A Walk Down Ivy Laine

Saturday, October 4, 2014 Continued

Saturday, October 4, 2014 Continued...

Being a continued account of the previous night's events, Saturday, at Tiffany's house.

Written at day's end.

It kind of feels like paper. Thin and course, warm and gritty. Floating freely in the sky, caressing my back, lifting me higher and higher. It is. Paper wings flutter around me, large and beautiful. We drift higher with the current, reaching for the moon. My fingers drift through it, reaching deeper to its core. It's cool, a crystal ball of luminescence around my arms. Then it's liquid, melting away across my body, soaking my wings. They can't hold me any longer. Suddenly I'm falling. My heart is rushing up to my ears. I want to scream, but can't. The wind takes my voice away-

"Ivy...Ivy...IVY!"

Tiffany's voice floats into my dreams, lulling me out of nightmare. Thank god. My hand brushes against something hard and smooth to the right of my air mattress on the floor.

Then Tiffany screams.

My eyes snap open. Instant vertigo occurs and I can't make sense of anything. Tiffany's room is nowhere in sight. Everything is white. Looking down towards my feet I realized what this is; a white coffin. I'm in a white padded coffin? My heart jumps into the sequence of thoughts, fully pulling me out of Dreamland. No, no, oh god, no....A fleeting thought drifts through my mind...My family...

"No! Live! I want to live! To be alive! I promise I'll make a bigger effort to know people. Promise I'll try harder, promise...I can't. This can't be. How? I want. I want to-" I whimper, completely confused as to how I ended up here. How did I die? Do people who are dead know they're inside coffins? This has to be a dream! I claw at the walls in desperation, only to find them crumbling beneath my fingers.

What?

I puncture a hole through the thin layer with my thumb, peeling it back. An amateur picture of a dress with red buttons peels back. I make the hole bigger, using all my fingers until light and air spill through. Hundreds of Tiffany's drawings make up my cocoon. A perfect oval domed layer of paper has been built over me in the middle of the night.

Muffled sobbing and squeaking break through my panicked thoughts.

I rip the hole bigger and crawl through it, pulling my legs out and scramble to stand up. The cocoon shivers as I look back at it, falling to individual pieces. I stumble back, slipping on the paper that that had once been carpet and fall on my butt. WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?!

Every inch of the room is covered in paper. I circle in place slowly, trying to picture Tiffany's room as it had been before. The desk and chair next to the giant window are wrapped in a giant paper cocoon, craft table on the left along the wall is also in a cocoon, and a smaller bubble on top of that must be the top of her lamp. The walls, windows and ceilings are all covered in a thin layer of paper. Every object that isn't flat has a paper bubble of some odd shape surrounding it.

Awe struck, I do another three-sixty, not believing this alien looking place.

Another loud thump comes from the direction of where Tiffany's loft bed should be.

Tiffany!

I scramble up and vault across the room, slipping and sliding on more paper until I reach the giant bubble. Tracing my hands over where the ladder should be, I try to rip a whole into the brown layer, bending my nails painfully back. This paper is like cement, smooth as granite.

Another thump and more muffled sobs make its way through the top of the bubble. There has to be a hole somewhere.

Why isn't this working? Why was this one different from mine? Then I notice it...half of a marking on the box; IDE UP? Ide Up? ...'THIS SIDE UP'! Cardboard! Her cocoon is cardboard!