Sunlight leaked in through the windows. Coming around the corner, my father sat in his rocking chair, a Dell laptop on his lap.
"Woah," he said, almost to himself, leaning in until the glow of the laptop light reflected off his face like a reflection in the window.
"What?" I asked, annoyed, but curious.
"A shooting in down-town Spokane today! Two women, shot in the leg… Some sort of gang-related violence…"
"What did they expect? It's Bloomsday weekend!" I shrugged it off. At least it was only two women, and only their legs. Still, it seemed the world was coming to an end.
When he looked up he smirked at me, glancing back to his computer work, and I grew annoyed yet again. "What?"
"It's Hoopfest, not Bloomsday."
"Ugh! Whatever." I turned away, sitting back on the King sized bed in the corner of the room.
A few brief moments of silence dragged on, exploding in my ears. The windows closed, blinds turned open, no music, no sound but the clicking of the mouse. "The next tropical storm is named 'tropical storm Alex.'" He laughed once, a short cheery burst in the never ending boredom.
I giggled. "Well, our Alex. Ha ha, he's gonna freak out!" My brother Alex, off doing his chores, was an odd child. Blond hair, blue eyes. My mother and father had brown hair and brown eyes, as I did. But the oddest thing about him was not his blond and blue in a gene pool of brown, no. He was odd because he seemed to "see" things.
Ironically, he stumbled in at that moment, with a spacey look in those blue eyes, hand extended, reaching slightly.
I took his hands. His eyes slowly faded from their dull, weird state and he appeared to be my brother once more. No, he didn't collapse, he'd grown use to it… figuratively.
"He showed me a building, where you are to go alone." He spoke these words gravely, like this world he saw was not his own. It likely wasn't.
The scariest part: he'd meant me.
These "visions" he lapsed into, they always happened. No if's, ands, or buts about it.
Pushing past me he walked, too gracefully, to the chair beside my fathers'. There he sat, picking up a pad of paper and a pen. "this is the street address. This is the basic building formation, the entrance is here." All this he wrote and scribbled, staring at my father, entranced in the picture.
The dresser shook. As did the picture on the wall, the bed, and the floor beneath me. Alex's picture flew into my hand at the perfect moment, of course. Everything flew up, seemingly impossibly, my very being vibrated. Flying, yet in another instant I'd landed.
A square building stood in front of me. Sand colored, thirty feet tall, fifty yards long. Not a grand piece of construction, but a simple one. Inside, a few of my friends lounged about, jumping to meet me when I entered.
"How'd you know where to go?" I asked Jill, the closest friend there, a hippy-ish type girl, along with Nick, a guy-friend of ours. Taylor, a seemingly tall guy for his height, came over to answer, saying "probably the same way you did."
"By brother saw a vision from Him and He sent me here."
"Oh… I unexplainably teleported here…"
"Great…" Jill threw her arms up in frustration. "We don't know what we're doing or why we're here, but we're here anyway!"
I looked around. Couches lined the far wall, a stairway entrance, clearly marked, a few feet away to the left, and a few windows orderly littered the walls. My friends, and some people I didn't know, sat on those couches, or walked around, talked, snacked, very relaxed.
"I'm going to the café." I announced, and Jill fluttered along beside me, agreeing with my ideal action. But on the squareular stairway, the building started to shake and tremble. "Wow, again?" Jill didn't like the constant moving as much as some.
Teleportation could only be done by Him and we all knew it. No questions.
We all dropped, and the people from downstairs were there too, all the girls wore dresses and the boys wore t shirts and jeans or shorts. We were in the middle of a huge flat meadow field thing, extending as far as the eye could see behind and in front of us. To each side, a small forest, bright and peaceful played out for us. A smallish chalkboard stood to one side, a moving one. The surface was a screen, almost. It showed an image of the building we'd been in moments ago, falling to rubble.
"When did that get there?" one boy shrieked, noticing a large metallic circle, about ten feet in diameter, laying on the ground, a foot thick. It sat several feet from the chalk board. Rolling clouds approached quickly, with a strip of rainbow colored light in a corn row array, color by color. Only as wide as the grassy part of the field. Around that, the clouds shimmered and ripples like a pool of liquid gold with several silver and gray rocks being skipped across its' milky surface.
The chalkboard meshed and silently sifted to a normal slate surface. It had my brother's picture wrinkled and open, pinned to the surface.
The board itself held the strategically hand drawn blueprints of the field, metal circle included.
"The circle…" a girl pointed exclaiming. The ten foot diameter slowly grew to be closer to fifteen feet, and the grass swirled together growing darker like the start of a hurricane.
Looking quickly back, the blue prints showed the same diagram. Taylor came forward with his backpack, and I shoved my sweatshirt in it quickly. He just laughed, saying "it's the end of the world. I'm thinking it won't matter what happens to us now." With that he tossed the bag into the forming vortex.
Grabbing hands with Jill and Nick, they grabbed hands huddling close.
"I think we should go first!" I almost yelled, trying to be heard over the wind of the storm.
"Are you crazy?" Jill hollered at me.
"Well, yes, but I mean it could be the gateway!"
"Nick, what do you think we should do?"
"I think we should decide quickly!" I nodded at Jill, then Nick.
Running in our huddle, we jumped into the now black hole. Others jumped in after us. Falling, the first feeling was a rush of heat, only for a second as we later discovered, he'd passed through hell. Then perfect neutral air, passing us at it's own pace. The walls of the tunnel were made of panels with changing dot patterns. I gently released my grasp on Jill and the one on Nick as well. I remembered wishing I could go to Wonderland…
With a whoosh of my hair, we landed in a Library and the ceiling closed up behind us like clouds closing around the last shred of blue sky. The library had knowledge. Knowledge you could feel. And books… So many books…
Picking up the book nearest me, I found it was Cinderella, the true version. I shrieked, and flipped it open, only to put it down and pick up the true story of Romeo and Juliet. Sometimes you must see the darkness for what it is before you can see the light. A banner found me peering up at it. It read, "The complete collection of questions un-answered" and I realized then that ay question ever asked that could not be humanly answered resided here, completed and explained. Just beyond that perceptive sign, a door, unlocked, stood waiting for someone to open it.
Sudden freedom flooded me, I felt the most free, loving, joyful feeling I'd ever encountered. I ran to the door and flung it open. The light and gentle warmth overwhelmed me and flooded be, body and soul until my bubbling cup of joy overflowed.
I was free, forever. I'd gone and found heaven.
I was Home.
