Sarah sat at her mirror. It was nearly bare. All of her pictures and trinkets were gone. Packed away in a box. As was her whole room. The bed she slept on for the last eighteen was bare. Her sheets washed and folded in the linen closet. She was leaving for college in just a few minutes in the car her parents had given her for her sixteenth birthday. She wasn't nervous. She was bored. Ever since her visit to the labyrinth, normal life just couldn't compare. Her friends stopped coming to her shortly after her seventeenth birthday. 'Normal' life got in the way. AP classes, track, and college essays dominated her life. Sarah couldn't remember the last time she had fun. She looked at the map sitting in front of her. MSU Campus Map. She just couldn't stand the thought of spending one more day in this slump. Before she noticed, she found herself speaking. "I wish the goblin king would take me away right now."
She looked around, almost guiltily, waiting for the man to appear and whisk her away on a fantastical adventure. But there was nothing and no one there. "Its just not fair!" She mumbled a curse and got up intending to put the last of the boxes in her trunk. She turned around, and jumped as she heard a voice reprimand her. "Now, precious, one would think you would have learned your lesson by now. Life isn't fair."
She spun towards the voice. Standing in her room, by the window, was the Goblin King.
"Now, precious, if you really meant what you said, I can take you away. I can take you away from the mundane and ordinary. Make every day an adventure. Show you your wildest dreams that you don't even know you have. All you have to do is take my hand." He held out his hand, palm up, fingers together.
Sarah hesitated. She could do this, but she knew that she could never come back. She thought of her family, She liked Karen, they got along now, but they weren't especially close. And she had always been distant with her father, he preferred to sit back and let Karen handle the parenting. Toby was the only one she would miss. But he had friends, a good home life. He'll do fine without her. She knew if she left they wouldn't remember her. It would be as if she never existed. Sarah made her decision.
She walked with purpose to the other side of the room. She stared in the Goblin king's eyes and took his hand.
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Just minutes after the nurses shut the machines down that were keeping Sarah Williams alive the beeping of the heart monitor started slowing. Then finally, they stopped. Karen covered her eyes with her hands and turned to cry into Robert's chest. Toby sat in a pink chair, his eyes rimmed red and silent tears snaking down his cheeks.
The accident that made Sarah Williams brain dead happened shortly after her sixteenth birthday. She had been driving home from a track meet and a distracted driver had plowed into the front driver's side of her car. It's been two years to the day. And finally she could rest.