The Rift

Chapter 5

The door opens quietly. Not the door to the house, the door to my bedroom. My father enters, saying nothing, but sits by my bedside and strokes my hair until I fall asleep. The yelling is over. My mother has taken the small, yellow suspension slip and pinned it to the fridge. I am quarantined to my room, as part of my punishment. My mother is beyond furious. I would say she hates me, but I know she doesn't. She just wants a good life for me. She wants me to do well in school and get a good job and be happy when I grow up. My father wants the same I know, but he's not as forceful about it.

Although when my mother is screaming at me, yelling horrible, horrible things, it does seem like she hates me. This was probably the worse lecture I've ever gotten. I won't go into detail, but according to my mother I'm some kind of delinquent who will never, ever, have a good life, or make her parents proud. I don't know why I did it. I guess I just wanted to have my little stream there with me when I was so sad. I know it's wrong, but I don't mind the punishment. Being locked in my room is the worst, not the suspension or cleaning the bathroom stall. Being in my room gives me nothing to do but think. And I hate that.

My father, as usual, hurts me the most. Because I love him. Alot. And seeing him so disappointed in me gives me a painful knot in my chest that I can't seem to shake, even now, with him beside me, his fingers in my hair. We don't need to speak. Our touch is all the words we will not, or cannot say. The tears fall from my eyes before I can stop them, dripping down my face and off my chin. My father brings his hand down, catching the droplet in his palm. I close my eyes, lulled into sleep by his gentle touch, and the warmth from his chest as I lean back against him. This is what i can never have with my mother; she doesn't understand me like he does. I love her, of course, but she simply cannot compare. There is only one thing that I loved more than my father.

My exquisite dreams.

I'm on my hands and knees, holding a damp, gross cloth, scrubbing a grungy wall with soapy water. The suspension was bad, sitting in my room all day, feeling like I had to scream because I couldn't stop thinking about things that caused me pain. Not to mention my mother looming over me like a hawk, glaring at me every time I moved, making sure I didn't leave my room. And my father, always in the background, quietly watching me with his sad green eyes.

But crouching on the floor in the stinking bathroom, washing off graffiti and wasting my lunch time, rivals it. I dip the cloth back into the bucket of warm, soapy water. I yank it back up, sending water flying but not caring, and wring it out. I begin to scrub, wiping off the sharpie. It's coming off, but very slowly i lean back, toss the yellow cloth back into the bucket, and wipe the sweat off my forehead. I'm so tired. Despite my wonderful sleeps, I'm always exhausted. Even on weekends, when I sleep until noon. I can't figure out why, but it's not helping the whole grade situation.

It's the last week of school, and final finished yesterday, on Monday. I'm dreading receiving the results. They come with our report card, which is a very big deal in our house, but it almost always disappoints these days. The last couple of years, it's just gotten worse. I could probably plot the descent on a graph... ugh, I'm still thinking math. All those ridiculous signs floating around in my head, and Ms. Tate glaring at me from her desk. That was definitely the worst test, and it was last.

I finally finish scraping off the last little bit off the stream. The cloth, now black, lands with a splash back in the bucket, where it will now stay. I grab the handle, and lug it out of the bathroom stall. I heave it up to a sink, and drop the rest of the blackened, bubbly water down the drain. There. It's finally done. I drag the empty bucket and the cloth back to the janitor's room. My punishment is over. At least the one the school gave me. I'm not sure what else my parents can do to me, so maybe the report card will not strike up as big a punishment as it usually does.

Well, a girl can dream. And I'm especially good at that. Or so I thought.

I'm floating away. Drifting along, my arms outreached, small waves tickling my toes. My hair spreads out in tendrils, flowing behind me in the soft current. My breath causes fog in the chilled winter air. Frost covers the trees; winter has started in The Rift. I'm not cold however, and I never seem to be, so I'm left to happily explore the winter wonderland. The seasons seen opposite here. As summer starts in real life, winter kicks into gear in The Rift.

I love it. I love to lick the icicles, dangling from the trees, I love to throw snowballs at small creatures, counting how many can hit. I love to build snowmen that are taller than I am, with little stone smiles and stick for arms, and examine the frozen leaves and flowers, preserved in ice. This especially, fascinated me. All the leaves on the jungle branches, all the multicoloured flowers decorating the ground, and coating in a crust of clear ice, making the hard, shiny, and beautiful. I walk around with them in my hair, plucking them from their frozen stems.

I found a little yellow one, so delicate I fell like I might break it every time I move. It's in my hair now, tied down by several strands near my face. I can feel it brushing my temples. I close my eyes, float away, but to a place I no longer wish to go.

Home.

But get there I do, and when I do, I notice something odd. I know, there have been a lot of odd things lately, and like others, although this one is quite a bit more inconsequential, it keeps nagging at me in the back of my mind. Like the scar that still remains on my leg, the long, jagged gash that appeared there one day, which traveled with me to reality from The Rift, something has come with me back home. The flower. Although I have to admit it changed on the journey to reality.

It used to be a bright, cheerful little things, with an emerald green stalk, standing straight and proud. It used to have a smell that would make you close your eyes and inhale it again and again. Here, at home, it seems to have died. It's now black stem drops straight down, hanging the flower upside down. The stem has shrivelled up, becoming wrinkly, with the texture of rubber. The flower itself has turned dark brown, with green fuzzy spots that look like mold. The smell coming off the bloom is so horrific i throw it out my window and into the neighbour's yard. It can small like rotting flesh over there. Petals scatter as it flies, little dark dots that look like the poo of a small animal. Lovely.

This should have meant next to nothing to me, but I keep thinking about it. It's weird (okay, maybe more than weird) that it came from my dreams, but worse has happened before, and it came from quite always off, so why shouldn't it rot? All flowers do after a while. Then it hits me. If a flower rots on its way from dreamland to stark reality, then why don't I? At that time, I didn't have an answer. Now, I do.

It didn't rot. Nothing changed about that flower, except the way I perceive it. In real life, the flower is something evil, something to be thrown away and never looked at again. The disgusting, gag inducing flower that I saw is what it looks like in real life. It's what The Rift really is. There, it is beautiful. But that brown thing was still the flower I had lovingly placed in my hair. And anything else that was bright from The Rift would show its true colors in reality.

But then, of course, I was too stupid, too caught up in the beauty, to really understand. You would be too.

Trust me.

When I woke that night, my father was gone. His hands had left my hair, his presence no longer filled up my bed. A bed that now felt too empty, and too cold, without him. A room that felt too dark, too sad, with only one, sad soul to inhabit it. A girl that had always felt lonely, and dejected, with two parents that had one another, without friends to support her, without siblings to always be there. A girl that lay in bed, curled up, head on her knees, while the moon rose ever higher in the sky.

A girl that cried herself back to sleep.

Hello! so i wrote this chapter really quickly (that's because i'm excited to get to the next one) so if there are any spelling or grammatical errors i apologize.please comment i would love to hear what you guys think. :)