My mom and I laid on the floor of her bedroom where her bed used to be. The two of us had just spent two hours moving everything out of there. We'll, everything except the mirror and the wooden chair. She wanted to paint the frame of the mirror and the whole wooden chair.
"Come on." I told my mom as I stood up. "If we don't get up now you'll be sleeping on the couch for the rest of your life." I stretched my hand out to help her up.
She laid on the ground and shrugged. "The living room doesn't seem that bad." I laughed at her as she talked with a straight face. "Big TV, blankets, pillows. Oh, and it's closer to the kitchen." She sighed and looked up at me. "But it's too far from the bathroom."
Taking hot showers is one of the few things my mother and I had in common. She liked tea, I liked coffee. She loved summer, I loved winter. She was an avid reader, and I preferred to keep my head out of the clouds.
"I guess we can paint the room." She huffed out as if she wasn't the one who spent a month telling me all about what she wanted her room to look like and an additional few weeks getting me to agree to help. She reached out for my hand and as I was pulling her up her hand slipped out of mine.
I felt like I was back in the dream for a moment. I was falling. I was screaming. But when I hit the floor hard I realized I wasn't back in the nightmare. "Addison!" My mother screamed as she ran towards me. "Oh my god! Your bleeding!" I tried to turn so I could see why, but my mother grabbed my shoulders. "Do not look in the mirror." Her tone was serious. I had only ever seen her like that a few times in my life.
She ran out of the room quickly. I looked down at my arm and saw a line of blood slowly trailing down my arm. Blood dropped from the palm of my hand. I didn't need to turn it over to see that it too was split open.
"Don't look in the mirror?" I whispered the words my mother had frantically said to me. When I turned around I expected to see something in the mirror, but I was just looking at fragmented peices of myself.
I set my hand down on the floor and pulled back immediately when I felt the sharp bite of glass once more. My blood smeared onto the glass. It was a decently sized peice, but my mind had to have been playing tricks on me.
Crazy. I had to be. Insain. There was no possible way I could have see that. I looked closer into the glass.
It was a dark field. There was no sun, it could have been night time wherever I was looking at. I moved my uninjured hand towards the strange place. It was as if I could feel it calling to me. Like I was missing part of myself and I could only find it there. Once my finger touched the glass it rippled and-
"OK, I have gauze, ointment, peroxide, and bandaids." I whipped my head around so my mother wouldn't notice me doing the exact thing she told me not to.
I stood up and moved away from the mirror. She started to clean me up, but I was barely there for it. What had I just seen? I knew I saw it that time. There was no denying it.
Mom patted my arm when she was done and proceeded to clean up the glass on the floor. "I'll go get the broom" i said as I was walking out of her room.
Her and I proceeded to paint her room. While waiting for it to dry we sat on the couch in the living room."If you want, since it's so late, you can stay the night." Her bright blue eyes were filled with hope that I'd say yes.
The two of us had been lonely since I had moved out a couple months ago. Going back to my apartment didn't seem very enticing after everything that had happened that day. "Yeah, that sounds good." I didn't want to be alone.
Her and I both ended up fading into a deep sleep while waiting. The TV played something in the background, but I hadn't cared enough to pay attention.
When I woke up my mom had her head in my lap, snoring very loudly. I gently slid myself from underneath her and pulled a blanket over her. My throat was sore so I made my way into the kitchen to get a glass of water. When I finally filled the cup it was gone faster than I had filled it. My throat felt much better after I drank.
Seeing my mom asleep on the couch brought me a sense of tranquility. When I had been younger she was always on edge. Looking over her shoulder like we were always in danger. I guessed that that's how mothers had to be.
Instead of moving her so I could lay back down, I went to my old room. Everything was already moved out and she had been working on making it into a comfortable place to read. There were four shelves of books on the far wall and a big couch on the wall to my left. A body length mirror hung on the wall across from the couch.
My mind wandered to the broken mirror and what I had seen in the reflection earlier that day. The only peice that showed the barren and desolate land was the one with my blood on it.
As I moved closer to the mirror I took the bandage off of my arm. I used my left hand to reopen the wound. I bit back a yelp as I did it. A small trail of blood went about two inches down my arm. Gathering as much as I could on my finger, I smeared it onto the mirror.
Nothing happened at first. Everything seemed still for what felt like an eternity. When my hand touched the glass it rippled and the same place I had seen before came into view.
Something called to me on the other side. It wasn't a voice, but the strongest feeling I had ever felt in my life. My hand went through the glass like water as did the rest of my arm. Just one more step.
I could feel the pull. I needed to find out what was pulling me I to that world. "Addison! Ple-" I had already began stepping through before my mother could finish her sentence.