The Blue Corridor

Interlude Five: Stars

On that night, Maisie sat on the porch in front of the house. It was a beautiful night. The wind was blowing gently, waving her hair around. She didn't want to move at all. The last few days have been an exhaustion she couldn't manage. Daniel's disappearance started the collapse of her family. A collapse that had its finish line right here and right now. Her mom was dead, and her brother seemed to be gone for most of that time. She was all alone in her life just after crossing her 18th year on this planet. She gazed at the sky above her. There were no clouds, and there was nothing more above her than millions of little lights blinking and shining.

-So many stars and so many planets, yet my life is so small. - she thought, maybe even whispered automatically. Nothing mattered for the time she focused on how vast the universe is. Everything she has lost didn't matter in the face of what was still out there, even though she lost everything she appreciated in her little life the most. It was almost midnight. Maisie's consciousness was drifting in and out of reality as she looked and that night sky above her. At that moment, almost as if she was sleepwalking, she decided to go back to the basement. Moving through her house she gazed at her family captured in the photos lying on the fireplace. Fragments of time frozen and placed in the physical reality, just like that. She descended the stairs and opened the huge mental door. There was nothing on the other side this time. Maisie deeply remembered Danie's face running at her from the other side. She was sure that memory was true, it couldn't be any other way. His face from the photo on the fireplace. It was him, she was sure of that.

So she sat in the corridor, at the very center of her side of it, taking a good look at its every detail. The blue paint covered the lower side of the walls. Its structure was uneven compared to the white concrete that covered its ceiling.

She was waiting there. Waiting for him to open the door again when suddenly the lights began to flash. Turning on and off life somebody was playing with the switch, but there wasn't any here. While half asleep, Maisie was brought back to reality, and shortly after the lights stopped, turning off completely

In the surrounding shadow, she saw flashes of blue light. It created a shadow in front of her. She turned around to see the control box on the wall bursting with strange energy. The little strikes of lighting occupied the exit, she was hesitant to rush through it.

But when the lights stopped and she saw an opening there was not much time to react. The control box exploded with direct and violent waves of energy. Maisie stood in the center of the corridor when the ground started shaking, the waves turned into tears in time and space. She could see what's behind them. An endless dark blue void. Tiny light dots within it, almost as if they were these stars she saw before. The cavity in her reality grew bigger to the point it consumed the corridor around her. There was no floor below her, but she somehow was staying in the same position. There was no gravity. She was levitating. She looked at the corridor entrance. It was still open. She tried to float towards it, but she couldn't move in the slightest. That's when she saw something. A figure was standing in her basement. A grown lady. She wasn't sure who she was until a moment when she saw a strand of blonde hair coming down her head. It was Maisie - at least, an older version of her. Wearing a normal set of clothes, she reminded her of her mother. The old Maisie gently closed the corridor door with a smile on her face. As Masie herself was lost in that endless void. With her last threads of consciousness, she wondered if what she saw was even real.