirt one took its place. My shoes touched the dirt of another planet. Those marks may not exist now, like Armstrong’s, but they quickly became one of the big symbols of my “achievement” anyways, after I took a picture of them later on that day.

Finally, after being so blind for so long, I started to notice the oddities of the world I had stepped into. My eyes shot from tree to eerie tree, realizing the gloominess of the forest. It was so dark on the ground level, leading me to initially believe it was early morning like it was back on Earth.

Then I looked at the sky. It wasn’t pink, or purple, or dark whatsoever. It was bright blue, and I saw the glare of the sun through a tree, almost directly overhead. The height of the tree surprised me, but still I could only see a glimpse of the sun through the leaves. My eyes looked all around me, taking in everything else. Belatedly, I noticed the flatness of the colors, the screeching darkness of the forest, and the general... familiarity of it all. One side of the path went deeper into the woodlands, a place that at that moment I had no desire to go to. On the other side, I breathed a quick sigh of relief as I saw a wide opening to lighter pastures and skies, and no more creepy trees.

Slowly I walked out from the property, farther and farther, ‘til I was in the middle of the path, where I went on my knees. My palms came to my face, shielding them from the world that was starting to become too much for me.

There on my knees, an idea of where I was popped into my mind, and my eyes widened.

The voice in my head tried to convince me that it was a trick, all of it.

“No. No, it is NOT what you think it is. It’s a trick. Just a trick.”

That’s what I told myself, at least.

The rest of my body came down with me, and the tears started dripping once again, coming from my hatred for whoever or whatever had ripped me away from home, my friends and family.

I had a life that I found to be worth living. A future to look forward to. To be just driven away from it like that with absolutely no real reason or even hope to believe I’d ever make it back had its impacts on me, that’s for sure.

A sound had gradually come to my ears as I contemplated this seemingly gloomy turn, and it was getting more powerful. Soon, I managed to see a different blue among the pure sky. It was blurry, I’m not sure whether from my tears or its speed. And boy, was it moving fast.

Desiring anything but to be seen and noticed by something alien to me, especially so soon, I ran for the cover of the porch, and hoped against hope that what I thought the sound was wouldn’t see the house. A few minutes passed, and the noise went away. The trees had, by some lone form of grace, obscured my residence.

Still sniffling a bit, I went back in the house, and checked the downstairs. There were a few picture frames down there, so there was yet more broken glass where some of them were knocked off. After inspecting the damage, I grabbed a few things, feeling more like doing a bit of exploration. Most notably, from a box in the storage room I grabbed a pair of binoculars, then headed back up.

To the outside world I went once again, this time going completely across the road. The trees, dirt, heck the entire world was... simplistic, for lack of a better term. It wasn’t exactly like the show, there was much more detail, but to say it was anything near realistic by human-Earth standards would be dishonest.

The entire thing was nutty, it actually could’ve been a painting for all I knew, until I went up to the trees. The dark, hundred-foot tall log really did just look like a tree from a cartoon, and a fairly menacing one at that. The Everfree had a certain sense of creepiness, though that disappeared if you were to retreat inside of the house. Curiosity by far beat my fear, so of course I went to go see what it felt like. The bark of the tree certainly felt real, just like any tree from Earth. It was sharp, not the kind that would be nice to your hands if you climbed it.

Disbelief still stayed with me to an extent, and I started walking down the path, touching all of the trees to be sure as possible. Soon I had reached the path’s entrance. The house was, in fact, barely in the Everfree, perhaps only a hundred feet. When I reached this point, I took in the new surroundings, the path now going along the sides of the forest to my left and right. Everywhere else was clear of trees, and my heart felt lifted just from exiting that blasted place. Across the walkway was a hill. I had no idea which way to go, so I walked across the road and hiked shortly up it just to get a better view of my new environment. There I found the sight that would make me feel the most enraptured I’ve ever felt.

In the distance, there were lots of buildings with quaint slanted roofs, red windowsills and framing, and of course the chimneys and odd little wooden perches that seemed to be a standard feature on many of the structures. This came with a faint but almost enchanting noise of a small-town market.

A poor little smile came to me, and finally I thought, Maybe this won’t be so bad.