LAST CHANCE WILL YOU SURVIVE

The Girl Who Went Nowhere

I ran to my phone to answer it.

"Hello?"

 "Joann"

"Yes? Who is this?"

"It's Aunt Lydia, we need you to come to the hospital and talk about your mother."

"Were you visiting?"

"No, I was filling out papers for your mom. And I wanted to talk to you about something."

"Okay, I'll be there this afternoon if that's a good time."

"Perfect. See you then."

I hung up and set my phone on the counter with a sigh. I got the rest of my food and started to eat it. When I was halfway done with my food I heard a loud noise upstairs. I watched Moose as he ran upstairs. I decided to follow him just in case something was wrong. When I got upstairs Moose was laying on Saud who was unconscious laying on the floor. I was going to walk up to him but Moose started to growl at me. I backed up until he stopped growling and started to lick Saud's hand. I sat on the bed waiting for Saud to wake up. 

About twenty minutes later I heard Saud moving. I looked at the ground where Saud was. He looked at the ceiling then he looked at me.

"Hi." I said laying on my stomach.

"Hi? When did you get up here?"

"When you passed out on the floor."

He moved Moose and sat up staring at me.

"You know you've never told me why you sometimes pass out."

He looked at the floor tracing it with his finger.

"It's complicated." 

I knew that was his way of telling me he didn't want to talk about it. So I got up off of the bed and went into the closet. I located my journal and took it off the shelf. I walked over to Saud and handed it to him. He looked at me then at the journal. 

"You said we could look at it together." I said sitting down beside him.

He nodded and opened it to the last page I wrote. When he was done reading he closed the book and looked at it. 

"What do you think?" 

He kept looking at the book thinking.

"It sounds like your last dream but in different events."

I thought about it and then looked at him with a confused face.

"What do you mean?"

"Well, you went to the stream like your last dream. And you ran away from it because of a noise. Either from me or the boy. I fell to my knees and closed my eyes but this time I had an arrow in my chest. And last time you died from drowning but this time you died from someone stabbing you."

I thought about it, and he was right.

"But who do you think it was that stabbed me?"

"I don't know, I want to say me but I don't have a scar on my neck."

I looked at his neck and he didn't have one.

"What about the masks?"

"One of the games I played was called masked hunt. How you play is all the players spread out across the map. We are all given different types of masks to put on. Once all players put on their masks the game will begin. Your goal is to kill the other teams with a bow or a knife. But it's hard because you don't want to kill your team. The thing about the masked hunt is you never know when you're going to play. So you can't discuss with your team how to know if it's you or not. But in the dream, they had matching masks. So I'm not sure what that's about."

"What about the boy saying something about being nowhere?"

Saud slowly set down the journal and held his legs up to his chest and stared at the ground.

"There was this old story a girl told me once. It was about a girl who hated her parents so much that she asked a plant to go nowhere, so nowhere she would be. When she got there she fell in love with the place and never wanted to go back with her parents. But that wasn't how it worked. At night nowhere didn't exist for the plant went to sleep. So she had to go back with her parents at night. It was told her parents got so mad at her for coming back late they locked her in the attic never to leave again. She was locked in there for so long that she made a real imaginary friend who helped her escape. They ran away and did everything together like he was real. The girl knew he wasn't real. But still treated him as if he was. One night when they were sleeping under a tree her father found her. Since she was just a kid and couldn't run far. Her father picked her up in anger telling her the things he would do to her for leaving. The girl got so mad and sad that she bit his hand to let her go. She started to run as fast as she could to escape him. Her friend tried his best to save her but he was imaginary. While the girl was running she looked back to see where her father was and tripped on a root hitting her head. As her father slowly approached her she cursed at him saying she never loved him. She swore to kill or hurt all who betrayed or hurt her. It was said hatred filled her heart when her father killed her that day. Her friend was so heartbroken that somehow he held and carried the girl to bury her. When he buried her he put the plant over it. For it was her favorite place to go. To keep the plant alive, he walked a long way with a pale to go to a stream for water. But before he left the stream he sang a beautiful melody with one tear of sorrow dropping into the water. After he was done singing his sad melody he would walk back with a full bucket to water the plant with his tear. The plant roots grew around the girl healing her because of the tears. The girl awoke but never rose from the ground. She had become a part of the plant. With hatred in her heart still, she killed her parents with the new magic she was given. With darkness covering her eyes she cursed her friend not knowing that he was the one who deeply cared for her. All she knew was he didn't help her while her father killed her. She cursed him by making him real and for him to love someone. But if he truly loves someone and says I love you to them then they will die in his hands."

He turned and stared at me. "Because if you truly love someone you wouldn't let them die."