"Just One Touch" - Short Story
- Directions: Read the story. Then write an ending to the story.
I am sitting in a chair next to Momma's bed. I am watching her get ready for a party. She opens the beautiful jewelry box on her nightstand. It is the size of a shoebox. It is wooden. It has colorful stones on top. They are red, green, yellow, and blue. To me, the box looks magical. It looks like it has special powers. "Now, you know you must never touch this box, right?" Momma says. I feel like she knows exactly what I am thinking. I just want to touch it. I just want to open it. I just want to try on all the jewelry inside and dance around the room! "Yes, Momma," I say. "I know." What do I know? I know Momma has always told me not to touch the box. She has said it since I was a little girl. "You are not old enough to wear my jewelry," Momma says. I am almost eleven years old! What is the big deal? I know that when Momma puts on the rings and bracelets from the box, she looks different. She seems to glow. There is one necklace with a yellow stone like a tiger's eye. When Momma puts this on, she seems to float instead of walk. Her feet do not seem to touch the ground. She moves lightly and gracefully. She moves without effort. Momma kisses me goodnight. She leaves for the party. I run to the window to wave to her, but she is already gone. Tonight I am very curious. Just one touch. I sit on the edge of Momma's bed. I place my hand on the nightstand. I pause. I think. My hand moves up and rests on the jewelry box. The box quickly flips open by itself! Jewels fly into the air. They dance around my head. I feel strange. I fall down to the floor. I wake up in a place I have never seen before.
Looking around me, there was nothing but darkness. Five, ten, maybe fifteen minutes passed before I was able to see anything. At first, it was only a faint glimmer but as my eyes adjusted more and more to the lack of light, I could barely make out my surroundings. In front of me lay a whole entire city. I started to finally take in the place that lay before me. To my right, there was a valley with rows and rows of the most beautiful buildings I had ever seen. The buildings were all the color of misty gray which gave them a dreamlike quality. They seemed to rise directly out of the rock as if they had been grown, not made by human hands. To my left there was a pair of giant stone doors that I estimated to be about fifteen feet tall and looked as if it would take four grown men to even begin to move them. When I looked down I found that I was standing on dusky green moss that wasn't uneven but perfectly smooth.
When I looked up, shock and confusion seemed to hit me like a ton of bricks. I expected to see the moon with some stars or a cloudy night sky but instead there was a rocky roof. From it hung hundreds of small stalagmites which brought the fear of them falling onto me into my heart. Due to this newfound fear, I tried to move to a local rock outcropping so I could be safer but when I did; it was like my body wouldn't respond. Instead I found it was like someone else was controlling my body because at that very same moment, my hand moved by itself and pointed into the dark and shadowed distance in front of me. I squinted my eyes and looked where my hand was pointing. It was like someone read my mind because at that very moment, it got considerably brighter in the giant cavern. What I found took my breath away. In front of me lay the most beautiful capital that man could ever make. The capital was surrounded by what seemed to be a two hundred foot tall, solid granite wall. I expected to find some sort of entranceway like a gate or something but my search was to no avail.
Instead, I discovered a lifting system. At the top of the granite wall hung a glass rectangular box that over hanged the wall by about ten feet. It had a system of ropes and pulleys that went to a lifting platform that was at presently lowered all of the way to the ground. Then a thought came into my mind, "A wall is built to defend something. So where is this thing it is supposed to defend?" I looked a little more above the wall and after a second I found what I was looking for and expecting to find. My assumption was that this was a wall and about a couple hundred feet behind it I would find a palace or something but instead the palace was built into the wall, the outermost buildings, that is. Their back wall had been built into the giant granite wall. A little more behind the wall lay towers, turrets and many other things. I kept on looking more and more backwards of the walls and found what seemed to be the center castle. It was so tall but it wasn't like the ones in fairy tales. I was about to explore this strange place even more but a thought stopped me dead in my tracks. "If there is a city and a palace, then where are the people that are supposed to live here?" I looked all around me but to no avail. It was like everyone had just up and left.
Once again my hand moved by itself and pointed to the right of me. That is when I found the city's sole inhabitant. It was a boy that looked to be around the age of fifteen or sixteen. He had shortly cut dark brown hair and his eyes were a lighter shade of the same color of brown. He was wearing some sort of armor that was deep black in color and frankly mad him kind of intimidating. To his right and left lay pieces to a beautiful sword, whose hilt had a ruby encrusted on it. I looked back at him closer and with a newfound interest in him and noticed something I seemed to have missed. He had an enormous amount of scars on his body. On his arms he had scars that were long and slender covering the whole length that I could see. His leg had some deep scars though. The biggest one was on his right leg's calf and it was about a foot long and an inch wide. I glanced towards his face and studied it for a second.
The word that seemed to describe him was emotionless. I wondered, with that kind of face, if he had ever smiled at all. I then looked him in the eyes. They say that the eyes are the window to the soul and as I looked into his, I was shocked senseless at what I found. It was like someone had taken the mind and soul of a war veteran who had seen more battle than any man should ever have to endure and placed it inside the 16 year old young man. In his eyes I found pain, extreme, unbearable and crippling pain that flooded his entire soul. Only on the innermost parts of it did I find anything else. Deep down within him, lay deadliness. The level of deadliness totally scarred me. It was a lethal deadliness that, if he let it free, it would enable him to kill without remorse, without conscience, without mercy. There was only one thing that kept this beast at bay; hope and love. Hope that he would be able to reach his goal, see the people that he loved and kept a special place in his heart for. But right then he stared at the city with an exasperated look, causing his hope to be lost. It seems that he had traveled long and far to see the inhabitants of this great city only to find that they were gone.
Somebody had snatched that hope away. Someone had released the beast inside of him. Immediately darkness seemed to pour out of his body. It wasn't a normal darkness though. It acted more like a liquid that was alive, seeping and crawling its way in all directions and specifically in mine. I try to run but I can't move. Something is holding me. Something is controlling my body and making it stay in the way of danger. Closer and closer it got to me. I looked back at the person and found that he had been cloaked in darkness, embracing it, enjoying it. He was no longer the scarred and hurt boy that was there, now he was something else, something darker and a lot more dangerous. And then the words came to me like a whisper in the dark; a Rager.
The darkness was almost upon me, so I did what I only could do; close my eyes. I expected to feel some sort of pain, some sort of weird feeling but it never came. When I finally mustered the courage to open my eyes I was no longer in the deep, dark and creepy place with the mysterious and dark figure. Instead, I was back in my mother's room. I was lying on my back on the floor with her assorted jewelry scattered all around me and the box at my feet. My Mom was standing above me with an, "I-Told-You-So" kind of grin plastered across her face.
"I told you not to touch my jewelry box. If you are wondering why you fainted, it is because I placed a bottle of very powerful chemicals in it. That way when you opened the box, you would faint right away." Mom said. Crouching down and looking me right in the eyes with a sincere look on her, she asked, "'Did you learn your lesson today?"
Instinctively, my head bobbed up and down, nodding to her that I had learned my lesson. My mother helped me up and then walked out of the room. I then realized that I was slightly shaking and had a cold sweat all over my body. I thought of all of the things that 1 had just witnessed in that dark place and came to the conclusion that it was just a scary and creepy dream. But that person, that sixteen year old boy would stick in my mind forever. All the questions that I had, all of the fear that was running through my mind would never be thoroughly answered.
After all, it was only a dream.