Unsettling Stories

I Passed Out And Woke Up With Two Distinct Memories

It was one of those Saturday nights for most college kids in my town, and on that specific night I was just playing the part of every single other one of them. We were all out drinking, having a blast, hopping from bar to bar and discovering new drinks and things about ourselves through our slurred and honest speech. Dialect of a drunken language. After the fourth bar and the twentieth time some losers asked us if they could buy us a drink, it started pouring down raining outside.

"Damnit," Leo said as the rest of the group shrugged their shoulders and kept dancing. He was the DD of the night and was clearly not having the time of his life or "living it up" as we had stated. By this point in the night, I was extremely intoxicated and getting exhausted. I slurred this to Leo whose eyes bulged out and thought I was speaking some new language thought up by aliens.

"What?" he asked.

"I said I think I'm going home. I can take a cab or something... it's just a few blocks over, you know."

Without too much of a fuss from him or any of my other friends, I was out on the street in the pouring down rain. Nauseous effects from the overabundance of alcohol set in and I began quickening my pace, thinking I needed to find the nearest trash can but instead losing the contents over the edge of a sidewalk. I kept walking and realized I had been walking in the rain for quite some time and it felt pretty good, so I kept up the pace and kept going until I reached my block.

A neighbor of mine was getting out of her car and smiled at me, but as I drew closer, her face turned to near horror. She pointed above me and I had only seconds to look up when I noticed that a monstrous branch was letting loose from the tree it was attached to. As it fell above my head, I heard her scream, "Lucy, WATCH OUT!!"

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When I woke, my eyesight was hazy as if I was looking through a telescope with limited vision on both sides, and my head was pounding like a rocket taking launch. As the blurriness faded, I noticed two people leaning over the bed and my vision zoomed in until I made out the lines of the man and the woman.

"Mom...Dad?" I asked, confused as hell and wanting to leap out of my bed, but my mom held onto my arm and stopped me from going anywhere.

"You took quite the hit," my mom laughed. "Freaked us out, back there."

I looked down at my ruffled, pink bed sheets and my sleeping gown with the princess on it. "Wha-what happened?"

"You fell out of the tree in the back yard, honey," my father insisted, placing a hand on my forehead and feeling my temperature. "We're going to let you rest and you'll feel better in no time. Good thing, too, because there's a lot of chores to do around here."

My parents trudged out of the room and as I began to gain more focus in the bedroom, I saw the other familiar bed across the room with the blankets pulled up to the mouth of nobody other than my sister, Julie. She was small and shaking, her eyes tremendous as she watched me from across the room.

"What?" I asked, still a bit lost and confused.

"You really don't remember?" she asked.

"Remember what? What are you talking about?"

"You...you don't remember what they did to you," she replied softly. "You don't remember anything. You think you fell out of a tree."

"What are you talking about?" I asked again, this time a bit furiously.

"Go look in the mirror, Lucy," she shot out, her face totally revealed from behind the blanket. She had large, black bruises all over her face and a cut at her lip.