Myth Land (unedited)

XI

Unlike the days before, I didn't see my friends when I got there. I threw my back against the soaked wooden box. Why was it wet? I don't know. I don't remember whether or not it was raining. I spaced out, and the next thing I knew the sun was blinding my eyes. It shone right into my eye balls. Ran through my brain. Not to enlighten it, but to burn it.

I closed my eyes very tightly that I hurt my lids, and then I shook my head. The next time I opened my eyes, the sun no longer had any access to torture my mind. I looked around to see if someone else was there, but I found none.

Wrong. I found the darker self who never stops following me on the ground whenever I go as long as the sun shines. There was no one else to talk to, so I decided to have a conversation instead. Some trivial things, you know, like asking her what were we doing there? Should we stay or just leave like what the baboon said? If we went home, what made it different than staying in the competition? Then I came to the realization that staying or leaving would not affect her much. She was only shadow, and her would always remain the same. I shouldn't have asked her. She didn't help much.

But why do I care so much about what the baboon said anyway? Besides, I give no loyalty or respect for a crooked, so-called powerful, enormous baboon who gave a speech of how to become a human but himself never once tasted the air of Myth Land.

'But again, why? Why should we go to Myth Land?'

My mind was distracted as my chest felt uneasy as I sensed a presence of beings approaching me. I straightened my back and placed my eyes to the creatures behind me fast enough to surprise them. Fronisi, Philip, Hyena, and Sophie's eyes widened as I assumed they were not expecting to see my ready-to-attack look. But when I think about it, how scary a mouse can be anyway?

'What's with that look?' Hyena chuckled as she didn't stop walking toward me.

'I thought you were someone else. I'm sorry.'

They didn't mind my apology and immediately made a circle around me. I didn't notice a banana tree's leaf full of foods that Sophie carried with her teeth. My friends seemed to be fine after the longest speech I had ever experienced in my life. There was no sign of tiredness in their looks. In fact, I saw their eyes radiated a brighter light than the sun could ever does.

Fronisi uttered in his smirked while the others were eating silently.

'I can't wait to lick the soil of Myth Land.'

'What do humans look like, actually?' asked Philip.

Fronisi stopped eating and took pieces of leaves he placed behind Sophie's back which again I failed to see when they came.

'I ripped this from a huge pile of evolved leaves called book before I came here somewhere near the Christmas tree. My fellow owls got it for me.'

He handed us a thin yellowish leaf-like sheet called paper from his claws, the last thing he had in them, 'This is human-made. Very cool, right?'

On the paper were pictures of what human looked like. It was strange... Humans reminded me of something... something familiar... or someone... but I couldn't recall. I put my disturbing mind aside and tried to focus on the sheets. Some of the pictures showed human activities. One of them swam like a fish. One of them walked like a monkey. One human whose size was smaller than other pictures crawled, but some activities were too foreign for us that we had no idea what they were doing.

Philip studied the picture with his mouth wide open and his eyes so close to the sheets that his head blocked our views.

'When I become a human, I will be as cool as this human right here,' he pointed his small hand to a picture of human whose body looked stronger than the others. The person had six bricks on the stomach, and one brick on each of the upper arms and behind the lower legs, and that human also lifted... something which looked like a thin coconut tree's stem with a huge rock at each end.