Once Upon a Witch's Moon

Once Upon a Witch's Moon: Part 1 - Ch 2

CHAPTER TWO

Twist woke in the dark. "Yet another useless nightmare cure," she muttered, listening to the wind whisper at her window and rattle the window panes. This one had even made the nightmare worse, something she would have thought was impossible.

If fighting the nightmare meant even creepier nightmares, she'd rather stick with the howling wind and the three cloaked figures who never asked her unsettling questions that made her feel she belonged in some YA fantasy novel where the chosen heroine had to battle bad guys non-stop to save the world.

It made sense that a girl who'd been dumped without a memory in a storm ditch by a tornado might have nightmares about wind, though she could have done without the hooded figures and the cackling laughter and incomprehensible whispering. She blamed it on too much Wizard of Oz when she was young and impressionable. Dorothy and she had had something major in common and she'd really identified.

When would she ever be rid of this thing? She snatched up a quilt and headed for the sanctuary of her closet floor. She couldn't hear the wind from there.

A pulsing light caught her attention, for a second reminding her of the skulls with their glowing grins. It was only her laptop, blinking to let her know it was on standby. She picked it up. She wasn't going to be able to sleep until the adrenaline of the dream had pulsed out of her body, maybe she could research more nightmare cures.

She closed the closet door, relaxing imperceptibly as the sound of the wind was silenced at last, and opened her laptop. She wrote down more cures in her journal by monitor light. At the suggestion to write down her nightmares, in order to banish them, she paused. Write the nightmare down?

Why not? She couldn't let anyone read it, but now that idea had been planted in her mind, she needed to write down her story - all of it. If it banished the dream, so much the better.

She opened up a new document, and began to write, starting with what she first remembered. Her true seminal moment. The day the tornado dropped her in Bob and Sylvia's Kansas corn field without clothes, family, or memory. She didn't need to add any talking chickens to make this story interesting.

When her alarm clock sounded, she rolled out of her closet, squinting against the morning light. Quickly, before her mom might find her sleeping in the closet, Twist gathered up the well-worn family quilt and folded it neatly on the bottom of her bed. She checked to make sure there were no signs that she had slept in her closet last night.

Sleeping in the closet was no big deal, but her mom probably wouldn't see it that way. Twist didn't want any questions. It was one thing to wake in a tangled sweat in the bottom of her closet every night. It was entirely another to have her mom worried about it.

She plugged in her laptop before she headed for the shower. It had gone dead in the night. She wondered if the story she'd written had been lost. Had she saved it? She couldn't remember. She hoped it had been lost, that way no one would ever see it and know the girl they thought was weird, was even weirder than they thought.

Showered, she surveyed the closet for any left behind clues that she'd slept in there. She took her journal out from under her pillow and scratched off "relaxation technique" from her list of nightmare remedies. The next one was "hot milk before bed." She wrinkled her nose. Maybe it was time to stop fighting the nightmare and just live with it. Live with being weird.

She'd hoped that her life would be perfect if only she could just once sleep for eight hours straight without being chased by hooded figures and, no matter how she fought, sucked up into a tornado that left her curled and shivering in the bottom of her closet. Falling asleep with her iPod playing Mozart hadn't worked - and neither had Bach, Rachmaninoff, Cold Play or Enya. She held out no hope for hot milk.